Ghost in the Wire

Hear ye, hear ye! I'm hoping to collect stories of the postmodern, you know the whacky realm of fun wherein critics reflect on, well, how inspirational/horrible/new are our postmodern environments. Inspired by Craig, I have decided to list some of my favorite pomo moments:

• "Look, a potlatch!" This is a perennial favorite among the pomo friendly critic, who sees in some artifact or event a collection of random semi-related elements and declares, as if these sorts of things have never been seen before, that whatever this collection is, it certainly looks a lot like parataxis/and...and...and/potlatch, etc. Doesn't matter if we're talking about David Lynch or Headline News; it's all potlatch to me.
• "Why? Why? Why?" Far from being a series of questions I may soon expect from my daughter (she's currently just over four months, so she's not trying to answer any basic questions about reality or human behavior just yet), these witty and pointed interrogatives are designed to show that even pomo types really believe in something, and are therefore not postmodern. These questions work best when accompanied by a smug "I've got you now!" smile and a handlebar mustache.
• "Postmodernism killed the Left." This one's pretty sweet, and goes a little something like this. Republicans ignore reality and could care less about facts. Not caring about facts and reality is basically postmodernism. Ergo, the right is the real flag-bearers of the postmodern, while real leftists are marginalized by the pomo dismissal of all really real reality. So answer me this, pomo-types: why do you hate America (or other country of choice)?
• "Nuance is so new historicism." This one takes reduction into overdrive, and usually surfaces when folks want to say clever things like "thanks to postmodernism, we know that the myth of a unitary subject was indeed a myth (see Derrida, 1967; Baudrillard, 1977; Foucault, 1980; Deleuze and Guattari, 1983)." Wherein the point is that all pomo types (who of course all recoil at being called postmodernists) all say the very same thing, and do so because they don't want to confuse their readers into thinking complexity is good.

Well, that's just a partial list, to be sure, but I'm sure you fine pomo types out there have a few of your own you want to share. We'll assemble a multiplicity of interweaving accounts that form an intersubjective potlatch of this "concept" called "postmodernism." Maybe then we can work on the same project as Blanchot and Bataille and Baudrillard and Caputo and Critchley and Deleuze and Derrida and Foucault and Lacan and Nancy and Ronell and Zizek and everyone else...