“Postmodernism” is a huge category, and one with very vague boundaries. It encompasses a lot of good thought on society and art, et cetera, but there’s also a whole bunch o’ bullshit contained therein. I feel torn: as a Sociology major, we discuss some somewhat postmodern ideas in my classes sometimes, but as a believer in the objective potential of the scientific method, and positivism/post-positivism, I feel very disdainful towards postmodernism. What it is, I think, is that people do use the label for this wide category of things, and fail to clarify what they mean. When sociologists talk of the “postmodern family,” they don’t mean what people like Richard Dawkins mean when they rail against the intellectual posturing of “postmodernism.” To work out this cognitive dissonance, I’d like to spend a few posts exploring the different permutations of postmodern, and how it relates to academic thought on society, science, and art.
The blickets…
Meet my friends. They are blickets (cute animals). They live with me, usually sitting on top of the bookshelf, or in my closet, or on my bedside table. From left to right, they are Martha, Splodge (the seagull), and Oinkment (the pig).
Splodge has lived with me for quite a while. I’ve known him for… hmm, about ten years? Probably more. Maybe more like twelve or thirteen. I met him in England, one day, when we ran into teach other on a bleak, windswept moor. He was lost, and I was too, and the wind was high and the rain was harsh. We could only see a few feet in any direction, so full was the air of water, so we found a stone bridge and huddled under there for hours, as the storm aired its grievances loudly. We awoke the next morning to find that the sun still barely penetrating the thick clouds (so low you could touch them if you stood on your toes). The rocks were damp and slick, and the plants were heavy with the rain. The heavy moist in the air left my hair damp across my face. But Splodge and I managed to find a small cottage tucked away in a valley, behind an old oak tree. A crone who lived there fed us scones with jam and clotted cream and sat us beside her open fire, and gave us a map so we could find our way home. We bid her thanks and were on our way, although I doubt she heard us, since she seemed to be deaf and only operating on some barely-active maternal instinct.
Oinkment is Japanese, though is name isn’t a very Japanese one. He’s very small, but he’s a brave pig. He is an orphan, and he never knew his parents. One day, he snuck on a ship going to America. It pitched so low he thought he would be swallowed up by the sea. He spoke with seagulls, though not any that Splodge knows, and conversed with the flying fish who jumped up alongside the boat to catch a glimpse of the strange land-dwellers who skimmed the surface of their domain. When he arrived in Los Angeles, he worked a brief stint in a store in Little Tokyo, until I ran into him. We became firm friends, and now he lives with me and Splodge.
Martha (on the left) likes trampolining, shopping, toasted sandwiches, volleyball, and pottery. She dislikes plastic bags, litter, public transportation, and CCTV. I imagine she’s going to have to get used to public transportation, living in a big city, and litter tends to go along with public transportation. She had a very tasty toasted sandwich a few days ago, while visiting friends who live under the ocean.
