PoMo Studies Hoax (gets taken seriously)

[David Morris]

Your whole post here confirms PoMo school to be drowning in politics
(Peterson who?).  PoMo is IMHO a bad label.  But that might just be my
architect's shame.  Either way, I hate PoMo jargon with a passion.

David Morris

On Thu, Oct 4, 2018 at 9:33 PM Matthew Taylor <matthew.taylor923 at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Jordan Peterson and his fanboys' misunderstanding and misuse of
> 'postmodernism' is hilarious when it isn't disheartening. Sometimes it
> seems like Peterson means postmodernity, but even then the term doesn't
> mean what he often wants it to...pesky definitions, always getting in the
> way of his weepy, inane, and self-contradictory rants about how scared he
> is of the world.
>
> Perhaps one of the most amusing, regularly recurring instances of this
> utter confusion of concepts is when the Peterson Pissants talk about
> "postmodern cultural Marxists" (or some similarly incomprehensible jumbling
> together of these terms). One of the most widely understood and repeated
> features of postmodernism is its skepticism of grand, totalizing
> meta-narratives. Marxism and Marxists, of course, claim to be able to
> render history and the world intelligible through a systematic analysis of
> class struggle, modes of production, dialectical materialism, etc.
>
> Marxism isn't suspicious of ideology qua ideology; it claims that
> ideologies have discernible class character, that ideas are a product of
> quantifiable material conditions and that competing ideas serve mutually
> antagonistic class interests. It doesn't shy away from being seen as a
> so-called 'meta-narrative.' This is also meaningfully distinct from
> Peterson, who rails against 'ideology'—thereby erasing the critical
> differences between the wide range of mutually exclusive, often
> antagonistic ideologies, acting as though they are all somehow the same and
> ought to be summarily dismissed—despite being deeply ideological himself,
> even if his ideology is incoherent, inconsistent, and informed by
> reactionary impulse rather than systematic analysis.
>
> It should be clear to anyone who has thought about these things for more
> than five minutes that postmodernism and Marxism are irreconcilable
> concepts. But the oddly popular, pseudo-intellectual, and altogether
> reactionary mode of thinking of which Peterson is exemplary doesn't care if
> what it says about these things is correct or even internally consistent;
> rather, the goal is just to burden these terms with enough negative
> associations that people dismiss and even revile them without ever even
> engaging with them to begin with.
>
> On Thu, Oct 4, 2018 at 5:08 PM David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> 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
>> >
>> --
>> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>>
>