Postmodernism
1) What is Postmodernism?
Postmodernism is an intellectual position or manner of discourse that questions worldviews linked with 17th-century Enlightenment rationality. Relativism and a concentration on ideology in the maintenance of economic and political power are related with postmodernism.
Postmodernism is sceptical about explanations that claim to be accurate for all groups, civilizations, traditions, or races, postmodernists say, and instead concentrates on the relative truths of each person. It believes that “reality” is a mental fabrication. Postmodernism denies the existence of unmediated reality or objectively rational knowledge, claiming that all interpretations are reliant on the viewpoint from which they are created; assertions to objective fact are dismissed as naive realism.
Knowledge claims and value systems are typically described by postmodern philosophers as contingent or socially conditioned, as products of political, historical, or cultural discourses and hierarchies. As a result, self-referentiality, epistemological and moral relativism, pluralism, and irreverence are all characteristics of postmodern philosophy.
Deconstruction and post-structuralism are two schools of thought that are frequently associated with postmodernism. Critical theory, which explores the influences of ideology, society, and history on culture, is at the heart of postmodernism. Universalist ideals of objective reality, morality, truth, human nature, reason, language, and social development are frequently criticised by postmodernism and critical theory.
Initially, postmodernism was a method of literary criticism and debate that discussed the nature of literary texts, meaning, author and reader, writing, and reading. As a departure or rejection of modernism, postmodernism arose in the mid to late twentieth century across a wide range of scholarly areas. Hyperreality, simulacrum, trace, and difference are used as critical ideas in postmodernism, which rejects abstract principles in favour of subjective experience.
2) Main Principles of Postmodernism:
Structuralism and Post-Structuralism:
Structuralism was a philosophical movement founded by French academics in the 1950s, partly in response to French existentialism and frequently associated with modernism and high modernism. The anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, the Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser, and the semiotician Algirdas Greimas are among the “structuralists.”
The early writings of Jacques Lacan, a psychoanalyst, and Roland Barthes, a literary theorist, have also been labelled “structuralist.” Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Jean Baudrillard, and Gilles Deleuze are examples of structuralists who turned post-structuralists. Jacques Derrida, Pierre Bourdieu, Jean-François Lyotard, Julia Kristeva, Hélène Cixous, and Luce Irigaray are among the other post-structuralists. Judith Butler, John Fiske, Rosalind Krauss, Avital Ronell, and Hayden White are among the American cultural theorists, critics, and intellectuals they impacted.
Post-structuralists, like structuralists, believe that people’s identities, values, and economic circumstances influence one another rather than having essential features that can be understood in isolation. As a result, the French structuralists saw themselves as advocates of relativism and constructionism. They did, however, tend to investigate how the themes of their research could be reduced to a set of key linkages, schematics, or mathematical symbols. (In “The Structural Study of Myth,” Claude Lévi-Strauss presents an algebraic model of mythological change.)
Postmodernity, as opposed to postmodernism, refers to a reconsideration of the entire Western value system (love, marriage, popular culture, and the shift from an industrial to a service economy) that has occurred from the 1950s and 1960s, reaching a peak in the 1968 Social Revolution. In contrast to the original form, post-structuralism is defined by new methods of thinking through structuralism.
Deconstruction:
Deconstruction, a philosophy, literary criticism, and textual analysis theory developed by Jacques Derrida, is one of the most well-known postmodernist concerns. Critics have claimed that Derrida’s work is founded on the line “Il n’y a pas de hors-texte” (‘there is nothing beyond the text’) from his book Of Grammatology. Such critics misunderstand the statement to mean that it denies the existence of reality outside of books. The statement is a corollary to the observation that there is no “inside” of a text, and is part of a critique of “inside” and “outside” metaphors when referring to the text.
Derrida’s method is characterised by his focus on a text’s unacknowledged reliance on metaphors and figures embedded inside its language. Derrida’s method occasionally entails establishing that a philosophical discourse is based on binary oppositions or eliminating notions that the discourse has determined to be irrelevant or inapplicable.
Deconstructivism, a postmodern architectural movement inspired by Derrida’s philosophy, is characterised by a design that rejects structural “centres” and fosters decentralised play among its pieces. Derrida left the movement with the release of Chora L Works: Jacques Derrida and Peter Eisenman, a collaborative effort he did with architect Peter Eisenman.
Post-Postmodernism:
Postmodernism has been challenged by the relationship between postmodernism, posthumanism, and cyborgism, for which the words Post-postmodernism and Post-poststructuralism were originally used in 2003. In some ways, postmodernism, posthumanism, poststructuralism, and other related movements might be considered part of the ‘cyborg age’ of thought over matter. Deconference was a post-cyborgism (i.e., what comes after the postcorporeal age) investigation that included postpostmodernism, poststructuralism, and other related topics. To comprehend the shift from ‘pomo’ (cyborgism) to ‘popo’ (postcyborgism), we must first comprehend the cyborg age.
Metamodernism, post-postmodernism, and the “death of postmodernism” have all been hotly debated in recent years; in 2007, Andrew Hoberek wrote in the introduction to a special issue of Twentieth-Century Literature titled “After Postmodernism” that “declarations of postmodernism’s demise have become a critical commonplace.” Raoul Eshelman (performatism), Gilles Lipovetsky (hypermodernity), Nicolas Bourriaud (altermodern), and Alan Kirby are among a tiny group of critics who have proposed a variety of ideas to define culture or society in the claimed aftermath of postmodernism (digimodernism, formerly called pseudo-modernism).
None of these new theories or labels have gotten a lot of traction yet. Nina Müller-Schwarze, a sociocultural anthropologist, suggests neostructuralism as a feasible path. The Victoria & Albert Museum’s exhibition Postmodernism – Style and Subversion 1970–1990 (London, 24 September 2011–15 January 2012) was advertised as the first to chronicle postmodernism as a historical movement.
3) Main thinkers of Postmodernism:
Jacques Derrida:
Jacques Derrida was a French-Algerian philosopher best known for coining the term “deconstruction” to describe a type of semiotic analysis he created in the context of phenomenology and addressed in several publications. He is regarded as a key player in poststructuralism and postmodern philosophy.
Derrida re-examined the fundamentals of writing and their implications for philosophy in general; he aimed to undermine the language of “presence” or metaphysics through an analytical technique known as deconstruction, which began as a divergence from Heidegger’s concept of Destruktion.
Michel Foucault:
Michel Foucault was a philosopher, intellectual historian, social theorist, and literary critic from France. Foucault’s work was initially connected with structuralism, but it is now considered to be part of post-structuralism and postmodern philosophy. His work has a wide range of applications in the English-speaking academic world, and he is regarded as a key figure in French theory. In 2009, he was named the most referenced author in the humanities by the Times Higher Education Guide. To describe the relationship between meaning, power, and social conduct within social orders, Michel Foucault created ideas like discursive regime or re-invoked concepts from earlier thinkers like episteme and genealogy.
Jean-François Lyotard:
In his 1979 essay The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Jean-François Lyotard is recognised with being the first to use the word in a philosophical context. In it, he uses Wittgenstein’s language games model and speech act theory to compare and contrast two separate language games: expert and philosopher. He compares the transmission or receiving of coded messages (information) to a position in a linguistic game, and he discusses the transformation of knowledge into information in the computer age.
In his book The Postmodern Condition, Lyotard characterised philosophical postmodernism as “incredulity towards metanarratives…,” where what he understands by metanarrative is anything akin to a unified, complete, universal, and epistemically certain story about everything that is. Metanarratives are rejected by postmodernists because they presuppose the concept of truth that metanarratives imply. In general, postmodernist philosophers contend that truth is always reliant on historical and social context rather than being absolute and universal, and that truth is always incomplete and “at issue” rather than complete and certain.
Richard Rorty:
In Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Richard Rorty argues that contemporary analytic philosophy makes the mistake of imitating scientific procedures. In addition, he criticises representationalism and connection theory as classic epistemological viewpoints that rely on the independence of knowers and observers from phenomena and the passivity of natural phenomena in respect to consciousness.
Jean Baudrillard:
In Simulacra and Simulation, Jean Baudrillard proposed that the interchangeability of signs short-circuits reality or the principle of the Real in an era where electronic media and digital technology dominate communicative and semantic activities. According to Baudrillard, “A territory, a referential being, or a substance is no longer a simulation. It’s the generation of a real without origin or reality by models: a hyperreal.”
Douglas Kellner:
Douglas Kellner believes in Analysis of the Journey, a postmodernist publication, that the “assumptions and procedures of modern theory” must be forgotten. Kellner delves deeply into the terms of this theory through real-life experiences and illustrations. Kellner emphasised the importance of science and technology in his study, arguing that the theory would be incomplete without them.
The scope was far broader than postmodernism alone; it needed to be interpreted through cultural studies, with science and technology playing a significant part. His theory is sparked by the reality of the September 11 assaults on the United States of America. Due to the level of irony, he wonders if the attacks can only be comprehended in a limited form of postmodern philosophy. The conclusion he paints is straightforward: postmodernism, in the sense that most people use it today, will choose which experiences and indicators in one’s world will become one’s reality as they know it.
4) Criticism of Postmodernism:
Postmodernism has a wide range of academic criticisms, including the claim that it is meaningless and promotes obscurantism. Conservative English philosopher Roger Scruton argued, in part in response to postmodernism, If a writer claims that there are no absolute truths or that all truth is ‘merely subjective’, he is pleading with you not to believe him. So don’t do it. Similarly, Dick Hebdige criticised the term’s ambiguity, listing a long list of otherwise unrelated concepts that have been labelled as postmodernism, ranging from “room décor” or “a ‘scratch’ video” to nuclear apocalypse and “implosion of meaning,” and declaring that anything that could signify all of those things was “a buzzword.”
Postmodernism, according to linguist and philosopher Noam Chomsky, is useless since it adds nothing to analytical or empirical knowledge. He wonders why postmodernist intellectuals do not react to questions in the same way that individuals in other professions do. What are the principles of their theories, what evidence supports them, what do they explain that wasn’t clear before, and so on? If [these requirements] aren’t met, he recommends following Hume’s counsel in comparable situations: ‘to the flames.’
According to Christian theologian William Lane Craig, it is a fallacy that we live in a postmodern world. In truth, a postmodern civilization is unthinkable; it would be impossible to live in. When it comes to science, engineering, and technology, people are relativistic and pluralistic; nevertheless, when it comes to religion and ethics, they are relativistic and pluralistic. That, however, is not postmodernism; it is modernism! “Postmodernism at its best might be seen as a self-critical – a sceptical, ironic, but nonetheless unrelenting – type of modernism; a modernism beyond utopianism, scientism, and foundationalism; in short, a post-metaphysical modernism,” according to German philosopher Albrecht Wellmer.
Beyond the Hoax by physics professor Alan Sokal and Fashionable Nonsense by Sokal and Belgian physicist Jean Bricmont, both volumes on the so-called Sokal affair, provide a rigorous, scholarly critique of postmodernism. Sokal published a purposefully nonsensical piece in the style of postmodernist articles in 1996, and it was accepted for publication by Social Text, a postmodern cultural studies journal. On the same day as the release, he provided an explanation of the Social Text article hoax in a different journal.
Sokal and Bricmont have received support from philosopher Thomas Nagel, who describes their book Fashionable Nonsense as “extensive quotations of scientific gibberish from namebrand French intellectuals, together with eerily patient explanations of why it is gibberish,” and agrees that “there does seem to be something about the Parisian scene that is particularly hospitable to reckless verbosity.”
“Postmodernism, the school of ‘thought’ that declared ‘There are no truths, only interpretations,’ has largely played itself out in absurdity, but it has left behind a generation of academics in the humanities disabled by their distrust of the very idea of truth and their disrespect for evidence, settling for ‘conversations,’ in which nobody is wrong and nothing can be confirmed, only asserted with whatever style you can muster,” according to analytic philosopher Daniel Dennett
H. Sidky identified numerous fundamental problems in a postmodern anti science perspective, including the confounding of science’s authority (evidence) with the scientist who conveys knowledge, the self-contradictory notion that all truths are relative, and the position’s intentional ambiguity. He sees anti-scientific and pseudo-scientific approaches to knowing in the twenty-first century as founded in a postmodernist “decades-long academic assault on science,” notably in the United States. Many of individuals who were brainwashed into believing in postmodern anti-science went on to become conservative political and religious leaders, legislators, journalists, journal editors, judges, lawyers, and members of city councils and school boards. Regrettably, they have forgotten their instructors’ lofty objectives, except for the fact that science is nonsense, says H. Sidky.
