Comments on: In the future, everyone will be John Malkovich for fifteen minutes.

By: Alan Kirby

Alan Kirby — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 11:15:12 +0000

Wonderful post – thank you.

I’ve just published a book whose argument you may find interesting – I hope you don’t mind if I mention it here. It says that postmodernism has been superseded by a cultural dominant based on digital textualities. It’s called “Digimodernism”, and it’s published by Continuum. I have a website where you can find the introduction, and a blog where I mull over related issues. In 2006 I wrote an article on which the book is based called “The Death of Postmodernism and Beyond” – you can find it on the web, and it begins by considering the very issue of today’s students versus postmodernism.

All the best

Alan

By: ScottyGee

ScottyGee — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 06:10:23 +0000

Rachel, thank you so much for giving me a reason to think about PoMo all day. I wish I could just stay home and continuously comment, but a man’s gotta work ya know!

By: g.a.

g.a. — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 23:44:39 +0000

16: I’m glad you threw it back, because 12 *was* full of shit. If professors really let you get away with crappo they weren’t doing their jobs.

By: Rachel

Rachel — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 19:36:02 +0000

#9: Tim, I hope your dental appointment goes well. “Anesthetic” doesn’t sound too promising. Wouldn’t it be good if you could take “anaesthetic” before going to, say, a crappy art opening?

#11: Scott, I agree with you completely. In fact, my students glommed on to a similar passage in their Jameson reading (“Postmodernism and Consumer Society):

“…the disappearance of a sense of history, the way in which our entire contemporary social system has little by little begun to lose its capacity to retain its own past, has begun to live in a perpetual present and in a perpetual change that obliterates traditions of the kind which all earlier social information have had, in one way or another, to preserve [....] The informational function of the media would thus be to help us forget, to serve as the very agents and mechanisms for our historical amnesia.”

Do you think people crave the apocalypse simply because they want to be shaken up?

#13: Steph, thanks–I was afraid of laying it on too thick. I hope the preying-on-my-students’-minds-for-vicarous-life (i.e., Malkoviching) metaphor wasn’t too cloying, either.

Oh, and Gary, those HS skills will always come in handy!

By: crankyprof

crankyprof — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 19:35:41 +0000

12: I think I (and many others) might take issue with the idea that PM theory allows the thinker to “get away with” what s/he openly admits is “crappo,” “flyby,” “sloppy,” “BS”–bad argument is bad argument, exploratory or no. There’s a difference between intellectual experimentation and unsubstantiated crappo! It is true, though, that under the auspices of PM being “undefinable” and “anything-goes,” a lot of BS tries to fly by. You gotta catch that shit and throw it back.