I know it has a lot of formal definitions, but to me it's always meant, "What I'm talking about it soooo far over your head that you just wouldn't understand." It helps if you picture the person saying this to be closing their eyes and speaking in a smug tone.

I checked the wiki for this, and conclusion is that I must've had a braincell dedicated to understanding this, but I killed it a few years ago.

Not exactly, i added the "sir" which actually did come later in the "discussion".

The question/statement was uninformed meaninglessness, Yes.

Thats what Im trying to get at. That an entire "intellectual field" of thought is belittled by other scholars to the point that its an Insult.

Moe: It's PoMo! ... Post Modern. ... Weird for the sake of bein' weird.

Oh, if someone had just explained it like that sooner... now I can totally relate.

Also remember that conservatives consider "liberal" an insult, too.

Ok, so from what I've learned here on the GWJ forums this week, if a conservative ever calls me a emo-pomo-demo-crat in a snide tone, I should translate that as fighting words, avoid the slo-mo and hit'em with whammo and a blammo.

How'd you do ?

That's pretty close to how I see it as well, but I would step away from calling postmodernism an 'intellectual field.'
Personally, I think alot of the frustration with post-modernism (in the contexts which I've been exposed to it), originates in the dismissal of traditional methods of analysis as fundamentally flawed and the dismissal of overarching explanations. In philosophy, at least, it goes like this: If you can never be someone else, then how can you understand their ideas or exactly what they mean? Postmodernism poses that question to every field of academics, art and design.

Not only does that invalidate much of the academic dialogue, it tends to drive any conversation toward concepts and questions that can never be fully answered. So, fundamentally, post-modernism is a framework in which everyone is wrong, and yet everyone is right. Because both concepts are meaningless. And that pisses me off.

Look at postmodern art. Art for Art's sake. The majority of it is complete and utter bullsh*t. What does that add to our discussion of art as a whole? Their contribution has been the reaction to the concrete certainties of modernism, but we got that. Yeah, okay. Great. Point taken. We'll keep that in mind. Move on.

So, as an undergraduate philosophy student, I tried to write a series of papers on holism as a response to postmodernism. Naive. But I still don't like it. It completely removes any foundation for looking at our world with any sort of curiousity.

You want a convoluted take on PoMo - look to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

I've always looked at Postmodernists as folks who feel entitled to their own reality despite considerable objective evidence to the contrary. They pride themselves at being enemies to Realism or Rationalism, often stating that facts "only provide an incomplete picture of the 'truth'". To them, sincere belief is more important than evidence.

In that sense, Neoconservatives are nearly perfect paragons of Postmodernism. So are Creationists.

That can certainly be said of many who believe in world peace. I think it is certainly fair to say that folks who insist that communal meditation sessions in Berkeley, CA will somehow stop genocide in West Africa are equally delusional to those who believe that "In Iraq, an ally of the United States is fighting for its survival. Terrorists and extremists who are at war with us around the world are seeking to topple Iraq's government, dominate the region, and attack us here at home."

This doesn't strike me as an accurate description of post-modernists. The difficulty is that the nature of the material is difficult to explain in conventional terms, and because of that it's attracted a whole bunch of posers and freeloaders who are always attracted by the latest intellectual fashion and bring the entire movement into disrepute. Like all analytical frameworks, it's bound to work well on some questions and not so good on others. So people will take some elements out of it, and fold those into the next analytical framework and keep trying to achieve the goal of having the theory that explains everything. The stuff that doesn't work will be discarded.

Entirely possible. Though my point in bringing that up was that that was probably the context in which the speaker used the term Postmodernist from, at least, my reading of it. Whereas a Realist would make a statement like "you are entitled to your own opinion, but not your own facts", a Postmodernists would insist that facts don't really matter.

I think the purpose of Avante Garde is to get people to re-examine their perceptions by approaching from a new angle, in other words, weird for the sake of being unfamiliar. That definition of postmodernism (from the psych article linked above) seems to be pretty spot on for "weird for the sake of being weird." It seems the statement of post-modernism is "whatever you think this is, you're wrong."

http://donatacom.com/archives/00001349.htm

"One of the things I love about postmodernism is that it's impossible to define, for to define it would mean it isn't postmodern."

Brilliant!

I remember first hearing the term in my first Freshman Writing Seminar** at Cornell, in regards to the transformation from 'modernity' to 'postmodernity' in Germany ... I've never quite been able to grasp it, and I suppose now I know why.

** Instead of having freshman take the normal 'English 101' type courses, Cornell requires that freshman take two 'Writing Seminars'. These are courses on some rather specific theme, that require a rather intense amount of reading and writing. The title of this course was something along the lines of: METROPOLIS, MODERNITY, AND MASS CULTURE: THE CULTURE OF CRISIS IN THE WEIMAR REPUBLIC (that seems to be the current title, I think they may have changed it slightly in the past ten years). The TA who taught my session told us at the very beginning that she did not give out A's on any paper unless it was the most brilliant thing she had ever read. After the first day of class, we had to write a practice paper that wouldn't actually be worth a grade, just to see where our writing skills stood. The subject was something along the lines of 'write an interview with a fictional character discussing the current events of the time'. I wrote up an interview with Captain Kirk, which she liked so much that she apparently showed to various colleagues and it caused a lot of discussion. Unfortunately I never wrote anything mind-blowing enough to pick up that A.