From: gcf@panix.com (Gordon Fitch)
Newsgroups: alt.postmodern
Subject: Re: Debil Postmoderns Cyberpunk
Date: 6 Sep 92 17:04:47 GMT
Organization: mydog in exile

In article <79225@ut-emx.uucp> kbrooks@ut-emx.uucp (kevin brooks) writes:
| In article <1992Sep2.134005.18841@panix.com>, gcf@panix.com (Gordon Fitch) writes:
| > In article <78739@ut-emx.uucp> kbrooks@ut-emx.uucp (kevin brooks) writes:
| > | ...
| [deleted my stuff]
| > 
| > I'm not sure what you mean here -- but Modernism seems highly
| > reflective to me; at least, "High Modernism" does.  Earlier
| > Modernism has many of the qualities of what we now call Post-
| > Modernism.
| 
| Do you get your kicks out of only quoting part of my comment and then
| inserting your comment without taking into account the rest of my original
| post?

I get tired of articles that quote in full.  I leave enough of
a quote in to show what part of the previous article I'm commenting
on, in the hope that the previous article was distributed to the
same sites as mine will be.  Had I known about your special
feeling for your words, of course, I wouldn't have touched a
one of them.  

However, I don't understand what your problem is anyway.  Any-
thing that starts "I'm not sure what you mean here" isn't
very apodictic, at least, it isn't by me.  I realize that in
some academic circles "I don't know what you mean" is a way
of saying "You're full of shit" but, believe me, it's been
many a year since I've even spied the glorious towers of
Academe from afar, and when I say "I don't know" it means 
"I don't know."

| > It seems to me that Modernism was the last effort to hold an
| > artistic ideology together, to keep the Parthenon and Les
| > Demoiselles d'Avignon in one bag and run their price up.  You
| > can't, apparently, get Warhol, grafitti artists, and van
| > painters into the bag without ripping it; hence, the _post_
| > Modern era; not a movement or an ideology, but the lack of one.
| > -- 
| >  )*(    Gordon Fitch    )*(    gcf@panix.com    )*(
| > ( 1238 Blg. Grn. Sta.,  NY NY 10274 * 718.273.5556 )
| 
| I will respond to your statement with a story derived from personal experience:
|  One time when I was commenting on a book that deals
| theoretically with cezanne's work, theory, and interpretation 
|  a friend asked me if I thought it out of place to have a book like that
| when cezanne, of all people, constantly expressed his resistance to theory. 

So are you providing a theory of "Postmodernism" alongside
the theories of "Modernism"?  This might salvage the Art
Market from the fate that awaits it.

| Another thing: Postmodernists, for all the stuff published by them on the
| "end of knowledge," they sure seem to know a lot about modernism -- not.:)

Here are some other things I don't know:  I don't know who,
or what, a "Postmodernist" is; I think of "postmodern" as 
denoting the period which followed the soi-disant "Modern"
or "Modernistic" movement which seems to have closed down 
around 1960.  Some people still work in the style, others
don't.  Which are the Postmodernists?  Or are they only
the critics of the era?

Secondly, I'm so out of it I don't know where this catch-
phrase of the form "X is y -- NOT!" comes from.  Was it some-
thing on television?  I keep seeing it, and it seems heavily
overworked now.  Any ideas?  It's certainly more postmodern 
than I am. 

Didn't take out a word, Kevin.  Okay?
-- 
 )*(    Gordon Fitch    )*(    gcf@panix.com    )*(
( 1238 Blg. Grn. Sta.,  NY NY 10274 * 718.273.5556 )