Sunday, June 20, 2004

Postmodernism and Gibberishism

A hundred points to anyone who can tell me what the passage below means!
The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporarlity into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.

Well, dont bother deciphering for this particular passage has won the first prize for the annual Bad Writing Contest in 1998 sponsored by the journal "Philosophy and Literature". This particular passage came from Judith Butler, a professor of rhetoric at Berkeley and not some jokster. Regrettably, there is a fashionable movement in the academic, especially in the arts and humanities that encourage such posturing to make up for the lack of content. The technical term for this movement is called "postmodernism" but as a Singaporean, I would like to translate it to be called "talkcockism". Postmodernist "scholars" would have you believe that there is no objective truth and reality, that language is a prisonhouse imposed by the powerful to constrain our thoughts and that science is not privileged in its understanding of the world, etc. Yet, it is strange that postmodernists do not hesitate to use products built on the principles of science like cars, phones, elevators, microwave ovens and televisions. This is indeed blatant double standard and we are left wondering what goes on in the minds of people who claim themselves to be in the school of postmodernism. I have one proposal, they are just people with no knowledge, no content but who aspire to be intellectuals and what best way than to act chim and say chim stuff that has no meaning whatsoever and at the same time, to deny that there is no such thing as "objective truth" so that whatever nonsense they sprout can masquerade as "alternative truths". So the next time, we encounter a text (be it a piece of writing or art) that is supposedly "postmodernist" and which defies our best efforts to understand, we should not be alarmed and think that we are stupid; because the fact is, we are not, the author is. =)

2 Comments:

Blogger liulian78 said...

100 points? Is your point system something like "Whose Line Is It Anyway?" where points doesnt matter?

10:57 pm  
Blogger Cynickal said...

Haha..... My "point system" is based on Harry Potter. Coz if u remember in the books/movies, whenever someone from a house did something well or got f***, the professor would declare "50 points for Gryffindor" or "10 points from Slytherin"......

12:12 am  

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