Re: Bad Machine

[Kory Heath <kheath@best.com>]

Adam Cadre wrote:
> 
> Kory Heath wrote:
> > Apologies if I'm misrepresenting "postmodernism".  I really don't
> > have a good definition of it, just a cloud of associations.
> 
> I generally think of a text as postmodern when it draws the reader's
> attention to the fact that it is a text.

Interesting.  That's not what I was thinking about at all, but now that
you say it, the word does seem to have some of those connotations,
also.  Phrases which come more quickly to my mind in this regard are
things like "meta-fiction" and "frame-breaking", but that's probably
because I've read a lot more Hofstadter than Derrida.

Anyway, in the context of my post, I was referring to a (somewhat vague)
picture I have of a style of "postmodern literary criticism", in which
it is not acceptable (or is deemed impossible) to discuss the "true"
intentions of an author - presumably because such "objective" truth is
nonexistent, or unknowable, or worthless (since we each construct our
own subjective, incommensurable narratives out of the streams of
essentially meaningless words we call "novels" and "stories"), or some
other relativistic claptrap.  If that's what art is all about, I ain't
interested.

The point of my footnote was that I don't necessarily think that all
"postmodernists" actually believe this.  I just know that, in the big
warm meme-pool in my head, the idea has bumped into the word enough
times to stick.

-- 
Kory Heath
kheath@best.com