postmodernism and claptrap.
i have made a few efforts to understand ‘postmodernism’ from various essays and comments only to come away none the wiser still wondering why or how it could be called a coherent critical approach ---to anything. the ‘school ‘ of thought is also called post-structuralism. (perhaps not accurately.)
well.. they use a lot of big words .. but…
i honestly wonder if it can be taken seriously? still people often mention Foucault and derrida and it seems to have some link with Marxian analysis which is definately an established and integrated approach in political science.. so..
terms such as existential- / post-phenomenology are used. well. i just wonder if it is worth the time it takes to find if it means anything at all or if it is just an empty attempt at attention-seeking behaviour by some totally bankrupt pseudo-academic/clown.
can it be called a scientific frame of enquiry? aaaa. boff !
it apparently started as a french critique of 'structuralism'.. which so far as I understood is a fairly superficial view of a body of whatever in terms of its structural principles alone.. like the formal structure of a movie or a bridge. sure design is arguably the most important element --if you’re an engineer.… but is still just an abstraction…and thankfully most people are not engineers… so yes.. I’ll go along with objections to structuralism as having much to contribute, but…. the pervasiveness of post-structuralism seems to have developed in the context of the disillusionment of marxists at the failure of the soviet experiment/structure. and so… people who were at odds with liberal or statist structures.. ie .. marxists had to come up with some ‘narrative’ or rather 'meta-narrative' so.. radical feminism, deconstruction as a weltanschauung, phenomeonlony and the like were bidding for attention/followers.
it seems to me that some vocabulary and ideas such as the dual reading of a model proposed by so-called deconstruction theory may have its usefulness, but it is fairly limited in its contribution though the crumbling of control economies in the last 2 decades of the last century followed by the crumbling of ‘laissez-faireism’ we are witnessing right now may owe it something. but I doubt if its much.. the seeds of their destruction was corruption/human imperfection. to me post-modernism is the counterpart in academia.. corrupt analysis. it is like a cake in la boulangerie that is way overdecorated /over-refined to the point of totally losing its merit as a cake. its lost the plot. incoherent. not worth bothering with. just a French fashion du jour.
my advice is if you want to speak greek, learn greek. its well worth the effort.
i’d like to be proved wrong but (apart from quantum mechanics,) there has been precious little contribution to the human store of philosophy since plato the divine.. life’s too short for claptrap. postmodernism is claptrap.
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