Neo- and Post-

A great example is the framing of the resurgence of religion as “post-secularism” rather than “neo-religiosity.”

I’ve been trying to think of examples where most of the work is indeed being done by the prefix, rather than the meaning being determined primarily by the associations of the main word – and hence its positive or negative charge coming from different evaluations of the concept or phenomenon. In one tradition of aesthetic practice, for example, both neo-classical and post-classical are bad, since both represent deviation from the truly classical, but neo-classical is definitely preferable (I should emphasise that I personally can’t stand it, but this is a common enough view).

Even restricting discussion to contemporary discource, ‘post-feminist’ makes me grind my teeth and mutter, but for plenty of deluded people this appears to be a basically good thing. In terms of ideas of historical development in political theory, presumably a lot depends on whether you regard a particular position as having continued validity (so the implicit claim that we’re past it is problematic and ideological, and we’d be in favour of reverting to it) or as being pernicious and/or defunct.

The emphasis in Andrew’s rather good example is on the idea that secularism was an unfortunate phase that we’ve now grown out of – returning to religion as it always has been rather than religion as something that needs reinvention.

To me they both say “count the spoons”. “Post-X” is almost overtly facing two ways at once. It asserts that plain ordinary X has been superseded, but doesn’t give any clues to what by (Ernesto Laclau, Alan Johnson and Alfred Sherman can all be called ‘post-Marxist’, at least in lifecourse terms). At the same time, it relies on evoking X as a source of value – better to be a post-Marxist than never to be Marxist at all. “Neo-X” does something similar with a slightly different emphasis – as if it’s important to preserve the value represented by X, but also to replace the content of X with something new. All very Hegelian I guess, but in a rather arbitrary and solipsistic way.

As for why two very similar obfuscatory strategies get different receptions, I suspect it’s partly the contingency that the “post-” prefix has been applied to things that people on the Left sympathise with but find a bit difficult, while “neo-” has been applied to things that people on the Right have similar conflicted feelings about. Or perhaps that’s actually an effect of the ‘progressive’/’reactionary’ overtones identified in the OP.

Post-apocalyptic world you see in the movies is usually not that great.

I have heard “Neofeminism” used to designate a religiously inspired return to traditional ideals of womanhood. “Postfeminism” would have been more accurate, but I suppose was intentionally not used in order to rhetorically imply amity with ideals of female ‘equality’. See Phil@4: [Hegel X Orwell?]

If you are a heterodox economist, New Keynesianism might be another Orwellian coinage of what would be better called Post-Keynesianism. Post-Keynesians, who might have been happier to call themselves Neo-Keynesians, then had to pick “post” since the “new/neo” tag had been taken.

As an editor: what about the hyphen?
Always ‘postmodern’, surely, and ‘neoliberal’; always ‘post-Keynesian’, though.
The hyphen adds a certain respectable, lace-curtain tone: the post-war settlement – NHS, social housing … whereas in the American paleopathology text I am working on, postmortem is the word – very CSI.
And don’t get me started on capitals: Pre-Columbian is not the same as pre-Columbian.

Italy has a political party (the Northern League) that can be characterised as either post-fascist or neo-fascist, depending on whether you support it or not. In fact it’s probably true to say that it is both, and that its supporters hope it offers the good bits of fascism while its opponents fear it is actually just a return to fascism.

[Further comment withdrawn in the interests of my blog]

Pr Q said:

the prefix neo- is automatically taken to be pejorative

Not automatically, it took time for neo- chickens to come home to roost. Neo-conservative and neo-liberal were both okay in the beginning until the later disciples went and spoiled it all. All intellectual doctrines undergo this progressive degeneration. eg je ne suis pas Marxiste.

Neo-classical economics is neutral to positive. Not to piss in his pocket, but one of the charms of Pr Q’s work is that he manages to turn neo-classical economics into somewhat bolshie political ethics. Marx did much the same thing to classical economics.

Its a satisfying bit of intellectual ju-jitsu to perform a reductio ad ratio, turning the adversary’s first principles onto him.

Neo-Darwinism – the ‘modern synthesis’ of natural selection and Mendelian genetics – is positive.
And I think that if you describe, say, a public building or city centre in Britain as “post-war” it warns visitors to prepare for the worst.

Here’s a guess: ‘Neo-X’ sounds too much like trying to do two things at once, being both completely new and a version of X (cf. “new and improved!”). ‘Post-X’ on the other hand indicates that what we’ve got is something that builds on X, but which isn’t itself a kind of X at all.

The whole of Italian politics is post-Fascist, apart from the very small area with a credible claim to be post-Resistance. The MSI, AN’s precursor, was crypto-neo-Fascist, but AN in its current form is quite definitely post-crypto-neo-Fascist (Fini denouncing Fascism tout court as “absolute evil” should have been a clue). Genealogy apart, the Lega fits much more comfortably into the contemporary European quasi-Fascist family.

Hang on, there is one claim that’s involved when you attach ‘post-‘ to something. It’s that what follows the hyphen belongs to the past. However, that doesn’t affect what I wrote a few minutes ago, seems to me.

All I can say is that Paul Davidson, then, is no editor.

I mean, consider the statement “X is a second class post Keynesian”

I mean, consider the statement “X is a second class post Keynesian”

An advocate of active fiscal policy who takes a few days to get there?

For a while during the Bush years, I saw “neocon” used by some American liberals as a pejorative term for all conservatives, including Moral Majority types who weren’t particularly neocons by any previous definition.

I always assumed that pejorative “neo” came from “neo-Nazi”. But in this case, the expansion of “neocon” probably came from the prominent role neocons had in Bush war policy.

“Neopragmatist” is positive, negative, or neutral depending on how the writer feels about Richard Rorty.

In music, “post-classical” and “neoclassical” have interesting uses (there are others, as mentioned above). “Post-classical” means something like “eclectic downtown types like Meredith Monk or the Bang on a Can guys” (not Jon Hassell, who is eclectic but not downtown enough, unless you mean his string quartet). I’ve seen “neoclassical” used to mean “ambient music with lots of strings and especially piano” like Max Richter or Goldmund. Both are fairly neutral to vaguely positive.

I’ll give a shoutout to Stirling Newberry’s partially opaque take on this:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2010/05/18/867455/-Post-America-IIThe-Post-PostSociety?detail=hide

If there is something to the cycles of history thing, then certainly, living in the post-WWII world, more than 60 years after, is straining our collective vocabulary for ideas and movements. Ditto for living in the 250th year of the industrial revolution (dating from the opening of the Bridgewater Canal, which halved the cost of coal to central Manchester). Even as the accelerating computer/communications revolution wipes out iconic institutions and artifacts at a more rapid pace than the 19th created them, we’re having a bit more difficulty than our 19th century ancestors optimistically peering into the future.

krhasan @6: “post” implies something new, moving beyond.

How about “post-consumer waste”?

Genealogy apart, the Lega fits much more comfortably into the contemporary European quasi-Fascist family.

Except that as Mr. Vieuxtemps points out @ 16, Lega Nord isn’t particularly fascist, merely a party seeking to gain political power by appeals to racism, xenophobia, and populism against sinister international economic elites. On the other hand, their apparent goal is the dismantlement of Italy, which would be more New Holy Roman Empire than New Roman Empire.

Anyway, how does neopaganism / neo-paganism fit? Certainly, I use it pejoratively, but that’s mainly a tone of voice thing, as I believe practitioners also embrace the term.

“true news as compost”: virtual kisses for Salient, as usual.

In the early 80s, I described my students at functionally post-literate; that was before 4G cellphones with 200k apps. Now I would suggest they are neo-literate; not necessarily a bad thing, but not all that good either.

I’m glad we agree that there’s more than one way to be a xenophobic populist, mds.

Cavemen on vacation sent Neolithic postcards.

What Bert said at 24 but ISTM ‘neo’ is used as a prefix more on the right and ‘post’ more on the left. Maybe ‘neo’ is more conservative and suggests incremental development and ‘post’ suggests a more radical change.

mds @ 39: how does neopaganism / neo-paganism fit? Certainly, I use it pejoratively, but that’s mainly a tone of voice thing, as I believe practitioners also embrace the term.

Yes, though we’re more likely to use “Pagan” than “Neopagan” (and some don’t like either word, not wanting to lump all of our various religions together). Post-Pagan would be an odd usage (for recent millennia) — I don’t think we’ve been around for sufficiently long this go round for post-Pagan to mean much.

Hix:

Do you have even one example of a German using neo-liberal non-perjoratively? I have never heard it used that way there. I think the conventions basically the same, it is a word someone else uses to describe someone, not a word one uses to describe oneself. (Unless maybe ironically.)

If you make up a word after dinner, it’s a post-prandial neologism.

That’s actually brilliant! Although still doesn’t match the Queen of Hearts.

Do you have even one example of a German using neo-liberal non-perjoratively?

Question: does this include FDP members? (I quite like the FDP when it comes to Germany.) They just call themselves Die Liberalen, but still.

Except that as Mr. Vieuxtemps points out @ 16, Lega Nord isn’t particularly fascist, merely a party seeking to gain political power by appeals to racism, xenophobia, and populism against sinister international economic elites.

I have heard very reputable people describe Berlusconi of all people as quasi-Fascist, which proves that the word fascism simply means “stuff I don’t like.”

And no video can be possibly better for this discussion than this:

You still have the time (& the place) for afternoon tea? Been gone from here (UNE) for at least 15 years…

As long as it’s a faculty shop I guess it’s safe.

I don’t think the idea that words have meanings is necessarily autistic, Lemuel (#26).
Of course the intricacies of usage as applied in the wild may be what you find most interesting, and I would imagine John had that in mind when he wrote the original post. But I think you’ll struggle to get beyond general statements based on anecdotal evidence.
If you do manage to work up a sturdy typology, be sure and post it.
Until then, another example:
Post-colonial.
Neo-colonial.
Very different.

Gene – I read Seneca’s Tragedies (all of ’em) when I was preparing for Cambridge entrance (I’m not old enough to remember the compulsory Classics paper, but there was a compulsory language paper & I opted for Latin). I haven’t really given them a thought since, not even while I was at Cambridge. I remember them as dry, prolix and incredibly gory – there’s a description of reading the entrails of a calf that I couldn’t get out of my head for weeks. (Steam, he puts in the steam.) Does his return to favour extend to the dramatic works? It’d be great if I could get a paper out of him after all these years.

Akshay: “Even restricting discussion to contemporary discource, ‘post-feminist’ makes me grind my teeth and mutter, but for plenty of deluded people this appears to be a basically good thing. ”

Not all that many people, I would think. At least here in Norway, feminism is such a nice word that lately, just about all parties, including the Conservatives, are fighting over it, trying to define their gender-related policies as feminism.

(I’m not too unhappy about that. It’s certainly better than leaving the word in the hands of academia and the fringe left, where it seems its goodwill is wasted and it can do real damage.)

I think that whether post- or neo- is best, depends mostly on the word’s initial connotations, with the exception that in Hegel-inspired parts of academia, post- still has a good ring in itself.

Do we have example of political “neo” forms that predate the nice alliteration of neo-nazi? The older forms like neoclassical don’t seem nearly as negative in connotation.

If all political ‘neo’ forms derive directly or indirectly from the example of neo-nazi, there is a reasonable claim that the negative connotaion doesn’t come from neo itself. The negative connotation of “fucking [something]” doesn’t really come from negative views about fucking either.

Castorp @64: Is referring to people one approves of as “bürgerlich” normal for German liberals?

Also calling Passos a Sozialdemokrat is just wrong. The German for “social-democrata” ought to be “Christdemokrat”

@Myles: “bourgeois-liberal social democrat”. He isn’t the latter, but it’s the name of his party (the main centre-right party since the revolution). It’s for historical reasons; the founder intended it to actually be a social-democratic party (and a member of the SI) but that position was taken so they fell into an available niche to the right. Nobody wanted to admit to being on the right after decades of right-wing dictatorship (the furtherest right party in parliament are “people’s” and “centre”) so they stuck with the leftish name.

“Is referring to people one approves of as “bürgerlich” normal for German liberals?”

It is in FAZ, which is conservative. More generally if you want to say something is bourgeois in a negative sense in German you usually say “Spiessig” or “Spiessbürgerlich.”

“Also calling Passos a Sozialdemokrat is just wrong. The German for “social-democrata” ought to be “Christdemokrat””

You answered your own point in response to Myles. They use the proper name of the party but put adjectives in front to alert you that it isn’t a traditional Social Democratic party.

This is probably just me, but I see neo as a synonym for pseudo. Neoclassical economics is nothing like classical economics, and nor is neoliberal economics like liberalism. That’s probably where it came from.

As I said back at #5, I think ‘neo-‘ and ‘post-‘ both work this trick of invoking a Hegelian supersession, with differences of emphasis – ‘neo-‘ says “abolished but preserved!”, ‘post-‘ says “preserved but abolished!” I think ‘trick’ is the word, though – in most cases the use of these prefixes has more to do with marketing than philosophy.

Harvested from Krugman’s comments:
“No reason not to keep on tellin’ the truth, but don’t expect Ryan, or Brooks for that matter, to wilt in the face of documented facts. In a post-Rovian world, facts don’t matter.”

Hmmm. A post-Rovian world. Where we live now, though I wouldn’t want to visit.

Looking at Wikipedia “very few people call themselves neo-Marxist” whereas post-Marxist seems to be widely used as a self-description.

Neo-gothic and Gothic-revival seem to be synonyms, but Zizek strikes me as a Lenin-revivalist (in a pastichey sort of way) but definitely not a neo-Leninist.

I’d say Zizek was post-Leninist but neo-Lacanian.

@Phil: I think “post” implies more rejection of the thing you are post. Postmodernism isn’t a kind of modernism, it’s a reaction against modernism. Postsecularism is a rejection, even a condemnation of secularism. Etc.

#81 Or post-Marxist but neo-Grouchian?

#45 “Cavemen on vacation sent Neolithic postcards.”

If you are laid off, and sending resumes from your location on the street, can you describe your present situation as “neolithic/post office,” or would that require your delivery system to involve rocks?

A tax on wine is a vin(e)ous impost.

not all that is neo is presumed to be bad

Maybe not, but “Neo-Geo” sounds ominous to me. What’s wrong with plain old Geo?

Post-Toasties. Opinions vary