Triangle Common Good

What exactly is "postmodernism?" Come join Triangle Common Good in beginning to understand this question as we discuss the first chapter and an essay summary of Frederic Jameson's influential Postmodernism: Or the Cultural Logic of Late Stage Capitalism in preparation of studying postmodernism more this year.

Frederic Jameson's Postmodernism: Or the Cultural Logic of Late Stage Capitalism is an influential analysis of what it means to exist in a postmodern culture, what about postmodernism makes it a break from modernity, and why understanding that we do exist in a postmodern culture is necessary for imagining new political futures. The book itself can be an intimidating read due to how much it references a massive amount of art and cultural discourse. For this reason, we will only discuss the attached first chapter and summary essay. In particular, the summary essay provides a readable starting point that will give us some basic understanding as we explore postmodernism more. The concepts raised in this discussion will guide our picks for the rest of the year as we work through the project of understanding our current political moment and how to advocate for something different.

The essay is written by Ira Chernus, a Professor of Religious Studies at UC Boulder. The influence of his religious studies helps him understand why the concept of totality or meta-narratives are so important to understanding part of what postmodernity is responding to in its rejecting of modernism.

Required Readings:

What if the future to worry about is not the future of 1984, but the future of Brave New World?

Come join Triangle Common Good in reading Neil Postman's seminal Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. This will be part of continuing our exploration of what it means to exist in a postmodern culture by exploring how television changed our experience of culture and reality.

Normally, we provide a summary of the book and author. For the case of this book, Postman's own quote provides a compelling summary:

“We were keeping our eye on 1984. When the year came and the prophecy didn't, thoughtful Americans sang softly in praise of themselves. The roots of liberal democracy had held. Wherever else the terror had happened, we, at least, had not been visited by Orwellian nightmares.

But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell's dark vision, there was another - slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley's vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy.

As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions". In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us. This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.”

Supplemental Resources:

Come join Triangle Common Good in reading David Graeber's Bullshit Jobs: A Theory. We will connect this theory of unmeaningful work to our ongoing discussion on what it feels like to live in our current society.

David Graeber was an anthropologist who gained a reputation as the "anarchist professor". He began his career studying how societies decide what to value. His book Debt: The First 5000 Years, which argued that the invention of debt - rather than trade - birthed the modern capitalist economy, marked a turn to a focus on historical anthropology. He would later go on to publish The Utopia of Rules and The Dawn of Everything. Botch of which would sell well and receive positive critical appraisal. Meanwhile, his advocacy work included participating with Occupy Wall Street, coining the phrase "We are the 99%".

Bullshit Jobs is a book-length expansion of a viral article he wrote for a niche radical magazine called Strike!. The article would end up netting over a million views for the small site, resulting in a book deal to expand on the article's premise. In the book, Graeber expands on the five types of bullshit jobs he sees in the world, tying their existence to society transitioning to work that was based on paying someone for owning their time, rather than the tangible results of their work. This kind of alienation from the meaning of work also includes a switch to jobs where your role is to enforce managerial rules or process, encouraging in individuals a kind of passive, submissive mindset and identification with the values of the managerial class.

Come join Triangle Common Good in reading Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power from Byung-Chul Han. This is a short work of 80 pages.

Byung-Chul Han is a South Korean born philosopher whose short, punchy books focus on exploring how the era of big data and smart technology has resulted in a loss of space for narratives, rituals, and contemplation and boredom. In particular, his work Burnout Society would garner him more public attention in recent years.

In Psychopolitics, he argues that self-optimization and a regime of "positivity" are leading to a mental collapse that can be tied to the ways in which data encourages existence in flow states. We will consider this in line with our discussion of postmodernism as encouraging the experience of "kaleidoscopic flows" that don't provide space to stop and contemplate the flow of feelings or imagery.

"It is impossible to subordinate human personhood to the dictates of positivity entirely. Without negativity, life degrades into 'something dead'. Indeed, negativity is what keeps life alive. Pain is constitutive for experience. Life that consists wholly of positive emotions and the sensation of 'flow' is not human at all. The human soul owes its defining tautness and depth precisely to negativity...Now the only pain that is tolerated is pain that can be exploited for the purposes optimization. But the violence of positivity is just as destructive as the violence of negativity. Neoliberal psychopolitics, which the consciousness industry it promotes, is destroying the human soul, which is anything but a machine of positivity...Healing, it turns out, means killing"

You will find below a link to a copy of an approachable reader on his works if you want to explore more or need help understanding his ideas.