Keiran, I like your post above. I can relate to what you're saying. Respect. And look, I'm not taking the P here, but your point, "Perhaps, after all, postmodernism can be 'defined' as a continuous inquiry into self-definition", well, couldn't that be colloquially described as navel gazing?

I can't see that that could do any of us any good.

However, you could very well be spot on

Margaret Sankey’s article a terrific explanation of postmodernism. What this discussion throws up is the paradox faced when trying to discuss postmodernism. Consider the following criticisms of postmodernism from this forum:

“Teaching should not just be about imposing one’s own knowledge and attitudes on students.
It should be about guiding them to find truth; how to differentiate between fact and opinion.
How can a philosophical approach arise if one has no wide understanding or appreciation of prior reasoning.”

“Whatever happened to aesthetic appreciation of literary works? Discussion of aesthetics within postmodernism is entirely absent. Why is this? Why have qualities of beauty become the 'new taboo' in critical theory? Postmodernism creates and promotes just as many taboos as it seeks to destroy.”

Our correspondents use terms such as “guiding” truth” “fact” “understanding” “aesthetics” “beauty” “taboos” as if they are somehow absolutes with a single defined meaning. Even if the writers have a clear understanding of what they mean by these terms, how they resonate (great postmodern term btw) with me or anyone else is more than likely to be very different. It doesn’t take much imagination to understand that a hardcore punk, or a stone-age New Guinea tribesman will see the concepts of “truth” and “beauty” and “aesthetics” and even “taboo” very differently.

If we take the argument of one of the correspondents:

“How can a philosophical approach arise if one has no wide understanding or appreciation of prior reasoning.”

Exactly. And surely one of the planks of any understanding and appreciation of reasoning is the capacity to understand that there are many ways of looking at a problem/issue. In a book of unnatural laws I used to own it was put as: Where you stand on an issue depends on where you sit.
So in any discussion about postmodernism we very quickly arrive at the point where the discussion becomes meaningless unless one applies the tool of postmodernism to the analysis. So the only way we can discuss postmodernism (and yes to argue against postmodernism) is to use the tool of postmodern analysis.
How’s that for a conundrum?

Barney

Mark Harrison, thanks for fascinating insight offered through Taiwan link.
Very dense, had me thinking hard. Am shot of personal reductionism and essentialism briefly, through this, and am considering both similarites and differences as to Australia, as well as being opened up to the Taiwanese as brothers and sisters (thanks, therefore, also to Prof. Sankey and On Line Opinion).
How fiercely and minutely are issues of identity fought out from moment to moment against desire, anxiety and fact, and what constantly morphing apprehended forms these tendencies assume.
Given what a mirror Taiwan obviously is as to tendencies down under, I learn I have again rested on my own assumptions.
But, the concept of "nativism", particularly, is a valuable window for insights into how "Australia" and "Australians" can handle their own rapprochements, but more carefully than in the drunkenly careless ways that occur just now. But could be just a personal representation of my aesthetics, most recently exercised in the admiration of the elegent representations of Indonesians suffering in the recent big 'quake. And as Baudrillard would remind us, we know it's not REALLY "real".

Yes, that paper was for a very specialized audience. Glad you got something out of it.

The "modern world" has led to vast growth in human knowledge, understanding and living standards. Without it, Margaret Sankey wouldn't be a professor and we wouldn't be having an intelligent online discussion.

By contrast, postmodernism seems nihilistic and negative, I can't see what it adds to human wellbeing. Conversely, I can see that its impact on the education system damages the life chances and future well-being of many children.

Hamlet, I liked yor ick'l witticism.

On the can't-sleep, won't-sleep graveyard shift, along the Street from a hopefully slumbering Realist, Faustino.

POSTMODERNISM

Postmodernism in poetry begins with the urge to return the political, ethical, historical; to incorporate the sociological, anthropological, pyschological, psycho-historical, indeed a vast gamut of social sciences and humanities material; as well as the physical and biological sciences into the domain of poetry. The poem to the postmodernist is an expression of the narrative and the educative, the serious and the comic, verse and prose. In postmodernist poetry the cry of the heart, as Yeats called it, is being subjected to the play of the mind and all the world’s complexities. This postmodernist poet also paints a great deal of religion and philosophy on his canvass, especially his own religio-philosophy, the Baha’i Faith. -Ron Price with thanks to Marjorie Perloff in Painterly Abstraction in Modernist American Poetry: The Contemporaneity of Modernism, Charles Altieri, Cambridge University Press, NY, 1989, p.381.

Constantly amalgamating disparate experiences,
as if a thought was itself an event to record, a
mechanism of sensibility devouring life, devouring
it, here, on these pages, making the visible, visible,
searching for an articulation of a new plane of
understanding, bringing in all that reading, endless
reading, hour after hour, until your eyes could take
in no more, could stand it not another minute, while
outside cold winds tore into the snow, hot sands blew
against spinifex and rain poured endlessly in the rainforest.
Then came the burnout, as if the brain went on shutdown,
and wandered into black-holes of darkness so intense that
even the body could not move: a rest was required. And
now it seems the work can go on until the final hour, at last.1

Ron Price
6 August 1997

1 these burnouts took place from 1963, perhaps as many as seven to nine times, until just before I began to write poetry extensivley in the early 1990s.