[mahemm]

Lots of people ITT seem to have an incorrect understanding of the term postmodernism. It basically boils down to the observation that history and human experience don't really move towards a single goal, but instead consists of lots of independent narratives going nowhere in particular.

These observations invalidate Modernist ideas that held that human historical development lead toward specific outcomes or followed observable patterns. For instance, postmodernist thought argues Marx was wrong in thinking that history followed a dialectical pattern, and instead holds that history follows no pattern.

[ganzuul]

I think that from mankind's innate curiosity and propensity to teach our young it is impossible to conclude that culture is without pattern. Like so, all of that seems invalidated.

I think that the mistake that postmodernism made was analogous to painting itself into a corner, where people fully studied culture from the outside without immersing themselves in it. They built abstractions until they no longer corresponded to observation and then concluded that there were contradictions in the subject of their study when there was none.

It rocked my world when out of the blue Regular Car-guy about-faced from a youtube hyuckster into a sleeper intellectual in relating the PT Cruiser with the modern world in the context of postmodernism. Zeitgeist, dumbed down to a car analogy without missing any of the salient points. It is some kind of perfection. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hoxqtnI4I4c

[mahemm]

A postmodern critique of this argument might start with your identification of a single "culture" that has a pattern. Who decides what this culture is and who its adherents are? What if there are exemplars of the culture that do not fit this pattern; are they inherently excluded from the culture by the fact that they do not fit the pattern? If so, it may be the case that we are fitting a pattern we would like to see onto a culture that is in fact varied and diverse, and which does not in fact have a particular direction.

[ganzuul]

I didn't mean to imply 'a' culture. I meant culture, like water.

Cultures don't have a name. Cultures are people. People sharing a history probably disagree in subtle ways about what their culture is as it is a matter of individual experience.

This doesn't validate postmodernism since there was no dichotomy to begin with and nothing to deny. Our history isn't human history. 'We' go back 3.5 billion years because we experience influence from then as a matter of evolution. The pattern is much broader that postmodernism claims it to be. Life is not anthropocentric.

[mahemm]

The ideas that "culture is a matter of individual experience" and that "there was no dichotomy to begin with and nothing to deny" seem to affirm the postmodern idea from my POV. That's basically what they argue.

By contrast, many Modernist philosophers believed that human history moved inexorably towards more-just society or that human knowledge moved towards perfect understanding of all phenomena.

Edit: not sure I understand what you mean when you say "The pattern is much broader that postmodernism claims it to be. "; the project of postmodernism is in part to show that there is no pattern.

[ganzuul]

I won't argue that Modernism is right. My position is that Modernism was moving in the right direction, that I don't know where to go next, but postmodernism definitely is not the right direction.

I think it is right to say that postmodernism was born out of the nuclear shadow. I think it a degenerate expression of nihilism as I believe I recognize certain philosophical missteps. Summa summarum one must adopt a constructivist approach to logic and be very weary of double negation. "No dichotomy and nothing to deny" is a double negation and certain conclusions can not be made from it. We can in particular not conclude that all information is of equal value from the equality of information channels. We currently do not have the means to conclude that the medium is the whole of the message, but postmodernism seems to claim we do.

Edit: That probably came off as a bit arbitrary. I'm not very good at communicating this stuff outside of dialogue so please only see this as something to frame a perspective with a fair bit of thought behind it, and not as a convincing argument.