POSTMODERNISM
Postmodernism
Political Theory, also spelled post-modernism, in Western philosophy, a late
20th-century movement characterized by broad skepticism, subjectivism, or
relativism; a general suspicion of reason; and an acute sensitivity to the role
of ideology in asserting and maintaining political and economic power.
Postmodernism And
Modern Philosophy
Postmodernism Political Theory, Postmodernism is essentially
a reaction against the intellectual assumptions and values of the fashionable
period within the history of Western philosophy (roughly, the 17th through the
19th century). Indeed, many of the doctrines characteristically related to
postmodernism can fairly be described because the straightforward denial of
general philosophical viewpoints that were taken without any consideration
during the 18th-century Enlightenment, though they weren't unique thereto
period. the foremost important of those viewpoints are the subsequent .
1. there's an objective natural reality, a reality whose
existence and properties are logically independent of human beings—of their
minds, their societies, their social practices, or their investigative
techniques. Postmodernists dismiss this concept as a sort of realism . Such
reality as there's , consistent with postmodernists, may be a conceptual
construct, an artifact of scientific practice and language. now also applies to
the investigation of past events by historians and to the outline of social
institutions, structures, or practices by social scientists.
2. The descriptive and explanatory statements of scientists
and historians can, in theory , be objectively true or false. The postmodern
denial of this viewpoint—which follows from the rejection of an objective
natural reality—is sometimes expressed by saying that there's no such thing as
Truth.
3. Through the utilization of reason and logic, and with the
more specialized tools provided by science and technology, citizenry are likely
to vary themselves and their societies for the higher . it's reasonable to
expect that future societies are going to be more humane, more just, more
enlightened, and more prosperous than they're now. Postmodernists deny this
Enlightenment faith in science and technology as instruments of human progress.
Indeed, many postmodernists hold that the misguided (or unguided) pursuit of
scientific and technological knowledge led to the event of technologies for
killing on a huge scale in war II. Some go thus far on say that science and
technology—and even reason and logic—are inherently destructive and oppressive,
because they need been employed by evil people, especially during the 20th
century, to destroy and oppress others.
4. Reason and logic are universally valid—i.e., their laws
are an equivalent for, or apply equally to, any thinker and any domain of data
. For postmodernists, reason and logic too are merely conceptual constructs and
are therefore valid only within the established intellectual traditions during
which they're used.
5. there's such a thing as human nature; it consists of
colleges , aptitudes, or dispositions that are in some sense present in
citizenry at birth instead of learned or instilled through social forces.
Postmodernists insist that each one , or nearly all, aspects of human
psychology are completely socially determined.
6. Language refers to and represents a reality outside
itself. consistent with postmodernists, language isn't such a “mirror of
nature,” because the American pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty
characterized the Enlightenment view. Inspired by the work of Swiss linguist
Ferdinand de Saussure , postmodernists claim that language is semantically
self-contained, or self-referential: the meaning of a word isn't a static thing
within the world or maybe a thought within the mind but rather a variety of
contrasts and differences with the meanings of other words. Postmodernism
Political Theory, Because meanings are during this sense functions of other
meanings—which themselves are functions of other meanings, then on—they are
never fully “present” to the speaker or hearer but are endlessly “deferred.”
Self-reference characterizes not only natural languages but also the more
specialized “discourses” of particular communities or traditions; such
discourses are embedded in social practices and reflect the conceptual schemes
and moral and intellectual values of the community or tradition during which
they're used. The postmodern view of language and discourse is due largely to
the French philosopher and literary theorist Derrida (1930–2004), the
originator and leading practitioner of deconstruction.
7. citizenry can acquire knowledge about natural reality, and
this data are often justified ultimately on the idea of evidence or principles
that are, or can be, known immediately, intuitively, or otherwise with
certainty. Postmodernists reject philosophical foundationalism—the attempt,
perhaps best exemplified by the 17th-century French philosopher René
Descartes’s dictum cogito, ergo sum (“I think, therefore I am”), to spot a
foundation of certainty on which to create the edifice of empirical (including
scientific) knowledge.
8. it's possible, a minimum of in theory , to construct
general theories that specify many aspects of the natural or social world
within a given domain of knowledge—e.g., a general theory of human history,
like materialism . Furthermore, it should be a goal of scientific and
historical research to construct such theories, albeit they're never perfectly
attainable in practice. Postmodernists dismiss this notion as a dream and
indeed as diagnostic an unhealthy tendency within Enlightenment discourses to
adopt “totalizing” systems of thought (as the French philosopher Emmanuel
Lévinas called them) or grand “metanarratives” of human biological, historical,
and social development (as the French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard
claimed). These theories are pernicious not merely because they're false but
because they effectively impose conformity on other perspectives or discourses,
thereby oppressing, marginalizing, or silencing them. Derrida himself equated
the theoretical tendency toward totality with totalitarianism.
Postmodernism And
Relativism
As indicated within the preceding section, many of the
characteristic doctrines of postmodernism constitute or imply some sort of
metaphysical, epistemological, or ethical relativism. (It should be noted,
however, that some postmodernists vehemently reject the relativist label.) Postmodernism
Political Theory, Postmodernists deny that there are aspects of reality that
are objective; that there are statements about reality that are objectively
true or false; that it's possible to possess knowledge of such statements (objective
knowledge); that it's possible for citizenry to understand some things with
certainty; which there are objective, or absolute, moral values. Reality,
knowledge, and value are constructed by discourses; hence they will vary with
them. this suggests that the discourse of recent science, when considered aside
from the evidential standards internal thereto , has no greater purchase on the
reality than do alternative perspectives, including (for example) astrology and
witchcraft. Postmodernists sometimes characterize the evidential standards of
science, including the utilization of reason and logic, as “Enlightenment
rationality.”
That postmodernism is indefinable may be a truism. However, it are often
described as a group of critical, strategic and rhetorical practices employing
concepts like difference, repetition, the trace, the simulacrum, and
hyperreality to destabilize other concepts like presence, identity, historical
progress, epistemic certainty, and therefore the univocity of meaning.
The term “postmodernism” first entered the philosophical
lexicon in 1979, with the publication of The Postmodern Condition by
Jean-François Lyotard. I therefore give Lyotard pride of place within the
sections that follow. An economy of selection dictated the selection of other
figures for this entry. Postmodernism Political Theory, I even have selected
only those most ordinarily cited in discussions of philosophical postmodernism,
five French and two Italian, although individually they'll resist common
affiliation. Ordering them by nationality might duplicate a modernist schema
they might question, but there are strong differences among them, and these
tend to divide along linguistic and cultural lines. The French, for instance ,
work with concepts developed during the structuralist revolution in Paris
within the 1950s and early 1960s, including structuralist readings of Marx and
Freud. For this reason they're often called “poststructuralists.” They also
cite the events of May 1968 as a watershed moment for contemporary thought and
its institutions, especially the schools . The Italians, against this , draw
upon a practice of aesthetics and rhetoric including figures like Giambattista
Vico and Benedetto Croce. Their emphasis is strongly historical, and that they
exhibit no fascination with a revolutionary moment. Instead, they emphasize
continuity, narrative, and difference within continuity, instead of
counter-strategies and discursive gaps. Neither side, however, suggests that
postmodernism is an attack upon modernity or an entire departure from it. Rather,
its differences lie within modernity itself, and postmodernism may be a
continuation of recent thinking in another mode.
Finally, I even have included a summary of Habermas's
critique of postmodernism, representing the most lines of dialogue on each side
of the Atlantic. Habermas argues that postmodernism contradicts itself through
self-reference, and notes that postmodernists presuppose concepts they
otherwise seek to undermine, e.g., freedom, subjectivity, or creativity. He
sees during this a rhetorical application of strategies employed by the
artistic avant-garde of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, an avant-garde
that's possible only because modernity separates artistic values from science
and politics within the first place. Postmodernism Political Theory, On his
view, postmodernism is a bootleg aestheticization of data 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 within the name of a
modernity moving toward completion instead of self-transformation.
Precursors
The philosophical modernism in dispute in postmodernism
begins with Kant's “Copernican revolution,” that's , his assumption that we
cannot know things in themselves which objects of data must conform to our
schools of representation (Kant 1787). Ideas like God, freedom, immortality,
the world, first beginning, and final end have only a regulative function for
knowledge, since they can't find fulfilling instances among objects of
experience. With Hegel, the immediacy of the subject-object relation itself is shown
to be illusory.
Postmodernism
Political Theory, As he states within the Phenomenology of Spirit, “we find
that neither the one nor the opposite is merely immediately present in
sense-certainty, but each is at an equivalent time mediated” (Hegel 1807, 59),
because subject and object are both instances of a “this” and a “now,” neither
of which are immediately sensed. So-called immediate perception therefore lacks
the knowledge of immediacy itself, a certainty that has got to be deferred to
the understanding of an entire system of experience. However, later thinkers
means that Hegel's logic pre-supposes concepts, like identity and negation (see
Hegel 1812), which cannot themselves be accepted as immediately given, and
which therefore must be accounted for in another , non-dialectical way.
The later nineteenth century is that the age of modernity as
an achieved reality, where science and technology, including networks of mass
communication and transportation, reshape human perceptions. there's no clear
distinction, then, between the natural and therefore the artificial in
experience. Indeed, many proponents of postmodernism challenge the viability of
such a distinction tout court, seeing in achieved modernism the emergence of a
drag the philosophical tradition has repressed. A consequence of achieved
modernism is what postmodernists might ask as de-realization. De-realization
affects both the topic and therefore the objects of experience, such their
sense of identity, constancy, and substance is upset or dissolved. Important
precursors to the present notion are found in Kierkegaard, Marx and Nietzsche.
Kierkegaard, for instance , describes modern society as a network of relations
during which individuals are leveled into an abstract phantom referred to as
“the public” (Kierkegaard 1846, 59). the fashionable public, in contrast to
ancient and medieval communities, may be a creation of the press, which is that
the only instrument capable of holding together the mass of unreal individuals
“who never are and never are often united in an actual situation or
organization” (Kierkegaard 1846, 60). Postmodernism Political Theory, during
this sense, society has become a realization of reasoning , held together by a
man-made and all-pervasive medium speaking for everybody and for nobody . In
Marx, on the opposite hand, we've an analysis of the fetishism of commodities
(Marx 1867, 444–461) where objects lose the solidity of their use value and
become spectral figures under the aspect of exchange value.
The Postmodern
Condition
The term “postmodern” came into the philosophical lexicon
with the publication of Jean-François Lyotard's La Condition Postmoderne in
1979 (in English: The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, 1984), where
he employs Wittgenstein's model of language games (see Wittgenstein 1953) and
ideas taken from act theory to account for what he calls a change of the sport
rules for science, art, and literature since the top of the nineteenth century.
He
describes his text as a mixture of two very different language games, that of
the philosopher which of the expert. Postmodernism Political Theory, Where the
expert knows what he knows and what he doesn't know, the philosopher knows
neither, but poses questions. In light of this ambiguity, Lyotard states that
his portrayal of the state of data “makes no claims to being original or maybe
true,” which his hypotheses “should not be accorded predictive value in
reference to reality, but strategic value in reference to the questions raised”
(Lyotard 1984 [1979], 7). The book, then, is the maximum amount an experiment
within the combination of language games because it is an objective “report.”
On Lyotard's account, the pc age has transformed knowledge
into information, that is, coded messages within a system of transmission and
communication. Analysis of this data involves a pragmatics of communication
insofar because the phrasing of messages, their transmission and reception,
must follow rules so as to be accepted by those that judge them. However, as
Lyotard points out, the position of judge or legislator is additionally an edge
within a language game, and this raises the question of legitimation. As he
insists, “there may be a strict interlinkage between the type of language
called science and therefore the kind called ethics and politics” (Lyotard 1984
[1979], 8), and this interlinkage constitutes the cultural perspective of the
West. Science is therefore tightly interwoven with government and
administration, especially within the modern era , where enormous amounts of
capital and enormous installations are needed for research.
Genealogy and
Subjectivity
The Nietzschean method of genealogy, in its application to
modern subjectivity, is another facet of philosophical postmodernism. Michel
Foucault's application of genealogy to formative moments in modernity's history
and his exhortations to experiment with subjectivity place him within the scope
of postmodern discourse. Postmodernism Political Theory, within the 1971 essay
“Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” Foucault spells out his adaptation of the
genealogical method in his historical studies. First and foremost, he says,
genealogy “opposes itself to the look for ‘origins’” (Foucault 1977, 141).
That is, genealogy studies the accidents and contingencies
that converge at crucial moments, giving rise to new epochs, concepts, and
institutions. As Foucault remarks: “What is found at the historical beginning
of things isn't the inviolable identity of their origin; it's the dissension of
other things. it's disparity” (Foucault 1977, 142). In Nietzschean fashion,
Foucault exposes history conceived because the origin and development of a
uniform subject, e.g., “modernity,” as a fiction modern discourses invent after
the very fact .
Underlying
the fiction of modernity may be a sense of temporality that excludes the
weather of chance and contingency live at every moment. In short, linear,
progressive history covers up the discontinuities and interruptions that mark
points of succession in historical time.
Productive
Difference
The concept of difference as a productive mechanism, instead
of a negation of identity, is additionally an indicator of postmodernism in
philosophy. Gilles Deleuze deploys this idea throughout his work, beginning
with Nietzsche and Philosophy (1962, in English 1983), where he sets Nietzsche
against the models of thinking at add Kant and Hegel. Here, he proposes to
think against reason in resistance to Kant's assertion of the self-justifying
authority of reason alone (Deleuze 1983 [1962], 93). during a phrase echoed by
Foucault, he states that the aim of his critique of reason “is not
justification but a special way of feeling:
another sensibility” (Deleuze 1983 [1962], 94). Philosophical critique,
he declares, is an encounter between thought and what forces it into action:
it's a matter of sensibility instead of a tribunal where reason judges itself
by its own laws (see Kant 1787, 9). Furthermore, the critique of reason isn't a
way , but is achieved by “culture” within the Nietzschean sense: training,
discipline, inventiveness, and a particular cruelty (see Nietzsche 1887).
Since thought cannot activate itself as thinking, Deleuze
says it must suffer violence if it's to awaken and move. Postmodernism
Political Theory, Art, science, and philosophy deploy such violence insofar as
they're transformative and experimental.
Deconstruction
The term “deconstruction,” like “postmodernism,” has taken on
many meanings within the popular imagination. However, in philosophy, it
signifies certain strategies for reading and writing texts. The term was
introduced into philosophical literature in 1967, with the publication of three
texts by Jacques Derrida: Of Grammatology (in English 1974), Writing and
Difference (in English 1978), and Speech and Phenomena (in English 1973). This
so-called “publication blitz” immediately established Derrida as a serious
figure within the new movement in philosophy and therefore the human sciences
centered in Paris, and brought the idiom “deconstruction” into its vocabulary.
Derrida and deconstruction are routinely related to postmodernism, although
like Deleuze and Foucault, he doesn't use the term and would resist affiliation
with “-isms” of any sort. Of the three books from 1967, Of Grammatology is that
the more comprehensive in laying out the background for deconstruction as how
of reading modern theories of language, especially structuralism, and
Heidegger's meditations on the non-presence of being. It also sets out
Derrida's difference with Heidegger over Nietzsche. Where Heidegger places
Nietzsche within the metaphysics of presence, Derrida insists that “reading,
and thus writing, the text were for Nietzsche ‘originary’ operations,” (Derrida
1974 [1967], 19), and this puts him at the closure of metaphysics (not the
end), a closure that liberates writing from the normal logos, which takes
writing to be a symbol (a visible mark) for an additional sign (speech), whose
“signified” may be a fully present meaning.
This closure has emerged, says Derrida, with the newest developments in
linguistics, the human sciences, mathematics, and cybernetics, where the
written mark or signifier is only technical, that is, a matter of function
instead of meaning. Postmodernism Political Theory, Precisely the liberation of
function over meaning indicates that the epoch of what Heidegger calls the
metaphysics of presence has come to closure, although this closure doesn't mean
its termination. even as within the essay “On the Question of Being” (Heidegger
1998, 291-322) Heidegger sees fit cross off the word “being,” leaving it
visible, nevertheless, under the mark, Derrida takes the closure of metaphysics
to be its “erasure,” where it doesn't entirely disappear, but remains inscribed
together side of a difference, and where the mark of deletion is itself a trace
of the difference that joins and separates this mark and what it crosses out.
Derrida calls this joining and separating of signs différance
(Derrida 1974 [1967], 23), a tool which will only be read and not heard when
différance and différence are pronounced in French. The “a” may be a written
mark that differentiates independently of the voice, the privileged medium of
metaphysics. during this sense, différance because the spacing of difference,
as archi-writing, would be the gram of grammatology. However, as Derrida
remarks: “There can't be a science of difference itself in its operation,
because it is impossible to possess a science of the origin of presence itself,
that's to mention of a particular non-origin” (Derrida 1974 [1967], 63).
Instead, there's only the marking of the trace of difference, that is,
deconstruction.
Hyperreality
Hyperreality is closely associated with the concept of the simulacrum:
a replica or image without regard to an ingenious . In postmodernism,
hyperreality is that the results of the technological mediation of experience,
where what passes for reality may be a network of images and signs without an
external referent, such what's represented is representation itself. Postmodernism
Political Theory, In Symbolic Exchange and Death (1976), Jean Baudrillard uses
Lacan's concepts of the symbolic, the imaginary, and therefore the real to
develop this idea while attacking orthodoxies of the political Left, beginning
with the assumed reality of power, production, desire, society, and political
legitimacy. Baudrillard argues that each one of those realities became
simulations, that is, signs with none referent, because the important and
therefore the imaginary are absorbed into the symbolic.
Postmodern
Hermeneutics
Hermeneutics, the science of textual interpretation, also
plays a task in postmodern philosophy. Unlike deconstruction, which focuses
upon the functional structures of a text, hermeneutics seeks to reach an
agreement or consensus on what the text means, or is about. Gianni Vattimo
formulates a postmodern hermeneutics within the End of Modernity (1985, in
English 1988 [1985]), where he distinguishes himself from his Parisian
counterparts by posing the question of post-modernity as a matter for
ontological hermeneutics. rather than calling for experimentation with
counter-strategies and functional structures, he sees the heterogeneity and
variety in our experience of the planet as a hermeneutical problem to be solved
by developing a way continuity between this and therefore the past. Postmodernism
Political Theory, This continuity is to be a unity of meaning instead of the
repetition of a functional structure, and therefore the meaning is ontological.
during this respect, Vattimo's project is an extension of Heidegger's inquiries
into the meaning of being. However, where Heidegger situates Nietzsche within
the bounds of metaphysics, Vattimo joins Heidegger's ontological hermeneutics
with Nietzsche's plan to think beyond nihilism and historicism together with
his concept of eternal return. The result, says Vattimo, may be a certain
distortion of Heidegger's reading of Nietzsche, allowing Heidegger and
Nietzsche to be interpreted through each other (Vattimo 1988 [1985], 176). this
is often a big point of difference between Vattimo and therefore the French
postmodernists, who read Nietzsche against Heidegger, and like Nietzsche's
textual strategies over Heidegger's pursuit of the meaning of being.
Postmodern
Rhetoric and Aesthetics
Rhetoric and aesthetics pertain to the sharing of experience
through activities of participation and imitation. within the postmodern sense,
such activities involve sharing or participating in differences that have
opened between the old and therefore the new, the natural and therefore the
artificial, or maybe between life and death. The leading exponent of this line
of postmodern thought is Mario Perniola.
Like
Vattimo, Perniola insists that postmodern philosophy must not separate the
legacies of modernity in science and politics. Postmodernism Political Theory, As
he says in Enigmas, “the relationship between thought and reality that the
Enlightenment, idealism, and Marxism have embodied must not be broken”
(Perniola 1995, 43). However, he doesn't base this continuity upon an indoor
essence, spirit, or meaning, but upon the continuing effects of modernity
within the world.
One such effect, visible in art and within the relation
between art and society, is that the collapse of the past and future into this
, which he characterizes as “Egyptian” or “baroque” in nature.
Habermas's
Critique
The most prominent and comprehensive critic of philosophical
postmodernism is Jürgen Habermas. within the Philosophical Discourse of
Modernity (Habermas 1987 [1985]), he confronts postmodernism at the extent of
society and “communicative action.” He doesn't defend the concept of the topic
, conceived as consciousness or an autonomous self, against postmodernists'
attacks, but defends argumentative reason in inter-subjective communication
against their experimental, avant-garde strategies.
Postmodernism
Political Theory, for instance , he claims that Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida
and Foucault commit a performative contradiction in their critiques of
modernism by employing concepts and methods that only modern reason can
provide.
He criticizes Nietzsche's Dionysianism as a compensatory
gesture toward the loss of unity in Western culture that, in pre-modern times,
was provided by religion. Nietzsche's sense of a replacement Dionysus in modern
art, moreover, is predicated upon an aesthetic modernism during which art
acquires its experimental power by separating itself from the values of science
and morality, a separation accomplished by the fashionable Enlightenment,
leading to the loss of organic unity Nietzsche seeks to revive via art itself
(see Habermas 1987 [1985], 81-105).
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