Certified_Heterosexual
The Falklands are Serbian, you cowards.
I read a post a few weeks back, at another site. The post read as follows:
This post has rustled my jimmies so much that I have decided I cannot allow this to happen again to anyone.
In this thread I will attempt to show that for the most part, academic postmodern jargon is a trap that must be avoided at all costs. It is a deliberate time sink with little value other than in affording elaborate, dense and kaleidoscopic plumage to some very pedestrian ideas.
I have read a lot of this stuff, little of it by choice. I'll begin with a short précis and then I will go off on one for several pages of rambling to demonstrate how real my life is outside that of words.
The deliberate obfuscation in the postmodern style exists for one purpose: subversion. The subversion of meaning and the tactic of leading your enemies into a boot-sucking midden of vertiginous poppycock is the point, and nothing more. Behind the jargon is usually a remark so simplistic that it has to be disguised to protect it from mockery. For example, the point made in the post above is “the old rules no longer apply because computers exist."
— — —
Précis Part 1: Welcome, Dear Readers
This is a story about the limits of reality— that bane of radicals both Left and Right. It is a lesson in the origins of Theory with a Capital T, the hot fever which passed among Western seats of learning like some as-yet-undiscovered Rhedosaurian plague.
It is a story which shows the limits of Theory and its attempts to escape them. Tragically, these attempts would always fail, because Theory turns out to be rather impractical.
However, Theory has a solution. It decides to do away with Practice altogether resolves merely to talk about itself, forever, but in a way that hardly anyone can understand. That which was once devoted to the destruction of everything else, is now devoted only to its own survival.
Précis Part 2: This is a Story about Theory
I would like to point out that it has been more than a few weeks since I first read The Post That Shall Not Be Named. I have tried to deny that it touched me in my no-no place without my consent, but can no longer. I have felt the fury of Krakatoa boiling in my guts, Dear Readers, and have cast aside the fool’s bargain I made to move on and stawp paoastign.
I accepted that yea, I hath been profoundly triggered. The rage is no longer raw, yet I will never cease to resent having to point out the poverty of postmodern jargon. Postmodern theory is a scattering of caltrops across a nude beach.
Here is my overlong post on why people who talk in postmodern idiom should be relentlessly mocked in public.
— — —
Part One: Cock Tales
As usual, the French are to blame.
One Frenchman in particular— Raymond Aron, friend of that notorious frog-eyed fanny magnet Jean-Paul Sartre. Aron, unlike Sartre, had the distinction of being right about a lot of things. He also (for the most part) looked and acted like a normal human being, which led the students to say of him: “better to be wrong with Sartre than right with Aron”.
Aron had come back from Berlin with a head full of Husserl. Simone de Beauvoir, strong independent groupie par excellence, wrote that he once remarked to Sartre that “If you are a phenomenologist, you can talk about this cocktail and make philosophy out of it." Ambitious mixologists the pair of them, they would both go on to do much more than that. In their own ways they made a cocktail out of philosophies— a Harvey Wallbanger of Husserl and Weber for Aron, an Existentialism-and-Marxism martini for Sartre. Both would drop the shaker.
A definition: Phenomenology is the idea that you should just talk about things, not whether they are really there or not. This idea— doing a lot of talking and nothing else— was to be the making of Sartre. He had a special gift for doing this talking in a way that made things harder to understand, a lesson he had learned from his first attempt at reading Heidegger.
In fact, despite looking like a melted Albert Camus novelty candle, the Apu Apustaja of Existentialism could not beat the ladies off with a shitty stick. Perhaps the attraction lay in his scintillating plays— such as Les Jeux Sont Faits, in which a young man desperate to prove his revolutionary credentials plays with a gun in bed that some critics have suggested is a metaphor for his willy. One of the baddies wears— le gasp!— a leather blouson and is called “Slick”. His other efforts, like Huis Clos, show the infernal horror of being stuck in a room with an audience of French pseudo-intellectuals for an hour. This play is about how awful it is that no one is as clever as you, the person who has paid to watch a masterclass in preening performed by temperamental theater undergrads.
Apart from his mesmeric works of fiction, such as the confessional title Nausea, Sartre managed to pass himself off as a serious philosopher by translating the works of Kierkegaard from Danish into Bullshit. As if by academic alchemy, he transformed Kierkegaard's slender and luminous volumes into impenetrable word-slabs with cryptic titles. Sartre is the inventor of the rule that if you are French and wish to be considered a serious thinker, your books must be titled like a crossword clue with no solution.
— — —
Part Two: Mixological Misadventures
Would you believe that being a holier-than-thou smartass for the sake of it caught on in France? Soon there were a lot of them at it.
Aron and Sartre had a magazine early on with people like Maurice “Marcel Marceau” Merleau-Ponty, himself a great gushing Ursprung of brainshart. The intellectual poverty of these verbal contortionists is demonstrated in the book “The Existentialist Marxism of Jean Paul Sartre” by James “Lolno” Lawler.
Both Merleau-Ponty and Sartre were determined to add a new, theoretical level of failure to the distinguished record of Marxism’s material failures. It proved impossible for them to reconcile this “philosophy of our times” with the ideas they had pickpocketed from the Existentialists. As it turned out, Marxism did not play nicely with the other children of the Revolution. The results of both attempts to combine Camus and Castro, Voltron-style, into a new unstoppable super-philosophy fell ridiculously flat. Yet the French had caught the bug, and others such as Jean-François "The Lolcow" Lyotard were keen to chase it into new avenues of meaning-independent content production (and the lucrative academic sinecures that came with it). By the end of the 1970s, however, their movement appeared to be running out of steam. It seemed that even the French looked like they might finally run out of Bolloques to talk. In 1979, however, this changed utterly with the publication of The Postmodern Condition— a veritable adrenaline needle to the heart of sophistry.
The language of the postmoderns and the enthusiasm with which trendy people with shocking hair- and lifestyles adopt it is appealing in this sense because it promises what the theologians would call a neo-Gnostic escape from the material. It allows you to say FUCK YOU DAD! whilst retaining the moral high ground. It permits exit velocity from the unfortunate mess of your previous dalliance with thoughts. It is the vocation of the lifelong adolescent, who sees a glorious iconoclasm in taking a big steaming dump on a war memorial.
Lyotard started off with his notorious What is the Postmodern? He said it was an incredulity toward Grand Narratives. Translated into plain speech, postmodernism was a mindset of ironic detachment towards any system of ideas that sought to explain the world and offer a goal.
The 1970s saw Soviet stagnation slowly begin to resemble the decline that became obvious during their long and disastrous humiliation in Afghanistan (“Afgantsy, The Russians in Afghanistan 1979-1989," Rodric Braithwaite).
This misadventure was a mise en abyme of failures: the failure to understand the legendary Graveyard of Empires contained a nested object lesson on the madness of the Communist ideal itself. In attempting to electrify, industrialise, and Sovietize the clans of Afhganistan, the futility of Marxist universalism was demonstrated openly. At enormous cost in terms of reputation, blood, and treasure, the grand project to modernise Afghanistan with concrete and comradeship failed completely and shattered the mythos which hitherto galvanised the Red Army, who over the ten-year "intervention" found themselves well and truly stuffed by a band of Iron-Age goatshaggers led by a military genius, Ahmad Shah Massoud— a man so remarkable as to deserve his own little digression.
— — —
Excursus: Carry On Up The Panjshir (A brief diversion into material limitations)
Ahmad Shah Massoud was one of the most brilliant guerrilla commanders of the twentieth century and deserves credit— alongside St. Pope John Paul II, Ronald Reagan, and the Laws of Economics— for effectively trolling the Soviet Union to death. Son of a copper, he spoke seven languages despite being an engineering student. On leaving university he fought the Afghan commies with a few fellow Muslim youths until at 25 years old, when he was shot in the leg and ran out of ammunition. When the Soviets invaded, he applied the tactics of Castro
and Mao against them, which would eventually result in the Soviets ragequitting the entire match.
He was an excellent guerilla commander, cutting off the main Soviet supply line for five years when heavily outnumbered with no air support. Despite repeated and increasingly intense offensives he held out with no more than 5 000 men against 30 000 Soviets with armour, artillery and an air force. He won various other stunning victories including the defeat of an Afghan division and an invasion of Tajikistan. He went on to lead the Northern Alliance against the Taliban and when all the other rebel leaders left, he remained in Afghanistan and refused to take the office of Prime Minister that the Taliban offered him by way of not getting rekt. He eventually encountered the limitations of the material plane in 2001 by way of an exploding news camera operated by Moroccan journalists, which should be a lesson to anyone considering giving an audience to the media.
— — —
Part Three: Anyways, Back to the Future
The Future is where the State withers away to leave the worker’s paradise, True Communism, in its wake. The Soviet state had begun to visibly wither, this is true, yet signs of paradise were there none. It was becoming obvious that something had to be done to resuscitate Theory, as Praxis was not holding up its end of the arrangement. The near-bicentennial humiliation of the Dar-al-Islam is a similar event, inasmuch as their abject lack of attainment in any field in recent centuries beyond the zoophilic indicates a markedly less-than-favourable position with their own telos. Where the fissures are obvious, as ever they are to the Muslim and the Marxist alike, the fraternity is also instinctual. They are both sons of a fallen heaven, each of whose god appears to have abandoned the game.
In order to guarantee a future for the kind of people who thought that leather blousons and Brutalist architecture were sexually appealing, Marxism needed an exit from the increasingly inconvenient “actually existing Socialism” of the real world. It found a release for the destructive nihilism lurking within every Jacobin in the adoption of the postmodern, post-Marxist critique of society, using a patented variety of esoteric jargon I will henceforth call “FutureBollocks”.
— — —
Part Four: Fouc’in Unbelievable
Like Jean-Paul Sartre, Michel "Fouc-All" Foucault was a chancer. He was bald, he loved turtlenecks, and he was heavily involved in the French BDSM scene. This is all anyone really needs to know about him. His true love in life was creating drama, and he had been doing that since school. He spent the rest of his life in such institutions, refining his ability to encode banal observations in the pseudo-mystical terms that would one day become the lingua franca of academe.
Foucault's "biopolitics" reduce to the astonishing and groundbreaking idea that governments exercise control over the bodies of the citizens they govern. This is the "bio" bit— that's really all he's saying. His first major book was Discipline and Punish (1975), which should be subtitled In Defence of Deviance. In it, the proud deviant Michel Foucault accuses society and its institutions of such blood-curdling tyrannical atrocities as locking up criminals and trying to cure the insane. The apotheosis of his genius is found in the four-volume expression of his shocking and powerful idea that every individual has a unique sexuality (or, as we say up in Boston, is a FAHKIN' QUEAH). I think this philosophical magnum opus was eventually put to music by Parker, Stone et. al. ("Everyone has AIDS," Routledge, 2004).
You can thank Foucault for the modern fashionable twaddle of "Black bodies" and "X-is-a-social-construct"— in fact, you can lay at his feet the modern world's wholesale frontal assault on any organised attempt at alleviating human isolation, misery, and suffering anywhere. His is the philosophy of a chronically miserable man who sees misery everywhere. "In every home a glory hole!" is his message.
Foucault has few ideas of his own which survive translation into plain speech. He too began his intellectual life as a French Phenomenologist, later going full Structuralist. This accounts for his aversion to frankness and saying anything of value.
— — —
Part Five: The Jargon of Authenticity
Foucault's superpowers were inherited by the generation that perfected FutureBollocks and began to exit the troublesome arena of consensus reality bounded by things such as bodies and buildings and ballistic missiles. The early obsession with talking about Things— phenomenology, Dear Reader— had matured into talking about Things that weren’t Things, but were still A Thing. Things like cyberspace and the limitless potential of human desire and other things made mainly out of words that didn’t mean anything. In order to help anyone who is either contractually or sadomasochistically compelled to teach this twaddle, there is a book which everyone reads and no one admits to having heard of. It is called Beginning Theory (Ending Sanity: the How-To book). Read this in small doses, and you will understand that there are those who gut the victim that is Meaning and those who pore over the viscera and various fluids to foretell the future.
You are disqualified from haruspicy if you cannot speak the hieratic language of this priesthood of piffle. These words I have used are unusual, but can be explained in simple terms— whereas they talk in a way that is designed to obscure. The reason is that usually there is nothing worth knowing behind the smokescreen.
— — —
Conclusion: The Virtual Reality-Based Community
The Postmodernist snake oil is different from the old Modernist variety in that it openly admits that it is never going to exist in any tangible form. The old Modernist Utopia was a promise that failed to materialize, the new Postmodernist Utopia is the promise of the immaterial. It is MineKraftWerk— a factory made out of and producing pixellated fantasy worlds for us all to inhabit eternally. It is a Utopia that is here in its infancy and is tantalising because we have to continually reach out in order to experience it, because it is not made out of tangible stuff. To put it another way, it is the HammerZeitGeist. "You Can’t Touch This," it says as it waggles holographically, tantalizing you with its implausible trousers as you shower it with very real money. In brief, these people have used talk of technology to gameify (and monetise) the rock of Sisyphus.
In their game world you are the Other, Dear Reader. NPC is YOU. If you refuse to play, there is a tacit sense that you don’t have the smarts to deserve a dose of FutureBollocks— to which the obvious retort is that if they are so effin' clever, why can’t they just say what they mean?...
There is no other object to FutureBollocks other than subversion by means of exhaustion in (a) nihilistic debauchery or (b) cynical exasperation. When nothing makes sense, everything is noise. It is the kind of equality enjoyed by landfill. Camus thought that we must imagine Sisyphus to be happy, as this— the absurdity of a life that ends, under conditions set without our consent which cannot be otherwise escaped— was the only thing that made life tolerable. For all his moral fiber, Camus is a dung beetle who believes the whole world shares his fragrant burden. In like fashion, the crafters of FutureBollocks can imagine no meaning worth a mention, no principle worth defending, no practice to recommend other than the endless campaign of vandalism-for-vandalism's-sake they call Progress. These people are the product of a type who have made entire careers defending and promoting things that do not and will never exist. Like their post-racial humanity, their borderless paradise and the socialist utopia their expertise is a thing unproven in a reality outside their own discourse.
The Postmodern world is made out of words that have been chosen for their properties of camouflage. They are not more easily found out because nothingness has neither shape, shine nor silhouette.
If Postmodernists spoke in plain English they would vanish overnight.
This post has rustled my jimmies so much that I have decided I cannot allow this to happen again to anyone.
In this thread I will attempt to show that for the most part, academic postmodern jargon is a trap that must be avoided at all costs. It is a deliberate time sink with little value other than in affording elaborate, dense and kaleidoscopic plumage to some very pedestrian ideas.
I have read a lot of this stuff, little of it by choice. I'll begin with a short précis and then I will go off on one for several pages of rambling to demonstrate how real my life is outside that of words.
The deliberate obfuscation in the postmodern style exists for one purpose: subversion. The subversion of meaning and the tactic of leading your enemies into a boot-sucking midden of vertiginous poppycock is the point, and nothing more. Behind the jargon is usually a remark so simplistic that it has to be disguised to protect it from mockery. For example, the point made in the post above is “the old rules no longer apply because computers exist."
— — —
Précis Part 1: Welcome, Dear Readers
This is a story about the limits of reality— that bane of radicals both Left and Right. It is a lesson in the origins of Theory with a Capital T, the hot fever which passed among Western seats of learning like some as-yet-undiscovered Rhedosaurian plague.
It is a story which shows the limits of Theory and its attempts to escape them. Tragically, these attempts would always fail, because Theory turns out to be rather impractical.
However, Theory has a solution. It decides to do away with Practice altogether resolves merely to talk about itself, forever, but in a way that hardly anyone can understand. That which was once devoted to the destruction of everything else, is now devoted only to its own survival.
Précis Part 2: This is a Story about Theory
I would like to point out that it has been more than a few weeks since I first read The Post That Shall Not Be Named. I have tried to deny that it touched me in my no-no place without my consent, but can no longer. I have felt the fury of Krakatoa boiling in my guts, Dear Readers, and have cast aside the fool’s bargain I made to move on and stawp paoastign.
I accepted that yea, I hath been profoundly triggered. The rage is no longer raw, yet I will never cease to resent having to point out the poverty of postmodern jargon. Postmodern theory is a scattering of caltrops across a nude beach.
Here is my overlong post on why people who talk in postmodern idiom should be relentlessly mocked in public.
— — —
Part One: Cock Tales
As usual, the French are to blame.
One Frenchman in particular— Raymond Aron, friend of that notorious frog-eyed fanny magnet Jean-Paul Sartre. Aron, unlike Sartre, had the distinction of being right about a lot of things. He also (for the most part) looked and acted like a normal human being, which led the students to say of him: “better to be wrong with Sartre than right with Aron”.
Aron had come back from Berlin with a head full of Husserl. Simone de Beauvoir, strong independent groupie par excellence, wrote that he once remarked to Sartre that “If you are a phenomenologist, you can talk about this cocktail and make philosophy out of it." Ambitious mixologists the pair of them, they would both go on to do much more than that. In their own ways they made a cocktail out of philosophies— a Harvey Wallbanger of Husserl and Weber for Aron, an Existentialism-and-Marxism martini for Sartre. Both would drop the shaker.
A definition: Phenomenology is the idea that you should just talk about things, not whether they are really there or not. This idea— doing a lot of talking and nothing else— was to be the making of Sartre. He had a special gift for doing this talking in a way that made things harder to understand, a lesson he had learned from his first attempt at reading Heidegger.
In fact, despite looking like a melted Albert Camus novelty candle, the Apu Apustaja of Existentialism could not beat the ladies off with a shitty stick. Perhaps the attraction lay in his scintillating plays— such as Les Jeux Sont Faits, in which a young man desperate to prove his revolutionary credentials plays with a gun in bed that some critics have suggested is a metaphor for his willy. One of the baddies wears— le gasp!— a leather blouson and is called “Slick”. His other efforts, like Huis Clos, show the infernal horror of being stuck in a room with an audience of French pseudo-intellectuals for an hour. This play is about how awful it is that no one is as clever as you, the person who has paid to watch a masterclass in preening performed by temperamental theater undergrads.
Apart from his mesmeric works of fiction, such as the confessional title Nausea, Sartre managed to pass himself off as a serious philosopher by translating the works of Kierkegaard from Danish into Bullshit. As if by academic alchemy, he transformed Kierkegaard's slender and luminous volumes into impenetrable word-slabs with cryptic titles. Sartre is the inventor of the rule that if you are French and wish to be considered a serious thinker, your books must be titled like a crossword clue with no solution.
— — —
Part Two: Mixological Misadventures
Would you believe that being a holier-than-thou smartass for the sake of it caught on in France? Soon there were a lot of them at it.
Aron and Sartre had a magazine early on with people like Maurice “Marcel Marceau” Merleau-Ponty, himself a great gushing Ursprung of brainshart. The intellectual poverty of these verbal contortionists is demonstrated in the book “The Existentialist Marxism of Jean Paul Sartre” by James “Lolno” Lawler.
Both Merleau-Ponty and Sartre were determined to add a new, theoretical level of failure to the distinguished record of Marxism’s material failures. It proved impossible for them to reconcile this “philosophy of our times” with the ideas they had pickpocketed from the Existentialists. As it turned out, Marxism did not play nicely with the other children of the Revolution. The results of both attempts to combine Camus and Castro, Voltron-style, into a new unstoppable super-philosophy fell ridiculously flat. Yet the French had caught the bug, and others such as Jean-François "The Lolcow" Lyotard were keen to chase it into new avenues of meaning-independent content production (and the lucrative academic sinecures that came with it). By the end of the 1970s, however, their movement appeared to be running out of steam. It seemed that even the French looked like they might finally run out of Bolloques to talk. In 1979, however, this changed utterly with the publication of The Postmodern Condition— a veritable adrenaline needle to the heart of sophistry.
The language of the postmoderns and the enthusiasm with which trendy people with shocking hair- and lifestyles adopt it is appealing in this sense because it promises what the theologians would call a neo-Gnostic escape from the material. It allows you to say FUCK YOU DAD! whilst retaining the moral high ground. It permits exit velocity from the unfortunate mess of your previous dalliance with thoughts. It is the vocation of the lifelong adolescent, who sees a glorious iconoclasm in taking a big steaming dump on a war memorial.
Lyotard started off with his notorious What is the Postmodern? He said it was an incredulity toward Grand Narratives. Translated into plain speech, postmodernism was a mindset of ironic detachment towards any system of ideas that sought to explain the world and offer a goal.
The 1970s saw Soviet stagnation slowly begin to resemble the decline that became obvious during their long and disastrous humiliation in Afghanistan (“Afgantsy, The Russians in Afghanistan 1979-1989," Rodric Braithwaite).
This misadventure was a mise en abyme of failures: the failure to understand the legendary Graveyard of Empires contained a nested object lesson on the madness of the Communist ideal itself. In attempting to electrify, industrialise, and Sovietize the clans of Afhganistan, the futility of Marxist universalism was demonstrated openly. At enormous cost in terms of reputation, blood, and treasure, the grand project to modernise Afghanistan with concrete and comradeship failed completely and shattered the mythos which hitherto galvanised the Red Army, who over the ten-year "intervention" found themselves well and truly stuffed by a band of Iron-Age goatshaggers led by a military genius, Ahmad Shah Massoud— a man so remarkable as to deserve his own little digression.
— — —
Excursus: Carry On Up The Panjshir (A brief diversion into material limitations)
Ahmad Shah Massoud was one of the most brilliant guerrilla commanders of the twentieth century and deserves credit— alongside St. Pope John Paul II, Ronald Reagan, and the Laws of Economics— for effectively trolling the Soviet Union to death. Son of a copper, he spoke seven languages despite being an engineering student. On leaving university he fought the Afghan commies with a few fellow Muslim youths until at 25 years old, when he was shot in the leg and ran out of ammunition. When the Soviets invaded, he applied the tactics of Castro
and Mao against them, which would eventually result in the Soviets ragequitting the entire match.He was an excellent guerilla commander, cutting off the main Soviet supply line for five years when heavily outnumbered with no air support. Despite repeated and increasingly intense offensives he held out with no more than 5 000 men against 30 000 Soviets with armour, artillery and an air force. He won various other stunning victories including the defeat of an Afghan division and an invasion of Tajikistan. He went on to lead the Northern Alliance against the Taliban and when all the other rebel leaders left, he remained in Afghanistan and refused to take the office of Prime Minister that the Taliban offered him by way of not getting rekt. He eventually encountered the limitations of the material plane in 2001 by way of an exploding news camera operated by Moroccan journalists, which should be a lesson to anyone considering giving an audience to the media.
— — —
Part Three: Anyways, Back to the Future
The Future is where the State withers away to leave the worker’s paradise, True Communism, in its wake. The Soviet state had begun to visibly wither, this is true, yet signs of paradise were there none. It was becoming obvious that something had to be done to resuscitate Theory, as Praxis was not holding up its end of the arrangement. The near-bicentennial humiliation of the Dar-al-Islam is a similar event, inasmuch as their abject lack of attainment in any field in recent centuries beyond the zoophilic indicates a markedly less-than-favourable position with their own telos. Where the fissures are obvious, as ever they are to the Muslim and the Marxist alike, the fraternity is also instinctual. They are both sons of a fallen heaven, each of whose god appears to have abandoned the game.
In order to guarantee a future for the kind of people who thought that leather blousons and Brutalist architecture were sexually appealing, Marxism needed an exit from the increasingly inconvenient “actually existing Socialism” of the real world. It found a release for the destructive nihilism lurking within every Jacobin in the adoption of the postmodern, post-Marxist critique of society, using a patented variety of esoteric jargon I will henceforth call “FutureBollocks”.
— — —
Part Four: Fouc’in Unbelievable
Like Jean-Paul Sartre, Michel "Fouc-All" Foucault was a chancer. He was bald, he loved turtlenecks, and he was heavily involved in the French BDSM scene. This is all anyone really needs to know about him. His true love in life was creating drama, and he had been doing that since school. He spent the rest of his life in such institutions, refining his ability to encode banal observations in the pseudo-mystical terms that would one day become the lingua franca of academe.
Foucault's "biopolitics" reduce to the astonishing and groundbreaking idea that governments exercise control over the bodies of the citizens they govern. This is the "bio" bit— that's really all he's saying. His first major book was Discipline and Punish (1975), which should be subtitled In Defence of Deviance. In it, the proud deviant Michel Foucault accuses society and its institutions of such blood-curdling tyrannical atrocities as locking up criminals and trying to cure the insane. The apotheosis of his genius is found in the four-volume expression of his shocking and powerful idea that every individual has a unique sexuality (or, as we say up in Boston, is a FAHKIN' QUEAH). I think this philosophical magnum opus was eventually put to music by Parker, Stone et. al. ("Everyone has AIDS," Routledge, 2004).
You can thank Foucault for the modern fashionable twaddle of "Black bodies" and "X-is-a-social-construct"— in fact, you can lay at his feet the modern world's wholesale frontal assault on any organised attempt at alleviating human isolation, misery, and suffering anywhere. His is the philosophy of a chronically miserable man who sees misery everywhere. "In every home a glory hole!" is his message.
Foucault has few ideas of his own which survive translation into plain speech. He too began his intellectual life as a French Phenomenologist, later going full Structuralist. This accounts for his aversion to frankness and saying anything of value.
— — —
Part Five: The Jargon of Authenticity
Foucault's superpowers were inherited by the generation that perfected FutureBollocks and began to exit the troublesome arena of consensus reality bounded by things such as bodies and buildings and ballistic missiles. The early obsession with talking about Things— phenomenology, Dear Reader— had matured into talking about Things that weren’t Things, but were still A Thing. Things like cyberspace and the limitless potential of human desire and other things made mainly out of words that didn’t mean anything. In order to help anyone who is either contractually or sadomasochistically compelled to teach this twaddle, there is a book which everyone reads and no one admits to having heard of. It is called Beginning Theory (Ending Sanity: the How-To book). Read this in small doses, and you will understand that there are those who gut the victim that is Meaning and those who pore over the viscera and various fluids to foretell the future.
You are disqualified from haruspicy if you cannot speak the hieratic language of this priesthood of piffle. These words I have used are unusual, but can be explained in simple terms— whereas they talk in a way that is designed to obscure. The reason is that usually there is nothing worth knowing behind the smokescreen.
— — —
Conclusion: The Virtual Reality-Based Community
The Postmodernist snake oil is different from the old Modernist variety in that it openly admits that it is never going to exist in any tangible form. The old Modernist Utopia was a promise that failed to materialize, the new Postmodernist Utopia is the promise of the immaterial. It is MineKraftWerk— a factory made out of and producing pixellated fantasy worlds for us all to inhabit eternally. It is a Utopia that is here in its infancy and is tantalising because we have to continually reach out in order to experience it, because it is not made out of tangible stuff. To put it another way, it is the HammerZeitGeist. "You Can’t Touch This," it says as it waggles holographically, tantalizing you with its implausible trousers as you shower it with very real money. In brief, these people have used talk of technology to gameify (and monetise) the rock of Sisyphus.
In their game world you are the Other, Dear Reader. NPC is YOU. If you refuse to play, there is a tacit sense that you don’t have the smarts to deserve a dose of FutureBollocks— to which the obvious retort is that if they are so effin' clever, why can’t they just say what they mean?...
There is no other object to FutureBollocks other than subversion by means of exhaustion in (a) nihilistic debauchery or (b) cynical exasperation. When nothing makes sense, everything is noise. It is the kind of equality enjoyed by landfill. Camus thought that we must imagine Sisyphus to be happy, as this— the absurdity of a life that ends, under conditions set without our consent which cannot be otherwise escaped— was the only thing that made life tolerable. For all his moral fiber, Camus is a dung beetle who believes the whole world shares his fragrant burden. In like fashion, the crafters of FutureBollocks can imagine no meaning worth a mention, no principle worth defending, no practice to recommend other than the endless campaign of vandalism-for-vandalism's-sake they call Progress. These people are the product of a type who have made entire careers defending and promoting things that do not and will never exist. Like their post-racial humanity, their borderless paradise and the socialist utopia their expertise is a thing unproven in a reality outside their own discourse.
The Postmodern world is made out of words that have been chosen for their properties of camouflage. They are not more easily found out because nothingness has neither shape, shine nor silhouette.
If Postmodernists spoke in plain English they would vanish overnight.
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