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From: jrovira@drew.edu
Date: 5/23/01
Time: 2:34:10 PM
Remote Name: 199.95.166.38
First off, interesting article about The Matrix. She missed some splendid opportunities to write about the movie from a postmodern context, however -- such as the inclusion of Baudrillard's _Simulacra and Simulation_ in the movie (it's the book Neo hid his computer disks in), and direct verbal parallels between the book and movie, such as "welcome to the desert of the real." If anyone is interested in reading an analysis of the movie in a postmodern context, I have a rough draft of an essay on my website:
http://www.jamesrovira.20m.com. Go to the non-fiction section. I hope to have a full analysis of the movie within the context of Baudriallard and Althusser up there within a week or so.
Anyway...all this fuzzy discussion about postmodernism seems a bit silly on this thread. The attitudes being described as postmodern have existed in Western society long before the word "postmodern" was even coined in the early 20th century. I'd suggest reading Pope's "Essay on Man" for a critique of those attitudes in his own society. Postmodernism as a philosophical phenomena really began with Lyotard's _The Postmdodern Condition_, in which he defined postmodernism as a "distrust of grand narratives," in other words, big stories that explain all of existence. That's probably one of the few meaningful definitions out there. Baudrillard in _Simulacra and Simulation_ talks about the new form of nihilism in terms parallel to Lyotard's discussion of postmodernism.
Anyway, the article written in disagreement with Os Guiness's book that declared postmodernism and dead phenomena, and many other articles on this site (perhaps not all), sound more like they're tossing around cool words than really engaging specific ideas. They sound a bit silly, contradictory, and uninformed. I suggest abandoning the word "postmodernism" in all your articles unless you're talking about a specific, well defined philosophical outlook and body of literature, and talk instead directly about the attitudes and beliefs current in society that you seek to address. Really, what you're describing could also be called "relativism," "situation ethics," or even just a general intellectual anemia. Write so that you address this condition rather than contribute to it; write from an intelligent and well informed standpoint.
I don't see that going on too much here.
Jim Rovira