@DuDuDuLangaLangaBingBong
I graduated from a Goldsmiths flagship course in the mid 2000s (Fine Art Practice with Contemporary Critical Theory) and have been slowly deprogramming myself ever since.
I thank Lindsay and Pluckrose for giving me the last bits of the puzzle that have allowed me to break free - it wasn’t that I, a working class single mum from a council estate didn’t ‘get it’. It was because they were gaslighting me into believing that ‘its’ that I got had to be deconstructed into meaningless gumph.
Goldsmiths was pretty intellectually rigorous in the early 90s; it was seen as the college for Oxbridge rejects from non-elite backgrounds. I'm not sure what happened, but what I do know is that the intake changed sometime in the early 00s ... and became a hellova lot wealthier.
I had a friend who was a lecturer there and she said that she had to pull some of her second and third year option courses sometime around 1999 because the students could no longer critically cope with the material. I also know that with the introduction of the REF (or whatever it was called back them, I can't remember), the college let a lot of old style lecturers go around that time (the ones that specialised in teaching and learning) and brought research-focused academics in.
Mind you, it was, I think, the first HE institution to run an MA with gender in the title.
But, back in the 90s, they were still really hesitant to look at certain postmodern concepts because they were so problematic in origin: Paul De Mann's exposed history of writing pro-Nazi articles, for example, really made his work on the relationship between authorship and script a bit suspect.
It's a very weird thing for me all this because I was trained in postmodern thinking as a method to get towards Truth (or the Total Phenomenon) through the application of a multiplicity of perspectives.
In short, if a load of people see an object and all report it has four legs, a seat, and a back of some description and you can sit on it, then it is quite highly likely to be a chair.
Likewise, if you read a hundred or more reports from all different perspectives about an incident or a place, you will gain a more accurate picture of the Total Phenomenon of that incident or place. I mean, this is the whole concept behind Calvino's Invisible Cities: all the cities he describes are Venice.
The postmodern perspective is opposed to the old Victorian "bourgeois" way of thinking that a chair is a chair because some important person says so. It could be seen as a democratisation of meaning, I suppose. Indeed, modernism and postmodernism can only be understood with reference to the movements as reactions to the 19th century bourgeois way of seeing.
But this new thing, which people are calling postmodernism, is nothing of the kind. It rejects the democracy of perspectives in creating meaning in favour of a nouveau authoritative set of statements issued by a group of illusive supposed demigogues: a new Victorianism, you could say.
It's all very odd.