Postmodernism





The term postmodernism refers to a philosophical and cultural movement that
is notoriously difficult to define, but distinguished largely by its
rejection of modernism. The term is hard to define precisely due to one of
its central premises: the rejection of "meta-narratives", ways of thinking
that unite knowledge and experience to seek to provide a definitive,
universal truth. Also adding confusion to the debate surrounding its
definition and significance is the fact that modernity and modernism are not
easy to define.

Postmodernists claim that modernity was characterised by a monolithic
mindset impossible to maintain in the culturally diverse and fragmented
world (which is sometimes referred to as postmodernity) that we live in
today. Postmodernism, instead, embraces fluid and multiple perspectives,
typically refusing to privilege any one 'truth claim' over another. Ideals
of universally applicable truths give way to provisional, decentered, local
petit recits which, rather than referencing some underlying universal
reality, point only to other ideas and cultural artefacts, themselves
subject to interpretation and re-interpretation.

The role of individuals (and especially the individual body) and action is
emphasised over standardized or canonical forms of knowledge. Knowledge is
interpreted according to our own "local" experiences, not measured against
all encompassing universal structures. In this sense, postmodernity owes
much to its allied school of thought, post-structuralism (or deconstruction)
which sought to destabilise the relationship between language and the
objects to which it referred.

Postmodernists often express a profound skepticism regarding the
Enlightenment quest to uncover the nature of truth and reality. Perhaps the
most striking examples of this skepticism are to be found in the works of
French cultural theorist, Jean Baudrillard. In his book Simulations, he
contends that social 'reality' no longer exists in the conventional sense,
but has been supplanted by an endless procession of simulacra. The mass
media, and other forms of mass cultural production, generate constant
re-appropriation and re-contextualisation of familiar cultural symbols and
images, fundamentally shifting our experience away from 'reality', to
'hyperreality'.

Postmodernism has applications in many modern academic and non-academic
disciplines; philosophy, art, architecture, film, television, music,
sociology, fashion, technology, literature, and communications are all
heavily influenced by postmodern trends and ideas, and are rigorously
scrutinised from postmodern perspectives.

Postmodern culture is ubiquitous and permeates every aspect of our daily
lives. From film and television programs to political personas and our daily
clothes, postmodernity, it has been stated, "is the very air we breathe".
(Steven Shaviro, Doom Patrols).

Note: It may be helpful to distinguish between postmodernism in its
philosophical, theoretic sense, and as a cultural phenomenon that can be
observed in daily life — often referred to as 'Postmodernity'.
Examples of postmodernity in action abound in Western society; in fact,
Wikipedia is a good example of a postmodern project.

Also note: "post-modern" tends to be used by critics, "postmodern" by supporters.

History of postmodernism

Postmodernism was first identified as a theoretical discipline in the 1980s,
but as a cultural movement it predates them by many years. Exactly when
modernism began to give way to post-modernism is difficult to pinpoint, if
not simply impossible. Some theorists reject that such a distinction even
exists, viewing post-modernism, for all its claims of fragmentation and
plurality, as still existing within a larger a 'modernist' framework. The
philosopher Jurgen Habermas is a strong proponent of this view.

The theory gained some of its strongest ground early on in French academia.
In 1979 Jean Fran�ois Lyotard wrote a short but influential work "The
Postmodern Condition : a report on knowledge". Jean Baudrillard, Michel
Foucault, and Roland Barthes (in his more post-structural work) are also
strongly influential in postmodern theory. Postmodernism is closely allied
with several contemporary academic disciplines, most notably those connected
with sociology. Many of its assumptions are integral to feminist and
post-colonial theory.

Some identify the burgeoning anti-establishment movements of the 1960s as
the earliest trend out of cultural modernity toward postmodernism. Tracing
it further back, some identify its roots in the breakdown of Hegelian
idealism, with the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein and his philosophy of action,
Soren Kierkegaard's and Karl Barth's important fideist approach to theology,
and even the nihilism of Nietzsche's philosophy. Michel Foucault's
application of Hegel to thinking about the body is also identified as an
important landmark. While it is rare to pin down the specific origins of any
large cultural shift, it is fair to assume that postmodernism represents an
accumulated disillusionment with the promises of the Enlightenment project
and its progress of science, so central to modernist thinking.

The movement has had diverse political ramifications: its anti-ideological
insights appear conducive to, and strongly associated with, the feminist
movement, racial equality movements, homosexual rights movements, most forms
of late 20th century anarchism, even the peace movement and various hybrids
of these in the current anti-globalization movement. Unsurprisingly, none of
these institutions entirely embraces all aspects of the postmodern movement,
but reflect or, in true postmodern style, borrow from some of its core ideas.

The use of the term

In an essay From Postmodernism to Postmodernity: the Local/Global Context,
[1] Ihab Hassan point out a number of instances in which the term
postmodernism is used before the term became popular:

   * John Watkins Chapman, an English salon painter, in the 1870s, to mean
     Post-Impressionism.
   * Federico de On's, 1934, to mean a reaction against the difficulty and
     experimentalism of modernist poetry. (The term was postmodernismo)
   * Arnold Toynbee, in 1939, to mean the end of the "modern," Western
     bourgeois order dating back to the seventeenth century.
   * Bernard Smith, in 1945, to mean the movement of Socialist Realism in
     painting
   * Charles Olson, during the 1950s,
   * Irving Howe and Harry Levin, in 1959 and 1960, respectively, to mean a
     decline in high modernist culture.

Also, many cite Charles Jencks (1977) "The Language of Postmodern
Architecture" among the earliest piece which shaped the use of the term today.

Postmodernism in art

Postmodernist art may be seen as a reaction to the reductionism and
abstraction of Modernism.

Where modernists desired to unearth universals or the fundamentals of art,
postmodernism aims to unseat them, to embrace diversity and contradiction. A
postmodern approach to art thus rejects the distinction between 'low' and
'high' forms. It rejects rigid genre boundaries and favours eclecticism, the
mixing of ideas and forms. Similarly, it promotes parody, irony, and
playfulness, commonly referred to as "joissance" by certain postmodern
theorists. Unlike modern art, postmodern art does not approach this
fragmentation as somehow faulty or undesirable, but rather celebrates it. As
the gravity of the search for underlying truth is relieved, it is replaced
with 'play'. As postmodern icon David Byrne, and his band Talking Heads
said: 'Stop making sense'.

Andy Warhol is an early example of postmodern art in action, with his
appropriation of common popular symbols and "ready-made" cultural artefacts,
bringing the previously mundane or trivial onto the previously hallowed
ground of 'high art'.

Postmodernism in economics

In economics, Postmodernism refers to multinationalist, consumer-based
capitalism, as opposed to the monopoly capitalism associated with modernism
through the first half of the 20th century, or market capitalism before
that. Some think semi-marxistically that the shift in mode and technology of
production may have precipitated or at least emphasized the change to
modernism and then to postmodernism.

Postmodernism in architecture

As with many cultural movements, one of postmodernism's most pronounced and
earliest ideas can be seen in architecture. The functional, mostly bland
forms and spaces of the modernist movement are replaced by unapologetically
bold aesthetics; styles collide, form is adopted for its own sake, and new
ways of viewing familiar styles and space abound.

Classic examples of modern architecture are the Empire State building or the
Chrysler building. A classic example of post-modernist architecture is the
ATT building in New York, which, like modernist architecture, is a
skyscraper relying on steel beams and with lots of windows — but,
unlike modern architecture, it borrows elements from classical (Greek)
style. Post-modern buildings are usually not so grand and imposing as modern
skyscrapers; they are more playful, and, often through the use of mirrored
glass that reflects the sky and surrounding buildings, call attention to
their environment rather than to themselves.

Postmodern architects include: Philip Johnson(later works), John Burgee,
Robert Venturi, Ricardo Boffil

Postmodernism in literature

Modernist literature has commonly relied on an objective and omniscient
point of view (think of the role of a narrator in a third-person narrated
novel). Perhaps Joyce's Ulysses may be the best example, but anything by
Dickens or Tolstoy may serve.

For a good study of modernism, see Marshall Berman's book All That is Solid
Melts into Air.

Among popular and influential examples of post-modern literature are Julian
Barnes' Flaubert's Parrot and works by Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon, John
Barth, and Kurt Vonnegut.

Some suggest Douglas Adams' series Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency
as a humorous introduction to postmodern ideas. Some postmodern philosophy
may also appear is his better known work, The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.

But some people think that modernity has reached its end; there will be no
more progress, just more combinations and re-combinations of what we now
have. They feel that the Enlightenment project is bankrupt, and they
celebrate this, feeling that the new global economy, the "information age"
has liberated us from everything that the enlightenment sought,
unsuccessfully, to liberate us from. These are people who looked to
post-modern art and architecture for inspiration in a new philosophy. The
leading proponent of this attempt to bring post-modernism into philosophy is
Jean-Fran�ois Lyotard who wrote a short book called The Postmodern
Condition. Guy Debord is another important post-modernist philosopher.

Deconstructionism

Deconstruction was a tool of postmodernism that was itself constructed by
the philosopher and textual artist Jacques Derrida. He played with words,
putting them together with unique combinations of punctuation to make points
about, in essence, how meaningless words are and the ways in which we give
them meaning. The term deconstruction itself is Destruct + Construct. By
analyzing an idea and breaking it into pieces, you are simultaneously
asserting its existence. If it did not exist and was not of importance, you
would not be analyzing it. Also, you are in the process of defining it and
reifying its existence as you name its pieces. Most people use
deconstruction simply to mean the analysis of the binaries within an idea.
Understanding that this analysis recreates the binaries is more difficult to grasp.

Postmodernism in philosophy

Many figures in the 20th century philosophy of mathematics are identified as
"postmodern" due to their rejection of mathematics as a strictly neutral
point of view. Some figures in the philosophy of science, especially Thomas
Samuel Kuhn and David Bohm, are also so viewed. Some see the ultimate
expression of postmodernism in science and mathematics in the cognitive
science of mathematics, which seeks to characterize the habit of mathematics
itself as strictly human, and based in human cognitive bias.

For further information, see Postmodern philosophy.

Post-Modernism vs. Post-Structuralism

In terms of frequently cited works, postmodernism and post-structuralism
overlaps quite significantly. Some philosophers, such as Francois Lyotard,
can legitimately be classified into both groups. This is partly due to the
fact that both modernism and structuralism owe much to the Enlightenment project.

Structuralism has a strong tendency to be scientific and seeking out stable
patterns in observed phenomena - an epistemological attitude which is quite
compatible with Enlightenment thinking, and incompatible with
postmodernists. At the same time, findings from the structural analysis
carried a somewhat anti-Enlightenment message, revealing that rationality
can be found in the minds of "savage" people, just in different forms than
people from "civilized" societies are used to seeing. Implicit here is a
critique of the practice of colonialism, which was partly justified as a
'civilizing' process by which wealthier societies bring knowledge, manners,
and reason to less 'civilized' ones.

Post-structuralism, emerging as a response to the structuralists' scientific
orientation, has kept the cultural relativism in structuralism, while
discarding the scientific orientations.

One clear difference between postmodernism and poststructuralism is found in
their respective attitudes towards the demise of the projects of the
enlightenment and modernity: post-structuralism is fundamentally ambivalent,
while post-modernism is decidedly celebratory.

Another difference is the nature of the two positions. While
post-structuralism is a position in philosophy, encompassing on views on
human being, language, body, society, and many other issues, it is not a
name of an era. Post-modernism, on the other hand, is closely associated
with "post-modern" era, a period in the history coming after modern age.

Postmodernism and its critics

Charles Murray, a strong critic of postmodernism, defines the term:

     "By contemporary intellectual fashion, I am referring to the
     constellation of views that come to mind when one hears the words
     multicultural, gender, deconstruct, politically correct, and Dead White
     Males. In a broader sense, contemporary intellectual fashion
     encompasses as well the widespread disdain in certain circles for
     technology and the scientific method. Embedded in this mind-set is
     hostility to the idea that discriminating judgments are appropriate in
     assessing art and literature, to the idea that hierarchies of value
     exist, hostility to the idea that an objective truth exists.
     Postmodernism is the overarching label that is attached to this
     perspective."

It is this underlying hostility toward objectivity, evident in most
contemporary critical theorists, that is the common point of attack for
postmodernist critics. Many critics characterise postmodernism as a
temporary phenomenon that can't be adequately defined simply because, as a
philosophy at least, it doesn't represent anything more substantial than a
series of disparate conjectures allied only in their distrust of modernism.

Indeed, there seems to be a glaring contradiction in maintaining the death
of objectivity and privileged position on one hand, while the scientific
community continues a project of unprecedented scope to unify various
scientific disciplines into a theory of everything, on the other. Hostility
toward hierarchies of value and objectivity becomes similarly problematic
when postmodernity itself attempts to analyse such hierarchies with,
apparently, some measure of objectivity and make categorical statements
concerning them.

Despite its ability to challenge the status quo and shake the foundations of
ingrained ideologies, many theorists think postmodernism is on decidedly
shaky epistemological grounds. How can we effect any change in people's poor
living conditions, in inequality and injustice, if we don't accept the
validity of underlying universals such as the 'real world' and 'justice' in
the first place? How is any progress to be made through a philosophy so
profoundly skeptical of the very notion of progress, and of unified
perspectives? Such critics may argue that, in actual fact, such postmodern
premises are rarely, if ever, actually embraced — that if they were,
we would be left with nothing more than a crippling radical subjectivism.
That the projects of the Enlightenment and modernity are alive and well can
be seen in the justice system, in science, in political rights movements, in
the very idea of universities; and so on. This is the common approach of
left academics with Marxist leanings, such as Terry Eagleton, Fredric
Jameson (Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late capitalism), and
David Harvey (The Condition of Postmodernity), whose attacks on the
philosophy of postmodernism have been frequent and scathing.

Such critics see postmodernism as, essentially, a kind of semantic
gamesmanship, more sophistry than substance. Postmoderism's proponents are
often criticised for a tendency to indulge in exhausting, verbose stretches
of rhetorical gymnastics, that sound important but don't appear to have any
discernible meaning. The more brave of the postmodernists may argue that
this is precisely the point. This tendency is parodied by the "Postmodern
essay generator", a computer program whose output is meaningless essays
which appear unnervingly similar to the actual writings of many followers of
postmodernism, and, more notoriously, by the Sokal Affair in which Alan
Sokal, a physicist wrote a deliberately and obviously nonsensical article
purportedly about interpreting physics and mathematics in terms of
postmodern theory which was nevertheless published by a journal of
postmodern thought. The same also co-authored Fashionable Nonsense, which
criticizes the abusive use of scientific terminology in intellectual writing
and finishes with a critic of some forms of postmodernism.

Whatever its philosophical value, postmodern phenomena can be observed in
nearly all areas of Western capitalist cultures, and a postmodern
theoretical approach can help explain much of this cultural condition,
irrespective of whether it offers a coherent, functional epistemology.

Postmodern Principles of Interpretation

   * There is no �reason� insomuch as reason is by definition a �3rd-person
     perspective� and there is no 3rd-person perspective without a
     hermeneutic, thus making it either a disguised 1st-person perspective
     or a 2nd-person perspective.