User:Patrick Welsh/sandbox
Theoretical generalization
[edit]Although postmodern criticism and thought drew on philosophical ideas from early on, "postmodernism" was only introduced to the expressly philosophical lexicon by Jean-François Lyotard in his 1979[a] The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. This work served as a catalyst for many of the subsequent intellectual debates around the term.[1][2]
In the 1990s, postmodernism became increasingly identified with critical and philosophical discourse directly about postmodernity or the postmodern idiom itself.[3] No longer centered on any particular art or even the arts in general, it instead turns to address the more general problems posed to society in general by a new proliferation of cultures and forms.[4] It is during this period that it also comes to be associated with postcolonialism and identity politics.[5]
Around this time, postmodernism also begins to be conceived in popular culture as a general "philosophical disposition" associated with a loose sort of relativism. In this sense, the term also starts to appear as a "casual term of abuse" in non-academic contexts.[5] Others identify it as an aesthetic "lifestyle" of eclecticism and playful self-irony.[6]
In philosophy
[edit]Poststructuralist precursors
[edit]In the 1970s, a disparate group of French theorists developed a critique of modern philosophy with roots discernible in Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger's critique of metaphysics.[7] Although few themselves relied upon the term, they became known to many as postmodern theorists.[8]
Poststructuralists, like structuralists, start from the assumption that people's identities, values, and economic conditions determine each other rather than having intrinsic properties that can be understood in isolation.[9] While structuralism explores how meaning is produced by a set of essential relationships in an overarching quasi-linguistic system, poststructuralism accepts this premise, but rejects the assumption that such systems can ever be fixed or centered.[10]
- Def of poststructuralism (Best & Kellner 1991, p. 20) — see also on Derrida
- N. vs. Western phi and H. vs. metaphysics lead to reevaluation p.22
- the ambiguities of "post-" p.29
- poststructuralism not a theory of pm and does not intervene in its debates
- on poststructuralism [11] on D. and vs. pm
- also Brooker p.205
Jacques Derrida and deconstruction
[edit]Deconstruction is a practice of philosophy, literary criticism, and textual analysis developed by Jacques Derrida.[12] Derrida's work has been seen as rooted in a statement found in Of Grammatology: "Il n'y a pas de hors-texte" ("there is no outside-text"). Attention to a text's unacknowledged reliance on metaphors and figures embedded within its discourse is characteristic of Derrida's approach. Derrida's method sometimes involves demonstrating that a given philosophical discourse depends on binary oppositions or excluding terms that the discourse itself has declared to be irrelevant or inapplicable.
Deconstruction, as developed and practiced by Jacques Derrida, contends that any text harbors inherent points of “undecidability” that undermine any stable meaning intended by the author. The process of writing inevitably, he aims to show, reveals suppressed elements, challenging the oppositions that are thought to sustain the text.[13]
Derrida argues that metaphysics establishes hierarchies and orders of subordination within various dualisms. It prioritizes presence and purity over the contingent and complicated, dismissing them as aberrations irrelevant to philosophical analysis. In essence, metaphysical thought prioritizes one side of an opposition while ignoring or marginalizing the alternative.[13]
Michel Foucault on power relations
[edit]French philosopher and social theorist Michel Foucault argued that power operates according to the logics of social institutions that have become unmoored from the intentions of any actual individuals. Individuals, according to Foucault, are both products and participants in these dynamics. In the 1970s, Foucault employed a Nietzsche-inspired "genealogical method" to analyze power-relations across their historical permutations.[14]
Both his political orientation and the consistency of his positions continue to be debated among critics and defenders alike. Nevertheless, Foucault's political works share two common elements: a historical perspective and a discursive methodology. He analyzed social phenomena in historical contexts and focused on how they have evolved over time. Additionally, he employed the study of texts, usually academic texts, as the material for his inquiries. In this way, Foucault sought to understand how the historical formation of discourses has shaped contemporary political thinking and institutions.[14]
Gilles Deleuze on productive difference
[edit]The work of Gilles Deleuze develops a concept of difference as a productive mechanism, rather than as a merely negative phenomenon. He advocates for a critique of reason that emphasizes sensibility and feeling over rational judgment. Following Nietzsche, Deleuze argues that philosophical critique is an encounter between thought and what forces it into action, and that this requires training, discipline, inventiveness, and even a certain "cruelty". He believes that thought cannot activate itself, but needs external forces to awaken and move it. Art, science, and philosophy can provide such activation through their transformative and experimental nature.[15]
Jean Baudrillard on hyperreality
[edit]Although trained in sociology, Baudrillard worked across many disciplines. Drawing upon some of the technical vocabulary of the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, Baudrillard argues that production has shifted from creating real objects to producing signs and symbols. This system of symbolic exchange, detached from the real, constitutes hyperreality. In the words of one commentator, "the hyperreal is a system of simulation that simulates itself."[16]
Postmodernity, he says, is the condition in which the domain of reality has become so heavily mediated by signs as to become inaccessible in itself, leaving us entirely in the domain of the simulacra, images that bears no relation to anything outside of themselves.[17] This hyperreality is presented as the terminal stage of simulation, where signs and images become entirely self-referential.[16]
A crisis of legitimacy
[edit]The Postmodern Condition
[edit]Jean-François Lyotard is credited with being the first to use the term "postmodern" in a philosophical context, in his 1979 work The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. In it, he follows Wittgenstein's language games model and speech act theory, contrasting two different language games, that of the expert, and that of the philosopher. He talks about the transformation of knowledge into information in the computer age and likens the transmission or reception of coded messages (information) to a position within a language game.[18]
Lyotard defined philosophical postmodernism in The Postmodern Condition, writing: "Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity towards metanarratives...." [19] where what he means by metanarrative (in French, grands récits) is something like a unified, complete, universal, and epistemically certain story about everything that is. Against totalizing metanarratives, Lyotard and other postmodern philosophers argue that truth is always dependent upon historical and social context rather than being absolute and universal—and that truth is always partial and "at issue" rather than being complete and certain.[19]
In this influential work, Lyotard offers the following definition: "Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity towards metanarratives [such as Enlightenment progress or Marxist revolution[2]]".[20] In a society with no unifying narrative, he argues, we are left with heterogeneous, group-specific narratives (or "language games", as adopted from Ludwig Wittgenstein[2]) with no universal perspective from which to adjudicate among them.[21]
According to Lyotard, this introduces a general crisis of legitimacy, a theme he adopts from the philosopher Jürgen Habermas, whose theory of communicative rationality Lyotard rejects.[22][23] While he was particularly concerned with the way that this insight undermines claims of scientific objectivity, Lyotard's argument undermines the entire principle of transcendent legitimization.[24][25] Instead, proponents of a language game must make the case for their legitimacy with reference to such considerations as efficiency or practicality.[2] Far from celebrating the apparently relativistic consequences of this argument, however, Lyotard focused much of his subsequent work on how links among games could be established, particularly with respect to ethics and politics.[26]
The philosophical criticism of Jürgen Habermas
[edit]The philosopher Jürgen Habermas, a prominent critic of philosophical postmodernism, argues in his 1985 work The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity that postmodern thinkers are caught in a performative contradiction, more specifically, that their critiques of modernism rely on concepts and methods that are themselves products of modern reason.[27]
Habermas criticizes these thinkers for their rejection of the subject and their embrace of experimental, avant-garde strategies. He asserts that their critiques of modernism ultimately lead to a longing for the very subject they seek to dismantle. Habermas also takes issue with postmodernists' leveling of the distinction between philosophy and literature. He argues that such rhetorical strategies undermine the importance of argument and communicative reason.[27]
Habermas's critique of postmodernism set the stage for much of the subsequent debate by clarifying some of its key underlying issues. Additionally, according to scholar Gary Aylesworth, "that he is able to read postmodernist texts closely and discursively testifies to their intelligibility", against those who would dismiss them as simple nonsense. His engagement with their ideas has lead some postmodern philosophers, such as Lyotard, to similarly engage with Habermas's criticisms.[27]
Frederic Jameson's Marxist rejoinder
[edit]Nevertheless, the appearance of linguistic relativism inspired an extensive rebuttal by the Marxist critic Fredric Jameson.[28] Building upon the theoretical foundations laid out by the Marxist economist Ernst Mandel[2] and observations in the early work of the French sociologist Jean Baudrillard,[29] Jameson develops his own conception of the postmodern as "the cultural logic of late capitalism" in the form of an enormous cultural expansion into an economy of spectacle and style, rather than the production of goods.[30][2]
Jameson's five symptoms [2]
Richard Rorty's neopragmatism
[edit]Richard Rorty was an American philosopher known for his linguistic form of neopragmatism. Initially attracted to analytic philosophy, Rorty later rejected its representationalism. His major influences include Charles Darwin, Hans Georg Gadamer, G. W. F. Hegel, and Martin Heidegger.[31]
In his Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Rorty challenged the notion of a mind-independent, language-independent reality. He argued that language is a tool used to adapt to the environment and achieve desired ends. This naturalistic approach led him to abandon the traditional quest for a privileged mental power that allows direct access to things-in-themselves.[31]
Instead, Rorty advocated for a focus on imaginative alternatives to present beliefs rather than the pursuit of well-grounded truths. He believed that creative, secular humanism, free from authoritarian assertions about truth and goodness, is the key to a better future. Rorty saw his neopragmatism as a continuation of the Enlightenment project, aiming to demystify human life and replace traditional power relations with those based on tolerance and freedom.[31]
- Roberts, Adam (2000). Frederic Jameson. Routledge.
- Reynolds, Jack. "Jacques Derrida (1930—2004)". Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Retrieved 23 September 2024.
Extra
[edit]According to scholar Stuart Sim, one of the best ways to describe a specifically philosophical conception of postmodernism is as an anti-foundational "scepticism about authority, received wisdom, cultural and political norms and so on", which he says places it within a tradition dating back to ancient Greece.[32]
Postmodernism in architecture was initially marked by a re-emergence of surface ornament, reference to surrounding buildings in urban settings, historical reference in decorative forms (eclecticism), and non-orthogonal angles.[33] Most scholars today agree postmodernism began to compete with modernism in the late 1950s, and gained ascendancy over it in the 1960s.[34]
general characteristics of art (Brooker p.203
Notable figures include Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jean-François Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard, and others. By the 1980s, this spread to America in the work of Richard Rorty and others.[35]
Scholars, however, disagree about whether his later works are intended as science fiction or truthful theoretical claims.[36]
Cite error: There are <ref group=lower-alpha> tags or {{efn}} templates on this page, but the references will not show without a {{reflist|group=lower-alpha}} template or {{notelist}} template (see the help page).
- ^ Aylesworth 2015, Introduction & §2.
- ^ a b c d e f g Buchanan 2018.
- ^ Connor 2004, p. 4.
- ^ Connor 2004, p. 12.
- ^ a b Connor 2004, p. 5.
- ^ Brooker 2003, p. 203.
- ^ Best & Kellner 1991, p. 22.
- ^ Bernstein, Richard J. (1992). The New Constellation: The Ethical-Political Horizons of Modernity / Postmodernity. Polity. p. 11. ISBN 978-0745609201.
- ^ Lévi-Strauss, Claude (1963). Structural Anthropology (I ed.). New York: Basic Books. p. 324. ISBN 0-465-09516-X.
quoting D'Arcy Westworth Thompson states: "To those who question the possibility of defining the interrelations between entities whose nature is not completely understood, I shall reply with the following comment by a great naturalist: In a very large part of morphology, our essential task lies in the comparison of related forms rather than in the precise definition of each; and the deformation of a complicated figure may be a phenomenon easy of comprehension, though the figure itself has to be left unanalyzed and undefined."
- ^ Brooker 2003, p. 205.
- ^ Buchanan 2018b.
- ^ Culler, Jonathan (2008). On deconstruction: theory and criticism after structuralism. London: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-46151-1.
- ^ a b Reynolds.
- ^ a b Kelly, lead section.
- ^ Aylesworth 2015, §4. Productive Difference.
- ^ a b Aylesworth 2015, §6. Hyperreality.
- ^ Connor 2004, pp. 568–69.
- ^ Aylesworth 2015.
- ^ a b Lyotard, J.-F. (1979). The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ISBN 978-0-944624-06-7. OCLC 232943026.
- ^ Lyotard 1984, p. xxiv.
- ^ Aylesworth 2015, §2 The Postmodern Condition.
- ^ Bertens 1995, p. 111.
- ^ Lyotard 1984, pp. 65–66.
- ^ Bertens 1995, pp. 119–121.
- ^ Lyotard 1984, pp. xxiii–xxv.
- ^ Gratton 2018, §§3.2–3.4.
- ^ a b c Aylesworth 2015, §9.
- ^ Bertens 1995, p. 108.
- ^ Connor 2004, p. 3.
- ^ Connor 2004, pp. 3–4.
- ^ a b c Grippe, lead section.
- ^ Sim 2011, p. 3.
- ^ Seah, Isaac, Post Modernism in Architecture
- ^ Huyssen, Andreas (1986). After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. p. 188.
- ^ Cite error: The named reference
Best-Kellner-2001was invoked but never defined (see the help page). - ^ Kellner 2020, §6. Concluding Assessment.