PoMo Studies Hoax (gets taken seriously)

[David Morris]

In architecture, PoMo was a late 70s/early 80s retrograde reaction against
what was felt as the reductive strictures of Modernism.  It was soon
supplanted by Neo-Modernism, still in favor now, after many iterations, a
quarter century later. PoMo architecture is remembered mostly as an
embarrassment. But I think it did provide a needed bursting of Modernism's
self-righteousness info bubble.

My exposure to Lit PoMo is mostly through the P-list.  To me its lingo is
comically convoluted and obscure.  It seems to me that Deconstructionism
would be a better name.  In architecture, deconstruction is seen as a
modernist's strategy, a means for abstraction of form by slicing, dicing
and unpeeling a familiar object into the unfamiliar.

Maybe Lit PMo theory is too politically rooted: It takes (took?) itself way
too seriously.  But any neo-libs that still try to work that angle seem to
have missed the last bus to more lucrative gigs.

David Morris

On Thu, Oct 4, 2018 at 6:16 PM John Bailey <sundayjb at gmail.com> wrote:

> "Postmodernism" has become the new catch-all term encompassing
> everything despised by the conservative neolibs who follow Jordan
> Peterson and the like. In the list above that includes psychoanalysis
> and sociology (both of which predate postmodernism by decades) and
> critical race theory which is often in direct opposition to postmodern
> theory.
> But pomo is a handy strawman if you look around and feel your tenure
> as big man on campus is threatened by all these newfangled ways of
> questioning your right to be boss. Pomo theory per se is hardly even
> taught much these days outside of art and architecture courses, in
> which instances it's regarded as a historical movement of the 20th
> century. I think a lot of proper postmodern theory is quite dangerous
> and reactionary itself but I find it bizarre that that's the whipping
> boy the new right have come up with.
> On Fri, Oct 5, 2018 at 7:51 AM David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> >
> https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2018/10/cultural-studies-hoax-mostly-being-brushed-off-as-tiresome-bs/
> >
> > "Three hoaxsters with no previous expertise brushed up on their pomo and
> > then wrote a series of deliberately dumb papers that they submitted to
> > serious, peer-reviewed journals in the areas of gender studies,
> > masculinities studies, queer studies, sexuality studies, psychoanalysis,
> > critical race theory, critical whiteness theory, fat studies, sociology,
> > and educational philosophy. Seven of their papers were accepted, and the
> > number probably would have been higher if they hadn’t been uncovered and
> > forced to end their experiment early."
> >
> > A Twitter response:  "If an amateur with no background can spend three
> > months brushing up on your field, and then immediately start cranking out
> > papers that get accepted at serious, peer-reviewed journals, there is
> > something badly wrong with your field."
> >
> > David Morris
> > --
> > Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>