Japn 230
More on Postmodernism
Scholars enjoy debating the term postmodernism. For example,
--Jurgen Habermas would argue that modernism's
project is still incomplete and therefore the Enlightenment values--philosophical,
social, political--need to remain on the table.
--Others feel that the old Enlightment
project has been discredited and that its old notions about history and social
reality lack any solid foundation or grounding in the contemporary world. Late
capitalism, they would say, brings the commodification of culture and the complete
undermining of coherehnce and meaning in today's world. The world, they would
say, has become "radically decentered."
TWO OTHER SIGNIFICANT VOICES ON POSTMODERNISM
--Jean Baudrillard, for example, sees reality as defined by the media--it's
a kind of hyperreality with everything constantly on display, "moving endlessly
and transparently across a surface where there is no control or stabilizing
reference, or any prospect of transformation."
--Jean Lyotard, another postmodernist, might say that there is one level of
reality which is plural and heterogeneous but which is constantly being forced
into unitary meaning by a totalizing agenda. He would rather see us pay attention
to differences, repressed impusles, and the multiplicitous and indecipherable
stuff at the edges of what we call reality. It almost sounds like Daoism! And
postmodernists do share a suspicion of reason and logic with the Daoists, for
they understand that reason is simply a type of conceptualization that is predicated
on judgments imbedded in social and political institutions, i.e., reason is
socially and politically contingent if not manufactured not something stable, permanent or sacred.
See also the information from John Lye's page on postmodernism:
—Where it is thought of as a broad range of:
1. Responses to modernism, especially refusals of some of its totalizing premises
and effects, and of its implicit or explicit distinction between 'high' culture
and commonly lived life,
2. Responses to such things as a world lived under nuclear threat and threat
to the geosphere, to a world of faster communication, mass mediated reality,
greater diversity of cultures and mores and a consequent pluralism,
3. Acknowledgments of and in some senses struggles against a world in which,
under a spreading technological capitalism, all things are are commodified
and fetishized (made the object of desire), and in which genuine experience
has been replaced by simulation and spectacle,
4. Resultant senses of fragmentation, of discontinuity, of reality as a pastiche
rather than as a weave,
5. Reconceptualizations of society, history and the self as cultural constructs,
hence as rhetorical constructs. There are 'postmodernisms' even more than
there were 'modernisms', and not all postmodernism partakes of all of the
following attributes:
—a reaction to, refusal and diffusion of, the elements of modernist thought
which are totalizing: which suggest a master narrative or master code, i.e.
an explanatory cohesion of experience; the result may be
1. A sense of discontinuity, of the world as a field of contesting explanations
none of which can claim any authority,
2. Parodies of all sorts of meta-narrative and master-code elements, including
genre and literary form,
3. The challenging of borders and limits, including those of decency,
4. The exploration of the marginalized aspects of life and marginalized elements
of society.
(The 'problem' with grand narratives is that they bring all of experience
under one explanatory and one implicitly or explicitly regulative order, and
hence are potentially (some would say, inevitably) totalitarian and repressive;
the problem of trying to live without them is that without their explanatory
frame there is no way in which acts can be validated (once one tries, one
uncovers a hidden grand narrative) other than through the validation of pleasure
or pain, some would say beauty or ugliness. It comes down to what one believes:
is living without grand narratives an act of courage and freedom in the face
of inevitable doubt and instability, or merely an opening of oneself to the
worst forces of the libido and an abandonment of necessary principles?)
—a sense that life is lived in a world with no transcendent warrant, nothing
to guarantee or to underwrite our being as meaningful moral creatures. Life
just is. We no longer look for a pattern. We live between the 1's and the 0's,
in the interstices of meaning; we live on the bleak terrain of an endless uncreated
happenstance universe. We may celebrate its specificity, its immediacy; or not.
Postmodernism goes different directions here.
—the writing of reflexive or meta-fiction: fiction which is in the first
instance aware of itself as fiction and which may dramatize the false or constructed
nature of fiction, on the one hand, or the inevitable fictionality of all experience,
on the other. a reaction to, refusal of, the totalizing of modernist form --
of the dominance in modernism of form and of the idea of the aesthetic, which
concept created a 'special world' for art, cut off from the variety and everydayness
of life (a negative judgment on this 'refusal' is that postmodernism simply
aestheticizes everything, see the next point)
—an attempt to integrate art and life -- the inclusion of popular forms,
popular culture, everyday reality; Bakhtin's notion of 'carnival', of joyous,
anti-authoritarian, riotous, carnal and liberatory celebration, makes sense
in this context and adds a sense of energy and freedom to some post modern work
the notion of carnival, above, is taken to the limit in the idea of transgression,
the idea that to live and think beyond the structures of capitalist ideology
and of totalizing concepts one must deliberately violate what appear to be standards
of sense and decency but are (if the truth were known) methods of social and
imaginative control. A more benign conception than transgression is the concept
of the paralogical: a revelation of the non-rational immediacy of life (considered
thus to be implicitly revolutionary, liberating); as with ideas such as carnival
and transgression, the paralogical gives access to the energy of the world,
and allows us to experience outside of the strictures of the grand narratives
which form our usual sense of our reality.
—the use of paradox, of undercutting, of radical shifts, in order to undercut
any legitimization of reality, subject, ontological ground a refusal of seriousness
or an undercutting of or problematizing of seriousness -- achieved through such
things as the above-mentioned notion of carnival, of the turning upside-down
of everything, and through the use of parody, play, black humour and wit; this
refusal and these methods of undercutting seriousness is associated as well
with fragmentation, as traditional notions of narrative coherence are challenged,
undone. The 'problem' with seriousness is that is has no room for the disruptions
necessary to expose the oppressions and repressions of master narratives, in
fact seriousness tends almost inevitably to reinforce them and hence the ideologies
they support; to attack seriousness does not mean, in this context, to abandon
conviction or good intentions.
—a crossing or dissolving of borders -- between fiction and non-fiction,
between literary genres, between high and low culture a sense that the world
is a world made up of rhetoric -- of language and cultural constructs and images
and symbols, none of which have any necessary validity
—a move away from perspectivism, from the located, unified 'subject' and
the associated grounding of the authority of experience in the sovereign subject
and it its the processes of perception and reflection
a fragmentation of the self (the unified, located subject), or a disappearance
or flatness -- the self, or subject, is no longer a 'psychological' reality
but henceforth a cultural construction, located rhetorically (in terms of the
kinds of language used, the subject matter, the situation), differently configured
in different situations
—the dramatization to a world in which there are not depths, in which there
is nothing 'under' appearances a greater emphasis on the body, on the human
as incarnate, as physical beings in a physical world. This is tied to postmodernism's
distrust of rationalism and of the ideology of the Enlightenment. This emphasis
on the physicality of our being leads in several directions, including
1. An emphasis on chance and contingency as fundamental conditions of our being
and
2. A positing of aesthetics rather than rationalism as guide to truth, hence
ultimately as the ground for ethics.
—a rethinking of modernism's break with history. There are (at least) two
directions in which this rethinking may go like this:
1. A greater awareness of history as a narrative, that is, a human construct;
history is accessible to us, but only as text -- its documents are texts,
its institutions are social texts. This does not mean that history did not
happen; it means that what we know as history is known to us only through
what is configured for our understandings by language, by narratives with
their own shaping forces, by figures of speech.
2. An insistence of the incarnate and the contingent, human life as located,
specific, grounded in the body and in circumstance.