I have a college dropout friend who is very smart, but averse
to intellecutalism, particularly its jargon. Within his
earshot, a kind of pompous guy was telling me how great the
movie Swimming Pool was. I hadn't seen that piece of crap
yet, but pointed out that my friend had not liked it. The fan
said, He probably didn't understand it (as if it was hard to
understand that movie; anyone who didn't guess the gimmick
early on was not paying attention). I laughed and said, No, I
doubt that's it. Needless to say, my friend was not amused by
this comment
(but didn't give the guy the satisfaction of responding). I
later told him how to put down a guy like this. Randomly
place the word postmodern in any sentence about the movie,
the more convoluted the sentence the better. The word
postmodern is the emperor's new clothes of
pseudo-intellectual speech. The guy will be so afraid that he
might reveal that he doesn't really understand postmodernism
and you do that he will just walk away. So it became
something of a game between us, whenever my friend finds
something pretentious, he makes up a nonsensical sentence
about it using the word postmodern. It's amazing how many of
these sentences actually make good sense.
Now I've been fascinated by, though not always in agreement
with, what I've read about postmodernism -- Lyotard, a bit of
Foucault, some Baudrillard, the Situationists that were his
precursors, Frederic Jameson, does Bourdieu count? -- but
there's no real there there (to paraphrase another
proto-postmodernist). It's not just one theory, but the
intersection of a whole bunch of theories (poststructuralism,
deconstructionism, discursive analysis, etc) fighting for
primacy. In fact, it sometimes seems that much of it comes
from infighting between them, as they each claim theirs is
the only right way of seeing.
That's not to say I don't feel we are living in a postmodern
world, or that I don't feel drawn to artists who engage that
world (whether or not they consider themselves
postmodernists, whether or not they deal with postmodernism
in a postmodernist way, whatever that is), but I thoroughly
understand why many find postmodernism to be sheer
academicism in the worst ivory tower sense of that
word.
Mark
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