Post-modernism: From surfing cows to Gollum as a lifestyle choice, pt. 2

PART 2

When we last met, we were talking about the modernists trying to get out of conventions and back to "reality". If you missed part 1, click HERE.

Post-Modernists were not too sure about that possibility. Their work is based on foundations laid both in Romanticism by philosophers like Nietzsche, Freud and Marx and in Modernism by, especially, the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure.

Nietzsche and his 'stache

Freud is trying to tell
you that yon CANNOT
be with your mom forever.

Marx doing the Napoleon

de Saussure

(I am having serious de ja vu about the introductory lectures. I am giving you the cliff notes of what took us a good year to, somewhat, understand...if by "understanding", you mean breaking the clouds of the initial terms and concepts only to realize you know enough to have no clue what on earth you are doing and wonder what you have gotten yourself into. For a nice illustration of what I mean, see the comic below from the great site “Itchy Feet”)

From the Romantic thinkers came the concepts (that the Modernists also used, but hadn’t radicalized to such an extent) that man’s destiny is shaped by the moral codes (Nietzsche), economic structures (Marx) and unconscious urges and psychological development (Freud). In the end, this means that the ‘subject’ was ‘subjected’ to structures beyond his or her control. Thus post-modernism uses a dual meaning of ‘subject’ – subject of and subject to. You may be the subject of a speech act (you, for lack of another term, “decided” to make it), but you were also subject to various constraints in not only grammar but also psychology and social etiquette, and many more things – which is, in part, what my MA thesis is about. 

All of this the modernists knew and accepted to varying degrees. The revolutionary and radical element was our little Swiss friend. 

Click HERE for part 3