I put together this collection of excerpts from a most excellent book, ‘Postmodern Theory: Critical Interrogations’ by Steven Best and Douglas Kellner, as well as other sources, with the hopes that this little essay will remove some of the myths associated with postmodernism, and will show that it is not some sort of a bogeyman, but instead a large field of philosophy and cultural theory that has asked very important questions, pointed out very important problems and offered vital new perspectives, which continue to be relevant to this day, and which inform and influence our understanding of the world and its affairs – although it has also had its fair share excesses and absurdities.
I think we should get one thing out of the way before we continue: no, contrary to a popular myth sustained by many scientists and scientifically-minded people, postmodern theories do not usually concern themselves with natural sciences. Postmodernism is a social and cultural theory, dealing mostly with the arts, literature, politics, subjectivity, and so forth. There have been some unfortunate thinkers such as Baudrillard, who utterly failed to grasp the meaning of the scientific concepts they made use of, but such blunders are to be expected in such a vast and diverse field. But to think that postmodernism ‘misunderstands’ science is to engage in the fallacy of composition.
Postmodernism in a nutshell: Postmodernism attacks the notions of monolithic universals, totalizing ideas and foundational claims characteristic of modern thinking and instead encourages diversity, plurality, fluidity and multiple perspectives. It is anti-foundationalist, anti-essentialist and has learned the criticisms of realist representational schemas*. Jean-Francois Lyotard defines postmodernism as an “incredulity toward metanarratives”, such as the unique status of the subject, the boundedness of information, and the march of progress (among other things), that had given order and meaning to Western thought during modernity, and which ignores the heterogeneity or plurality of human existence.
I’ll mostly avoid specific theoretical concerns, such as discourse theory, poststructuralist principles, and the like.
But let us first delineate the discourse of the modern, to see its differences from the postmodern.
Simply put – postmodernity is the historical period that follows modernity, just as the Renaissance was followed by modernity, as marked by specific cultural and social changes that alter the shape of human society to a greater or lesser extent. The postmodern period is said to be characterized by the commoditization of knowledge, globalization, and transnational consumerism, which replaced borders with networks, and the sale of goods with the sale of images.
Modernist thinkers describe modernism as such: it is characterized by innovation, novelty and dynamism; modernist thinkers championed reason as the source of progress in knowledge and society, as well as the privileged locus of truth and the foundation of systematic knowledge. Reason was deemed competent to discover adequate theoretical and practical norms upon which systems of thought and action could be built and society could be restructured.
Modernity entered everyday life through the dissemination of modern art, the products of consumer society, new technologies, and new modes of transportation and communication. “Modernization” came to denote those processes of individualization, secularization, industrialization, cultural differentiation, and rationalization which together have constituted the modern world.
Yet the construction of modernity produced untold suffering and misery for its victims, ranging from peasantry, proletariat, and artisans oppressed by capitalist industrialization to the exclusion of women from the public sphere, to the genocide of imperialist colonization. Modernity also produced a set of disciplinary institutions, practices, and discourses which legitimate its modes of domination and control.
Now postmodern theorists claim that the contemporary high-tech media society is producing a new form of existence, a novel sociocultural formation which requires new concepts and theories. Some theorists interpret these developments in terms of novel types of information, knowledge and technology, and others in terms of development of a higher stage of capitalism marked by a greater degree of capital penetration and homogenization across the globe.
Now, on to postmodern philosophy. In postmodern philosophy, modern theory is criticized for its search for a foundation of knowledge, for its universalizing and totalizing claims, for its hubris to supply apodictic truth.
Postmodern theory provides a critique of representation and the modern belief that theory mirrors reality, taking instead ‘perspectivist’ position that theories at best provide partial perspectives on their objects, and that all cognitive representations of the world are historically and linguistically mediated. Some postmodern theory accordingly rejects the totalizing macroperspectives on society and history favored by modern theory.
Postmodern theory also rejects modern assumptions of social coherence and notions of causality in favor of multiplicity, plurality, fragmentation, and indeterminacy. In addition, postmodern theory abandons the rational and unified subject postulated by much modern theory in favor of a socially and linguistically decentered and fragmented subject.
In politics, modernity is characterized by party, parliamentary, or trade union politics, in opposition to postmodern politics associated with locally based micropolitics that challenge a broad array of discourses and institutionalized forms of power.
Postmodern discourse in the aesthetic field celebrates the emergence of a ‘new sensibility’ in culture and the arts which challenges the rationalist need for content, meaning, and order. The new sensibility, by contrast, immerses itself in the pleasures of form and style, privileging and ‘erotics’ of art over a hermeneutics of meaning. Consequently, the new sensibility was more pluralistic and less serious and moralistic than modernism. Postmodern art is also characterized by the breakdown of the high-low distinction and the appearance of pop art and mass cultural forms, as well as a ‘closing of the gap’ between artist and audience. The new tradition rejected traditional values of Protestantism, Victorianism, rationalism and humanism. Postmodernism calls for a new criticism that abandons formalism, realism, and highbrow pretentiousness, in favor of the subjective response of the reader within a psychological, social, and historical context.
Against modernist values of seriousness, purity, and individuality, postmodern art exhibits a new insouciance, a new playfulness, and a new eclecticism.
Some depressed conservatives characterized the new emerging postmodern culture thus: they [postmodernists] reject and destroy the foundational assumptions and values of Western society, which include the loss of geographical and social unity, where the Western world could claim moral superiority and rights over ‘uncivilized’ peoples; and incredulous attitude toward progress as the trajectory and goal of history; the decline of utopian values; and skepticism toward the modernist belief in a direct correlation between liberal-humanist principles and moral conduct, a position made questionable in the 20th century by the savagery of world wars and the harmonious coexistence of high culture and concentration camps. Thus the postmodernists no longer blindly and unproblematically trust in science, art and reason as beneficent, harmonizing forces.
In a more theoretical vein, postmodernism draws from poststructuralist thought. In traditional theories of meaning, signifiers come to rest in the signified of a conscious mind. For postmodern theorists, the signified is only a moment in a never-ending process of signification, where meaning is produced not in a stable, referential relation between subject and object, but within the infinite, intertextual play of signifiers.
These new theories of language and discourse led to critiques of modern philosophy, attacking its root assumptions. It was claimed that modern philosophy was undermined by its impossible dream of attaining a foundation of knowledge, and absolute bedrock of truth that could serve as the guarantee of philosophical systems. This foundationalist assumption has been called a ‘metaphysics of presence’ that supposedly guarantees the subject an unmediated access to reality. The binary oppositions governing Western philosophy and culture (subject/object, appearance/reality, speech/writing, truth/falsity, happiness/unhappiness, and so on) work to construct a far-from-innocent hierarchy of values which attempt not only to guarantee truth, but also serve to exclude and devalue allegedly inferior terms and positions. The binary metaphysics thus works to positively position reality over appearance, speech over writing, men over women, or reason over nature, thus positioning negatively the supposedly inferior term.
In conclusion: postmodern theory stresses the importance of differences over unities and identities while championing the dissemination of meaning in opposition to its closure in totalizing, centered theories and systems, and can be characterized by a skepticism toward the simple binary oppositions predominant in Western metaphysics and humanism.
* - The idea that there is a strict differentiation between the “inside” of human mind and the “outside” of reality, and that humans have a direct, unmediated access to this outside reality. Also known as the correspondence theory of truth or the “mirror of nature” idea.
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