It would be so useful if bad people were walking around with a great big neon “L” for loser attached to their heads — it would make it easier to avoid them. Unfortunately, they don’t. They’re not that stupid that they’d advertise their loserhood.
Or are they?
For years now I’ve noticed a very handy written/oral flag some of the bad agents willingly throw out there: it’s two magic words, “cultural Marxism”. Trust me on this, anytime someone starts babbling about cultural Marxism, the Frankfurt school, white genocide, any of that crap, you’ve got ’em pegged: they’re neo-Nazi ninnies. If, like me, you’re still confused about why you’re getting called a cultural Marxist in the first place, here’s an excellent overview of the history of the term. Bonus points for a cool deep German accent.
One thing briefly mentioned in the video is that the ninnies are beginning to realize that the words “cultural Marxism” is a give-away, and that they can’t even define it or explain the evidence behind the concept, so they’re transitioning to a new term: “post-modernism”. It’s the root of all evil, don’t you know. Of course, they can’t explain that one, either, but they trust that no one wants to be labeled with it, so they’re going for it. Also, the word has another useful property, in that it actually is a real thing, unlike “cultural Marxism”, and it has a real and useful meaning that is understood by people who actually use the concept, so it’s going to be harder to sort out. Not everyone who says “post-modernism” is a crank, just the ones who use it as a synonym for degenerate cultural practices and say it with a sneer.
“Not everyone who says “post-modernism” is a crank, just the ones who use it as a synonym for degenerate cultural practices and say it with a sneer.”
Such as Richard Dawkins perhaps?
If you want to talk to an actual Marxist, it won’t be too difficult to find one. To find a cultural Marxist however is a completely different matter. Cultural Marxism only exists in right wing’s fantasies.
You forgot perhaps the biggest recent arsehole identifier of the lot: MAGA.
Dog whistles abound.
I read Marcuse in the late 60s, one of those Frankfurt School “cultural Marxists”…and he was Jewish. His writings influenced my thinking. It was one reason I applied for non-religious CO status in the spring of 1970.
For lovers of irony, here’s a quote from Rational Wiki regarding a now-defunct* definition:
*I assume. I’ve certainly not come across it—the term “Champagne Socialist” being the closest in meaning which I’ve encountered.
@1
I mean, yeah?
I post a lot on The Guardian and The Independent comments page ,them two words get a lot of use ,along with Liberal Fascists. They are popular with a few regular rightit wingnuts .
lol wtf? Post modernism is an art term, a term that refutes modernism and questions the very notion of art. I can’t WAIT for some neo nazi white nationalist to use this.
“It’s Po-Mo!”
“…”
“You know, Post-Modern?”
“…”
“Weird for the sake of weird.”
waydude@#8:
Post modernism is an art term, a term that refutes modernism and questions the very notion of art. I can’t WAIT for some neo nazi white nationalist to use this.
We need to troll them into using “neo-dadaists” or “cultural dadists” as a label for “bad” – let’s get them as scared of Alfred Jarry as they are of Saul Alinsky. It would be quite a put-on!
“Neo-Jarryites at university campuses are de-platforming, re-platforming, and crawling around under the platforms! Merdre!” It is political incorrectness run wild with its hair on fire and drinking absynthe!
Post-modernism is not just about art. The term simply designates intellectual movements aimed at attacking (or assuming the failure of) modernism. “Modernism” in that context is the late enlightenment assumption that all things could be scientized and rationalized, quantified and comprehended.
Derrida is easy to lampoon as a blatherer of mystical-sounding bullshit but other post-modernists are not. Foucault, for example, was interested in the relationship of knowledge and power in civilization (he said he was not a post-modernist) which is hardly a silly topic. There is some listing of pop psychology/social science theories in post-modernism, which I think has done neither post-modernism or psychology any good. Basically post-modernism is a critique of culture. It hasn’t reached a conclusion, either, so when people demonize postmodernism they are just as likely to be scoring on their own goal.
For example, I could easily make a scholarly-sounding argument that Donald Trump is a postmodern president: his inconsistency and unconcern for the truth, his focus on manipulation of popular culture… I won’t go on.
When someone labels “post-modern” as a bad thing, it’s like when people talk about “the left” or “the right” – it usually is just waving a flag that says “I am a shallow thinker and I would like to be manipulated.” By the way, the idea that we can deconstruct arguments and reveal how our opponents are using value-laden labels they don’t understand: that’s a post-modernist critique. If they were using breakfast cereals they don’t understand, that’s a Dadaist critique.
Art scholars are notoriously defiant of concision in defining terms, but one of the predominant meanings attached to postmodernism over the years – and the one that rankles people like dickdawk (and me circa fifteen years ago) – is that multiple ways of viewing a subject are valid.
Sometimes when that is expressed, it sounds like the postmodernists are suggesting there is no such thing as objective reality and that all opinions about it are legitimate. Hence skeptics and atheists getting in a knot. But the irony in conservatives getting upset by this is that they’ve been the primary beneficiaries of it.
Since the 90s, whenever a conservative viewpoint runs up against facts, they’ve shielded themselves with this postmodern notion – you have your facts and i have mine, it’s all just opinions and points of view. And of course, conservatives are the ones whose ideas run counter to reality most of the time.
–
Marcus @ #10 — “Dada dadaists” perhaps? Or “Lah-di-dadaists”?
Terms often change their meanings over time as they are put to new uses. Sometimes those uses are plainly nasty and a given term is tainted and rendered unusable or meaningless. Doesn’t matter whether arguments are purely theoretical. That’s how ideas get bandied about and earn acceptance or invalidation. I have working understandings of Postmodernism and Cultural Marxism (the same way I have working understandings of republicanism and liberalism). I also acknowledge that the terms are not well understood by the public and do not possess fixed meanings. That’s the nature of theoretical formulations and ideologies. The embedded video is not especially helpful and suffers badly under Godwin’s Law. Sneer all you like, I suppose. Radicals and bigots may well deserve it. But there might be some value still in evaluating competing claims using loaded terms rather than labeling their users all losers.
Marcus Ranum @ 10:
Maybe we should start by referring to Trump as President Ubu?
@9 voidhawk — damn you, I was just going to post that clip from the re-modeled Moe’s.
The original Nazis used a very similar term (Cultural Bolshevism, I think it was) to describe people they intended to exterminate (and art they didn’t like). It was a similarly-vague term, roughly meaning “people and things we hate, and wish to kill and/or burn.” The only real difference is that they weren’t the least bit coy about their anti-Semitism.
But remember everybody, today’s Nazis might be completely different from the Nazis of the past. There’s no possible way to know if they’re at all alike. The fact that they use the same terms and behave in the same ways tells us nothing at all. For that matter, the Nazis of the past might not have been so bad either! How can we ever know? If only there were several entire libraries-worth of books on the topic…
The preceding paragraph was written with the bitterest of sarcasm.
brutus wrote:
This is the “have your cake and eat it too” clause. Either they’re using the original definition, or they’re using a redefined one. If you accuse them of using a redefined one or the Nazi one, they insist, , yet their complete ignorance of anything actually argued under that definition of cultural Marxism makes it clear that’s not what they mean. Bring the fact that this Frankfurt school was about criticism of culture from the standpoint of Marxist critical theory, and they fall back to the shifting definitions of words that you mentioned.
Godwin’s law isn’t that you mustn’t talk about Nazis, but that any conversation on the internet will tend to escalate to the point where people are accusing each other of being just like the Nazis. If you want to argue shifting definitions on this one, please show how your definition is more useful than the prior one. Otherwise, it just looks like you’re trying to terminate discussion.
Did somebody mention Godwin’s Law?
https://mobile.twitter.com/sfmnemonic/status/896884949634232320
If past usage is any guide, I expect that they’ll describe things people have done for thousands of years.
Sure, it’s a bit scattershot … but maybe the root of all evil is in there somewhere.
They’ll abandon cultural marxism once it stops being useful. They will find something else to attach their disgust to while pretending that it’s a characterization. I act like it’s a mere insult directed at a part of the culture relevant to their behavior social opposition.
Autism is often used in similar fashion in image board communities such as 4chan. Behavior that a person did not like was simply labeled “autism” as if that was self evident. I tore those people to pieces at Ponychan but outside of my territory it was not uncommon.
It it also a human urge we share with them and a social tool worth keeping sharp for special occasions (it attaches more than disgust). Freeze peach is a good thing.
Rather freeze peach is good as a tool of mockery, the whining we attach freeze peach to is worth the mockery. I felt I was a bit jumbled in my last comment.
I have a love / hatre relation with Post-Modernism. I love the emphasis on discourse and how language affects how we think about stuff. And the search for hidden dynamics of power and control in discourse. Post-Modernism has had in many ways a positive impact on Academia and scholarship.
However there is also what I would call “extreme” Post Modernism, which uses the rhetoric of extreme relativism, verging on solipsism. The hiding of banalities in absurd jargon. And of course related to that the convoluted, esoteric way some of it is written. I am also more than a little pissed with how some of the “extreme” Post Modernist writing likes to pat it’s self on the back about how “radical” it is. Also the rather banal tearing at the idea of “truth” is annoying.
Now to be fair I have probably read more of the “extreme” bad stuff than the good stuff. So I suspect that my view of Post Modernism is probably more negative than it deserves. Still it is a pity that some modern practitioners of Post Modernism do make it far to easy for their opponents to find to stuff to be stunned into disbelief by.
I would however like to emphasize that Post Modernism does indeed have good results and has contributed positively to modern Academic development at least some of the time and probably more than I know.
Has for “Cultural Marxism”? Well that is just the equivalent of a swear word and should be rejected out of hand.
Poking my head in here from my cultural studies classes (where we’re busy learning about, you guessed it!, post-modernism):
Post-modernism is a reaction largely to the failure of the “grand narratives” of Modernist thought (as well as to Aesthetic Modernism in art, literature, theatre and architecture). It got its start at the end of the Second World War, when there was a lot of disillusionment (particularly in continental Europe – most of the early post-modernists were French, and there’s a lot of very good social and cultural reasons for this) with the grand Modern/Enlightenment narratives of the March of Progress, the Triumph of Science, “liberte egalite fraternite” etc. Because yeah, they’d worked so well in preventing the horrors of the Holocaust; not to mention Hiroshima and Nagasaki, hadn’t they? [s]Those narratives had made the world So Very Much Safer, for those who were basically living in the fall-out zone for the impending global nuclear war… so yeah, do tell us about how believing these Grand Narratives makes everything So Much Better; we keep forgetting.[/s]
So, out of this position of deeply cynical reflection on the narratives of Modernity and Modernism, grew a school of social and cultural analysis which was interested in looking largely at “what the fsck just happened, and how did it happen?”. Foucault was interested in the analysis of how power worked on a local and a historical level in various social institutions – what he called the “archaeology” and “genealogy” of institutions of power and control. Post-modern theorists got interested in the workings of culture as a way of creating systems of power and control – both “high culture”[1] and the emerging mass of “low” or “popular culture”. They weren’t interested in creating a new narrative to replace the old ones – what they were interested in doing was critiquing the ways these grand narratives were still being used to control the populace, to maintain power over us, and to manipulate us into consenting to the ways we’re told things have to be.
So yeah, I can see why the alt-right would be having a scunner on post-modernists. Post-modernist thinkers are more likely to poke holes in the grand narratives the alt-right loves to sell itself. Things like “American Exceptionalism”; “Manifest Destiny”; “White Supremacy”; “Second Amendment Rights”; and so on are merely grist to the post-modernist mill. A post-modernist analysis of these concepts can quite clearly dig out the historical antecedents of them (their “genealogy” in the Foucaultian sense) and the ways they build on existing structures of power and control (their “archaeology”, as per Foucault), and point out exactly how little actual meaning any of these things have in real terms, aside from as ways of describing series of myths and legends the culture likes to recite to itself in order to perpetuate systems of power and control.
… and now if you’ll excuse me, I have about 39 pages on signs and symbolism to read and take notes on before next Tuesday, so I’d better get cracking.
[1] The aesthetic Modernists were very keen on High Culture, and had a narrative about how Art would explain the fundamentals of the world. Aesthetic Modernism would have been all the more interesting if it hadn’t emerged at a time where early methods of automation (the camera, the phonograph, the offset printing press, the pulp fiction magazine, the movie camera) were threatening the livelihoods of people who worked in the arts… As such, I tend to find the efforts of the Aesthetic Modernists to redefine “high” culture as being the sort of elite thing where you needed a university education in Classics in order to understand the implications of things to be largely a rather Luddite job-preservation scheme.
Another handy way to identify bad agents is the use of the term ‘regressive Left’.
That the right would be the beneficiaries was one of my three main objections to postmodernism when I first came across it, back in the 1970s and 1980s, when it was at the peak of its popularity in the humanities, at least in the UK (the others were that it was, at least in its stronger versions, simply false, and that it used forests of impenetrable jargon and mutually back-slapping references in its texts). My view still tends to be that there are two versions of its main theses: one that is true, but mostly not new, and indeed, deeply rooted in modernism (that no aspect of culture, including science and philosophy, is ideology-free, that “progress” is neither easily defined nor inevitable, etc.) and one that is new, false, and anti-rational (there are only texts, no objective truth, etc.).
And yet it is difficult to think of a meta-narrative more totalising than that of postmodernism! Or an elite more closed, and arcane in its jargon, than academic postmodernists.
Another word that’s lost all meaning: elitist. It seems like conservatives have twisted that word into meaning “someone who has opinions different from my own that they think are correct”.
KG @27: ok, I’ll bite. How would you describe the Great meta-Narrative you see postmodernism as imposing? And why does the extra level of abstraction implied by the “meta” produce something you’ll describe as the same thing as the non-meta narratives it critiques?
Also, isn’t modernism all about progress being easily and universally defined and inevitable? Or do I just not understand what you mean by modernism?
octopod
No, this is not Modernism. Scientific discoveries and technology sparked a revolution in social thought, which affected many areas of culture. The basic philosophical definition of the Modernist movement is: Modernism refers to a reforming movement in art, architecture, music, literature and the applied arts during the late 19th Century and early 20th Century.
Spaceships are Modernist. Innovation and technology were having fantastic results such as antibiotics and vaccines for childhood diseases. Post-Modernism is merely a philosophical term for reverse engineering. Taking things apart and examining the components can be a very useful exercise, and applies to many areas of modern life. We are all post-modern in any case. Some of us happen to be vintage mid-century modern, but the current age is the post-modern era ushered in by Andy Warhol and the 60’s.
Out of curiousity I read the wiki entry for Post-Modernism. It’s rather obnoxious, very poorly written, and I find the focus on nihilism to be misplaced. It is a basic truth that god did it doesn’t have any explanatory power, and acknowledging that fact doesn’t mean you are being nihilistic.
octopod@29,
Incredulity toward (everyone else’s) meta-narratives. A belief that they, uniquely, are not in thrall to one.
The term is not mine – it is a favourite among postmodernists. The wikipedia article on metanarrative defines it as:
Perhaps in the case of postmodernism, one should substitute, for ” a society”, “a group of academic cultural theorists”. But it’s at least arguable that postmodernism “offers legitimation” to Putinism, Trumpery, “alternative facts”, and the “centrist” whiners about a lack of “ideological diversity”. As the linked Wikipedia article says of Lyotard:
So, the beliefs of Trumpists that they are being oppressed by feminism and the “gay agenda”, that white men are the real victims, that the “deep state” is conspiring with George Soros, that Trump would have won the popular vote if millions of “illegals” hadn’t voted, are just as valid as the leftist view that this is all pernicious crap – because they are both just “locally legitimated language games”.
If any writers are “modernist”, H.G.Wells is surely among them. Read The Time Machine (or The War of the Worlds, or The Island of Dr. Moreau), and tell me he was “all about progress being easily and uiniversally defined and inevitable”.
I thought “post-modernism” was a thing from the 80s. Now I’m hearing about it again all the time.
Maybe it’s because that era is now over (?). Are people still trying to figure out what has happened?
This is the post-post-modern era…
…and irony doesn’t work anymore.