Could postmodernism be avoided?

Alright I'm not sure if this should go in this forum but seeing how postmodern thought came into being after 1900 I'll put it here.

Anyway my question is if could postmodernism as a way of thinking be avoided? Because it is hard to define postmodernism I am listing a few points that I think define it or brought it about:
High levels of consumerism and materialism. A world in which commerce and money are given great importance and anyone can be bought or sold. Teenage market power is a part of this as is the worship of choice.
A world were belief based on feeling trumps fact based in the rational order. (ei. a world where creationism is taken seriously only because many people believe it)
The collapse of the family as a social unit.
The collapse of a central authority and erosion of standards of conduct. Situational morality.
Therapeutic culture and awarding mediocracy. "It's not your fault so and so happened..." "You are a very special person..." etc.
Pervasive cynicism and excessive nihilism. The, "so what?" and impotent "what can I do about it?" attitude. In shorter words massive indifference.
The use of technology to make money in anti-humanist ways.
Preference of security over liberty. And at the same time there is liberalism in great amounts.
And the death of the individual through excessive individualism. If everybody is different and special then no one is different nor special.
The creation of pop-culture.
The information revolution brought by the internet.
Depthlessness and multitasking.
And the Hip-Attitude

What exactly brought the postmodern attitude is very hard to tell. But part of it believes that it was inevitable and that no matter what route you take you will end up in the same place. So is there a way to avoid it to make an AH which results in people thinking entirely differently and never getting to this point?
 
This seems pretty hard to untangle. The "postmodernism" of bored, spoiled, directionless young people is one thing, while the more serious things you list are really deeply rooted in modern times. The Enlightenment, capitalism, the Industrial Revolution, Marxism-- these all contributed to bringing us to where we are, for better and worse.

Now, what comes after the post-modern? I feel bad for our descendents, a few generations from now, trying to figure out the difference between post-post-modernism and post-post-post.
 

Susano

Banned
Wait what? Thats not postmodernism. You simply gathered everything you disliked about modern society in one list and labeled it "postmodernism". Thats utter garbage. Postmodernism is the erosion/putting behind of categories/roles/boundaires/definitions/genres etc. That and nothing else. The rest ist just modern society.
 
Have Friedrich Nietzsche die before publishing his works. He had a couple of near-misses that could have do it. Without his theories, any post-modernist analogue would be drastically different.
 
Post-modernism is just modernism ON DRUGS, due to modernism's inability to accomplish its own promises of a fairer, nicer world thanks to reason and science. It was modernism-gone-wrong that gave us totalitarianisms and two world wars. Butterfly away most of the things that went awry in the early 20th century and you have a beginning.

Btw, what the OP says is not post-modernism. Philosophical postmodernism is only a re-evaluation of what modernism means and how to correct its perceived inhumanity.
 
could be avoided High levels of consumerism and materialism. A world in which commerce and money are given great importance and anyone can be bought or sold. Teenage market power is a part of this as is the worship of choice.
A world were belief based on feeling trumps fact based in the rational order. (ei. a world where creationism is taken seriously only because many people believe it)
The collapse of the family as a social unit.
The collapse of a central authority and erosion of standards of conduct. Situational morality.
Therapeutic culture and awarding mediocracy. "It's not your fault so and so happened..." "You are a very special person..." etc.
Pervasive cynicism and excessive nihilism. The, "so what?" and impotent "what can I do about it?" attitude. In shorter words massive indifference.
The use of technology to make money in anti-humanist ways.
Preference of security over liberty. And at the same time there is liberalism in great amounts.
And the death of the individual through excessive individualism. If everybody is different and special then no one is different nor special.
The creation of pop-culture.
The information revolution brought by the internet.
Depthlessness and multitasking.
And the Hip-Attitude
Probably you can see mitigated all this in a timeline without WW-I and WW-II (and without USSR,Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany).
Another possibility is a world rule by commies or nazis,but in this case i prefer "postmodernism".
 
Can anyone give 'postmodernism' a good definition?

I consider the keystone to postmodernism as opposed to modernism was a loss in the belief that reason and science could provide explanations to everything and with it the acceptence that much of human activity is irrational and unconscious. In a sense atleast Freud is arguably more important then Neitzsche, not least because I don't think Neitzsche was translated out of German untill fairly late on, although that may just be the case for French society.

This change had happened before WW1, and was being recognised arguably even before the start of the twentieth century. True it compounded issues that 'modern' society was tearing itself to bits but that alone wasn't the cause. At the danger of approaching Hegel it seems inevitable there would be a backlash against reason at some point.
 
This change had happened before WW1,.
Infact i have said "mitigate",not avoid.
Many of the elements that Maximiliano I call "postmodernism" are developed in the last 50-30 years,others are before,but in the last decades went worse.
 

Goldstein

Banned
Post-modernism is just modernism ON DRUGS, due to modernism's inability to accomplish its own promises of a fairer, nicer world thanks to reason and science. It was modernism-gone-wrong that gave us totalitarianisms and two world wars. Butterfly away most of the things that went awry in the early 20th century and you have a beginning.

Btw, what the OP says is not post-modernism. Philosophical postmodernism is only a re-evaluation of what modernism means and how to correct its perceived inhumanity.

Althought your definition of post-modernism is mostly correct, as a philosophy student, I have to disagree in which are its roots, and in some other points too. (By the way, I am one of those who have sympathy for modernism, but think that the postmodernist discourse is poisonous crap... but that's another issue).

For a start, the horrors of the 20th century may have fueled postmodernism, but just as a dubious and non-capital arguement, and such horrors didn't guarantee its emergence in any way. The horrors of the 20th century, fundamentally Nazism and the world wars, were ideologically supported by a "new" kind of discourses that disdained the possibility of objective knowledege and, maybe because of that, had to rely in a sapiential, almost-revealed rethoric (From the German idealism to Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger...) and became more and more opposed to the modernist ideal as years passed. As for the horrors of the real socialism, thay were unrelated to the western block. As for the promises of a fairer, nicer world, they're pretty accomplished from a late 18th century perspective... except, of course, in plastic arts, where the situation can be described as dreadfully dystopic.

It has a lot more to do with the emergence of the consumer society mixed with the old fear of a machinist society, fueled by one of the most frightening consecuences of such a new and revolutionary social order: That, contrary to what Orwell thought, you can improve dramatically the living standards and keep people stupid and easily manipulable, even more easily through an aesthetic individualism that, let's say it clearly, is totally false. The problem is that philosophical postmodernism implies a nihilistic embracement of that reality ("The simulation doesn't hide the truth, it is the truth what hides that there is no truth. The simulation is true")
And it has to do with the realizing that most of our way to perceive reality has a linguistic nature, an idea that has been excessively extrapolated.

Also, postmodernism doesn't really show a better alternative to the modernist excesses, unless you think that showing public opinion as a source of "truth", blowing up every meaningful discourse, or even substituting the concept of meaning with the prevalence of the image and the simulation (it depends on the author), are an alternative. I don't think so.

To avoid postmodernism, it would be neccesary the emergence (in the 50's or 60's) of a more rational approach to the consumer society, maybe relying in the neccesity of knowledge as a means of personal independence, objectivity as a means of defense against power, a more ethical science... basically, rationalist means to avoid the most negative and destructive effects of a consumer society. A single alternate biography could do the trick.
 
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Can anyone give 'postmodernism' a good definition?

I consider the keystone to postmodernism as opposed to modernism was a loss in the belief that reason and science could provide explanations to everything and with it the acceptence that much of human activity is irrational and unconscious. In a sense atleast Freud is arguably more important then Neitzsche, not least because I don't think Neitzsche was translated out of German untill fairly late on, although that may just be the case for French society.

This change had happened before WW1, and was being recognised arguably even before the start of the twentieth century. True it compounded issues that 'modern' society was tearing itself to bits but that alone wasn't the cause. At the danger of approaching Hegel it seems inevitable there would be a backlash against reason at some point.

This is good. It's hard to define post-modernism as tightly as, say, communism, partly because it was identified after it had come about. So we're stuck trying to pick its "essence" out from the bigger social, technological and political conditions that the post-modern mindset happened to grow up in. Pornography is modern, internet porn is post-modern.

The best thumbnail description of postmodern (overlapping heavily with post-structural) thinking I've heard: that there is only Discourse and Power Relationships. Not comprehensive or deep, but useful for a non-philosopher like myself.

Back to the idea of the thread, though, if you try to get a world in which cynicism, world-weariness, consumerism, self-doubt, and irreligion are avoided-- well. Look at some of the "stars" of non-post-modernism: Mullah Omar. Erich Mielke. Pat Robertson. Excuse me, I need to go find my beret and break the filters off my cigarettes.
 
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