Post-modernism: From surfing cows to Gollum as a lifestyle choice, pt. 5

This is part 5 of our mind numbing/melting series on Frederik's masochistic Master's thesis mind.

Last off we looked at Napoleon's butt...Or was it the but about x? 
PART 1, PART 2, PART 3, PART 4

Found it!

Post-modernism isn’t (necessarily) an attempt to explain, ALL THE THINGS! 

Nope!

It often looks at things like this, or the origin, or gender vs. sex and says, that, while there is certainly some connection, it is often so negligible or already so caught up in convention (even saying that sex is given is based on an ideology and contains certain meanings, thus the question there would automatically be, how is that meaning of “given sex” used and where does it derive its legitimacy from?) that we can safely put that connection aside.

We can thus say that Waterloo does refer to a temporal-spatial plane in what is modern Belgium where the forces applied by high velocity metal spheres released from long metal tubes caused the bodies of thousands of homo sapiens to no longer receive signals from the neural networks situated in their craniums, causing the side that moved below a tri-colored flag of three vertical stripes to subject themselves to the other homo sapiens.

Found it!

While that obtuse exercise in trying to give as neutral a description as possible is fun, it shows that there is no such thing as a “real” or “neutral” connection to a referent. Why did I talk about modern Belgium? What does modern even mean? Why did I focus on the French surrendering and not the British winning? Even with all of these issues aside, Waterloo never just refers to a neutral event. The meaning ALWAYS has relations to other things. What battles are connected with it? How was its impact seen? That impact is not what WAS, but what we SAY happened. 

Real causal chains are impossible to map, because causality is too complex to really comprehend. But just think of what Waterloo MEANS to someone born in Paris as opposed to someone born in London. It has the “same” referent, yet the SIGNIFIED is completely different. Thus in the end we are forced to admit that everything we do must be dragged through language, only to be sullied by whatever social associations we happen to have. 

If you wish to get sullied even further, join us next time! (For the final post...of my introduction...to then be able to explain the theory I will be using in my thesis...)

You know you want to be!

Click HERE for the last part