Post-modernism / Postmodernism / The postmodern condition As a critique of modernity Read: 1. Jean Francoise Lyotard The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge; 2. Jurgen Habermas Unfinished project of modernity ; 3. Tim Woods Introduction to Postmodernism; 4. Ihab Hassan Modernism and Postmodernism
Post-modernism (as in the West) Essentially, a critique of the dominant paradigm (modernity that which oppresses) the modern record : world wars; cultural imperialism, Holocaust - Nazism and its concentration camps, genocide; The Great Depression; bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Vietnam War, widening chasm between rich and poor makes any belief in the idea of progress or faith in the future seem questionable.
Post-modernism challenges: Universal absolute Truth Objective knowledge Reason on the basis of experience Progress! A set of practices to destabilize given concepts Weird for the sake of weird
But,! The modern record is also: development, end of colonialism, birth of new nations - democratic republics, enfranchisement of women, antislavery, minority rights (social emancipation movements), multiculturalism (some of these which began taking shape in the modern era have been appropriated by the postmodernism discourse)
Modernism The Self question Rene Descartes method of doubt; everything subjected to doubt I think, therefore I am ( Consciousness, therefore I am - Descartes redeemed; but if Descartes really meant the previous he was almost on the verge of self-realisation but not yet there) I think, therefore I am - Self-knowledge there is nothing between me and my thinking Post-modern DECENTERING the mind can not be the centre of all knowledge; Wittgenstein the limits of my language are the limits of my world, and, also I am not at the centre of the world
Jean-Francois Lyotard Grand (meta)narratives little narratives (petits recits) (The Postmodern condition: A Report on Knowledge, 1979)
Main points or rather descriptive categories Knowledge - objectifiable knowledge - result of science- western societies in dominant position - control of information - cause for power concentrated in a few hands - need to decentralise knowledge - knowledge societies - another category of knowledge besides scientific knowledge which is not the totality of knowledge - narrative (something internal as opposed to scientific knowledge which is verifiable and therefore external - therefore, let us classify knowledge as grand narratives & little narratives?)!7
Knowledge and power - who decides what knowledge is, and who knows what needs to be decided? Language games (Wittgenstein (1889-1951)) - The university is sick (denotative), The university is open (declaration/notice), Give money to the university (prescription) (description of the status of the sender (of the statement), the addressee and the referent) every utterance is a move in the game controlled by rules (Witt) Any observable social bond is composed of language moves!8
The nature of social bond: The modern alternative - society as an organic whole, selfregulating; Marxist view that society is about class struggles and dialectics born of capitalist encroachment upon traditional civil societies. the latter model itself became totalitarian such that the class struggles were not allowed to exist Role of two kinds of knowledge - the positivist knowledge which has impact on men and materials and is a productive force; reflexive knowledge!9
The nature of social bond: The postmodern perspective - Ruling class will continue to be a class of decision-makers. But, the old authorities - nation states, monarchies, historical traditions are losing their hold. The individual counts - subjective knowledge counts. breaking up of grand narratives and the emergence of little narratives. Lyotard s point - self does not amount to too much. The self is already in a web of social bond, right from the time it begins to exist in this world.!10
more points : communication between individuals is a game, greater degree of flexibility; communication in an institution - constraints on language moves. institutions should allow dissensus much more than striving for consensus We know today that the limits the institution imposes on potential language moves are never established once and for all (even if they have been formally defined), Rather, the limits are themselves the stakes and provisional results of language strategies, within the institution and without. Examples: Does the university have a place for language experiments (poetics)? Can you tell stories in a cabinet meeting? Advocate a cause in the barracks? The answers are clear: yes, if the university opens creative workshops; yes, if the cabinet works with prospective scenarios; yes, if the limits of the old institution are displaced. Reciprocally, it can be said that the boundaries only stabilise when they cease to be stakes in the game. This, I think, is the appropriate approach to contemporary institutions of knowledge.!11
Thought and language are not directly related Hegel; mediated by a complex mix of sensations; Kant synthesis of the manifold Russell generalized views about the world; concepts between us and the world
DECENTERING direct knowledge of anything even of the self is mediated by concepts, language, society
JACQUES DERRIDA Margins of Philosophy Everything is a text; nothing outside the text Language is a system of differences Structure Language can reveal or impose structure No difference between describing reality, a text, language etc. No sharp line between describing and imagining; fiction and non-fiction
RELATIVISM SCEPTICISM
LOGOCENTRISM reason as a tool used by the empowered; disbelief of meta-narratives LIBERATION valuing authenticity; The past is restrictive! BUT
Concepts of truth, knowledge, goodness and sin etc. are social constructs But the law of gravity and heliocentrism etc. are not social constructs! Post-modernism is oppressive (But Lyotard s The Postmodern Condition has already separated scientific knowledge from its realm of inquiry. It is exclusively about the legitimation of narratives and language games)! POST-MODERN GENERATOR
If there is no reason, no truth, there s only power WVO Quine (1908-2000) and that can be dangerous
Post-modernist literature Brian McHale Post-modernist fiction Ontological dominant questions about worlds, how do I experience the shift from one world to another, which self of mine experiences these shifts Shifting from one world to another SoC? (understanding the mind to know how it experiences the world) - there is a self which can read the mind - the self is above the mind Characters come out of the story to populate the reader s world Alice in Wonderland? Linda Hutcheon A Poetics of Post-Modernism giving voice to minorities not found in official histories historiographic metafiction Fredric Jameson Post-modernism pastiche without a political purpose
Begin with: Rushdie Midnight s Children Marquez One Hundred Years of Solitude And then go to: Kurt Vonnegut Slaughterhouse 5 Science fiction essentially post-modern (McHale) Calvino If on a Winter s Night a Traveller Pynchon The Crying of Lot 49
Modernity and Postmodernity Modernity and postmodernity Christian theology Modernity West God at the centre to humanity at the centre Postmodernity humanity (God is dead; secularisation Renaissance and Humanism) at the centre to earth at the centre (aspiration to post-humanity; ecology and earth healing) Atlantic Indian Cape Point
Spirituality without God (that is so Indian; read the ways of the ancient Indian seekers); Modernity nationalism and war; where was God, the Church Postmodernity glocal; global sensitivity and cultural sensitivity (but not necessarily tolerance) Modernity science explains away the obsoleteness of Catholic cosmology (geocentrism to heliocentrism) Postmodernity chaos theory; humanity is evil and good; humanity is basically flawed Post-postmodernism - the individual self is the real thing, it is above mind-body dualism, it knows everything is an illusion, the world is an illusion, the mind impressions are illusions, its original nature is inertness and a detached observer of the illusionary everything
What is Post-modernism Problem of definition Attitude towards absolute truth claims which are ways of controlling people Incredulity toward meta-narratives (big stories power of reason, power of modern medicine) Bastard offshoot of modernism impossible to listen to God
What is Post-modernism Reaction against modernism optimism about human potential; reality can be observed, unity of all knowledge, power of reason Disappearance of the above confidence; growth of cynicism No one is in a neutral position; god s eye view impossible; multiple perspectives; humans determined by communities in which they live Author not significant; we construct our own realities
What is Post-modernism Intellectual Impostures, Sokal & Bricmont Derrida (Of Grammatology), Foucault (The History of Sexuality), Lacan Pseudo-profundity Trickiest and strangest philosophers Demonisation of Derrida in the West
The ( French ) theories Structuralism Poststructuralism, Deconstruction Post-Humanism Semiotics! US 1960s and 70s: anti-formalist (art and painting; Clement Greenberg) revisionist reading of non-formalist modernisms post-formalist avant-garde Extreme pluralism
Rosalind Krauss 1993 The Optical Unconscious: larger modernist sensibility Consider what has been left out by dominant versions of modernism persistent engagement with modernism Ref: Idees Recues: The Role of Theory in the formation of post-modernism in the United States, 1965-1985. Chris McAuliffe. Ph.D. Diss. Harvard University, 1997.
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