Modernism, Postmodernism, Meta-modernism

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huckelberry
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Re: Modernism, Postmodernism, Meta-modernism

Post by huckelberry »

I am sorry if I am just clogging up this thread. Some Schmos comments about comedy were interesting. I have not kept up that much with comedy so cannot further than line. I do not even know a couple people he mentioned.

I will try a question. First , I am an old guy , old enough that college literature classes I took did not mention postmodernism or point out deconstruction as any special focus.I am thus quite unclear as to how much focus this particular approach receives. I have watched a few Jordan Peterson presentation with mixed feelings. Is he not exaggerating?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5rUPatnXSE
I find some humor in his remarks , though his characterization of postmodernism sounds like a comic caracture. I do not like what the far right does with the subject. I think Bill Marr is right to point out how some elements on the left set themselves up as obvious easy targets.
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Re: Modernism, Postmodernism, Meta-modernism

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Tossing out another fishing line,,

I have a suspicion that postmodernism has contributed to a combination of focusing on who, oneself, who feels disadvantaged plus an indifference to careful truthfulness and honorable principals. I think this is behind the bizarre event of Trump becoming president. It can also lend itself to other varieties of political fanaticism. Those could be left right or some other axis but narrow,limited in thought and holding excesses of anger and self righteousness.

There is plenty of reason to look for some way past postmodernism. I looked a few times by google for further articles on what can come after postmodernism such as meta modernism. I found them to be long on verbal mush. It sounded as if there was hope an escape will appear by accident.
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Physics Guy
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Re: Modernism, Postmodernism, Meta-modernism

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I'm not an art or literature criticism guy, and I'm not even much of a consumer any more. I always used to read a lot, but for the past ten years or so my former reading time has mostly gone into trying to write a novel myself. I feel that I've learned a lot that I never noticed before, about how stories work. That is, I'm not sure I've learned anything about how they can work really well, but I've learned some things about how they can completely fail. I suspect there may still be some failure modes that I don't yet recognize.

The fact that fiction is a painfully thin illusion is hard to avoid noticing once you try doing it for a while. Or at least, that's one way to put it. Perhaps another way to say it is that something like 90% of the story that people will read won't be what you write, anyway, because it will be the expectations and preconceptions that are in the readers' own heads. The reader is this grand piano full of taut strings and resonating spaces, and as an author you're just tapping a few keys. It has to be that way. There's a massive decompression algorithm that unpacks a few kilobytes of alphanumeric characters into a story. If stories did not work like that, we wouldn't have any stories.

You're really constrained by the architecture of the instrument. You're supposed to be creative and fresh, but that's a lot harder than you'd think, because merely thinking of some stuff that hasn't been done before isn't nearly enough. Most of the stuff that hasn't been done before hasn't been done because it doesn't work at all. It makes no sense, or it's dull, or it's downright annoying. Innovation is a thin border zone between familiarity and garbage, because 90% of the effect you create relies on the audience's prior expectations. If you try to ignore the rules in their heads, you won't be being original. You'll just be babbling incomprehensible gibberish.

Some of the rules are probably permanent. They're hardwired in human neurology, or even in nature more generally. Some of the reasons why readers respond as they do are so flexible that they're different for every individual reader. In between there are patterns of expectation and association that may be largely the same for a whole generation of readers, in a whole chunk of the world, because of all kinds of things.
T.S. Eliot wrote:Miss Nancy Ellicott smoked
And danced all the modern dances;
And her aunts were not quite sure how they felt about it,
But they knew that it was modern.
I was a teenager before it was cool.
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Re: Modernism, Postmodernism, Meta-modernism

Post by Morley »

Physics Guy wrote:
Wed Jun 07, 2023 7:50 am
I'm not an art or literature criticism guy, and I'm not even much of a consumer any more. I always used to read a lot, but for the past ten years or so my former reading time has mostly gone into trying to write a novel myself.
As you put it, art might be "incredibly thin and incredibly fake," but the process of creating art is actually incredibly demanding and incredibly difficult. The real illusion is that from the outside, it looks like anyone could have done it.

Creating art that's meaningful or significant is exponentially more challenging, still. That's why you have artists painting the same damned birch forest over and over again. They figured out how to do that one thing, and do it okay, now they're either just working on finally getting it right, or have given themselves over to reproducing the same book with different characters because they've figured out a formula that kind of works.

Walking the thin, red line that winds its way through the impositions of culture and human hardwiring--as well as the limitations imposed by our own individual psychology (and by the constraints present in whatever medium we've chosen)--is all pretty daunting. But it's obvious that you already know all of this.
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Re: Modernism, Postmodernism, Meta-modernism

Post by Morley »

honorentheos wrote:
Sun May 28, 2023 11:10 pm
I watched this Youtube video this weekend and thought others may find it interesting as well. The subject is ostensibly the evolution of movie narrative from its roots in moderism through today where the deconstruction of postmodernism and often nihilist or absurdist inevitability it brings to art, to the increasing search for meaning and sincerity within the many strands of narratives of hyper-modernism.

https://youtu.be/5xEi8qg266g

And, frankly, true to the subject, I thought there is much more to take from this than a video essay on film. The topic extends to every topic we discuss on this board. It is, at many levels, truly a discussion of...art.
I usually try to stay away from youtube video, but I thought this was a pretty good summation, honor. Thanks.
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Re: Modernism, Postmodernism, Meta-modernism

Post by Physics Guy »

Morley wrote:
Wed Jun 07, 2023 2:02 pm
The real illusion is that from the outside, it looks like anyone could have done it.
Yeah, this is weird. The final product seems to be fully open-source. If somebody sells you a smartphone, you know that it's full of circuitry that you could not make at home, but with a novel, there is no obvious hood for anything to be under, no secret sauce that you can taste without being able to identify the ingredients. That sequence of characters is the whole product. So as a reader you might think that you could reverse-engineer it easily just by carefully reading the text. Other art forms than writing may add technical requirements like focusing a camera or swishing a brush, but it appears as though that's all you'd need, because in the end everything you see is just brushstrokes, everything you hear is just notes.

The hood under which the engine is hidden is your own skull; the engine is your own brain. You own it, but you don't have access to its inner workings. So having the text of a novel, or the score of a symphony, is like having a source file for a large iOs app—or maybe even like having the machine-code executable. It does nothing at all by itself. Everything it does is really a feature of the inaccessible hardware, which it merely directs.

I think you can indeed teach yourself to produce art just by studying enough of other people's productions, but it'll be like learning programming by studying source code on your own. There's a lot more to it than just typing out a lot of misspelled words and weird punctuation.
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Re: Modernism, Postmodernism, Meta-modernism

Post by honorentheos »

Morley wrote:
Wed Jun 07, 2023 2:23 pm

I usually try to stay away from youtube video, but I thought this was a pretty good summation, honor. Thanks.
Glad you found it worth the time.
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Re: Modernism, Postmodernism, Meta-modernism

Post by Morley »

honorentheos wrote:
Wed May 31, 2023 5:39 am
But there's a broader point here. I think our society is at a point where we've deconstructed ourselves into societal failure. While I didn't agree with MG's points, I actually agreed with MG's concerns in the broad strokes in his thread where he mistakenly blamed Gen Z for being irreligious and ruining society as a result. And like the essay points out, those who would push a return to High Noon or, more likely, Top Gun Maverik, aren't responding to the state of the world as it is but as they fantasize how it OUGHT to be. MG would have the world return to making High Noon.

It's getting so that every time I get together with old friends and grown children and we talk philosophy, politics, the future--and the world that we’re leaving those who are coming after us--we inevitably settle into that bitter silence that tastes of despair. I wake in the night with it thick on my palate and move through the day with it in the pit of my stomach. We have screwed up the world and worn out our welcome. I have the sense that we have not just killed the planet but have destroyed all the old gods and ideals.

Not long ago, I was sitting in the class of man who is a colleague and friend. I was critiquing one of the art-god theorists he was presenting. I was scathing and merciless, and, I thought, very correct and on point. He stopped the class and quietly reprimanded me. He reminded me of how easy it is to critique, but how very difficult it is to create. No theory answers all questions, but to come up with any idea that coherently addresses any issue should be valued and respected. I knew he was right.

In my own art practice, it's too easy for me to overthink the thing I'm working on. There's a point in any piece where I hate the piece and I hate myself--where I move from creation to destruction and bitter loathing. When I do this, I have to just put my head down and work on through it. I abandon thought, stifle the voice, and work on through it. I don't know of any other way out.

I don't know how we do that with the kind of world we've created. We've critiqued ourselves into a kind of vinegary paralysis. I don't know how we work our way out.
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Re: Modernism, Postmodernism, Meta-modernism

Post by Physics Guy »

I'm trying to adopt a philosophy that I'm calling "enlightened crappiness". The idea is that much of whatever impact my product is ever going to have is going to be due to factors outside itself, anyway. It'll be about exactly who finds it, and what they bring to it, and what they do with it.

So, past a certain point of effort on my part, any further improvement that I might achieve will be a small effect, anyway, compared to all those factors that are beyond my control. At that point, further work on that project will be accomplishing less than simply calling, "Cut!" and shipping out whatever it is, for whatever it's worth in the form that it has, so I can start something new.

It's going to feel, at that moment, like leaving my work in an unfinished, crappy state. I think it might be enlightened, though, because I'm beginning to think that quality as an inherent property of anything is at least partly illusion. A lot of what's good, about anything good, isn't really in the thing itself, but in what people do with it. The time to finish isn't when the thing's perfect but when it's ready for those other people to take over—or not. That I just can't control.

"Enlightened crappiness" is kind of a crappy name for the concept. So now I'm thinking it's perfect.

(The only products that I actually produce at any appreciable rate are physics lectures and papers, which aren't exactly artistic, but I think they're pretty similar as far as this principle goes.)
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Re: Modernism, Postmodernism, Meta-modernism

Post by Some Schmo »

huckelberry wrote:
Sun Jun 04, 2023 5:49 pm
I do not think we abhor deviation from expectations but relationship to expectations is necessary for perception.
Deviation from expectations, in my opinion, is what causes some of the greatest moments of joy in our lives.

Comedy, for instance, is all about deviation from expectations. If you can predict the joke, it won't be funny. We laugh when someone takes in a direction we didn't expect. Of course, part of our expectations when we go to a comedy show is to laugh, and a comedian tailors their show with that expectation in mind.

Nate Bargatze (a comic I've really been into lately) has a great joke about how comedy shows aren't funny if you aren't expecting comedy. It just sounds like an angry sermon. I thought that was hilarious (it's a joke from a comic's comic, but I love it anyway. Maybe that's why).
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