Every now and then I make some minimal effort to get the gist of post-modernism. Or deconstruction, or post-structuralism, or whatever it is. The fact that I don’t understand the distinction between these terms, if there is any, is indicative of the extent of my progress. Otherwise intelligent people seem to be interested in this stuff, so it seems like there must be something in it.

But trying to read the stuff is like trying to read Ministry of Education documents (and I suspect this is not a coincidence). Each individual sentence has some minimal meaning, but any given paragraph doesn’t seem to say anything at all. It feels like you are not supposed to actually read for meaning, but for a sort of general vibe. And if you ever get to an actual point, it seems to be a trivial one like “different cultures are different” or “people sometimes say things they don’t mean” or “powerful people have more opportunities to express their views”.

It may be a significant clue that I also don’t understand the obsession post-modernists seem to have with Madonna. She just doesn’t seem to be very interesting to me. She sings boring, insipid music and she’s perpetually five to ten years behind the times in any kind of style I can see.

This article seems to confirm my worst suspicions about postmodernism. Is it fair?

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 11th, 2004 at 11:23 pm and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.