To be read while listening to the Beastie Boys, Sabotage, at full tilt. Speakers, not earbuds you nit-wit.
In the beginning, circa 1989-93ish, post-modernism was out of step with mainstream academia. Derrida was a curiosity. Baudrillard was simply too dense to understand. (Confession: Baudrillard’s book, “The Gulf War Did Not Take Place,” is actually damned profound and prescient once you get past the kind of syntax that would make Yoda blush.) And Foucault, poor Michel (already dead by the time I attended university) was still dismissed as a fad—although of all the post-moderns Foucault’s work has aged the best and is worthy of respect. His discourses on the body, knowledge and the aggrandizement of power over all three by public institutions presaged neoliberalism. Credit where credit is due.
Sed tamen aberro . . .
Regardless, to the overworked and underpaid graduate students the post-moderns had the frisson of transgression. And nothing attracts the mediocre like a charlatan wrapped in the mantle of authenticity.
Eventually, those grad students became instructors, adjuncts and associate professors all over the country. Chipping away at the old ways by introducing Lyotard’s “incredulity towards meta-narratives” and Roland Barthes declaration that “the author was dead” both invalidating authorial intent and empowering the reader’s (usually baseless) interpretation, Derrida’s rejection of common sense and objective interpretations (known as ‘Deconstruction’) was the perfect mortar for the worst possible innovation.
It was probably Foucault, as his education included a substantial grounding in the history of science, who connected the dots leading from Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, aka the observer effect, and grafted the concept onto his own thinking on the fluid and relative nature between institutions and power.
Then, in 1975 he took LSD. The experience changed everything according to Foucault. He completely revamped his work on human sexuality and its was here that sex took on the aspect of a social construct, to be negotiated. Sex was no longer an issue of pleasure, but of truth. (And thus our sexual identity politics were born.) Foucault’s popular discourse took on a life of its own, especially after his premature death in 1984.
The post-moderns soon expropriated wholesale the ‘observer effect.’ Unfortunately they abandoned rigorous analysis at the same time and like the good mediocre minds they were, adopted a pose I call, “la pose de Sarte.”*
With a highly dubious interpretation of science in one hand and quasi-erotic mojo in another students flocked to their lectures in droves. The ladies showed up for you. The men showed up for the ladies. And everyone ate up the half-baked but dangerously sexy contrarian theories on race, gender, and the negotiation of sexual identity.
Sometime between 2002 and 2014 when I returned to academia the entire coterie of post-moderns had infected all the humanities. And the observer effect acted like leprosy rotting the academy from every which way at once.
But the classes were full. Administrators took note. Professors got grants.
“Whoa, this grift is working?” They thought.
“Nicely done, Waldo.”
Now they’re wearing Zegna shoes and hand-woven black woolen Irish turtlenecks. Undergrad coeds hop in and out of their beds like Mae West on meth.
Soon they get published in peer reviewed journals by overworked and underpaid peers who just don’t give two fucks because university administrators have proliferated while tenured jobs have declined in nominal and real terms.
Big time college sports gobble up what is left of the academic budget, so universities start hiring half-assed adjunct professors and pay them slave wages.
And still, the post-moderns strike le pose, claiming their bullshit truth is equally as true as 2+2=4, when in actuality said theory is the the square root of wildebeest horns multiplied by baboon asses, divided by the Pyramid of Giza plus the Sphinx.
Making any sense yet?
It should not. It should boggle the mind, as not one iota of the post-moderns nonsense theorizing is scientifically provable or falsifiable. It’s bunkum. A weak attempt to prove there is no such thing as objective reality to anyone but the observer.
While working on my second masters I signed up for a seminar on the history of human sexuality. This was 2015 and we deconstructed the biological focus of traditional theories of sexuality. Now there was a masterclass of freeway rubbernecking idiocy. After that nonesense, we discussed Foucault, Jameson and finally Deluze, who more than any other post-modern flagrantly conflated science and mathematics to justify nothingness and subjectivity’s role on the observer’s effect, especially on sexual identity.
Give you one guess what conclusion we arrived at: sex is a social construct.
To be fair, gender is a social construct. The Thai’s have three genders, masculine, feminine and khathoey, or ‘Lady Boy.’ Kathoey are fully integrated and accepted into mainstream Thai, Cambodian and Laotian society. But sex, sex is not a construct.
I can prove the objective reality of sex’s falsifiability as a social construct.
Question: can you have an orgasm? Answer: yes. Then you are male or female.
Answer: no. Well, I respect your commitment, snip-snip, but you are neither male nor female.
Why would the professor care about any of this? He has tenure and his agenda. Besides, he’s getting laid more than Hank Moody in Californication.
Meanwhile the students grow stupider yet simultaneously more arrogant as they adopt le pose.
A vicious cycles ensues and we now find ourselves in the present moment, slaves to time’s relentless arrow.
But as the close neared its end it was time to put up or shut up. Yes, I know how to be a good suck up of a student and get high marks!
So, I wrote my research paper on the Alexandrian Greek poet Constantine Cavafy and his catamite. I got an ‘A’ but the course, well, to be generous, it was a shit show of moral degeneracy and complete intellectual absurdity.
I’d have been better off in Amsterdam’s Red Light District. At least I’d have had more fun.
————————
*Sarte: French existentialist philosopher of high regard and mortal enemy of Foucault.
Feral Finster
I had a similar, less violent conversation with a young lion of deconstructionism about the indeterminacy of language.
“Ever gone to a McDonalds?” Yes.
“Ever ordered anything there?” Yes
“Did you get what you expected?” Yes
“Did you pay for it with money?” Yes
“Did you expect to pay for it?” Yes
“How did you know what to order and what it cost?” I read the menuboard….
Stupid humans.
spud
i notice that the dumbing down of america became accelerated in 1967, with the push for football, and country western music. with football, it was to desensitize watchers to violence. i was a bar once where i watched a women scream kill him repeatedly to a play on t.v., whilst the jukebox blared ogi from mustogie.
now that same force is after rock and roll, because its innovative, and makes people think.
anyone, and i mean anyone can write a country western song. all you need to do is to aim for the lowest common denominator with a country accent, and you have a hit.
Purple Library Guy
There are things that were/are wrong with modernism and Enlightenment thinking that did need some kind of correction. Those people were just too damn sure that they had no biases and their shit didn’t stink. The postmodernism we got was . . . an overreaction.
And, it was also very oriented, whether accidentally, on purpose, or somewhere in between, towards making it easier to baffle with bullshit than to dazzle with dexterity. And so just as current rules in most capitalist countries being oriented towards making grifting more profitable than production has led to a whole lot of grifting and not so much production, postmoderny rules of the game in academia has led to a whole lot of bullshit spouting.
One weird thing about postmodernism is that it’s ultimately a group of PHILOSOPHICAL positions, but as far as I know nobody in actual philosophy departments pays any attention to the stuff.
Incidentally, I don’t know about postmodernism in the arts, but given the track record in other disciplines I wouldn’t be surprised if there was some kind of fix in. We know that abstract, fully non-representational art such as Jackson Pollock got a huge boost from the CIA, which wanted a Western “art” that could go up against Soviet Realism, represent freedom, and be apolitical and so unthreatening. They literally bankrolled artistic journals and shows and stuff through a cut-out or two. Meanwhile in the social sciences like sociology and anthropology, authorities were worried by tendencies towards Marxism, so the Rockefeller foundation put a good deal of money into pushing the academy towards a value-neutral, pure description sort of approach instead. Again, don’t know about postmodernism, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a bit of that sort of thing going on.
It can be kind of pathetic looking at well-meaning people trying their hardest to come up with emancipatory narratives but all they have for tools is postmodern stuff that leaves them with no real basis to advance one ethic over another or say whether any situation is good or bad. When you see some post-colonialist who obviously would like to be saying something clear and solid but they’re stuck with intellectual tools that won’t do the job, yeah, it’s just sad.
I do have one quibble with the original post–“Question: can you have an orgasm? Answer: yes. Then you are male or female.
Answer: no. Well, I respect your commitment, snip-snip, but you are neither male nor female.”
What the fuck is that BS supposed to be? Think for ten seconds, honestly. Sometimes people react to the pointless complexity of postmodernism by wanting everything to be ten times as simple as it actually is.
Paleobotanist
Jean-Paul Sartre, not Sarte!
Egoculexegonos
(This message is not meant to be published as it’s just a heads-up on a typo)
Where the text says “Sarte” it should say “Sartre”.
Oakchair
Does anyone actually run into any post modernist thinkers in their day to day lives?
If you went and asked everyone you personally know if they even know what post modernism is what percent would say yes?
The only time I hear about Post modernism is when people are railing against it.
I guess it counts as it’s own evidence that the observer creates reality because it doesn’t seem to exist outside obscure internet blog posts.
Gaianne
Early post modernism:
Enlightenment thinking has accomplished a lot, yet it is now clear that the observer’s own self subtly affects what is observed.
Later–
Karl Rove: We make own reality.
–Gaianne
Purple Library Guy
If you go to a university and go into certain disciplines, it’s around. Mind you, most of the disciplines in question are the ones losing funding while the business department and to some extent STEM gain it. Liberal arts and social sciences.
I do get the impression that even there, it’s already past its height.
breac
the critique of folks doing postmodernism by rote, sure, that’s the fate of any intellectual strand that becomes hegemonic. happened with modernism, happened before that too.
and of course it’s been exacerbated by the financialisation of education.
all true, and nothing whatsoever to do with the core of this kind of thinking.
i think your attitude probably comes from two places:
1. in a reactionary period with the left in retreat, lefty academics have been less engaged with material reality and struggle. so what they do instinctively looks useless.
2. i think you confirm one of the central theses of postmodernism, which is that the core of how we feel and think about something is ultimately as aesthetic as anything else. this seems evident since you don’t make much of an actual argument about what’s wrong with postmodernism. a cartoon about observable reality apparently does the trick.
there is insane richness in texts like the order of things or mille plateaux or the differend, but you don’t see it. that’s completely fine, it’s just not your bag. that’s true for all of us. i was never able to get into analytical philosophy for example.
finally though, to say that postmodern stuff is unfalsifiable is a real tell. you’re conflating the hard sciences with everything else. as every good (non-postmodern) historian or anthropologist or sociologist etc will tell you, the point of studying the human world is not to get to falsifiable propositions in the sense of the hard sciences, but to pose interesting or urgent questions on the basis of seriousness of purpose.
in the process there are indeed true facts that you can unearth, but they are incredibly fragile. often they are contested or partial or uncertain; it is necessary for a record of them to exist in some form, which is incredibly arbitrary and often a result of what the elite saw fit to record; and it’s necessary for the researcher to pose the right question, which is a result of present-day concerns and perspectives. so yeah, facts/objective reality, but utterly shot through with randomness, partiality, contestation, and the preoccupations of the self and the other, the past and the present.
facts that nobody cares about disappear or if they arbitrarily survive are an irrelevance. so for a fact to exist, it’s necessary for people to care. and once people care, what facts they find and how they couch them is everything. in the human world, facts without a social/political/ideological/cultural framework have never existed, and never will.
you could say they are … (ahem) socially constructed.
Dermot O Connor
POMO: “There are no meta-narratives, only narratives and interpretations”.
uH-Oh
META-NARRATIVE DETECTED
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Where the text says “Sarte” it should say “Sartre”.
Or, better yet, where the text says “Sarte”, it should say “Satire”.
Human thinks way too much of itself. When it is all said and done, considering how vast and unknowable the universe is or universes, it will be as if human never even existed. We are not special, we merely think we are.
bruce wilder
“We are not special, we merely think we are.”
Descartes wears Army boots!
Need a critic? Need a philosopher?
Prompt an AI agent to critique and summarize another AI agent’s pre post postmodern podcast performance. At 1.5x.
Phillip Allen
A most enjoyable essay. Thank you.
Mark Level
I am late to this party as I got distracted by my life going crazy (in a good way this time, April was another story) plus bogged down with multiple replies on Ian’s last thread.
I think SPK’s take here is mostly brilliant, I only have one Master’s degree so I will defer to your authority, but quibble on a couple of things.
So starting late last century or early this one, AdBusters Magazine really hipped me to how incoherent and untrustworthy Post-Mod is as a whole, and deliberately in many cases. It’s a political sleight of hand to keep Late Capitalist Misery in the drivers’ seat, with some notable exceptions.
I confess as to Baudrillard I have read next to nothing, uninformed. Now Foucault is another matter. There was a very good series coming out in the 80s and 90s “Philosopy Comics,” unfortunately I can’t find it on Amazon but it was a collaborative effort of 2 men, one a Philosophy Prof and the other a talented amateur and the artist. I saw actual books by the prominent guy, he had several published.
It was actually very informative & I learned a great deal about Foucault’s thinking. The fact of his being gay, + being into BDSM big-time affected a lot of his work, most clearly in Discipline and Punish, on the Penal System. They had a funny bit in there where he was the dad from The Family Circus, he was all ball-gagged and tied up by the Mom, when Jeffy walked in and witnessed their romp! I dipped into some Foucault later and found him to be very anti-authoritarian and sincere, came to admire him. And yes I felt bad about his early life, he lived fast and died young. And yes, if you don’t have intractable psychological issues or self-hatred, LSD can be an incredible Eye-Opener, and a Spiritual Emetic. The first time I took it, age 19, I saw all my ridiculous, petty inner fears and inhibitions, restrictions and started ripping up as many by the roots as I could. For the first time in a previously traumatic childhood and teens, I felt “safe” in the World, I realized Life is Precious directly, saw the beauty of Animals more than previously, really felt there was something close to a God, though I generally refused Theism at that age, my Mysticism IQ shot up and I knew Reincarnation was real, for the most part I wasn’t a horrible person in my previous lives. With a mind like Michel’s no doubt his works were more incisive.
Speaking of Sartre, he had the opposite experience to Michel, “Nausea”, saw the world as ugly and Hellish, beyond redemption. Beware when you open those Doors of Perception, what you see in the soul mirror may be horribly deformed and ugly!! I never had a “bad trip”, I had parts of trips that were bad, but talked myself out of it, “It’s just the drugs, Marco”. Once a friend turned me on to that Mexican Cactus and I briefly saw and communicated with Mescalito himself, he was genial with me, not frightful at all, nothing like some of PK Dick’s threatening characters. Hongos, mushrooms often tore up my stomach and made me puke, that was the only thing I ever feared when crossing that liminal space.
Yeah, being a professorial Sensation certainly does work with the ladies, & Men as well. Not too long ago I watched the ridiculous film of Philip Roth’s “The Human Stain.” Roth wrote some brilliant stuff and some garbage in his career, and that was in the latter group. I quit at a certain Big Reveal about 2/3 of the way thru, too absurd. I only watched it coz I was reading a Harper’s piece about Roth’s declining reputation, the woman author attended a big PR Fan Event in NYC, the first one (held once every decade) after his death. “Woke” was very much in the air, and since Philip was a shameless horndog, “Little Philip” between his legs in charge more often than Big Philip in his head, he regularly did ridiculous and shameful things. So when 6 foot, blonde Nicole Kidman played the broken “Faunia Farley” character in the film, Roth hired a Limo, tried to demand she ride with him so he could fuck her. She said no of course.
Here’s the idiocy of the book, as seen only thru the film– The big reveal that made me stop. So the main protagonist is Sir Anthony Hopkins, at his Brit-accented best, the character impersonated being Jewish in the 50s coz he was something “worse”, he was Black. A brilliant literary scholar, he only entered Academia despite being Jewish as a kind of early preferential racial hiring. His father, Mr. Silk, was a black Pullman Porter played by Harry Lennix, who is Christian and insists Silk Jr. attend Howard University, and his untimely early death allows Prof. Silk to instead feign Jewry as “Nathan Zuckerman” and eventually become the college president. The book is set in the time of Woke, early on at the first class meeting, he tries to call, randomly from his roster, on 2 black students in the class who are either (a) not attending, or (b) too frightened of his Olympian Arrogance to respond. He is condescendingly explaining why the Youth should read Homer, even though the Illiad is “ugly war stuff” focused on “toxic masculinity” etc. (I’m paraphrasing, not the exact words.) That’s also pretty dumb for a genius character, ‘coz I have read the Illiad and know that Achilles ran away to the Court of Skyros and cross-dressed as a woman before seducing a maiden there, and I’ve never been a College Prof.
So because he’s impersonating an arrogant Jewish man, I guess Roth has him go into a loud temper tantrum before the students about how ignorant “savages” don’t study the great works, wallow in the gutter. The savages word is considered racist and directed at blacks (it’s never credible that Sir Anthony could come forth from black loins) and other faculty members witness his tirade and call him out. Enraged, he quits on the spot, and his beloved wife can’t stop him, she’s a Nepotistic #2 in the Classics Dept., she has a stroke and dies suddenly within a day or 2 of his walking out, he blames political correctness for her death!! In the Harper’s piece, the most popular comment at the Roth Society meeting was a man who noted the broken “Faunia Farley” character played by Kidman is a miserable post-office worker and part-time janitor who killed her 2 children by negligence when younger, but she’s also a brilliant Auto-Didact who knows Literature, seduces the 3-4 decades older Zuckerman for hot sex. So this guy noted the Book’s Faunia Farley looked nothing like Kidman, got massive applause.
Alright, enough of that ridiculous tangent, it does relate to SPK’s overall topic however. I certainly agree that apart from Foucalt and a handful of others, including some amazing work in Semiotics at the time, most of it was bunkum. For Semiotics, see works like the irregular journal Semiotexte, published by MIT Press, e.g.
“No objective reality.” An arguable point, hardly original, hell Socrates as quoted by Plato discussed this at great length. I don’t have the answer, my opinion on this changes at different times. The comic is clever, if derivative. Back to philosophy, someone played exactly this same script out with Bishop Berkeley. Samuel Johnson kicked a large rock where they were arguing, said “I refute it thusly!!” I read the Philosophy comics on the pre-Socratics, the Idealists, Greek Philosophy, etc.
Deleuze a con-artist, I read only a bit before getting that.
I agree strongly with Judith Butler’s Femininity is a Social Construct, and that men (straight ones anyway) are essentially masculine if they have a working cock, women have to “become” women by certain performative arts, dress, grooming, pretending submissiveness even when not so, etc. Interesting bit of trivia, which I learned from Willis Goth Regier’s brilliant Book of the Sphinx, publ. by Univ. of Nebraska Press, women’s standard haircut, shorter in front and 2 descending longer strands descending on the right and left is believed to have originated in ancient Egypt, then copied by neighbors. (African hair is often “different” of course.)
Yes, I agree to your corollary, gender is definitely a social construct. When Morrisey and the Smiths hit big when I was about 25, me and friends would Vamp at nightclubs, a bit of Gender Queer performance, flounce around and limpen our wrists. Like the divine Oscar said, being bisexual doubles your odds of getting a date on Friday Night!! That was only a temporary stage, a male friend tried to perform fellatio on me once at an orgy (I was a member of the Bay Area OTO at the time), but since we were all doing MDMA I couldn’t quite get to the peak. That was the fullest extent of my Gay Flirtations, I deviated back to the Mean of Heterosexuality soon after, Women’s bodies do far more for me than men’s do.
As to moral degeneracy, which I continue to practice either privately or consensually if there is a mutual interest with some woman, it gives the spice to life and shouldn’t be avoided, unless you are a wuss. Like with drugs, just don’t overdo it, endanger yourself or others or get coerced into something you don’t want, keep things consensual is Rule #1.
I affirm that if I had ever spent any time in Amsterdam other than at Schiphol Airport flying to and from Spain, I would’ve indulged. Too bad I was too dumb to add 2 days there at the time!! I did have lots of fun during my 2 trips to Thailand in 2009, they are very sexually liberated for the most part.
Didn’t listen to the Beastie Boys. I had been streaming Brazilian music just before writing this (it’s much more suave (soft sounding with zh’s etc.) and prettier than even Spanish music, but didn’t stream the Beastie Boys, after that, Lightning Hopkins, including some of his upbeat stuff came up and it worked okay.
We’re on the same page musically a lot Sean; I’m very fond of Straight Outta Compton, among others.
Dagnarus
Is it wrong that the cartoon annoys me? The professor is clearly slapped on his right cheek. But in the last panel the welt is on his left cheek. Is it AI? Or was the artist just not bothered with continuity?
Either way I feel like it says something about our culture.
mago
Like señor Mark Level I’m late to the party, too, not that anybody missed me.
Yeah, spud. Country Western music. Lost my dog, my job and my woman left me. Had to listen to that shit every morning on the radio growing up, and I hated it. Although my postmodern life did come to resemble that. Ha ha. Joke’s on me.
Too much to say regarding ML’s post. I knew Amsterdam well, and loved the canals and cafes and museums and art galleries and those mean beat streets, including the red light district. Ah, to be young again.
I also followed the Van Gogh trail. He’d tell you just like he told brother Theo, take this post modern ear and shove it.
That’s all. Thanks.
Albert65
La pose is whst you mean as le pose except as je le pose does not exist except in some wiktionary editor’s head.
StewartM
Well, the fundamental principles of post-modernism: that we humans create patterns from the observed data to form explanations (or “narratives”; they have more of a literary than a scientific background usually) and what arrangements we create and prefer are chosen by a combination of personal bias, cultural background, and political/social pressure, I see as undeniably true. As Thomas Kuhn has written, they even intrude into scientific investigations; the Copernican model of the solar system in fact did not explain it much better than the Ptolemaic model, but its explanation was far simpler and we prefer simple narratives to complex ones when given the choice.
But that’s a far thing from saying that all arrangements or “narratives” are equal. The difference is utility. A “narrative” that not only explains past and present observations, but also can predict ones, is a far more useful “narrative” than one that is a “just-so” story with no predictive value.
And that’s the real error of the post-mos you are critiquing. None of this should lead to epistemological anarchy. Yes, the accepted explanations (“narratives”) may be wrong, they may be falsified, but they will be replaced by a “narrative” that explains things more completely. As Hume cautions, all “matters of fact” based on observation cannot be known with certainty. But this does not mean that we can’t eliminate the ones that are obviously wrong.
Your observer effect cartoon, however, is strictly speaking not a rebuttal of the position. It echoes Samuel Johnson’s kicking a stone in front of a church to refute Bishop George Berkley’s “immaterialism” (that only minds and ideas exist) saying “I refute it thus!”
https://askaphilosopher.org/2015/10/13/when-dr-johnson-kicked-the-stone/
https://philosophynow.org/issues/165/I_refute_it_thus
The other nitpick I have at your essay is that there are people who want to have sex, try to have sex, and can’t have orgasms. (I figured that was the case, but I looked it up).
https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/24640-anorgasmia
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Yes, the accepted explanations (“narratives”) may be wrong, they may be falsified, but they will be replaced by a “narrative” that explains things more completely.
I’m not quite so sure about this. The way things are going, the opposite is more likely to manifest and I say that without any fairy tale literary narrative to justify its predictive value.
Your post-modern narrative is that things improve over time in regard to human thought and behavior because it always has so it always will. Why else would you assume that the current narratives will be replaced by narratives that explain things more completely?
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Is it wrong that the cartoon annoys me?
No! It rubbed me the wrong way too, but I’m not exactly sure why, I guess because I’m not a good post-modernist and have no narrative.
Tune in next week when the incomparable, and highly flexible and easily transformative, ML informs us he was also an astronaut and David Bowie’s Major Tom from Space Oddity was him.
Mark Level
Haha!! Thanks, LAS, I appreciate your attempts to suggest I’m lying or confabulating, but you are mistaken. I’m not creative enough to make stuff like that up, I suspect you of sharing resentful projection. It lands nowhere near me. I’m not a Waltery Mitty type, I was until like age 20, then things got real out on my own in the School of Hard Knocks, I practiced Joseph Campbell’s “follow your dreams” before I even heard it. I lived in the SF Bay area 32 years, a lot of fun, open perversity, the same the 7 years I was in New Orleans (1982-89) hung out with witches, sissies, my parents were so boring I always liked the deviants and weirdos. (I was careful though, some projected danger which I steered clear of.)
Did you ever even answer my earlier rant when you asked about one of my partners, I asked about why you never mention your wife who you mentioned only once. A trip to the recycling center. Do women have no influence on you?
If you’re afraid of queers or sexual exploration (within reason) I feel sorry for you. I don’t know David Bowie, the only musician celeb I ever met was David Jay of Bauhaus and later Love and Rockets. A friend of mine ran a small press magazine, Esoterra with his SoCal buddy, my friend “Robert Fitzgerald” published many books on Occultism, his SoCal pal Chad was into Norweigan Death Metal, see here: https://www.amazon.com/EsoTerra-Journal-Extreme-Chad-Hensley/dp/1840681667
Around 1994 Robert flew to Britain to see friends, he’d found Alan Moore’s contact info. and sent him several issues, asked him for an interview and got it. It was published in the mag, some questions about his interest and Magick came from me so Alan generously autographed a book to me, “To Mark, Yours in the Ideoplam.”
Around 1995 Robert or I won free tickets to Love & Rockets’ show at the Great American Music Hall in San Fran Sisssssy!! (This is not my coining, there’s a gay, paraplegic man who DJ’s for the U Cal Berkeley college radio station named Anthony something, his DJ name for 4+ decades has been “Sex 14s”.) Robert bought magazines for David Jay, a close friend of Moore’s, including the interview, left them with security and asked for a meeting with them, post-show, we got invited back for a few beers. At that show I ran into an old N’Awlins friend, Cathy Harr, who’d moved to Burlingame with her husband, she was a middling light in the music industry, managed some bands she loved, couple of successful ones. I’d first met her when she was dating my roomate in NOLA, she was the Station Manager of the excellent Tulane radio station WTUL which I still listen to. When we were protesting Bush Sr’s convention in 1988 soon before I left, with Catholic Worker, Gay, Yippie, black militants and other allies, she promoted our and others’ events. After she followed me and my friends to the Bay Area, things got violent between her and hubby. He’d pissed off people before, the guys in the band Pop -O-Pies once knocked him around after he insulted them at a live show. They were breaking up and she stabbed him!! I mostly steered clear of her after that despite many friends in common. My other celeb autograph came from the legendary publisher of Harper’s magazine, Lewis Lapham, I saw him speak with a Libertarian wacko about 2 months before the Iraq invasion in San Francisco. He had a signing table, I bought one of his books and we had a quick conversation, I noted Rummy’s “The abscence of evidence is not evidence of abscence” was stolen from the UFO community, he appreciated the insight. Oh, I also saw the legendary battlefield reporter Robert Fisk, bought an autographed The Great War for Civilization from him. He had interviewed Osama bin-Laden twice before 9/11, spoke to a big crowd at a community church in Oakland. I conversed briefly with Glen Greenwald after he’d spoken at the same church after breaking the Snowden story, no autograph.
I enjoy edgy, weird stuff– Uranus in Leo when I was born. As the great Jim Hightower says, “The only thing in the middle of the road is roadkill”, a political analogy.
Will respond to mago later, also I really should have responded more to SPK regarding the great Marxist scholar Fredric Jameson, “Glimmers of Totality.” He was age 90 and still publishing when the article came out in 2024, Marc Greif sings his fulsome praises for tearing Po-mo to shreds over many years in Harper’s.
Instead had to rebut the Hater. Haters gotta hate, trolls gotta troll. I’m not showing off viz my past adventures, I’m just sharing them when they relate (mas o menos) to the thread topic. Thx for the nostalgia trip, LAS!!
Mark Level
Oop, Ideoplasm!! Leave one letter out and it looks like gibberish.
StewartM
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“I’m not quite so sure about this. The way things are going, the opposite is more likely to manifest and I say that without any fairy tale literary narrative to justify its predictive value.”
Oh sure–because if the PTB find the narratives that actually do have predictive value threatening or ‘dangerous’ they will try to both suppress them and continue promoting their false narratives. However, these will eventually fail. Marvin Harris, “Cows, Pigs, Wars and Witches” writes on the so-called ‘freedom to believe’ that if these people were set loose in physics, chemistry, or biology labs they would only be a temporary inconvenience before their bodies would be swept out along with the rubble that they had created. I wrote in a blog long ago that the value of science was not that it produced infallible ‘truths’, but that its practice forces people to set forth the conditions that which THEY THEMSELVES have to admit that they were wrong, and that the list of scientists who were famously wrong about something, even something central to their main focus of study, is a veritable “Who’s Who” list (i.e., everyone!).
But the ideologues and religious zealots never constrain themselves to this kind of falsification. How many times have you heard “If we cut taxes on the rich, we’ll grow the economy by leaps and bounds and the deficit and debt will shrink not expand!”? When their ‘truth’ fails, they just scream it louder. It’s also why conservatives of all stripes are so “fundamentalist” and anti-empirical on everything, from economics to social issues. They don’t want to have to submit their supposed ‘truths’ to falsification. I’ve had Randies practically scream this at me!
Eventually, there will be progress. But it may shift locales. We’re seeing it shift in our lifetimes away from the dogma-bound West to China, while nobody does everything right, the Chinese are doing a helluva lot of things more right than us. Do you not think that we know more than people say, 200 or 500 years past?
StewartM
Just happened on a Youtube post about the supposed lack of diversity in “Leftist” thought, versus the greater diversity among the Right.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/ABmXh4SAqNw
I wrote in the comments:
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So the graph doesn’t really measure opinion (i.e., things where reasonable and informed people may disagree) but includes actual knowledge (where the boundaries of possible disagreement between reasonable and informed people is far less). So what it really shows is that the Right contains a lot of loonies.
(But we knew that already)
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The odd thing is that the “post-modern” perspective of the ‘freedom to believe’, like the 1970s counterculture, is thought by many to be a ‘left/liberal’ trait when in practice it is a right/conservative trait. Hell, the people who justifying their opinions on Gaza are using ‘the right to believe’ entirely bogus history (i.e., the Bible) in face of what we see in the archaeological record–or, to say, like the foundational stories of most cultures, there’s a lot of provably false myth and not much fact.
Jan Wiklund
According to Swedish sociologist Bo Rothstein the ultimate practitioner of post-modernism is Donald Trump: Nothing of what he says has any relation to reality, nor is it intended to have.