Petrarchive – Thread 6101

shut up

>>6103
I can't

it's already happened
Francois Laruelle!!

>>6101 (OP)

Postmodernism represents the breakdown of the large social narratives, e.g. communism or fascism. At some point one could reasonably believe that a society, built around rejecting all large scale social structures (calling this liberalism is historically wrong, but the term is used to describe exactly this) would make human conflict obsolete. Humans not captured by these "social diseases" would freely choose identities built around hedonistic activities and conflict based on these identities would never threaten society in general.

This is the status quo in most of the West. The end of history is universal perpetuity of this state of humanity. But what is increasingly clear is that a significant part of humanity outright rejects this and that societies who embrace it are becoming increasingly unstable. Both from the outside and from the inside. It is not a world view that can carry you through war, poverty and hunger. The next great philosophical development will be how humanity reconciles the death of ideology with a world which has become dangerous. Nietzsche tried to construct an answer for the individual, but a Nietzschean society is unthinkable. It is a question which will find an answer, sooner or later.

>>6110
I know the name, but not anything about him. What's the rundown on non philosophy?

>>6111
Ideology and large social narratives are alive and well. 'Human rights', rationalism, progressivism, tech-optimism, liberalism, environmentalism and even postmodernism itself are just some of the grand narratives that rule over the minds of nearly every Westerner.

Philosophies rise and fall in popularity not based on the quality of their ideas, or even the claque of the clique which produced it, but based on what suits élite groups. Remember that the organised minority always beats the disorganised mass. This goes some way to explaining why postmodernism has been so popular (especially since it is largely, though by no means entirely [Derrida struck me as very serious], mush). Postmodernism is just an intellectual way to deal with what happens when you throw together a lot of cultures because of e.g. telecommunications, airplane transport, immigration, globalised economy, etc. You only need to talk about 'rhetorics without violence' etc when you have instigated a situation where violent rhetoric can easily develop into physical violence. This explains why postmodernism is often used toward a political end despite the fact that the actual texts themselves are often too abstruse to be political (see Foucault's description of Deleuze's Thousand Plateaus as a 'primer in anti-fascism'--utter nonsense of course, you could easily justify any sort of thing using Deleuze)

Read John Gray.

>>6111
>But what is increasingly clear is that a significant part of humanity outright rejects this and that societies who embrace it are becoming increasingly unstable
Do you mean this about the societies which are rejecting "postmodernism" as "breakdown of large social narratives"? Or that societies are accepting the breakdown of large social narratives, which is resulting in their degeneration?

>The next great philosophical development will be how humanity reconciles the death of ideology with a world which has become dangerous.
Ok, I somewhat agree. 20th century style political narratives are dropping dead, e.g. United Nations style benevolence, world revolution Soviet bloc idealists, etc. But how is the world becoming "more" dangerous?

>>6130
Who is?

>>6120
I agree with you over the anon you're replying to. It's hard to imagine to talking to any average Westerner without having the common acceptance of liberalism.

>>6129
>Postmodernism is just an intellectual way to deal with what happens when you throw together a lot of cultures because of e.g. telecommunications, airplane transport, immigration, globalised economy, etc.
What do you think postmodernism is?

Giant statues of Nietzsche in every city

>>6268
>What do you think postmodernism is?
It's well-known that it resists easy definition, but it's reasonable to say it is a rejection of meta-narratives. But I am talking about it as an historically-situated philosophical movement so it is not necessary to define it too precisely. Hence proto-postmodernists like Feyerabend don't need to figure in my discussion.

I am seeking to understand why postmodernism became popular when it did, rather than sinking into obscurity. I have already said that the quality or thoughtfulness of a group of ideas has nothing to do with the acceptance of the ideas. I am also interested in why postmodernism often has hard political edges even though, given the highly abstract level on which it has tended to operate, it could be arrogated to many non-leftist ideologies (some people have done this, like Dugin--not that I agree with him, I think he's a hack--but it has been very rare.

My theory is that postmodernism would have no social role if we lived in the 1500s, even a secular, post-Christian 1500s, because back then people lived in small groupings and there was basically only one culture you were exposed to your entire life: your own. There was no sense of alienation. Everything can be taken for granted.

>My theory is that postmodernism would have no social role if we lived in the 1500s, even a secular, post-Christian 1500s, because back then people lived in small groupings and there was basically only one culture you were exposed to your entire life: your own. There was no sense of alienation. Everything can be taken for granted.

What bizarre logic. "If something were different it would have been different". The 1500s were fully steeped in religion, not just as a bonus attribute of life as you understand it in our current era. Everything from literature to science to money, art, politics of power, global events. Relation to the Roman Empire, the obvious Christianization story; the Moors and Ottomans and Northern Africans; the centering of the Bible around tribes, Israel, Jews; god even the fucking calendar used.

See this is the sort of analysis one makes without any historical context. I'm seeing this everywhere, people who try to combine threads of history as if they are programming functions and they're doing this simulation of what would happen if we took away this or that element.. What horseshit. Go read a book faggot.

>>6277
What I am saying is not a tautology.
I am pointing out that postmodern philosophy has been pushed by the élite because it serves élite goals.
Postmodernism is a way of coping with what happens when different cultures are smashed together by, e.g., airplanes and TV.

Everybody knows that life was suffused with religion back then, in a way which is very difficult to recover now. This is no secret or great discovery of yours.

I still challenge your overly-tidy notion that people were that isolated in 1500 or could not experience alienation simply due to vague material circumstances which prevents human cross-culture communication and discovery... I don't think postmodernism would have been so summarily rejected as you postulate. Look at someone like Hieronymous Bosch who lived in that era, you think he wouldn't have caught onto the idea?

Absurdism will make a comeback

>>6295
No, H Bosch (to my mind, a genius) was Christian and had no need to 'move beyond' metanarratives nor construct 'ontologies of peace'/'rhetorics of non-violence', because Christianity, in all its variegated forms, and all the variety it deployed, held the fullness of Truth.
The only real work presaging postmodernism was Tristram Shandy but, like I said, I'm discussing postmodern philosophy in terms of how it serves élite purpose at a particular and historically-situated moment, rather than in terms of what its exponents claim to mean when they say what they say.

>vague material circumstances
The people of old lived generally in small villages of less than a hundred, and would never have seen or heard of a foreigner; foreigners being only relevant as occasional enemies and therefore being fundamentally the same, be they Spanish, French or Dutch...
Our society has changed more in the past 80 years than it did from 2000 BC to 1800 AD. Divorce--new reproductive technologies--transport--the plane--media--"mass society" broadly

>>6296
lol

>>6301
>The people of old lived generally in small villages of less than a hundred, and would never have seen or heard of a foreigner

This is precisely what I am trying to counter... We're going around in circles here. You really think that, let's say, Europeans in 1500 would never ever have "seen or heard of a foreigner". But they would have been totally steeped in the religious culture around them which talks about events happening in the Middle East. And people considered everyone "foreign" that could be 50 kilometers away, not in the broad nationstate paradigm you have today, where an Englishman would not have met a "Spanish, French, Dutch" person, but they might have met a Scotsman, Welshman or Irishman who seemed wildly foreign, spoke an unintelligible language. They might have talked to a trader or someone who did go to other lands or just fucking made up stories about it because that's how people are

Your "only in occasional conflict" oversimplification of the rich tapestry of humanity is so LAZY! Especially since you just had to land on the 16th century.

I am telling you that your modernist perception of how backwards the past was is fallacious, the only thing that has "dramatically increased" is the physical configurations of the technology that we use. I always get the sense that people who bang on about us being so special and advanced that only we could "get" postmodernism do this because they hate talking about history. They hate remembering all the crap and it's easier to sum it up this way instead of beholding the stupidity and blessedness that is the human race..

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dtA7df8bvDc

>6326
NTA, wouldn't the middle age villages be exposed to trade caravans? Plus it's not like you were banned from ever leaving your village back then.

>>6326
What I said is true, a European back in 1500 (for instance) would, in general, live his whole life and die without ever seeing a foreigner. Artistic projections of foreigners in poetry or the Bible do not count, because that is quite different from having one living across the road from you. There was essentially one worldview you could have back then, living as an ordinary, uneducated person, which was a broadly Christian one. There was no need to accommodate the Other, or even understand him. Mostly he was a thing to be feared.
Also, people in Britain (for example) were already aware of themselves as a nation in medieval periods. There is no comparing the sense of alienation from talking to someone from a village 50 kms away to what we have now. Modern world = babel of cultures. Postmodernism was promoted as a way to negotiate difference.
> the only thing that has "dramatically increased" is the physical configurations of the technology that we use.
The only thing that dictates the direction of society is mass and scale, and technology fundamentally alters both of these, so technology must be fundamental.

>>6337
For clarity, I am not arguing that we should go back to the era I describe here, but it did have the advantage that it didn't have this alienation (a term I find too simple but one for which I can find no replacement). Suicide rates nearly nil too.

>>6326

Just adding onto this that this guy picked probably the worst time period for this point. Early modern armies were entirely made up of mercenaries from ethnic groups all across Europe, with Catholic and Protestant and troops of other denominations fighting alongside each other. It was the beginning of internationalism and also the beginning of the age of print, so the religious and cultural milieu was so incredibly diverse it's hard to overstate the amount of ideas that a literate urban dweller in Europe would have been exposed too.

>>6337

>What I said is true, a European back in 1500 (for instance) would, in general, live his whole life and die without ever seeing a foreigner.

No, this is just not true for a variety of reasons. 1) Foreign contact at that time, in the way that we understand "foreign contact", was quite common, especially if you were anywhere close to a node on a popular trading route. 2) "Foreigner" would have meant something a lot closer than what we think of today. To a 16th century Englishman, a Scot or an Irishman would be "foreign", a totally different culture and under a totally different ruler and likely a different confession. But today, a Scot, Englishman, and Northern Irish would broadly be understood as a common culture, certainly in comparison to new immigrants. 3) The people that would fit your description, never seeing a foreigner in their life, would be like the poorest of peasants who, for the purpose of this discussion, are not the ones involved in philosophical ideas.

Give it up mang. He's just mad he has to live to le evil foreigners next door and is projecting that narcissistic injury onto a blanket statement of all of human progress

>>6385
I picked 1500 deliberately.
You have to remember the limited impact of war at that time because of limited state capacity. I also specifically mentioned villages; naturally urbanites are more worldly. Moreover, what goes on in armies is only of limited relevance because military matters represented an exception and was not understood to be the norm. Moreover, Catholics and Protestants are really easily comprehensible to each other because, to a great extent, what doctrines they had which were novel they formed in reaction to one another. Watching what Luther wrote and how he changed his mind, it seems obvious to me that much of what he was saying was, especially later on, designed to provoke the Catholic Church, and doing this necessarily involves some apprehension of the other. This is an apprehension that really could not have existed between followers of Buddhist doctrine and of Christianity.

I cannot really understand how you can argue that with the advent of transportation, television and latterly the internet the world is not more connected than ever, and that there will be necessarily more cultural friction. This is not by any means a controversial statement, I see it as basically a truism. My idea is that postmodern philosophy is essentially a quietistic attempt at negotiating difference in this new landscape, and has been promoted by élite groups for precisely this purpose. That is what is interesting here.

3) is wrong, the poor have a 'doctrine' like everyone else even if it may not take a sophisticated form. But I am not talking about postmodernism retroprojected into the past, but rather why postmodernism became necessary when it did.

>>6386
Your entire point essentially consists in defining foreigner as a relative term and therefore saying that people from Worcester circa 1500 would have understood people from Ireland as as foreign to them as someone from a major city today might understand someone from a small village in say Pakistan or Bhutan or Haiti. We can already see this cannot be true. Foreignness is an objective fact based on lack of common habitus (in a sociological sense).

>>6389
see earlier, I say
>I am not arguing that we should go back to the era I describe here
This isn't really to do with foreigners but cultural alienation generally. If I were someone living in a non-Western country, I might not be too happy about having my country culturally colonized by the West

This is what I said originally
>My theory is that postmodernism would have no social role if we lived in the 1500s, even a secular, post-Christian 1500s, because back then people lived in small groupings and there was basically only one culture you were exposed to your entire life: your own. There was no sense of alienation. Everything can be taken for granted.
I can't see how this is even controversial.
Even if the West had undergone a collapse of Christianity back then, we'd still never need postmodernism, because postmodernism is a solution fashioned to the ubiquitous modern phenomenon of cultural friction

>with the advent of transportation, television and latterly the internet the world is not more connected than ever

Literally neoliberal propaganda. You sound like a 90s magazine advertisement. You don't even want to attack your "truism" for fun, you keep bludgeoning it into your rhetoric when clearly the mood of this board wants to examine every detail for examination's sake...

> Foreignness is an objective fact based on lack of common habitus (in a sociological sense).

A certain breed of right wing American loves to do this sort of theatrical comparison where they're so, so distant from other foreigners. Like people from Pakistan or Bhutan live in huts or something and don't eat convenient food and scroll their phones like every other person on this planet in year 2025. You know this is true but want to feel special (narcissistic injury) so you emphasize how unfamiliar they are to you.

This genre of poster is older ex-liberals (30s+) who are still willing to semi-ironically appropriate leftist rhetoric like:

>If I were someone living in a non-Western country, I might not be too happy about having my country culturally colonized by the West

Well, because you'd still be a right winger, but only in another country. But "cultural colonization" is a fake internet term, and the real histories of colonization and blending of cultures have a much more nuanced pattern which is not wholly negative at all times.

Look dude, you're trying real hard to play along in this forum but it's time to retire back to Kiwifarms with your other like-minded peers.

>>6394
You are so mixed up, it's hard to know where to start.
Is it really your view that with modern life and all the dislocation from traditional mores which accompanies it, that nonetheless there is no more cultural friction than in the past? It is so implausible it's absurd.
>Like people from Pakistan or Bhutan live in huts or something and don't eat convenient food and scroll their phones like every other person on this planet in year 2025.
I specified rural Bhutan, rural Pakistan, etc. Of course, cities are quite westernized and we all know that even the far reaches of the countryside are slowly being encroached upon by technology more and more so, and thus being subject to globalization. Re 'narcissistic injury', this is yet another instance of attacking the man rather than the idea. Needless to say, I don't think the West should be especially proud of cultural developments like watching brainrot content on TikTok or ordering Uber Eats, so I derive no pleasure from the fact it exists here in great amounts and only in smaller amounts in the less-developed countries.
>Well, because you'd still be a right winger, but only in another country
Surely this is not what you actually think.

>>6111
>a Nietzschean society is unthinkable

true. but a society RULED by Nietzscheans is perfectly thinkable.

As we get more computerized, the next step is to apply systems-level thinking to our society's laws. Most, if not all, of our governments on Earth are backed by some sort of basic written laws. The effects of hows these laws have been extended, amended, rewritten, and changed is becoming more and more apparent now through software development. It might seem like a crazy comparison, but the speed in which software develops can help us understand how laws develop. For example, we can look at the lifespan of critical software (Windows, Linux) and see its development in comparison to the "software" of our nations (laws, supreme court justifications, etc).

Anyone can you tell that both software and laws degrade over time but now we can compare the two more aptly. Laws and legalese also have a direct relationship with programming languages too.

>>6390

You keep doing this rhetorical two step where you start with a wildly historically inaccurate claim like "the average European in 1500 would live their entire life without seeing a foreigner" and then when pushed back on it you go to "well all I'm saying is the modern world is more connected than ever!" Those are two different claims, the latter of which I don't have a problem with, but the former is just plainly wrong.

You are also using foreigner as a relative term here, it's just that you have decided that all pre-modern Europeans are just "European" or one consistent culture group, so that a Breton and a Neapolitan would not refer to each other as "foreign". That's arbitrary because there are clearly cultural, linguistic, and religious differences that would mark those two as different and therefor foreign. Sure, a Neapolitan might be less foreign to a Breton than a Chinese person, but that relative difference doesn't erase the foreignness from the Breton and Neapolitan. If it did, then where's the line? Is there a geographic line for foreigner? Is it just about "Christendom"? Is it skin color? Is it language? All of these add into some mixture of difference that makes your initial statement completely absurd and historically misinformed.

>>6413
In 1500, Europe was in the main rural and localized, with most people living in small communities. Travel was difficult, often dangerous, and most people had limited exposure to cultures outside their own. Though there were urban centers and trade routes which facilitated contact with foreigners, these were just not representative of the ordinary man's experience. There are very extensive demographic studies relating to England which show how most people lived and died within the same area, having little opportunity for travel. The idea of the nation was nascent, I feel confident in saying most people would have felt their primary attachment to their local community or general region.

>You are also using foreigner as a relative term here, it's just that you have decided that all pre-modern Europeans are just "European" or one consistent culture group, so that a Breton and a Neapolitan would not refer to each other as "foreign". That's arbitrary because there are clearly cultural, linguistic, and religious differences that would mark those two as different and therefor foreign.
We all understand this, there is no need to explain it. It is obvious that a Neapolitan is different from a Breton.
>Sure, a Neapolitan might be less foreign to a Breton than a Chinese person, but that relative difference doesn't erase the foreignness from the Breton and Neapolitan.
Well, foreign-ness is not a binary matter of foreign/not-foreign. There is no line and no line need be drawn, it is a matter of degree and of intensity. It remains true that past generations were exposed to less "strangeness" than later generations are. Is this actually being denied?

>>6415

>Well, foreign-ness is not a binary matter of foreign/not-foreign. There is no line and no line need be drawn, it is a matter of degree and of intensity.

Yes, thank you, that is exactly what everyone here is trying to tell you.

Again, you are right that the human experience is far more connected, global, multicultural, etc. than 1500. But that does not mean that multiculturism and "internationalism" (no nations yet, so maybe globalism is better) was marginal to the point of non-relevance to philosophical or theological thinking of the time. This was THE time period where old narratives about the structure of the world, and humanity's place in it or where our salvation lies, began to break down. A new world was literally being discovered, with new ways of thinking starting to break into mainstream European consciousness. Not to mention the total disintegration of a common understanding of Christianity that led to apocalyptic bloodletting of that "one culture". Millenarianism and heresy were prolific, and new ways of thought, even new ways of seeing were appearing everywhere and humanity was both marginalized and dignified by science and philosophy at the same time. I just fundamentally don't understand how you can look at this period of time and not see any similarity between the forces that led to post-modernism in the 20th century.

You can draw your line at one specific type of European villager, who would have never encountered, say, a pilgrim, much less gone to a popular market or been enlisted into an army. But that ignores the large and growing population of literate urbanites and aristocracy that were the sponsors and creators of all the new philosophy and art and lifestyle that completely flies in the face of your statement.

And even if your point is that the lowliest European peasants who would have never once left their lot are exposed to less strangeness than the lowliest modern "peasant" that has always lived in their same hometown, I would still argue that those peasants would probably tell you of their own "strange" experiences that would sound rather similar to stories and experiences of today's "peasants". The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Im bumping this to reply to later sorry

I think it's just hilarious that the academic humanities went through the linguistic turn in the middle third of the 20th century, everyone did high theory and deconstruction in the last third, and when it was all said and done they all just scuttled away into identity shit, eco shit, and, to a lesser degree, digital humanities.

>>7069

It makes a lot of sense when you remember that academic humanities from like 1920 forward have all advanced on the terms and the timelines of young generations performatively leapfrogging earlier gens, usually by grabbing some new tool or technique just in time to shove some shit out and get tenure. The only problem with this system is that (as in art) it has prioritized conceptual gimmicks at the loss of serious appreciation and study of past masters. The foundations of a typical scholar today are quite weak. Nobody has any classical languages. Nobody does essential bibliographic groundwork. Nobody in a historicist field reads any scholarship from 20, 50, 100 years ago unless it's been canonized on exam reading lists (and even then no one is reading their exam lists).

There's resonance between >>7071 and >>7088

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