If I ever want tenure somewhere this will come in handy 😉

Socialist realism, capitalist discourse and Marxism

John la Fournier
Department of English, Carnegie-Mellon University

Jacques R. Long
Department of Sociology, University of Illinois

The essay you have just seen is completely meaningless and was randomly generated by the Postmodernism Generator.

2008-05-15: Oy. Pomo discovers satellite imagery, with typically inane results.
2008-11-11: The spread of postmodernism nicely tracks the rise of all sort of illiteracies. It also nicely explains why a US college education leaves you laughably clueless.
2009-03-29: Taking down pomo fools a few notches is always good fun.

As far as I know, the only person ever to win a Nobel Prize in Literature for writing that was explicitly anti-obscurantist was Bertrand Russell. (Orwell might have gotten one had he lived longer; maybe a case could also be made for Churchill.) In retrospect, Russell’s clarity seems to have been a serious mistake: had he learned to write as cryptically as his student Wittgenstein, his reputation today would’ve been vastly greater. Alas, more recent “public rationalists”—such as Carl Sagan, Isaac Asimov, Richard Feynman, Steven Pinker, and Richard Dawkins—have repeated Russell’s mistake of boringly saying what they mean, and for that reason, have failed to produce any serious literature. Almost by definition, people who like rationality are going to want to write dry, methodical arguments, rather than novels or poems that bypass the neocortex and directly engage the emotions. But the consequence is that they’ll tend to cede the emotional field without contest to the woo merchants. If you want to defend yourself against obscurantist sharks, you need to enter the dark waters where the sharks live. That’s why, in my view, the rare efforts to do that—to right the historical imbalance, to sing Modus Ponens from the rooftops—are actually worth something.

2013-09-24: A lot of academia isn’t actually doing anything useful. Shocking, I know.

What do porn star Ron Jeremy, Max Weber and Michael Jackson have in common? Very little — except the 3 names appear in the list of references for a recent hoax paper by a group of Serbian academics who, fed up with the poor state of their country’s research output, scammed a Romanian magazine by publishing a completely fabricated article.

The paper is replete with transparent gimmicks — obvious, that is, had anyone at the publication been paying attention — including a reference to the scholarship of Jackson, Weber, Jeremy and citations to new studies by Bernoulli and Laplace, both dead more than 180 years (Weber died in 1920). They also throw in references to the “Journal of Modern Illogical Studies,” which to the best of our knowledge does not and never has existed (although perhaps it should), and to a researcher named, dubiously, “A.S. Hole.” And, we hasten to add, the noted Kazakh polymath B. Sagdiyev, otherwise known as Borat.

2015-05-25: This article tries hard to find value in abstruse nonsensical writing like Foucault, eventually grasping for “poetry”, but ultimately failing. A better explanation is “idea effort justification”, the mistaken belief that obscure texts are profound because you had to work so hard for them.
2017-04-04: Pomo is cancer

The irrational and identitarian “symptoms” of postmodernism are easily recognizable and much criticized, but the ethos underlying them is not well understood. This is partly because postmodernists rarely explain themselves clearly and partly because of the inherent contradictions and inconsistencies of a way of thought which denies a stable reality or reliable knowledge to exist. However, there are consistent ideas at the root of postmodernism and understanding them is essential if we intend to counter them. They underlie the problems we see today in Social Justice Activism, undermine the credibility of the Left and threaten to return us to an irrational and tribal “pre-modern” culture.