The Wisdom Of Aylett

I'm not a big fan of post-modernism, and I was going to incoherently rant on about why. The I found this rather good interview with one of my favourite perverters of the english language, Steve Aylett, from Front Wheel Drive and decided to nick that instead cos he sums up my feelings on the matter in a far more eloquent manner than I:

"I'm not so much bothered by the matter of literary postmodernism, than by postmodernist notions as they're used in real life -- where people carry those ideas over into the world, thinking that the words are the same thing as the object they label (that the map is the territory, contrary to Robert Anton Wilson's urging) and that the objects and facts can be shuffled and reorganised in the same way that their labels can be; including actual people. A lot of times this is harmless: if you give a muddy brick to a student of postmodernism and tell him it's the beer you just bought him, he should accept it with thanks. But human beings have a tendency to turn just about any philosophy into a justification for the manipulation of others, usually by re-labelling people as objects or lower-order creatures, which can then be furnaced or disposed of in any old way. But postmodernism doesn't even have to be subverted to those ends -- it's the arch-philosophy of re-labelling and can be used to smooth the way for any atrocity or neglect, any sort of evasion of the real results of your actions. Look at the news and see hundreds of examples of this."