Alan,
Quite on the contrary, I think I would enjoy your class very much. Seeing
the full context of your definition for postmodernism was fascinating and I
don't doubt it was a shared concept among a good contingent of
intellectuals. I really liked :
> Semiotic emissions of symbols which appear sourceless and undirected
> (Disneyland effect).
>
My, now quite meta, criticism was just that the word "postmodernism" is
awash with many definitions and contexts in what I'll jokingly refer to as
our "modern" times. Even modern-architecture is starting to fray as a
concrete definition.
I also teach and write, (usually techno babble) to cyberpunks, architects
and engineers, "definitioning" of terms is a verb I often use to ensure the
act of word grounding occurs in the realms of intellectual discourse. It's
a practice that comes from writing code where word interpretation quickly
leads to the mind-body problem and bugs.
Re:apology
I'm sorry to hear you're having rough times. I hope this too shall pass.
Cheers,
Brey
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Message: 1
> Date: Mon, 12 Feb 2024 12:42:14 -0800
> From: Brey Tucker <brey.tuc...@gmail.com>
> To: netbehaviour@lists.netbehaviour.org
> Subject: Re: [NetBehaviour] Leonardo vs. Machiavelli: The Mediocrity
> of Evil and a New Saint Genevieve (Brey Tucker)
> Message-ID:
> <CAOFRKZ1Vb00Jms4VVrU21g7CRAPCqBwN2Y07qx9vF=
> mpoce...@mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
>
> Greetings,
>
> I just wanted to follow up on Alan's criticism of the word use of
> "postmodernism", which I found to be even more of a misuse of the word than
> the more obvious use in Max Herman's piece. Semantic shifts are unavoidable
> but just in case it's not widely experienced information... Postmodernism's
> word use definitively started in art, as a way to define the departure from
> French Impressionism by John Watkins Chapman back in 1870. Its most
> agreeable definitions are in painting and architecture.
>
> Intellectually, in reference to society, I would argue that Max Herman's
> use is still more applicable than South American favelas as the context of
> the piece was centered on "modernity", especially with its identity in
> European culture and democracy, etc. being much closer to the
> original publication of Arnold J. Tynbee's 1939 essay that stated, "Our own
> Post-Modern Age has been inaugurated by the general war of 1914-1918".
>
> I would argue any use of the word "postmodern" or such variation of
> "modernity" would require time to define its context as the word use is
> extremely varied now across topics such as hyperreality, simulacrum and
> objective reality. I quite enjoyed the way Max took the time to define it
> and use it, albeit a departure from how I generally conjure postmodernism
> in my mind.
>
> Alan, you're rich with great ideas and interesting conversation but I would
> have expected more of a criticism defending Machiavelli's positive
> contributions to society with the need for acceptance of cruel realities
> than this niche use of a common word.
>
> Cheers,
> Brey
> --
> >
> > Message: 2
> > Date: Sat, 10 Feb 2024 12:58:07 -0500
> > From: Alan Sondheim <sondh...@gmail.com>
> > To: NetBehaviour for networked distributed creativity
> > <netbehaviour@lists.netbehaviour.org>
> > Subject: Re: [NetBehaviour] Leonardo vs. Machiavelli: The Mediocrity
> > of Evil and a New Saint Genevieve
> > Message-ID:
> > <CAO=
> > pi2brr4caymwbe6dskawxhuleabmax87yvkwxboqxcv7...@mail.gmail.com>
> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
> >
> > Hi,
> >
> > Just want to point out I've taught and published and lectured on
> > postmodernism, and videos I co-created with Dawja Burris dealt with the
> > subject in El Paso and Ciudad Juarez and I have no idea how you're using
> > the word or attacking it - it wasn't facetious, it was concerned among
> > other things, with informal economies and South America favelas etc.It's
> a
> > complex socio-economic subject and its effects cover issues such as
> > migration, homelessness, around the world. I just don't think you've read
> > deeply into the subject; for example scientific methodology was an
> integral
> > part of the discussion.
> >
> > - Best, Alan
> >
>
> Message: 2
> Date: Mon, 12 Feb 2024 16:46:55 -0500
> From: Alan Sondheim <sondh...@gmail.com>
> To: NetBehaviour for networked distributed creativity
> <netbehaviour@lists.netbehaviour.org>
> Subject: Re: [NetBehaviour] Leonardo vs. Machiavelli: The Mediocrity
> of Evil and a New Saint Genevieve (Brey Tucker)
> Message-ID:
> <CAO=pi2B1djAAyEjYCvvw0xntJxpDF=40X=
> sr4trgmkyccsh...@mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
>
> Hi Brey,
>
> I'm sorry you found it a misuse. You'll find references to Toynbee and
> social movements; I don't have the references here at this point, but some
> were from Latin America. It was used widely to indicate social movements
> and informal economies as well as cultural transformations. For you there
> are agreeable definitions, they aren't for me. When I taught postmodernism
> (and I'm sure you'd find the course a horror) we focused on art, yes - I
> taught in art depts. - but the wider social movements were critical. The
> "word use" started in a lot of different disciplines, I don't know what an
> "agreeable definition" is - perhaps agreeable for you, perhaps we should
> take a vote? In any case, I found Max Herman's piece dismissive and
> conservative in a way that for me, and for the writers I was teaching,
> would have been problematic. I did edit an issue of Art Papers way back
> then (Art/crit mag from Atlanta still going strong) on Postmodernism, which
> certainly went way beyond art per se; it might be available somewhere. If
> you find I'm misusing the word, I'll defer to you at this point. I do
> remember using Leotard among other theorists btw at the time - I might be
> able to dig out the essay or biblio.
>
> Alan
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 3
> Date: Mon, 12 Feb 2024 16:59:17 -0500
> From: Alan Sondheim <sondh...@gmail.com>
> To: NetBehaviour for networked distributed creativity
> <netbehaviour@lists.netbehaviour.org>, NetBehaviour for networked
> distributed creativity <netbehavi...@netbehaviour.org>
> Subject: [NetBehaviour] Pomo
> Message-ID:
> <CAO=
> pi2d7ygw5txxr9zcjt+3rxfl6o4aoqpiasozxbkbfvk0...@mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
>
> For what it's worth, I found the following, which was used in courses and
> talks I was giving on the subject way back then. I don't want to defend it
> now; it's way out of date. Thanks, Alan
>
> ostmodern Checklist
>
>
> (I used this for teaching - and still use versions of it; it's only an
> outline but at least provides a basis for discussion - Alan)
>
>
> >From modernity to postmodernity, the following processes occur, primarily
> within post-industrial societies:
>
>
> Transformation of society from industrial to service to information econ-
> omy.
>
> Transformation from analog to digital processing technologies.
>
> Transformation from knowledge to knowledge management, and from knowledge
> management to the articulation of fragmentary flows of information.
>
> Exponential growth of knowledge and emergence of the knowledge industry.
>
> Increased ad hoc attitudes towards labor, coupled with vocational disin-
> vestment (i.e. flexiwork).
>
> Transformation from late capitalism to ad hoc transnational managerial
> capitalism and bricolage entrepreneurialism in post-industrial nations.
>
> Weakening of the nation state and growth of bricolage governance (local
> mafias).
>
> Replacement of essentialisms by constructivisms, combined with the hard-
> ening of essentialist positions as a rearguard action (i.e. backlash to
> the woman's movement).
>
> Breakdown of materialist/idealist distinctions.
>
> Increasingly reified ethnicities, political consciousness and symbolic
> capital stressing 'traditional' geographic boundaries (homelands), at
> times coupled with anti-development attitudes.
>
> Increased breakdown and reification of traditional models of public and
> private (personal) relationships (sexual, civic, social, institutional).
>
> Proliferation of entertainment forms tending towards technological ef-
> fect (representations, media, programming) and distribution channels re-
> sulting in the breakdown of network hegemonies (Internet diffused gov-
> ernance for example).
>
> Proliferation of information flows into the private spaces such as the
> home, the body, etc.
>
> Semiotic transformations from inscriptive (hardened, maintained, stable)
> processes to fissuring (weakened, stuttering, pre-oedipal/symbolic, de-
> stabilized) and fissuring regimes.
>
> Likewise from classical matter (stabilized signifier/sememe demarcations)
> to non-classical matter (problematic signifiers, significations).
>
> Increased leakage of the signifier (excesses, supplement).
>
> Increasing jostling of signifying regimes within information flows.
>
> Increased incommensurabilities, including languages, teleologies, and
> scripts.
>
> Problematizing of space-time and stable categorizations.
>
> Development of mathematics of non-classical spaces (monster curves, frac-
> tals, catastrophe theory, chaos theory, eccentric or abject spaces).
>
> Mathematico-physical inclusion of disorder.
>
> Development of "intermaths" (massive parallel processes (Bailey)), with a
> tendency towards discrete, computational, digital, mathematical develop-
> ment (four-color theorem, reliance on the computer, artificial life).
>
> Endocolonization everywhere, coupled with the manufacturing of romanti-
> cisms (not only among minority ethnicities but also among the left - i.e.
> the "radical" effect of Wired magazine).
>
> Increased gaps between richer and poorer, in terms of both economic and
> cultural/informational capital.
>
> Emergence of subcultural-noise cultural phenomena, simultaneously using
> micro-technologies (pirate radio) and abjuring technology altogether.
>
> Ecological destabilizations and managerial or fundamentalist responses.
>
> Intensification of apocalyptic and survivalist subcultures.
>
> Increasing rhetorical/idiolectical emissions and distorted communica-
> tions.
>
> Increased problematic or property in general (including the technology of
> reproduction, birthing; intellectual property; farmlands).
>
> Increased development of _discursive fields_ and their receptors, and
> their interpenetrations (hypertext, punk rock).
>
> Simultaneously totalization of universal (computational) languages and
> functional idiolectical autonomies, the commodification of idiolects
> (rants, serial murders, dualities).
>
> A = A (Shelling's identity, totality) replaced by 0 = {X: x not-= x} (the
> null set as equivalent to the set of those x not equal to themselves -
> displacement and slippage).
>
> Semiotic emissions of symbols which appear sourceless and undirected
> (Disneyland effect).
>
> Stabilized "rigid" objects replaced by part-objects, incompletions,
> fragments.
>
> Transformation from cultural hegemonies taken for granted (with their
> associated margins) to competitive multiculturalisms within hegemonic
> regimes.
>
> Advent of microelectronics expanding the tacit environment of the body,
> tending towards full (seamless) virtual realities.
>
> Seamless virtual realities as the current _horizon_ of the technological
> subject.
>
> Destabilization of world economies coupled with exponential population
> growth.
>
> Increased reduction of DNA variability, increased toxicity of the planet.
>
> Massive plant and animal extinctions.
>
> Deep pollution of local and usually urban environments.
>
> Increased "natural" catastrophies as the result of human interference
> (Mississippi flooding).
>
> Proliferation of shack cities (favellas, colonias) without sewage, water,
> electric, and the growth of world-wide shack cultures.
>
> Emancipation increasingly tied to communication and communicative strat-
> egies - including weapons and weapon technology as media - the void (of
> power, territory, language) becomes integral to the emancipated society
> which is cast adrift.
>
> World-wide growth of the Internet, including dark-net domains.
>
> Tendency towards "technology with a human face" by the development and
> proliferation of increasingly higher-level languages - tendency towards
> cyborg-regimes.
>
> Elimination of _master narratives,_ replaced by situational micro-narra-
> tives (Lyotard).
>
> Backlashing through an insistence on non-transcendentalist ethics among
> tight subgroups (survivalists, fundamentalists) coupled with a freezing of
> inscriptions (reliance on biblical word).
>
> Confluence of genders, transgressive sexualities operating within an
> _engendered field._
>
> Increased problematizing of gender within queer/theory/feminist debates.
>
> Institutionalized transgressions, abjections.
>
> However, circumscribed abjections and alienations replaced by irreducible
> abjections.
>
> Traditional rites and rituals transformed into simulacra, combined with
> the exhaustion of tradition (interior horizons of tradition, and _tradi-
> tion_ replaced by _traditions_).
>
> Growth of technological vulnerabilities and parasitologies (manufacture of
> illegal domain names on the Net, hacking, cracking, pirate radio and
> television, phone phreaking, etc.).
>
> Art replaced by techne, and an exhaustion of traditional artistic/cultural
> notions of progress and development.
>
> Questioning of historic, geographic, anthropological methodologies and the
> emergence of self-reflexive discourses (Mike Davis, Michael Taussig).
>
> Increased serialities (manufactured "inauthentic" relations beneath and
> within the sign of capital).
>
> Increased cultural tourisms, relativisms, equivalences, beneath and within
> the same.
>
> Increased splitting of academic fields, discourses, languages.
>
> Commercialization of the university, alliance of business and education -
> i.e. _the business of education,_ _education of business._
>
> The simulacra of desire's liberation and the potential of infinite choice.
>
> Replacement of the spectacle by the simulacrum (no longer strings to pull)
> (Baudrillard).
>
> Replacement of the body by the cyborg-body, of the symbolic by the imag-
> inary masquerading as the symbolic, of the real by the symbolic.
>
> Replacement of the televised real by the symbolic-real, the real-symbolic
> by the real.
>
> The perception of life as the _condition_ of the real (Mars-life, diffu-
> sionist theories).
>
> --------------------
>
> A split among _postmodernisms_ themselves into _apartment postmodernism_
> characterized by wealth, personal telecom terminals, and a mobile urban-
> ism; and a _postmodern poor_ characterized by nomadicisms, urban inten-
> sifications, information economies (de Soto), available tech/telecom
> strategies, and_electric media_ (loudspeaker, telephone, telegraph).
>
> The development of _postmodern geographies_ which include nomadic and
> telecom geographies (electromagnetic spectrum for example), body/gender
> territories, and noise culture domains.
>
> The development of telecommunications as a _third space_ beyond the
> _second space_ of time and the _first space_ of traditional geographies.
>
> Appearance of the _postmodern body,_ part-object, cyborgian, simulacra
> appearing as _transgressive logics_ across and within its surfaces, the
> new frontier corrupted by violent social/environmental decay (appearance
> of immune deficiency and other diseases, increased medical technologies,
> disappearance of the dead (Gulf "War," etc.).
>
> Entrepreneurship within the digital realm, realm of the body - the sub-
> tending of the real.
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> The postmodern remains unnamed; what drives it, its drives, are unnamed.
> Names reproduce within the modern; their semantics are Kripkian, held in
> place as rigid designators true in all possible worlds (counterfactuals).
> In the postmodern, rigidity is problematic, deconstructed; worlds them-
> selves are fuzzy, interwoven, partial. Communication at the speed of light
> (Virilio) brings time to a standstill.
>
> (Postmodern poor: Postmodernism occurs within a critical space, a space of
> the catastrophic, emptied of symbolic legitimation and stability. Because
> of capital flow, emigration, and struggles for individual survival and
> autonomy, the space begins to "fill up," creating a cacophony of (infor-
> mal) regimes competing for cultural and economic power, gaslines, water,
> labor, prostitutions, and so forth. The resulting struggle produces com-
> peting domains in which the symbolic itself is at stake; nothing, not even
> communication, can be taken for granted. The zone is a chaotic accumula-
> tion of intensities, condensed matter and languages, a dead or deligimi-
> ized zone. The planet itself is becoming an accumulation of such zones.
>
> Poor postmodernism is life which skips modernism, and heavy industry,
> jumping when possible to radio, television, Internet - just a short dis-
> tance from the maquiladora poisoning the environment - the early post-
> industrial revolution of electronic assembly plants, tourisms, and small
> manufacturing. (But here too is a myth (and where is "here"?); unemploy-
> ment also grows, scarcity and desertification increase; but here, too,
> a telenovella...))
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> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 4
> Date: Tue, 13 Feb 2024 01:23:00 -0500 (EST)
> From: Alan Sondheim <sondh...@panix.com>
> To: NetBehaviour for networked distributed creativity
> <netbehaviour@lists.netbehaviour.org>
> Subject: [NetBehaviour] apologies
> Message-ID: <7d56768e-cf9b-b8ae-7639-2265a538b...@panix.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed; charset=US-ASCII
>
>
>
> apologies to everyone, it's been a very rough couple of days
>
> best, alan
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 5
> Date: Tue, 13 Feb 2024 06:56:58 +0000
> From: IJAD Dance <joum...@ijaddancecompany.com>
> To: NetBehaviour for networked distributed creativity
> <netbehaviour@lists.netbehaviour.org>
> Subject: Re: [NetBehaviour] apologies
> Message-ID:
> <bf4901b5-4a33-428b-8fe2-c27b44303...@ijaddancecompany.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
>
> Sending you positive energy, and lots of kindness.
> I hope rough times evaporate?..
>
> Joumana Mourad
> Digital performance specialist
> Artistic Director
>
> ?
>
> joum...@ijaddancecompany.com
> IJAD Dance Company
> Registered Charity: 1080776
> www.ijaddancecompany.com
> @IJADdance
> Facebook: IJAD Dance Company page
> Curator:http://www.openonlinetheatre.org
>
> Support IJAD
> https://www.giveasyoulive.com/join/IJAD
>
> To join our mailing list please subscribe at:
> https://ijaddancecompany.com/newsletters/
>
> > On 13 Feb 2024, at 06:23, Alan Sondheim via NetBehaviour <
> netbehaviour@lists.netbehaviour.org> wrote:
> >
> >
> >
> > apologies to everyone, it's been a very rough couple of days
> >
> > best, alan
> > _______________________________________________
> > NetBehaviour mailing list
> > NetBehaviour@lists.netbehaviour.org
> > https://lists.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
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