15 Matching Annotations
  1. Jun 2024
    1. text as an unfinished thing

      Comment by danallosso: In another sense, though, it makes the reader's process more visible so that the reader no longer needs to trespass into the author's territory. I've always been dissatisfied with the lit-crit position that the author must be completely decentered and her contribution minimized to make room for the reader. THIS seems to create a real space for the reader, and in so doing maybe it also allows the author to reclaim some of her space.

  2. Jan 2024
    1. The second thing we are missing is our need to grow beyond our predominantly postmodern worldview

      for - key insight - polycrisis - solving - postmodernism alone if insufficient

      definition - postmodernism - worldview that champions decentralization, diversity, leaderless coalitions, horizontal networks, etc., etc. author: John Bunzl

      claim - post modernism alone is no match for the dynamics of hierarchical Destructive Global Capitalism (DGC) - unity of required amongst the fragmented postmodern movements

  3. Dec 2021
  4. Oct 2021
    1. Let us then create a new guild of craftsmen without the class distinctions that raise an arrogant barrier between craftsman and artist! Together let us desire, conceive, and create the new structure of the future, which will embrace architecture and sculpture and painting in one unity and which will one day rise toward heaven from the hands of a million workers like the crystal symbol of a new faith.

      Bauhaus

      The Tower of Babel

      When I first read this manifesto, I had immediate associations with the Tower of Babel. The cathedral project of global neoliberal capitalism began as a socialist utopian project in the Weimar Republic as Germany’s first experiment in democracy. The democratic experiment failed when the Nazis shut down the Bauhaus in 1933.

      The experiment continued in the United States of America as the Bauhaus diaspora spread the ideas of modernism to the art, design and architecture academies around the world.

      The World Trade Center in New York City embodied the vision of modern architecture that Walter Gropius had been exploring at the Bauhaus, defining the trinity of building materials of the modern world: steel, glass, and concrete.

      When the twin towers collapsed on 9/11, the modernism movement came to an abrupt end. Ever since, we have been living in a distinctly postmodern world.

  5. Jul 2021
    1. In the same way that libertarian ideas had been lying around for Americans to pick up in the stagflated 1970s, young people coming of age in the disillusioned 2000s were handed powerful ideas about social justice to explain their world. The ideas came from different intellectual traditions: the Frankfurt School in 1920s Germany, French postmodernist thinkers of the 1960s and ’70s, radical feminism, Black studies. They converged and recombined in American university classrooms, where two generations of students were taught to think as critical theorists.

      Libertarian ideas being picked up in the 1970s.in analogy with

      Frankfurt School in 1920s Germany and French postmodernist thinkers of the 1960s and 70s put into "Just America"

  6. Nov 2020
    1. What has happened, I think, is relatively simple: A critical mass of the staff and management at New York Magazine and Vox Media no longer want to associate with me, and, in a time of ever tightening budgets, I’m a luxury item they don’t want to afford. And that’s entirely their prerogative. They seem to believe, and this is increasingly the orthodoxy in mainstream media, that any writer not actively committed to critical theory in questions of race, gender, sexual orientation, and gender identity is actively, physically harming co-workers merely by existing in the same virtual space. Actually attacking, and even mocking, critical theory’s ideas and methods, as I have done continually in this space, is therefore out of sync with the values of Vox Media. That, to the best of my understanding, is why I’m out of here. Two years ago, I wrote that we all live on campus now. That is an understatement. In academia, a tiny fraction of professors and administrators have not yet bent the knee to the woke program — and those few left are being purged. The latest study of Harvard University faculty, for example, finds that only 1.46 percent call themselves conservative. But that’s probably higher than the proportion of journalists who call themselves conservative at the New York Times or CNN or New York Magazine. And maybe it’s worth pointing out that “conservative” in my case means that I have passionately opposed Donald J. Trump and pioneered marriage equality, that I support legalized drugs, criminal-justice reform, more redistribution of wealth, aggressive action against climate change, police reform, a realist foreign policy, and laws to protect transgender people from discrimination. I was one of the first journalists in established media to come out. I was a major and early supporter of Barack Obama. I intend to vote for Biden in November.
  7. Feb 2020
    1. be terribly self-conscious.

      A characteristic of Post-Modernism . . .

    2. metafiction

      By definition PoMo

    3. For, as with TV,whether we happen personally to love technology, hate it, fear it, or all three, we still look relentlessly to technology for solutions tothe very problems technology seems to cause - catalysis for smog, S.D.I. for missiles, transplants for assorted rot.

      Pomo!

    Tags

    Annotators

  8. Oct 2019
    1. It is with postmodernism that the hunger for novelty begins to fade. Postmodern theory does not rate originality very highly. It has put revolution well behind it. Instead, it embraces a world in which everything is a recycled, translated, parodied or derivative version of something else.

      Postmodernism wnats to make new without claiming it's new -- since everything has been done before, but also we can violate the rules of the past.

  9. Jul 2019
    1. for lack of a better term

      I'm not really satisfied using the term "critical theory" either, given that it could include works that aren't really "PoMo" (eg, Marxism or historical materialism). I'd use "post-structuralism", but I don't think that many folks know what it means and it's not totally accurate either. So I decided to just leave it as "critical theory" as in the original rant.

  10. May 2019
    1. text as an unfinished thing

      In another sense, though, it makes the reader's process more visible so that the reader no longer needs to trespass into the author's territory. I've always been dissatisfied with the lit-crit position that the author must be completely decentered and her contribution minimized to make room for the reader. THIS seems to create a real space for the reader, and in so doing maybe it also allows the author to reclaim some of her space.

  11. Jan 2019
    1. I want to plea for monistic affirmativepolitics grounded on immanent inter-connections and generative differ-ence

      This strikes me as a key distinction between postmodernism and posthumanism. Postmodernism can be thought of as post-utopian, while posthumanism works toward an affirmative, generative future. I don't know if posthumanism is utopian, per se, but it doesn't seem to be dystopic in the way that postmodernism often is.

  12. Apr 2017
    1. we have likelybeen posthuman all along

      Society itself is post-human, but computers and mechanical technologies just make it increasingly apparent. I would make a similar argument for our understanding of postmodernism as well.

  13. Sep 2016
    1. One of postmodernism’s key insights is that many practices that seem natural or inevitable are anything but. 

      Somewhat unexpected nod to critiques of essentialism. Makes sense in context.