Postmodernism is dead!

…At least that is what some have been saying. But just as God was once declared dead, I wonder if postmodernism, like God, ever existed or was ever alive.

I believe that much was done to raise, to project into and under one name, Postmodernisn, perspectives that were never as afr and wide or unique to a time after modernism and indeed even Modernism represents an idol with a hollow inside.
Any definition I could give of “modernism” or postmodernism will be insufficient and partial, and my argument will be defined by some as a straw man. I thus only direct myself here to modernism as defined by Wikipedia- easy tool with wide-distribution- and do not presume to refute of attack all possible definitions of modernism. That said:
Modernism is a trend of thought which affirms the power of human beings to make, improve, deconstruct and reshape their built and designed environment, with the aid of scientific knowledge, technology and practical experimentation, thus in its essence both progressive and optimistic.”

Wiki also says of postmodernism:
"Postmodernism is an idea that has been extremely controversial and difficult to define among scholars, intellectuals, and historians, because the term implies to many that the modern historical period has passed. "
Because of this, it gives a few candidates:
1- “Others believe the world has changed so profoundly that the term applies to nearly everything, and use postmodernism in a broad cultural sense. People who believe postmodernism is really just an aspect of the modern period may instead use terms such as “late modernism”.
2- “Postmodernism is incredulity towards metanarratives.” Jean-Francois Lyotard”
3- “It’s the combination of narcissism and nihilism that really defines postmodernism,” Al Gore

There are more many more, because it is a term that can be glued to all aspects of life including literature and religion.
But when one considers the recorded history one finds that this is not one event after modernism but a repetition in a cyclic revolution. That is, that thinkers have for centuries, from ancient greece, to the Romans and beyond, into the enlightement, modernity, Comte, positivists, been divided between those who set forth optimistic systems and those who doubt them. The “progress”, or change from one to another system, is an effect of this doubt, this scepticism.
But doubt does not define a time after modernity, nor modernity a time after scepticism. Both co-exist and interact. Just as a person can be optimistic and a pessimist in one life. It is not that one no longer believes in “metanarratives”, but that one no longer believes one certain mat-narrative because of another one one now believes.
The fact that one does not believe in anything, still leaves one with that belief. The paradox, the irony cannot be escaped.

For this reason, it is now easy to find that indeed postmodernism, or late-modernism, is dead, because it was never alive, it was never in existence except for the minds and for the minds of those who had an agenda, and posmodern definetly were political, and who had use for a perspective of history subdivided along these lines. In their vivisection of history they were as optimistic as the most advanced theoretical scientist, though he meant to be “post” that. The fact is that our tendency has been, and probably will be, to be optimistic and pessimistic at once. It seems strange but one’s negativity towards a thing or idea comes from an optimistic attitude towards another idea. If I do not believe in one narrative it is by virtue of another which I do believe. Even my unbelief is still a belief. My atheism a religion, a faith. If there is no end, that in itself becomes an end.

The details changes, but nature remains.

For these reasons, it seems to me, that too much is made about postmodernism and modernism prior to that. Much the same was done with the death of God. Many people wish to get beyond when they have not even arrived at. There was no concerted movement of disbelief by the whole of humanity, just as there was never a collective faith, or belief in metanarratives. The world has always had it’s atheists, and the atheists have had to contend with the believers, and more ironic than that is that the biggest disbeliever in one, say, religion, is often one from a different religion.
It is not because the democritization of the mediums, the activity in the receptors, and all this by technology, that has lead to the demise of such a movement that never wanted to be defined anyway. Modernism never went away and neither did God die. People went to church and still accepted Jesus as their personal savior etc, etc. Same with reality, with truth, and narratives. They remained, and gave way to a new revolution of the eternal wheel of chaos and order, multiplicity and singularity, of expansion and contraction, the ascendancy of one not meaning the obliteration of the Other but the down-turn, provisional and never metaphysical.

That is my narration…

There are pre-modern ideas (eg ‘There is God!’) There are modern ideas (eg ‘All men are equal!’) and there are postmodern ideas (eg ‘Life can be understood in terms of desire!’).

Suffice to say, all three types exist today. But certainly, the third type is not dead.

Foucault’s been dead.Derrida, only recently.

With just those 2 already we’re in trouble!

  • Foucalt was a man with some very precise ideas who STRONGLY resisted categorization (I actually think that WAS one of his ideas) - Technically he would have emerged from the milieu of structuralism but he himself was very explicit that he wasn’t a structuralist and was annoyed when so labeled. I think he would have very strongly rejected the label post modern for himself.

Someone is at the Door seems to be the resident Derrida expert here - so he might know but my guess is Derrida would not have gone for that label either???

The only one who I’ve seen welcoming the label was that fella Lyotard

To me throwing a whole load of French philosophers with almost nothing in common into a bucket called post modernism is just lazy thinking.

  • They all seem to be, very, very roughly, outgrowths of modernism any ways though to call them all modernists would be lazy also by the same token…Handiest just to read people and then make up your mind – though it seems to be a route most don’t go for – and with some of them I can see why!

I would like to know who first started using the term and why!?!?!

kp

Great thread Omar, and I’ve got a response for you. Firstly, an except from one of Lyotard’s later books, which isn’t available online so I hope that you appreciate the time it will take me to type it out:

JF Lyotard, Rewriting Modernity, in The Inhuman, p24-5

So, might we say that we’re only ever in a process of rewriting modernity, rather than embracing some particular historical entity that ‘is’ postmodernity. As such, postmodernity isn’t dead, but rather takes the place of a ghost or spectre, haunting modernity at every turn. Spectral metaphors are probably the most common rhetorical device in ‘postmodern’ philosophy, and this may explain why.

Of course, but one encounters this same sort of problem in ANY argument about ANY historical entity, going all the way back to Aristotle, as Lyotard notes. So, should we feel bad about this? I don’t think so. We should simply be careful because of it.

To me, this is the definition of the Enlightenment, rather than modernity. I wrote, on my aesthetics thread at:
ilovephilosophy.com/phpbb/vi … p?t=151039

Now, this is specifically applied to art, but I think it holds across the broad range of cultures that we’re implicitly discussing, that modernity is a self-reflection, and postmodernity a reflection on that self-reflection.

No offence to you or wikipedia, but the day I ask an American presidential candidate about philosophy is the day I get arrested for trying to assassinate said presidential candidate.

Lyotard’s ‘definition’ remains the benchmark, but as I’ve tried to show in my above citation, even he has reservations and scepticism similar to your own.

This is more or less where I’m at with this - the belief in cyclical modernisms and postmodernisms that is inescapable. I’m trying to remember exactly where I read this theory most explicitly, described as a combination of Nietzsche’s Eternal Recurrence and the Marxist/Hegelian philosophy of struggle. It’s not coming to me, for once, probably because this notion crops up all over the place.

Foucault never called himself a postmodernist (or at least, not in anything that I’ve read of his), and neither did Derrida. This is significant - ‘postmodernist’ is a term largely used by critics of such theorists as Derrida, Foucault, Barthes, Lyotard, Deleuze and so on. Just like ‘Al Qaeda’, in that respect.

It’s also, like the use of the term ‘conspiracy theorist’, an ad-hom/strawman argument.

To my knowledge, the term ‘postmodern’ was first in use circa 1912, but it’s really not an easy word to trace (somewhat ironically, I feel). I’ll tell you now - google is useless regarding such questions.

Cheers for all that Some one - looks like you went to some trouble with it too - I’m in the process of cutting, pasting and printing for study on the bus home!

krossie

Hello SIATD. Long time no read.
Thank you for the paragraphs from Lyotard. It is sort of the ideas in my mind when I read that “postmodernism is dead”, ala Kirby. I hope that you appreciated that I also see the same problem with the “death” of God, and for similar reasons.

— So, might we say that we’re only ever in a process of rewriting modernity, rather than embracing some particular historical entity that ‘is’ postmodernity. As such, postmodernity isn’t dead, but rather takes the place of a ghost or spectre, haunting modernity at every turn. Spectral metaphors are probably the most common rhetorical device in ‘postmodern’ philosophy, and this may explain why.
O- I think that postmodernism is highly marxist and takes the metaphor, I thought, from Marx. But my question is if “modernity” itself is a new entity or idea? Or has it existed before , in another guise, another name, so that in effect, the term “modernity” could possibly be a tool towards a particular end, part of an emancipation narrative. I do not place the french philosophers from pulling such a stunt.
No one, not even Kirby, has actually questioned why postmodernism is no longer as relevant, or why it has gone underground. You say that it is now a ghost, a spectre, but that is to take on face value the propositions in the postulation. When the result, the conclusion, is not reached, then I question the premises before. To say that it is a ghost or a haunt of modernity is yet another narration of emancipation, of liberation from an unspecified “What”. Modernity? That is my question: Is modernity but a vacuous term that simply has a post at the gates of a castle that protects the interests of historicism? Or is modernity a term that applies to a global condition that permeates culture, politics and even science.
To me it seems that modernity is regarded as an over-belief in science, in progress and what it can do. The greatest modern then would be Julian Huxley. Yet to me Huxley is a man that has existed before, and not just in the west. He is a man ordering his reality and making prosnoctications of what he sees. It is religion, and this is why you find the same type of man in ancient Egypt as you may find him 400 or 500 years before the birth of Christ. Yet, this man’s possibility for belief, requires also unbelief, so much like the impregnation you spoke of. Modernity carries with itself it’s own undoing, as well as postmodernity, because there is in one and the other the need for a narration that excludes other narrations and even in the everything-is-an-interpretation-including-this-one, the truth is that in practice that narration excludes by it’s wording other narration.
It is uncertain that everything is uncertain…I think said Pascal. That is reasonable. But the late modernist or post M takes as final that nothing is final. The paradox remains. It appeals then to irony, but it acts like a scientist. Everything is theoretical and experimental, but these are treated with a certainty that negates it’s fluidity and engage in a rigid narration, a narration virtualy impossible when the principles, the premises set, are followed to a logical conclusion.
I am rambling…

— Are there any characteristics of postmodern art/literature that distinguish it from modern art/literature?
O- Depends on who is regarding the book or painting etc. The question is, if the differences are in the work itself or in the eye, the mind, the ear etc, that is appreciating the work. Differences exists in trained subjects that are absent in ordinary persons. So are the diffirences in the works themselves or in the people? And if it is in the people then it is not a necessary difference, but contingent on the education and preferrence of the subject. Once again, it a situation that takes us back and we find it in other discussions, most of all, theological considerations. Because of this prevalence of diversity, I don’t believe that there, in themselves, in the lowest denominator, so to speak, characteristics that make one work postmodern and only postmodern and another anterior to that to all avaiable subjects. Trainned in a certain tradition, a subject will make distinctions. To a certain extent, even I can make rough distinctions, but no set of distinctions seems to be universal and thus it is a social construct, these differences of postmodern and modern and one can simply group them by other structures and orders. What cannot be evaded if the need to structuralize, organize, people, works, into divided phenomena; that there can be distinctions impossible to make is not an option. The characteristics do not exists in themselves but the need for characteristics does.

— Now, this is specifically applied to art, but I think it holds across the broad range of cultures that we’re implicitly discussing, that modernity is a self-reflection, and postmodernity a reflection on that self-reflection.
O- Reflection on self-reflection, however, goes back to the greeks themselves, so I would not call that particular activity modern, antique or postmodern. To say, what you just said above, is simply to tell another story, another tale, full of fury and thunder, but which might very well signify nothing at all outside of the particular mind.
Ingrained in Freud’s and Nietzsche’s legacy is a child-like perspective, a naive perspective that contradicts that hard scepticism it applies to other things. Where else do we find such double-thought? In religion.

— No offence to you or wikipedia, but the day I ask an American presidential candidate about philosophy is the day I get arrested for trying to assassinate said presidential candidate.
O- Wahahaha!!!LMAO. =D>

— Lyotard’s ‘definition’ remains the benchmark, but as I’ve tried to show in my above citation, even he has reservations and scepticism similar to your own.
O- Yes. Thank you. The best philosophers are those with the courage to attack their own convictions and conclusions.

— This is more or less where I’m at with this - the belief in cyclical modernisms and postmodernisms that is inescapable. I’m trying to remember exactly where I read this theory most explicitly, described as a combination of Nietzsche’s Eternal Recurrence and the Marxist/Hegelian philosophy of struggle. It’s not coming to me, for once, probably because this notion crops up all over the place.
O- Well, that is what I am saying: That in all of this, or under all of this “incredulity” there is a credulity living, most naturally and expected, together with it’s opposite. Because of this co-existence and codependency, I simply have abandoned the clarity of the narration of any post, or modern or classical or some other distinction. To me they are all expressions of our common humanity, true today as they have been for centuries and even millenia. Nietzsche is at his best, if I can find a metaphor, in his Human All Too Human, than when he tries to end his nausea with new re-ligions and meta-narrations about Overmen and Eternal anything.