Post Modernism infects British Courts

My good friend Jurgen is no great fan of po-mo pompom shakers and other twentieth century theory-nuts and neither am I. The British Empire was built upon strong sturdy concepts like "identity, historical progress, epistemic certainty, gin and tonics and the univocity of meaning." Do you think a post-modernist could build a railroad? No. We'd end up with some kind of bricollage constructed from brightly-coloured model railroad parts from the fifties, arranged in a fractal pattern that only led back to where it started. You try to put a Class 7p 'Brittania' steam engine on a track like that and you'll crash into the ocean before you can say 'derridean dirigibles and gibbering gerbils!' My point is this: postmodernism is utterly useless and could never have collected the riches of africa and india in such a straightforward and efficient manner as modernism did. Certainly no one would question the value of that.

Anyway, the dark continent aside, the Stanford Dictionary of Philosophy puts Jurgen's position as such -- "On his view, postmodernism is an illicit aestheticization of knowledge and public discourse. Against this, Habermas seeks to rehabilitate modern reason as a system of procedural rules for achieving consensus and agreement among communicating subjects. Insofar as postmodernism introduces aesthetic playfulness and subversion into science and politics, he resists it in the name of a modernity moving toward completion rather than self-transformation."

Listen well, the Judge who was ruling on the Da Vinci Code plagiarism case has gone gaga for pomo! He embedded a code within his ruling, thus making a playful and parodic reference to the very book he was supposed to be passing judgement upon. Of all places to find this mephistophelean aesthetic playfulness a judicial judgement is the worst! Judgements are meant to be authoritarian and oh so serious! Why do you think they wear powdered wigs?!?!

The New York Times reports that "the first clue that a puzzle exists lies in the typeface of the ruling. Most of the document is printed in regular roman letters, the way one would expect. But some letters in the first 13½ pages appear in boldface italics, jarringly, in the midst of all the normal words." What in the name of Pith Helmets was he thinking? We all know full well that the text is a determinate and linear structure that constructs a single, cohesive meaning using words. You can't convey information with typesetting that's NONSENSE! How would a person know whether or not they were interpreting your sly insinuations correctly? Legal Documents are no place for conniving connotations to be hanging around and smoking cigarrettes on the corners of the paragraphs. All we have room for is well-behaved denotations, walking quickly and assuredly, with their heads down.

Of all the rational, Kantian, high-brow cultural institutions, I thought the British court system would hold out against the primitives (or postmodernists, same thing) forever, but alas, I was wrong, and thus, the end is near. Postmodernism itself is a sign of the apocalypse, but this, this might be the apocalypse's first tender trod upon our culture.

Anyhoo, you can go and read about the complicated and clever code in the New York Times, or you can go and read the Standford Dictionary of Philosophy's entry on Postmodernism so that you may know your enemy.