nealcassatiel:

rosemoonweaver:

trisscar368:

@ijudgeusohard replied to your post

I feel like post modernism was thought up by people who can’t create anything but still want to own it.

I am so sorry that your encounters with art, literature, philosophy, music, and world history classes has left you with this impression.

Western civilization goes through phases.  Ideas and concepts are sparked and they spread through everything in the creative spectrum, from typography to architecture.  The Enlightenment gave birth to Modernism, and Postmodernism sprouted off as a reaction and counter; that is, an era that praised logic and man’s intelligence and potential and looked for potential utopia ran smack dab into the Industiral Revolution, shortly followed by World War I and World War II.

Postmodernism isn’t just “I get to interpret things however I like” in fandom and literature.  It’s a philosophy of skepticism and subjectivity, born from an era where suddenly nothing was as certain as it seemed.

Excuse me, what? Postmodernism was thoughy up by people who can’t create anything? Well fuck, I guess someone needs to dig up Heller and Vonnegut tell them they’re uncreative hacks.

A large portion of everything written post WW2 is postmodern. Supernatural with its Man v Fate, Man v God (literally textually The Author), Humanism Wins message IS postmodern.

Postmodernism wasn’t created on tumblr. Postmodernism is old.

*giggling uncontrollably* @rosemoonweaver @trisscar368 amazing. 

Also, I feel like if there’s a fandom to be in if you don’t like post-modernism it’s SPN. I mean, when they encounter the Supernatural books, then go to the Supernatural conventions, then The French Mistake…. I mean, ffs that is like prime post-modernism meta. I mean, Chuck literally references Kilgore Trout. Wait…. maybe the commenter was channelling Chuck, looking at his meta characters coming to see him and crying out into the postmodernist void that maybe he didn’t in fact create them and the whole of ‘post modernism was thought up by people who can’t create anything but still want to own it’, before watching his own characters walk out the door realising that he didn’t create anything in the end…. 

lol. That is endlessly amusing to me and is going to stick with me for a long time. Just God lamenting that he himself is a hack and his creation is untamable. 

Regardless, I do think there are a million and one conversations we could have about modern v postmodern interpretations of something postmodern. I think there could also be a good case for discussing genre flipping and the first few seasons of SPN as Gothic horror and capital-R Romanticism followed by the idea of a Humanist Apocalypse and how the world reacts (and Man reacts) to a world without active gods. We could have discussions about how SPN may have started out not in a postmodern frame work but became that way. We can have discussions about whether or not the author is dead while the story is still being written. We can have so many neat conversations that all deal with a basic understanding of what the words we’re using mean. Like, so many of the themes and ideas SPN plays with are postmodern and you almost can’t talk about them without mentioning authors like Vonnegut and philosophers like Foucault. Hell, they bring up the question of “what gives a story meaning” with Metatron. It’s not like this shit isn’t brought up in the show, either in the text or in the themes. 

But before we can have discussions about meaning in the text, regardless of what our focus is, we need to agree on terms. We cannot have good faith arguements without some semblance of understanding. But when the start of the discussion is “postmodernism is bullshit” there is no way to have those discussions.