I recently wrote this in response to a comment on this video. What do i get myself into:
Sure Hamblettamaud,
postmodernism introduced this idea of a person as a “social construction,” all those other words and phrases are basically ways of saying the same thing. (Philosophers would shoot me for saying that.) Before the postmodern period–in the modern period, from about 1600 to about 1900–the philosophical view of man included the idea of a fundamental “human nature.” Most people still talk like they believe in human nature, or at least they still use the phrase, but really we don’t mean it in the same way as it used to be meant. It’s no longer absolute. And that’s because…
Postmodernism created the “man as a product of his environment.” The woman created by society. The self as a social construction. It was a shift away from the old Aristotelian and Christian views of the soul and the individual as entities that exist wholly formed before they interacted with the world. And even though it’s almost taken for granted now, this was a huge philosophical and scientific dogfight for over a century.
The primary difference is that before postmodernism if you were “good” then no matter how many violent movies/videogames/songs you absorbed, they would have no effect on you. Now people say that a person’s character is shaped by the parts of society that they are exposed to. The whole argument about Marilyn Manson (or whoever’s fashionable nowadays) making people kill people wouldn’t even have made sense 150 years ago.
p.s. I realize that this response is kind of all over the place and not very informative, but hopefully it shows you that these guys are saying things that make sense to people who are willing to throw away years of their lives trying to understand it, and that they’re not just blowing smoke to sound impressive. And also, just to preempt a common criticism, the reason that the language used by philosophers is so incomprehensible is because of how dense it is packed with information. Could you imagine how slow conversations would go if we had to say all those paragraphs that I just said, just to talk about a thing?
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What are you arguing? That hitherto man was unaffected by his environment? Hasn’t man always been a synthesis of biology and environment? Maybe it’s only the idea of “environment” that has changed, due to the proliferation of media–which now constitutes more of our environment than any of its physical manifestations (i.e. family, neighbors, teachers, priests) creating a precedence of valuation in being a greater media presence than a greater human being (whatever the hell that is).
p.s. Hey Brandon, it’s Gene.
oh, uh, er: No argument, just a pathetic attempt at description of what a couple of terms mean. That guy, “hamazzufltasdkjetc” asked a couple of trollish questions and implied that philosophers were all a bunch of intellectual onanists. Something that really irks me and in this case i decided to respond. Unfortunately, UTOOB does not allow comments of more than 500 characters or some such limit, and so i didn’t actually respond. Not to him, anyway. But still, i stuck a very brief description of some concepts involved in postmodernism on the internet.
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