would someone please explain to me postmodernity… what it the postmodern and why is it said to be ‘imoral’ … is postmodernity seen as a negative social movment… or a bad philosophy?
hope u can make heads or tails out of what im trying to ask…cause i sure can’t…
Actually, the way you’ve phrased this is exactly the problem. Postmodernism doesn’t really mean anything. My views are usually grouped under that label however (I’ve given up arguing against the label and just hope that the ideas I want to get across can, I don’t know, outshine the other stuff that seems just plain silly). So, while I can’t define postmodernism, I might be able to help if you can get a little more specific (Davidson, Foucault, Derrida, Rorty and a few others have my utmost respect).
Hmmmm, don’t suppose you want to be a little more specific in what you, personally, mean to be postmodern. Don’t worry about definition. There isn’t one.
In the postmodern world, all is in flux. There are no ‘meta-narratives’, and only piecemeal progress in science and the arts. It is a term which tries to define the confused condition of the world we live in.
Goodbye Hegel, goodbye Marx. Science rules over philosophy, and all Arts are a corrupted by our apathy. Few commentators or artists attempt to confront this world head-on, as it is so complex confused and coincidental. Only through using our imaginations can we come to terms with the vinegar truths that Nietzsche so cruelly barked at us. Bring on Yeats, Keith Tyson and Monty Python.
Really?
Then how do you explain Derrida’s comment,“We will really never be done with Hegel. All that I have done is expand on that point.”
Or Foucault:
“One cannot study the past without Marx.”
or Foucault again:
“When we are done, Hegel will be standing there, waiting paitiently for us.”
Derrida declared himself a follower of Marx, so as to rebutt any grand naratives of the day, namely Fukuyama’s End of History. He was by no means a follower of Marxism or any belief in a universal theory that entails. All ideas can be deconstructed for Derrida, and his siding with Marx was more a homage to his method and approach to his subject, the habit of subverting the basis of any grand theory or idea. Derrida’s admiration of Marx was one of the many humourous ‘hangings of irony’ that he so liked to exhibit and reinforce with seemingly unassailable intellect. The truth of Derrida’s project is to present a school of thought so sovereign as to be capable of tearing apart anything, anything he chooses to tear apart. This is done using the tool of pessimism. It is in my view irresponsible and ‘*at most, a kind of sophisticated doodling of the margins of serious, truth-seeking discourse’.
Brad, why don’t the likes of Derrida or Foucault try to expand on Hegel’s ideas. Apply the finding of various social sciences to his ideas and try to come up with meta-narrative for the modern world. Is this too difficult? Is the world we live in too complex? Is it a fallacy to pin down any universal declaration concerning human nature, which can in turn be used to somehow change the world for the better? I’ve done that myself on this very website.
I do not deny that Derrida and other ‘post-modern’ writers use and admire the ideas of Marx and Hegel, but highlighting that does not negate the fact that the postmodern view of the world sees science as our passage into the world of the unknown, where the grand narratives of the past cannot tell us what the future, the realm of the unpredictable, will turn out to be. Marx, in other words, cannot be regarded as a prophet dispensing incontestable wisdom.
The ‘piecemeal’ approach to advancing our understanding of humanity and the natural world is no longer questioned by anyone other than those like Derrida whose intellect and pessimism combine to somehow lay claim to sovereignty over all that it studies. It’s inaccessibility and plays on words are the real confidence trick. I pity Derrida.
*Stuart Sim
Some of the introductory books that i have read about postmodernism describe one of its aspects as a panache or collage (i.e. a conglomerate). For instance in architecture they mention Las Vegas, where buildings arise with no forethought from the planners as to fitting into the surroundings. Madonna is frequently mentioned, as an artist who eternally recreates herself through varying forms. but this is just one form of the very general, ambiguous word that is postmodernism.
I will try an elaboration on postmodernism. To me postmodernism, if there is a single underlying theme, it is the view that ‘reason’ as traditionally understood cannot solve all the problems that face philosophy. Going back to Descartes, we see a vision of philosophy as that science that will unify all the sciences, we also see a frustration that philosophers have not been able to come to much agreement on any of their conclusions, unlike say mathematicians. Descartes, for several reasons, thought this was a flop, and that even on the biggest questions we can use our reason to come to definitive conclusions, if we proceed with caution through our search.
This goes on for awhile, through various permutations. Kant comes along and believes that he has shown us the definite limits of reason to know any truths about the objective world. After some important reactions to Kant, we end up with the idealists, like Hegel, who taking the Cartesian vision of philosophy to an absurd level (or so postmoderns might argue). Not only can we know everything about the world and our own minds, but we can even know that there is a grand scheme that structures reality and we can know the end that this scheme proceeds towards. Marx falls into the above category also, just in terms of the material dialectic. It are these reasons that Hegel and Marx are important for postmodernism…without an understanding of these dudes, or at least without an understanding of the philosophical landscape of their times, it is tough to see what is going on with the postmoderns.
Nietzsche is arguably the first postmodern…and if not, then the seeds are definitly there in his philosophy. There are a couple of reasons. First, Nietzsche shifts philosophy away from the grand schemes and the ivory tower of reason to the individual. Morality is not to be discovered via reasoning into the structure of the world, but is created by the individual (this is more radical than we now can really see because for us this view is so commonplace). Nietzsche brings ‘man’ down from the pedistal that s/he has enjoyed throughout the history of philosophy, we are now just one animal among others…and really are quite sickly in comparison with much of the rest of nature. Ultimately even reason itself is a kind of construction or projection of our own…one that we can either submit to or challenge. This is part of what Nietzsche means by ‘God is dead’. One could also read this as saying ‘Old school philosophy, the philosohpy of the moderns and the scholastics, is dead’. There is more in Nietzsche, but for the present purposes these are the main seeds.
The early 20th century brought about a revival of reason, through cats like Bertrand Russell and Husserl. It is not just a coincidence that Derrida’s first really significant paper was on Husserl. I think it is important to understand the early century landscape, especially the linguisitic turn, to see postmodernism, but not necessary. The main thing, as I see it, that one needs to have a grasp of from the linguistic turn is the sign-signifer issue. Its basically like expressing a truth about the world for the most part implies a correspondance between language and the world. This for the most part also implies a correspondance between ideas, language as the intermediary, and the world. Remembering Nietzsche (but not referring to any particular postmodern philosopher) we end up with something like this. Reason is the necessary structure of truths (self-contradictories are always false, so forth) but what is reasonable is itself a product of the structures embedded in language. Therefore, truths about the world conform to language and not vice versa. Even more radical than this (if one would think even such is possible) is that langauge itself refers only to langauge, and not to a world in itself or objective reality. What gives a word is meaning is not what it corresponds to in the world, but other words. Thus, it is by difference that meaning happens. Philosophers like Derrida take this idea and run with it, attempting to show that all our truth edifices…all ‘philosophies’ express ‘truths’ by already implicitly setting up their own oppositions to distinguish themselves from. This is the binary oppositions…true/false, appearance/reality, and so forth. For the most part, I think you can probably see some of the implications this has on our conception of Truth and the traditional view of philosophy’s job.
This discussion could go on and on, I surely don’t feel like I could teach postmodernism 101 in a message post. But I would say that I don’t think postmodernism leaves us in as ‘negative’ a state of affairs as it is sometimes believed. If ‘negative’ is to be characterized as man is not provided absolutes by the world, then yes, we are in a negative state of affairs. But I think this price may be worth what we get in return. For one, we don’t end up in a situation where we have closed the book on the questions. All truths, even those in accordance with reason, are open to questioning. This doesn’t mean that we outright reject them…I don’t think Derrida or any other postmodern philosopher that I can think of does this if you read what they are saying carefully enough. It means all truths are subject to dialogue, and all perspectives have equal weight in examining them. Futhermore, even the examining itself is open to examination, as well as the rules that have traditionally governed such examinations. Relativism itself is a thesis based on the type of binary oppositions that Derrida opposes. There are no truths themselves that characterize what postmodernism is, postmodernism is more a perspective on philosophy…and doing philosophy, than it is a system or anything like that. That is why it is perhaps misleading even to refer to postmodernism as ‘postmodernism’.
I am sure there are plenty of philosophers out there that would argue against my short commentary on postmodernism. Postmodernism is not my ‘speciality’, phenomenology is. What I would suggest to someone who really wanted to know what postmodernism is all about is the same I suggest to people who want to know what phenomenology is all about. Read the postmodern philosophers themselves and talk with as many people as you can about what these philosophers are saying. I would also suggest to study the history of philosophy as much as you can, not just from the perspective of what each individual philosopher is saying, but to think of it in the big picture…the history as a continuing narrative…and read the postmoderns with this narrative consciously in the background when you are trying to see what a particular postmodern is getting at.
Trey
and just in case there are any hardcore postmoderns here, I don’t mean that the history is a continuing narrative…that itself is a deep issue for postmodernism…only that I think this is the best way to look at the history at least initially for the person trying to break into postmodern philosophy.
Trey
I’d say that was a pretty good description of the biggies in Postmodernism. Curious if you buy Foucault’s point that, it was his dissatifaction with the phenomenological subject that led him in the direction that he did, toward the disappearance of ‘Man’ as he says in “The Order of Things.”
Actually, the resistance to narrative that you sometimes see is funny. I remember reading a book on Japanese history, “Things Seen and Unseen” by Harry Harootunian. He argues that it is a non-narrative text, but I went running to my prof., “What does he mean by that? It reads like a narrative. Does he mean something different by narrative than I think narrative mean?” My professor just smiled and said, “No, you’re right, it’s a narrative.”
Or as another friend pointed out, “What is all this stuff about non-linear thinking, I can draw lines and connect all these things.”
Narrative doesn’t have to be monolithic, there doesn’t have to be anything like a definitive narrative, but I suspect that narrative as a rhetorical device is far too useful to throw away altogether.
I don’t think it is so much throw away narratives, just as we wouldn’t in our everyday discourse deny many basic truths that we all accept. It is a matter of seeing a narrative for what it is and not making it out to be something more than it is (or so a postmodern might argue). Taking this stance leaves one open to dialouge…other points of view, in a way that absolutes might not.
Trey
----- Many thanks to Treysuttle for that illuminating, informative thread on Postmodernism. Now if you could give me the low-down on Phenomenology so that i could finally understand Sartre… 
I will start a thread on phenomenology and Sartre this afternoon when I get in from work.
Trey
Postmodern or postmodernism is sociological term that is said to refer to a society of new values, lifestyles and artforms. All of which are suggested to have created a whole new cultural characterised spirit and beliefs. (Kirby et al. P226)
New values and beliefs about such things as individuality and the artist as the author. because of this free expression and creative confidence spiritual and beliefs become stronger.
Post modernism could be and as discover quite often is, considered to be in some ways detrimental to society.
My opinion of Postmodernism is that it is what it says. post modern and as such it could not be anything other than what it is. What it is considered as to mean to each individual is just what it is to mean by iitself. It allows the diversity in ways of thinking in societies that today have so much cultural diversity. to be able to live amongst such diversity there has to be the freedom of thinking how one chooses. this to me is postmodernism nothing but of benefit to be and a natural progression from modernism.
Yoda
with some friends, whilst recovering our faculties of reason after inhibeting them with phallic fungi, we were struck by the possibility that postmodernism presents a regress…
that it is detached from the thing as it is itself, and that ‘postmodernism’ becomes fodder for the proverbial barrel to the temple of reason, the head, of post-‘postmodermism’…
or maybe i still aint got that reason thing back? maybe the whole exercise was itself post, beyond, prior to and antecedent of our own innocuous conclusions…
‘very modern art’