A note on my poem.

It's been pointed out to me. That my poem in the last post, is impossible to understand. So I thought it might be helpful to give people who feel that way a brief run down on the philosophy behind it.

You're not supposed to understand the poem. Very simply put, the poem is a complaint against the ridiculous use of language that post-modernists love to revel in. I don't find this practice half as clever as I do designed to confuse and impress.

I do believe that language needs to lend itself to different disciplines so that people can discuss ideas with each other quickly and more succinctly. (It's easier to speak in language codes for physics, or literary theory or Internet technology etc. The word post-modernism is a good example. Bringing to mind and summing up many ideas that it would take an eternity to explain everytime a literary theorist might otherwise mention it.) Apart from the necessity of different disciplines to apply specific dialects to make life easier though, I feel language is designed to communicate and that language should be accessible and about effective communication.

When those people who love to chatter away in 'po-mo' speak, (and those who love to write inaccessible po-mo poetry,) make their messages impossible to attain for the normal person, then what they essentially do, is isolate those people from what should ideally be the democracy of language, and turns their branch of philosophy or their discipline, into just another elitist one. I think this goes against the very philosophy of a lot of post-modernist thought in the first place. Po-mo is supposed to make meaning in language accessible to any man in the sense that he can intepret these texts for themselves and then create their own truth or meaning from them. This idea hints at a democracy of language, but how can this be done when po-mo theorists are busy isolating large body of readers? All it ends up doing is distancing one reader, and therefore one human being, from another. In my opinion, post-modernism eats itself when its constuct negates its content.

So there you have the idea behind my poem. The fact that it confuses is a proof of point. And it isn't just gobblede gook. If you ever sat down to interpet that long string of unintelligable words, what it basically amounts to is: for all my huffing and puffing and grandstanding, I have really done nothing to further the evolution of human morality.

The idea is that almost anyone can speak that lingo if they really want to, but it's ideas not obtuse application of language, that counts.

Below is a link to a simple definition and explanation of post-modernism for anyone interested.

http://www.toronto-h.schools.nsw.edu.au/postmodernism.htm

Also some might find this interesting: The fictitious and contrived modernist poet who was designed as a literary hoax to demonstrate the unintelligable waffle that posed and still poses as poetry as little more than a joke. His poems made no sense, having been designed not to. He became very famous. You could read this in two ways. A: That meaning and truth really are only in the mind of the reader, which would support post-modernist claims. Or B: That people really are gullible idiots.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ern_Malley


Something a little more in depth - my critical appraisal of the politics of post-modernism in a nutshell.

Now don't get me wrong, I like post-modernism, to a point. I like the general politics behind the school of thought that was born in the Parisian revolution of 1968, which utilised post-modernism to challenge existing ruling class authorities. I like it as a tool to deconstruct litertary texts, and even, as they say, the text of life. But to me it's only half the picture, and I'm a bit of a critic of the school of thought as a whole. My reason for this, is that I don't see in post-modernism (as a political tool, and in many other forms,) as the full picture. Because I don't believe it can be truly revolutionary without a collective notion of truth for people to gather under and strive torward. The notion of many relative truths has the possibility of leaving people fragmented and isolated from one another. And post-modernism denies the possibility of any metaphysical truths.

Although it is argued that post-modenrnism served to critique opppressive structures, such as the years of Hitler, there were also Nazi apologists who utilised the same approach to support it.
It is only valuable as a tool to challenge existing authoritarial schools of thought and political structures, but is not designed, and doesn't accomodate very well, new creations of political and philosophical structures, indeed even designed to ensure no new ones are ever created. Po-mo theory as a political tool, is great if you're an anarchist. But I am not.

But even more than that, it has become a conservative and largely unchallenged school of thought, turning it into little more than a fundamentalism that has lost its potency.

Now let's get back to really important things - WATCHING TELEVISION!