What the Fuck is Postmodernism
I can’t figure out whether the concept/babble of Postmodernism is so simple that it’s baffling or whether it really is terribly baffling and I’m just simple. Or, could it be that postmodernism is simply a sort of stylishly intellectualized new form of astrology whereby its concerns and explanations are so general and vague that something is bound to stick if you throw enough things at a wall. Or, could it be that in its rejection of Grand Narratives, postmodernism is the anti-ideology ideology making it both as useful and as tantalizing as crotch-less panties. It won’t stop bodily emissions of the southern kind from staining your pants but it’s not meant to be worn with pants anyhow. In conclusion, my Epiphany of the Day is this: Postmodernism is not to be worn with pants.
Or, you can read what David Weinberger had to say in the article “Knowledge & Fallibility (Or Postmodernism is Right)”:
“……our culture, under the grip of philosophers, came to believe that knowledge is a corrective for fallibility. Having recognized that our unreflective grasp of the world is unreliable, we've treated knowledge as a way to gain the certainty that we had previously assumed we possessed. Thus, the story of knowledge begins with mathematics, and it ends — an ending in which we still live — with Descartes' reduction of the realm of knowledge to a single, self-reflective proposition. When we think of knowledge as a corrective for fallibility, we are comfortable with a knowledge aristocracy in which there are authorities different from you and I. They are the great encyclopedias, the great newspapers, the great journals. We are mere footloose commoners who look things up in the works the aristocrats have announced. But there is no corrective for fallibility. We live in the breach between the world and how we take it. We are that breach. It closes only when they shovel the dirt over us. Until then, there are only degrees and modes of fallibility. That doesn't mean the authorities have no authority. It does mean that there is nothing with total authority. We're stuck with always having the argument about what to believe because knowledge is a way to manage fallibility, not to escape it.”
