tagged with postmodernism
On postmodernism, politics, plastic surgery, and the serendipity of a good metaphor:
[The current administration’s] disdain for anything as prosaic as reality also aligns it, rather oddly, with postmodern culture, for which reality – rather like the body in the cosmetic surgeon’s operating theatre – is pliable stuff to be moulded into whatever shapes you fancy, not recalcitrant material that thwarts your attempts to mould it. Eagleton, Ideology (xv)
Kinross on Tschichold’s turn towards the traditional:
This astonishing change came to dog Tschichold’s career. When, in 1946, he first explained it publicly (in a highly-charged exchange with Max Bill), his reasons were of two kinds: that his modern typography had been authoritarian and militaristic and so imbued with the spirit that also drove German National-Socialism; and that modernism in typography was limited to publicity work (as opposed to book design), could not properly articulate content, could be practised only by an uninitiated élite. These arguments – a tangle of true perceptions and ingenuous special pleading – inform what may be the only decent attempt at postmodernism in typography, done for the most serious moral-political reasons. Kinross, Unjustified Texts (175)
Yet today much book design has gone the way of “publicity” work, has relinquished the love affair it had with texts. Which is not to say there aren’t any beautifully designed books being published, but they are increasingly difficult to find. Serious readers are forced to contend with incompetently designed and poorly composed texts if they are to read at all.
A certain postmodern fondness for not knowing what you think is perhaps reflected in the North American speech habit of inserting the word ‘like’ after every three or four words. It would be dogmatic to suggest that something actually is what it is. Instead, you must introduce a ritual tentativeness into your speech, in a kind of perpetual semantic slurring. Eagleton, After Theory (104)
I think this habit may also have to do with avoiding responsibility for what you think. If you, like, support the war, you can easily disavow that support later when, like, it’s no longer cool. My favorite version of this is the phrase “like, I don’t know,” meaning both “I don’t know” and “it’s like I don’t know.” The latter suggests that the speaker can’t distinguish between knowing and not knowing, something I imagine could be difficult when you know very little.
