I was in the shower, as I usually am when I do any kind of philosophical thinking, when I came up with this crazy connection between post-modernism and Sarah Palin. Don't expect any of this to answer any questions for you in the end because I certainly don't have the answers but it might provide enough fodder to spend some time on wikipedia searching for the actual definitions of such words as postmodernism, neoconservatism, and feminism. I imagine that last one might not be too tough to figure out the meaning of but in truth it's more complicated than we've been led to believe. (edit: as an added caveat for getting through and reading all of the shit I've just finished spewing on this blagging... there is a joke and punchline at the end. So hold on tight...)
When I first learned about post-modernism I was pissed off because it was, and remains, a difficult word to define. In order to understand what post-modernism means first you need to know what its actually post- to. I've asked a few people how they would define "modern" and the answers were almost entirely "like, something going on today" or "contemporary" or technologically advanced, or something like that. While it's true that a lot of the things we have in our contemporary world would not exist if not for the modern movement, these answers all fall short of the definition. Modern defines an era of thought born through the eighteenth century European Enlightenment where the virtues of reason and science were held as the highest. Modernity meant believing in grand truths and finding them through natural philosophy which became "science" or "knowledge" in the mid nineteenth century. Modernity holds logic and reason to the utmost importance. If there is a question, there is an absolute answer and there is truth. In summary, modernism's goal is to construct a way of thinking that yields truth and aspires to answer the questions we come up with. The goal is to build something. The anti-thesis is post-modernism whose desire is to deconstruct and tear down the world that modernity built. "Whereas modernism was primarily concerned with principles such as identity, unity, authority, and certainty, postmodernism is often associated with difference, plurality, textuality, and skepticism." (wikipedia).
Post-modernism has a really broad definition though. It's really difficult to define but if you can think of it at its root... it declares itself as the world after modernism. In fact, it wishes to declare modernism (and even the idea that there is a truth to anything) dead. The idea is that nothing is true or concrete or absolute. In fact, we simply cannot know things but can only speculate and skepticize. (not a word). It's mostly famous for how art works and literature are deconstructed in various ways trying to gain different perspectives on the meanings but never claiming that there is a truth. Post-modernism lends itself to many disciplines such as gender issues such as patriarchy, and colonialism. The biggest problem that I have with post-modernism is that it's like Godzilla. Modernism built something... like Tokyo. It's not perfect but we're working to make it better... and then a big lizard named Godzilla comes along and sets the whole place on fire. What the hell did Godzilla do but leave a burning mess of rubble? To me, that's what post-modernism is.
Not only that, but there is a really cool quotation that I want to share... which is long but really great at defining post modernism:
"When it becomes possible for a people to describe as ‘postmodern’ the décor of a room, the design of a building, the diegesis of a film, the construction of a record, or a ‘scratch’ video, a television commercial, or an arts documentary, or the ‘intertextual’ relations between them, the layout of a page in a fashion magazine or critical journal, an anti-teleological tendency within epistemology, the attack on the ‘metaphysics of presence’, a general attenuation of feeling, the collective chagrin and morbid projections of a post-War generation of baby boomers confronting disillusioned middle-age, the ‘predicament’ of reflexivity, a group of rhetorical tropes, a proliferation of surfaces, a new phase in commodity fetishism, a fascination for images, codes and styles, a process of cultural, political or existential fragmentation and/or crisis, the ‘de-centring’ of the subject, an ‘incredulity towards metanarratives’, the replacement of unitary power axes by a plurality of power/discourse formations, the ‘implosion of meaning’, the collapse of cultural hierarchies, the dread engendered by the threat of nuclear self-destruction, the decline of the university, the functioning and effects of the new miniaturised technologies, broad societal and economic shifts into a ‘media’, ‘consumer’ or ‘multinational’ phase, a sense (depending on who you read) of ‘placelessness’ or the abandonment of placelessness (‘critical regionalism’) or (even) a generalised substitution of spatial for temporal coordinates - when it becomes possible to describe all these things as ‘Postmodern’ (or more simply using a current abbreviation as ‘post’ or ‘very post’) then it’s clear we are in the presence of a buzzword." (Dick Hebdige).
kkk... so... how do you tie this into neo-conservatism and feminism? Well, I intend on extrapolating it all from one of the most important of all post-modern philosophers and yet another quotation from wikipedia. Have a listen with your eyes:
Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007)
"In Simulacra and Simulation, introduced the concept that reality or the principle of the "real" is short-circuited by the interchangeability of signs in an era whose communicative and semantic acts are dominated by electronic media and digital technologies. Baudrillard proposes the notion that, in such a state, where subjects are detached from the outcomes of events (political, literary, artistic, personal or otherwise), events no longer hold any particular sway on the subject nor have any identifiable context; they therefore have the effect of producing widespread indifference, detachment and passivity in industrialized populations. He claimed that a constant stream of appearances and references without any direct consequences to viewers or readers could eventually render the division between appearance and object indiscernible, resulting, ironically, in the "disappearance" of mankind in what is, in effect, a virtual or holographic state, composed only of appearances."
If you got the same thing out of this as I did, you'd see that we have already reached the point of recognizing the indifference and interchangeability of important events. I mean, how many people have watched the North and South Korea debacle unfold but regard it like a movie? We see these things going on but soon realize that our lives haven't changed a bit and they didn't need to change. I think 9/11 has been one of the most significant events to combat this problem in that it changed the way North Americans live their lives in many ways for good and bad but only because it happened in America. Nine years later and 9/11 is a popular buzzword that has fueled political agendas ever since... those agendas are neo-conservative. Believe it or not, Bush's politics were pretty close to Clinton's until after 9/11. He didn't want to be a nation builder or a bringer of democracy to other countries... after 9/11 that seemed to be his only goal (and of course to get more oil). Neo-conservatives can be defined by these short points:
* a tendency to see the world in binary good/evil terms
* low tolerance for diplomacy
* readiness to use military force
* emphasis on US unilateral action
* disdain for multilateral organizations
* focus on the Middle East
* an us versus them mentality (Wikipedia)
Looks pretty familiar yes? Welp... now we have arrived at the feminism portion of this blagging. Palin has been held by some, and most importantly herself, as a feminist. Since feminism has many schools of thought which all fight with each other and contradict one another, I can't help but agree that she could be called a feminist. If I can be frank though, she holds the same views as other neo-conservative men in politics which is probably why McCain got her in the VP slot for the Republican party way back when. There is no denying that she is neo-con as is Christine O'Donnell of the Teabaggers and some more of those crazy women on the Fox news who eat from the finger tips of Glenn Beck (ffs). The thing that is important to remember here is that truth is not important to them. All that is important is emotion and ignorance. Iraq doesn't have a WMD program? oh well, Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden are practically brothers and so we should go to war. Did you know that the majority of Americans believes that there is a connection between Iraq and Al'Qaeda. In truth they hated each other... but if we're told over and over and over and over that there is a connection then that's all the public needs to believe it. To repeat what Baudrillard said, "a constant stream of appearances and references without any direct consequences to viewers or readers could eventually render the division between appearance and object indiscernible..." thus making us indifferent. But more importantly to neo-con politicians, when it comes to voting season it's important to know where the misinformation came from.
The neocon women are a new face of power for women. I know that a lot of feminists hate this fact because Palin and her cronies espouse philosophies that are damaging to other schools of feminism... but any press is good press. I suppose the only way I can justify calling Palin a feminist is that the definitions of words and philosophies evolve over time. If Palin calls herself a feminist, she changes the definition of the word to incorporate the things that she stands for... it might not jive with traditional feminism but it doesn't need to. Her feminism is allowed to be different from Virginia Woolf's feminism so long as its understood that they have a common ancestor. I liken it to gorillas and humans. They are not the same but the linkage is that we have a common ancestor and split off into different species. Can't the same be said for Woolf's feminism and Palin's feminism? I'd like to believe that this whole posting would come down to a punchline to the longest joke I've ever written, but there is no denying that while feminism is typically associated with hairy women... in a battle between Woolf and Palin, Palin is the gorilla of the two. =)
