Lance deHaven Smith's Conspiracy Theory in America

[Jan Klimkowski]

There is a special ring of Dante's hell reserved for the Post Modernists. Right next to the Social Democrats.

Indeed. With Foucault clad in spiked leather cracking his S&M whip, smiling with an ironic death rictus

Post Modernism and its bastard self-reflexive offspring represent one of the great disasters of modern civilisation.


::gtfo::

[Lauren Johnson]

Magda, mind saying more about this?

There is a special ring of Dante's hell reserved for the Post Modernists. Right next to the Social Democrats.

Why assigning them [Post-Modernists] such a warm place? Seems a bit much to me.

[Magda Hassan]

Magda, mind saying more about this?

There is a special ring of Dante's hell reserved for the Post Modernists. Right next to the Social Democrats.

Why assigning them [Post-Modernists] such a warm place? Seems a bit much to me.

They could just as well be thrown into a freezing outer ring of Saturn for all I care. Or they can move in a relative direction toward a transformative hermeneutic of quantum gravity. Pretentious obscurantist bourgeois wankers. On a good day.

[R.K. Locke]

Postmodernism appears to have been part of a twin-pronged attack on the intellectual, moral and spiritual (in the broad sense) faculties of the west over a period of decades. Preparata's argument in The Ideology of Tyranny is that:

"The postmodern attitude, in its craving for differentiation, erasure of boundaries, and permissiveness, is indeed highly compatible with the defining traits of our corporate, market-oriented age. This basic realisation reveals that the apparent antagonism between modernists and postmodernists is somewhat feigned, if not imaginary."

He further argues that the ideologies of postmodernism and neoconservatism are essentially two sides of the same coin; Foucault and his intellectual successors representing the "left" side of a kind of Hegelian dialectic, with Ernst Jünger and his concept of the anarch on the right, both synthesised in Bataillian esotericism.

Also very interesting, I think, is the discussion of Heidegger's philosophy of Dasein in the context of the divine figure Cura (or "Care").

Now where have I heard that name before?

[Lauren Johnson]

Magda, mind saying more about this?

There is a special ring of Dante's hell reserved for the Post Modernists. Right next to the Social Democrats.

Why assigning them [Post-Modernists] such a warm place? Seems a bit much to me.

They could just as well be thrown into a freezing outer ring of Saturn for all I care. Or they can move in a relative direction toward a transformative hermeneutic of quantum gravity. Pretentious obscurantist bourgeois wankers. On a good day.

Oh, I get it. You don't like postmodernists.

Trouble is, "postmodernism" is often a pejorative term similar to "commie pinko," which allows one to throw mud at the enemy -- you know, like what some people you have identified doing in a certain 9/11 thread while another gets a pass. Funny how that works.

A lot of postmodern writing is useless. The worst might be something like a PhD thesis entitled: Lady Gaga and Poker Face: the Deconstruction of the Culturally Inscribed Male/Female Duality ... blah blah. I agree there is lot of it is crap in it.

On the other hand, there have been some major contributions by some accused of being postmoderns. For example, Edward Said in Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism opened my eyes to how colonialism and imperialism is inscribed in Western literature. Foucault's studies in the relation of knowledge and power are brilliant as far as they go. Those themes can be detected at DPF, where we can find many references to the panopticon, which is straight out of Foucault. I have to admit, as obscure as Derrida can be, I enjoyed his systematic dismantling of Francis Fukuyama in his Specters of Marx.

To define terms, I view modernity to be the core of the Enlightenment project, the view that knowledge is universally true and applies to all peoples in all places. Postmodernity deconstructs that project. I'm all for it. But if dismantling totalizing systems is all there is, then indeed it is wankery. In short, in many ways, I would argue that we at DPF are profoundly postmodern

[Magda Hassan]

No I don't. Thought I think it is fine architectural term.

I have no problem with anyone whatever their philosophical trapping dismantling Francis Fukuyama. Who apparently doesn't even support his own original theory any longer. So, I suppose he is no longer the Neo-con darling. I wouldn't disagree with much of what you say there Lauren.