re: Great lecture on Postmodernism. All we are now seeing started in the Universities

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Things that have been listed as micro-aggressions include saying that you do not see people in terms of race,

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I have my own critical theory for this kind of tripe. It's called frick you.

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This gets to the point I have made here for well over a decade. It is most accurate on the ground level to view Progressives from a psychological viewpoint rather than an ideological viewpoint. When people said "Liberalism is a mental disease" 15 years ago, people scoffed. When people now say "Progressivism is a mental disease" everybody gets it. These are people who have convinced themselves that living in the freest and most prosperous country in human history is actually like living through a racistsexisthomophobic dystopian nightmare. They shop at Whole Foods one moment and then throw a brick through the window the next. It's a sickness under the thin veneer of ideological theory. It is rooted in deep ignorance, narcissism, resentment and personal alienation. And they gather en masse and project it via Marxist sloganeering and destruction of American traditions, principle, ideals and Institutions, out into the world. And they would replace all that with whatever passion they happen to feel on any given day. It is a dangerous Infantilism of the mind and hea

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Nice post! It’s almost like we have a generation of quasi Manchurian candidates that the Dim Marxist indoctrinators have activated for this election cycle. Remember, this latest display of Marxist madness (rioting, looting, property destruction) was instigated by the death of a black man at the hands of a white police officer.

There’s no denying that Mr Floyd’s death was outrageous and sickening but the death was quickly labeled a racist act of violence against black Americans, yet there was no proof Chauvin had a history of racism or that Chauvin’s knee to Mr Floyd’s neck was applied because of racism.

None of that mattered, it was a grand opportunity to create societal outrage just as Ferguson was to used to create societal outrage to further a political agenda. I did a google search on Chauvin to see if their was any history of blatant racism.....I found none but I did find this article from USA Today, May 27, 2020

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A Minneapolis police officer videotaped on Monday holding a black man to the ground with his knee during an arrest has become the target of false claims on social media that attempt to tie him to political agendas and racist ideologies.

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Twitter and Facebook posts with hundreds of thousands of views on Wednesday claimed Derek Chauvin was pictured wearing a “Make Whites Great Again” hat and standing onstage at a Donald Trump rally, neither of which turned out to be true. The spread of false information was so rampant that the president of the Minneapolis police union set the record straight, telling The Associated Press that none of the officers involved in Monday’s incident were at the Trump rally in Minneapolis last October.

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This country is done if regular Americans don’t begin to stand up against the leftists that are trying to destroy America.

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Applied post-modernism trains people to do just the opposite. It cannot but help to increase anxiety and decrease ability to function.

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Soo the George Costanza hypothesis.

really though, it’s funny but what was George in Seinfeld.. narcissistic. All of this post modernism is stooped in hyper narcissism.

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I don't know his background, but I studied this stuff in the mid 2000s, and lived and breathed Foucault, Derrida, Lacan and all of these guys for almost 10 years.

I was an English major/grad, which is where this stuff really took shape in the 80s-90s.

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i studied philosophy before switching to history for graduate school. i can tell you that in graduate history courses foucault and derrida were more often talked about than read. i would occasionally open my copy of the archaeology of knowledge or discipline and punish and show my colleagues the marginal notes that i'd made. 99 percent would be shocked that i had actually read the texts

and in response to the other poster:

lyotard's definition of postmodern is a good enough start. he defined it as "incredulity toward metanarratives." he did not mean that truth is relative. the ancient greeks, esp. protagoras, had argued that 2500 years ago. instead, lyotard argued that totalizing, foundational theories of knowledge or narratives that are used to legitimize truth are increasingly rejected. these metanarratives include christianity, science, the enlightenment, universal progress, and even marxism. so it's not like "there is no truth". but that the underlying foundations used to "ground" or legitimize truth itself are no longer recognized.

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That’s the first time I’ve heard it described that way. How can Lyotard justify that?

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well, he can't and that is the "postmodern condition". the theme runs throughout postmodern thought, the idea that there is no foundation, first principle, or fixed point of reference upon which to legitimize truth claims. instead, there is just contingency, play, ambiguity, uncertainty. to be sure, we can appeal to metanarratives to explain something, but we cannot appeal to those metanrratives to ground truth claims.

and to turn this conversation back to the original topic, i found and read martin jay's paper on the intellectual history of the use of the term "cultural marxism" and its relationship to the frankfurt school. i always wondered where this strange appellation came from, and apparently a devotee of lyndon larouche wrote an article in the 90s that linked the frankfurt school with what he called cultural marxism, which broadly defined just meant "everything that is bad". much like people use postmodernism as an epithet. that connection was later picked up by more mainstream conservatives and took off.

incidentally, i don't see a whole lot of the cancel culture, grievance studies BS coming out of the frankfurt school. if anything, this has its roots in gramsci's idea of counter-hegemony. but using gramsci as a scapegoat for "cultural marxism" doesn't allow for all of the anti-semitic tropes that get played in criticizing the frankfurt school and its thinkers.

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This is nonsensical. I'm working on a long series of posts as to why the term "postmodernism" is now a catch-all term for everything that is conveniently bad. Pluckrose and especially James Lindsey have been amazingly sloppy in their analysis.

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Meh. Consider the audience and goals right now, if you can put aside the pedantry for a moment and gain some perspective.

Just stopping in to thank the OP and those joining in. As someone having spent school years on mostly science courses, I welcome the opportunity to expand my thinking. I was stuck at postmodernism as:

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truth is relative

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and accepted that simplification. I have bookmarked this thread and hope it continues to share ideas, opinions, and sources.

I can't recall ever using cultural marxism and I've always found it odd in concept anyway, so I agree.

I don't mind being told some of our usage of postmodernism is faulty. For my own personal convenience, it would be great if it accurately described the anti-positivist, revolutionary, deconstructionist (albeit not necessarily or solely in language) and arguably post-truth underpinnings for where we are now.

But it may not, and I'll live with it if so.

It's not really the core of this thread, but I certainly agree with the points made about liberalism and the harm posed by conflating that with "leftist." That's not new, it's regularly discussed here and has been an annoyance for me personally ever since "classical liberalism" was introduced as a concept to me in high school.

But I think particularly for the current battle, it would be very helpful if we could reclaim "liberalism" because I think it's crucially important to distinguish it from what's happening all around us (plus it provides a big tent for Americans to unite under without political party baggage). It won't happen, but it would be helpful.

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Meh. Consider the audience and goals right now, if you can put aside the pedantry for a moment and gain some perspective.

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He can’t.