Yes. But I ask you, what aspect of pomo had not been articulated previously by other people many, many years ago? I mean the sophists were a kind of postmodernism. — Manuel
I think since pomo started out as a sort of global state of the infoNation, it's less a question of precursors and more a question of contemporaneous relevance. As 180 pointed out, there were lots of precursors, but clearly Darwin wasn't talking about advertising and computing, nor was Copernicus, nor Wittgenstein, not Einstein. Nor does a philosophical precursor translate automatically into a worldwide change of view: philosophy is largely constrained to academia, even more so than science. Postmodernism started as a report on the postwar West. It was empirical first of all, not theoretical.
This is sort of jumping the gun a bit, but if we accept that the postmodern era happened at all, then we're accepting an event prior to which there was a general belief in special neutral, objective frames of reference from which you can judge the truth of certain statements and after which there was a general belief that no such frame exists (scepticism about authority): everything that uses language does so within a language game, with its own assumptions, biases, hidden dichotomies and preferences, axioms, contradictions, etc. There's a nice analogy with quantum mechanics here: observing an experiment makes you part of the apparatus... You can't not play the game.
In this regard it seems to me that something like deconstruction is warranted. The lack of a neutral perspective justifies a wariness about accepting the perspective of the author without examination. Otherwise we can take the position that, while metanarratives fell out of favour, they're not necessarily wrong, that there's an optimum set of metanarratives that are objectively true. Which is what the next thread was going to be about
In reading this thread I'm beginning to see a distinction between an era and a people. The OP had me thinking merely of an era (post-modern); but subsequent posts discuss a person (a post-modernist). The latter could be a person like me, who: 1. simply thinks the era is/was real, 2. embodies the characteristics of the era; 3. embraces the characteristics of the era; or 4. merely happens to live in the era. I might be #1 and #4 but don't know enough about myself or the characteristic to know if I qualify for #2 or #3. Still reading. But I think it might be helpful to me if the distinction was made. Maybe I'll just have to struggle to discern from context. — James Riley
Yes, this is why I stated the OP as I did. Postmodernism started out pretty much as a description, even a criticism, of trends. Some postmodernists are not in favour of postmodernism, they're just also not in favour of sticking their heads in the sands. Others do embrace it, some ironically, some not. Some flit between opposing it with respect to their metanarratives and endorsing it with respect to other, less-favoured metanarratives, a position that's pretty easy to deconstruct which we might consider the start of post-truth.
My point is that p0m0 says nothing new that has not been said clearer, more insightfully and more applicably since the late 16th/early 17th century. — 180 Proof
Which late 16th/early 17th century texts were concerned with advertising and computers?
Nice quote. I've read Derrida reject the accusation that deconstruction levels the playing field, an accusation I've never understood. Just because you can deconstruct any text, it doesn't follow that all texts are shown to be equally incoherent or unstable. No deconstructionist is going to hear a Trump speech and read a Nature article and conclude that they're much of a muchness.
I'm not wanting to pooh pooh pomo (poohmo?) criticism; I would like to hear more, but there are strong whiffs of substitution, straw men, and other fallacies in almost all critiques I've heard. Chomsky's criticism is pretty well known and well-quoted, and it's... huh?!? When something makes very clever people say very stupid things, it's worth checking out.