MCM = a major? Lord help us.

that's it, right there...

what do you know about modernism? the linguistic basis of structuralism? i can't do it for you right here (its 25 years ago for me) but its not something a stoned discussion was ever going to get right.

The term 'postmodernism,' variously defined by different `representatives,' has garnered the quality of a catch-all term describing new directions in architecture, art, literature, social science theory, critical philosophy and other disciplines that all seem to be cross-fertilizing, with often revolutionary effects. It is used to describe a socio-cultural condition of postmodernity growing out of the forces of late-Modernism, which is in turn inextricable intertwined with the expressed desires of late-Capitalism, as well as the interpretation and critique of that constructed condition. -- Neil p Corkeran

http://www.jahsonic.com/PostModernism.html

Disclaimer: no academic education in the arts at all. I'm just a bit of a fan.

The usual highlight point is that Modernism was concerned with a quest for new certainties, a new modern way (post-Darwin, Freud, then Einstein) of viewing and understanding the world. This account of the way things are is termed a metanarrative. Postmodernism centres on a rejection of the idea that there is such a perfect metanarrative (the failure of Modernism is routinely claimed), the idea that there are instead many, perhaps an endless number of, legitimate metanarratives and that none should be regarded as better or superior, or 'privileged'.

This had some corrolaries, not least (to take a representative example) the recognition that the literary canon was itself such a privileged metanarrative, packed with dead white European males, and that other voices were legitimate too, and it is from this that we have reached a position where feminist criticism, literature and sections in bookstores are common (again just one example - black and gay perspectives are other obvious cases).

Another distinction is the keenness on the part of Postmodernism to examine its roots, so you get loads of referentiality, to previous works and the common culture and all that. There is also an enthusiasm for questioning other certainties, often by ironising them, and this leads to the importance of irony in PoMo, for better and worse. The 'worse' bit might be that PoMo is unwilling to commit to any ideas, so can seem to just be mocking others and never making a stand for anything.

Semiotics, from where we get talk of signs and signifiers, links in with a lot of this: multiple readings, the legitimacy of interpretations based on alternative perspectives, irony and so on. I'm even farther from being an expert here, but Roland Barthes is a good place to start.

Sign = something that says something, a word, a road-sign, a picture, 'the finger'(!), etcetera. Signifier = the thing it means (the Platonic essence, if you like) ie; the word 'tiger' means 'big cat with orange and black stripes indiginous to indie/africa blah blah blah'. The signified is the actual thing itself, in the case of the sign and signifier 'tiger', the signified is the particular beastie about to rip your arm off, etcetera. If you get into Eco-ist semiotics and so on you can add whole different levels of sign/signifier/signified, incorporating different people's analogues of understanding in relation to how they interpret different signifiers.

Postmodernism is great in that anyone can say anything, as long as they use words like hermenuetics and paradigm and so on, and sound incredibly smart and abstract and incisive without actually menaing or understanding anything (see Sokal + Bricmont for proof). My degree is Media Popular Culture w/ Philosophy and I did loads on po/mo in my final year towards my dissertation. Destroy - Baudrillard, Kristeva, Deleuze & Guitatatatatatararrrri. Seek - Frederic Jameson, Umberto Eco.

FEH

you gotta have a philosophy and a dream at the very least a personal manifesto not a pick and mix ragbag of old ideas.

Destroy: De Saussure

In fact, don't read either of them - just get yourself a good summary.

I agree with everything Nick says above, although he forgot to mention that the relationship between the signifier and the signified is a completely arbitrary one. Hence totally different-looking words for the same object in different languages (eg. dog = chien in French).

The meaning that we imbue words with comes from learned codes or conventions of interpretation. These codes change through time, leading to a slipping and sliding of meaning. Basically the key concept is that meaning is not contained in a text - it is the result of interpretation.

and if that is the case you shouldn't bother with this.

http://www.dourish.com/goodies/decon.html

It really is just a way of dressing up old ideas in fancy, undecipherable language.

I don't see quite see it. Dick said he was fond of joyce, kafka and proust (aren't they modernists)?

besides, I can comprehend dick and joyce and kafka ;-)

And Andrew, I don't know if you're familiar, but you'd love Harold Bloom's The Western Canon.

That's a dissing.

*jaw drops to floor* (and not in awe)

Generally speaking, I'm completely against readings of movies that try to break it down into simplistic "ism" binaries. Most writers and directors are beyond that and only bring "isms" into the picture so as to criticize or ridicule them. Mamet especially.

Notice that the dept isn't called "POSTModern Culture and Media" - a clue

At the time I felt like Frederic Jameson made the most anally rigorous case for its validity as a useful word to describe the ECONOMIC distinction of our time vs 100 years ago

As for binaries it's how we create meaning innit? ("this NOT that") Are there critiques of postmodernism that seriously dispute this?

signifier = word (usually, and for ease of explanation)
signified = concept/thing that signifier refers to

the relationship between the two is arbitrary - ie, the signifier could be anthing/ any word - we just all agree on it being one thing for the sake of communication (and sometimes/most times ideology). there is no *essential* relationship between the signifier and the signified. we call a dog a dog but the hairy beast before us is only a 'dog' cause we all accept that's the best name for it.

i could go into the chain of signification etc, but i should be working. post-modernism, in all its -isms, attacks/looks at/deconstructs 'given' relationships between signifier and signified and unmasks them as being arbitrary and constructed for usually hegemonic ends.

it does other stuff too, like make people's student loans get huge without the hope at the end of ever getting work that will help pay them back. at it's best - you'll stop believing in anything, and then your student loan won't matter. if this happens i suggest you read a book called 'self as narrative' (Kim Worthington) - it provides some light at the end of the tunnel.

basically postmodernism is suspicious of meta-narratives...

not aimed a claire, rather pomo itself!

porno
pomo

Carry on!

so the signifier is the code - could be a word written down, could be a smile, could be an old tree stump possibly
signified is the unscrambled message

of course it's not going to be exactly the same message on the other end, like a game of telephone people are going to read things into things, and there's noise on the line; semiotics is about what all the factors are that we use to decode things and what we use to fill this inevitable gap or lack, however small. the semiotician's job isn't to "unmask" or whisk away a false exterior to reveal some true concept whose force or power to be understood was obscured by language, it's to understand how our economic organization and sexual relations and a zillion other things coach us to code and decode language in the ways that we do

it's important to distinguish between semiotics and postmodernism though. I doubt "postmodernism" can be salvaged as a useful word really. If anyone remembers their Jameson be my guest here.

My first day taking "Foundation of Semiotics" the professor scoffed at the title of the class. "Semiotics is by its nature a non-foundational discipline" she said.

mark s is again OTM...
i guess another example of my confusion...
I have read bits and pieces of B.'s Simulacra and Simulation and what I am confused about is, again, this problem (I brought it up on the hip-hop thread) of practical (what should be done) versus theoretical (this is what exists). What I got from B. is the idea that the word "authentic" can actually be an impediment to social critique because so much of what we see around us is plastic, derivative, etc. So, for example, if I were to critique pop music, and I were to conclude that I thought there was something wrong with it, I would not call the music "inauthentic" or "not in touch with its roots", or other things like that.

On the other hand, one could read B. and decide that "inauthenticity" is something to revel in, and that art should seek to exacerbate its own plastic nature and also duplicate (and some would say improve upon) the plastic and inauthentic nature of popular art (ie venturi and las vegas).

A: "Everything is postmodern now"
B: "So in what way is it even a useful word then?"
A: "It distinguishes the past from the present"
B: "How?"
A: "By pointing out that they're different."
B: "In what ways?"
A: "The past is not postmodern. The present is."

Aaron surely what your saying is a discussion about the use of the word inauthentic and its meaning. If everything is inauthentic then using it as a critique is pointless since there is nothing to base that critique on - there is not even a clear idea of the authentic. (We can perhaps talk about levels of inauthenticity, and self-reflexive inauthenticity but in both cases the very concept of inauthenticity is taken as a given and no longer what we are discussing).

Yes, the Manifesto is coming.

I hate the word authentic, it sounds like it should be some sort of eugenics practised on lousy writers.

For example, we can view infinity as a process, but also a thing-in-itself (Hegel: "progression to infinity is not the real infinite which consists in being at home with itself in its other") and thus talk of ordinal infinities. The many ways in which we *think* about mathematics do not themselves equal mathematics, though they approximate it.

So the frustration is that he confuses the embodiement of knowledge (the form he argues it has to take) with the idea that all knowledge can be is embodiment. Or rather that's my concern, as I haven't seen him make this confusion in what I have read and heard of him but the quotes above ssem to suggest otherwise.

[sinkah: as far as I know Lenin never tried to demolish Kant but only the neo-Kantians. he left the demolition/improvement of Kant to Hegel & to some extent Marx]

i came to lenin-on-hegel via r.dunayavskaya (sp?) and c.l.r.james, so am possibly way adrift (also i live among neo-leninists so-called)

when marx turned hegel on his head he surely turned kant right-side up again!!?

(nietszche said: the prob w.kant is he found the key to the cage, but then stayed sitting inside it after the door was open)

dunayavskaya doesn't even get what the law of value is without mystifying it beyond all comprehension.

as I recall Lenin's main point of polemic is "these dudes claim to be doing something spectacular and new but really they just arrive at Kant, and even then they fuck it all up."

1. Everything before Modernism sez yay and hoorah for unity and wholeness!

2. Modernism sez no way there is no unity boo hoo.

3. Pomo sez there is no unity HUZZAH.

And uses strings of impenetrable words in order to give the appearance of substance where in fact there is no substance. The didactic paradigm shift between neo-delusional violence and post-feminist de-masculinising Nietszchean post-structuralism alluded to in the film Batman allows the neo-futurist postmodern audience a dialectic hermenuetic of the constant and fluctuating post-Marxist a priori ideology.

You see?

I don't think there is a short answer to the question of what is the significance of sign and signifier. The whole point of many of these theories is that they have no fixed value. You could read some of the shorter seminal works of post-modern or post-structuralist or semiotic theory (I can never remember which is which): Roland Barthes "The Death of the Author," Jean Baudrillard, "A System of Objects," and I'm sure a Jacque Derrida essay on Marxism is floating around out there.

A few concepts are useful, but you would get equally useful, if not more useful concepts, from modern economic theorists: Marx, Ollman, Veblen. I would rank history as more useful than semiotics

Sorry I was so crabby upthread.

I tend to be allergic to theory qua theory, so I often judge these clusters of ideas by how useful they are in practice. I was not at all interested in semiotics until semiotic language was used in a film book I quite liked (Eloquent Gestures), likewise I was skeptical of poststructuralism until Judith Walkowitz's City of Dreadful Delight. I haven't read many persuasive examples of semiotics or poststucturalism since those books, in fact, but I haven't been looking very hard.

I told you I liked Graham's computer abilities.

But the sort of root meta-narrative to be suspicious of in economics is the idea of individuals as rational actors who will make whatever decisions maximize given values for themselves.

I definitely think it's more interesting to approach postmodernism not at its center, which can be sort of airy and impenetrable, but by following its applications in different disciplines. I think I got more out of Jameson by reading about postmodernity in lit criticism than I got from actually reading Jameson.

Good point. All of which means, ironically, if the word has no coherent significance to the point that it doesn't have a common signified, it does not truly exist in any unified discrete sense.

I'm opposed to any school of criticism too hung up on schools and eras anyway. I find Bloom's writing tolerable b/c he tries to break away from all that, save Vico (who is just a cycle anyway). And I lurve Northrop Frye's writing. I'll take those two guys anyday over the Saussure/Lyotard/Barthes/Lacan/Derrida/Foucault/etc. school.

Po-mo vs Futurism vs Modernism

Jan