Difference between revisions of "Postmodernism" - New World Encyclopedia

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'''Postmodernism''' is a term applied to a wide-ranging set of developments in [[critical theory]], [[philosophy]], [[architecture]], [[art]], [[literature]], and [[culture]], which are generally characterized as either emerging from, in reaction to, or superseding, [[modernism]].  
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'''Postmodernism''' (sometimes abbreviated as '''Po-Mo''') is a term applied to a wide-ranging set of developments in [[critical theory]], [[philosophy]], [[architecture]], [[art]], [[literature]], and [[culture]], which are considered to have emerged from, or superseded, [[modernism]], in reaction to it, soon after the end of [[World War II]], which caused people much disillusionment.  
  
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Postmodernism (sometimes abbreviated '''Pomo'''<ref>other spellings are ''Po-Mo'', ''PoMo'', [http://www9.georgetown.edu/faculty/irvinem/theory/pomo.html The Po-Mo Page], [http://www.mnstate.edu/gracyk/courses/web%20publishing/PomoLectureNotes.htm MN Uni lecture notes], [http://www.fiu.edu/~mizrachs/pomo.html Mizrach, Sociology Miami University] Retrieved December 18, 2007.</ref>)  
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Many theorists agree that we can distinguish between two senses of postmodernism: 1) postmodernism as a reaction to the [[aesthetics|aesthetic]] "modernism" of the first half of the twentieth century in architecture, art, and literature; and 2) postmodernism as a reaction to the long-standing "[[modernity]]" tradition of the [[Enlightenment]] from the eighteenth century. To be distinguished from the former which is more aesthetic, the latter is quite often called "postmodernity," referring to more [[history|historical]] and social aspects of postmodernism. The latter is closely linked with [[post-structuralism]] (cf. [[Jacques Derrida]]'s [[deconstruction]]), insinuating a rejection of the bourgeois, elitist culture of the Enlightenment. Without this distinction, postmodernism may lack a clear central hierarchy or organizing principle, embodying extreme complexity, contradiction, ambiguity, diversity, and interconnectedness or interreferentiality. But, its general features are usually considered to include: a rejection of grand narratives; a rejection of absolute and universal [[truth]]; non-existence of signified; disorientation; a use of [[parody]]; [[simulation]] without the original; late [[capitalism]]; and [[globalization]].
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was originally a reaction to [[modernism]] (not necessarily "post" in the purely temporal sense of "after"). Largely influenced by the disillusionment induced by the [[World War II|Second World War]], postmodernism tends to refer to a cultural, intellectual, or artistic state lacking a clear central hierarchy or organizing principle and embodying extreme complexity, contradiction, ambiguity, diversity, and interconnectedness or interreferentiality.
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{{toc}}
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Postmodernism has invited a wide spectrum of criticisms, from conservatives who feel threatened by its rejection of absolute truth, from [[Marxism|Marxists]] who may tend to be allied with the Enlightenment, and from [[intellectuals]] who cannot make sense of it. It, however, is welcomed by schools such as [[feminism]]. It is even accommodated by Christian [[theology|theologians]] as a good opportunity to develop a more convincing, new theology, and some of the examples include [[Jean-Luc Marion]]'s [[postmetaphysical theology]] and [[John D. Caputo]]'s [[deconstructive theology]] in search of a true [[God]].
  
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[[Postmodernity]] is a derivative referring to non-art aspects of history that were influenced by the new movement, namely the evolutions in society, economy and culture since the 1960s.<ref>Britannica, 2004</ref>. When the idea of a reaction to—or even a rejection of—the movement of [[modernism]] (a late 19th, early 20th centuries art movement) was borrowed by other fields, it became [[synonymous]] in some contexts with postmodernity. The term is closely linked with ''[[Post-structuralism]]'' (cf. [[Jacques Derrida]]) and with modernism, insinuating a rejection of its bourgeois, elitist culture.<ref>Wagner, British, Irish and American Literature, Trier 2002, p. 210-2</ref>
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==A Brief History of the Term "Postmodernism"==
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The question of what postmodernism means is problematic because the notion is complex. [[Ihab Hassan]], one of the first to discuss about postmodernism in the 1960s and 1970s, writes in 2001: "I know less about postmodernism today than I did thirty years ago, when I began to write about it… No consensus obtains on what postmodernism really means."<ref>Ihab Hassan, "From Postmodernism to Postmodernism," ''Philosophy and Literature'' 25:1 (2001).</ref>  
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The [[history|historical]] origins of the term lead back at least to English painter John Watkins Chapman, who was probably the first to use the term "postmodernism." He used it in the 1870s to simply mean what is today understood to be [[Post-Impressionism|post-impressionism]]. In 1934, Spaniard [[Federico de Onis]] used the word ''postmodernismo'' as a reaction against modernist [[poetry]]. In 1939, British historian [[Arnold Toynbee]] adopted the term with an entirely different meaning: the end of the "modern" Western bourgeois order of the last two- or three-hundred-year period. In 1945, Australian art historian Bernard Smith took up the term to suggest a movement of [[social realism]] in painting beyond [[abstraction]]. In the 1950s in America, [[Charles Olson]] used the term in poetry. Only in the 1960s and 1970s was the term more popularized through theorists such as Leslie Fielder and [[Ihab Hassan]].
  
 
==Two Facets of Modernism==
 
==Two Facets of Modernism==
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A good way of understanding postmodernism is by knowing modernism first, because postmodernism seems to have emerged or grown from modernism. If we carefully look at modernism, we realize that it has two different facets, or two different definitions: 1) twentieth-century aesthetic modernism, which emerged during the first half of the twentieth century as a reaction against nineteenth-century traditions such as the Victorian tradition; and 2) the much longer historical tradition of "modernity," which started from the humanistic rationalism of the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, and which was still continuously influential at least till the middle of the twentieth century. Scholars such as David Lyon have made this distinction between the two facets.<ref>David Lyon, ''Postmodernity'' (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1994).</ref> Without knowing this distinction, one's understanding of the meaning of postmodernism can be very unclear.
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Since postmodernism emerged from [[modernism]], it is essential to have some understanding of modernism first, but modernism itself is not a single entity. If we carefully look at modernism, we realize that it has two different facets, or two different definitions: 1) twentieth-century [[aesthetics|aesthetic]] modernism, which emerged during the first half of the twentieth century as a reaction to nineteenth-century traditions such as the [[Victorian Age|Victorian]] tradition; and 2) the much longer [[history|historical]] tradition of "[[modernity]]," which started from the [[humanism|humanistic]] [[rationalism]] of the [[Enlightenment]] of the eighteenth century, and which was still continuously influential till the twentieth century. Theorists such as David Lyon and Mary Klages have made this distinction between the two facets of modernism, and also a resultant distinction between two senses of postmodernism as well.<ref>David Lyon. ''Postmodernity.'' (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1994)</ref><ref>Mary Klages, [http://www.colorado.edu/English/courses/ENGL2012Klages/pomo.html "Postmodernism."] ''English Department, University of Colorado''. Retrieved March 8, 2008.</ref>
  
 
===Twentieth-century aesthetic modernism===
 
===Twentieth-century aesthetic modernism===
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Modernism in this sense was a series of aesthetic movements of wild experimentation in visual arts, [[music]], [[literature]], [[drama]], and [[architecture]] in the first half of the twentieth century. It flourished especially between 1910 to 1930, the period of "high modernism."
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{{main|Modernism}}
  
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Modernism in this sense was rooted in the changes in Western society at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. It was a trend of thought that affirmed the power of [[human beings]] to create, improve, and reshape their environment, with the aid of [[science|scientific]] [[knowledge]], [[technology]], and practical experimentation. Embracing change and the present, it encompassed the works of thinkers who rebelled against nineteenth-century academic and [[historicism|historicist]] traditions, believing the traditional forms of [[art]], architecture, literature, religious [[faith]], [[social organization]], and daily [[life]] were becoming outdated. They directly confronted the new economic, social, and political aspects of an emerging fully industrialized world.  
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Modernism was a series of aesthetic movements of wild experimentation in visual arts, [[music]], [[literature]], [[drama]], and [[architecture]] in the first half of the twentieth century. It flourished especially between 1910 to 1930, the period of "high modernism."
  
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The older ideas that [[history]] and [[civilization]] are inherently progressive, and that progress is always good, came under increasing attack. Arguments arose that not merely were the values of the artist and those of [[society]] different, but that society was antithetical to [[progress]], and could not move forward in its present form. [[Philosopher]]s called into question the previous optimism.  
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Modernism in this sense was rooted in the changes in Western society at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. It was a trend of [[thought]] that affirmed the power of [[human beings]] to create, improve, and reshape their environment, with the aid of [[science|scientific]] [[knowledge]], [[technology]], and practical experimentation. Embracing change and the present, it encompassed the works of thinkers who rebelled against nineteenth-century academic and [[historicism|historicist]] traditions, believing that the traditional forms of [[art]], [[architecture]], literature, [[religion|religious]] [[faith]], social organization, and daily life were becoming "outdated." They directly confronted the new economic, social, and [[politics|political]] aspects of an emerging fully [[industrialization|industrialized]] world.  
  
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Two of the most disruptive thinkers of the period were, in [[biology]], [[Charles Darwin]] and, in [[political science]], [[Karl Marx]]. Darwin's [[theory of evolution]] by [[natural selection]] undermined religious certainty of the general public, and the sense of human uniqueness of the intelligentsia. The notion that human beings were driven by the same impulses as "lower animals" proved to be difficult to reconcile with the idea of an ennobling spirituality. Marx seemed to present a political version of the same proposition: that problems with the economic order were not transient, the result of specific wrong doers or temporary conditions, but were fundamentally contradictions within the "capitalist" system. Both thinkers would spawn defenders and [[schools of thought]] that would become decisive in establishing modernism.
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The older ideas that history and [[civilization]] are inherently [[progressive]], and that [[progress]] is always good, came under increasing attack. Arguments arose that not merely were the values of the artist and those of [[society]] different, but that society was antithetical to progress, and could not move forward in its present form. [[Philosopher]]s called into question the previous [[optimism]].  
  
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Of course, there actually were a few reforming spiritual and theological movements around the same time which also reacted against the nineteenth-century traditions. They include [[Neo-orthodoxy]] by [[Karl Barth]] in Europe, and [[pentecostalism]] and [[fundamentalism]] in America. But, they seem to have been less visible and prevalent than activities of radical aesthetic modernism.
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Two of the most disruptive thinkers of the period were, in [[biology]], [[Charles Darwin]] and, in [[political science]], [[Karl Marx]]. Darwin's theory of [[evolution]] by [[natural selection]] undermined religious certainty of the general public, and the sense of human uniqueness among the [[intelligentsia]]. The notion that human beings were driven by the same impulses as "lower animals" proved to be difficult to reconcile with the idea of an ennobling spirituality. Marx seemed to present a political version of the same proposition: that problems with the economic order were not transient, the result of specific wrongdoers or temporary conditions, but were fundamentally contradictions within the "capitalist" system. Both thinkers would spawn defenders and schools of thought that would become decisive in establishing [[modernism]].
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Of course, there actually were a few reforming spiritual and [[theology|theological]] movements around the same time which also reacted against the nineteenth-century traditions. They include [[Neo-orthodoxy]] by [[Karl Barth]] in Europe, and [[pentecostalism]] and [[fundamentalism]] in America. But, they seem to have been less visible and less prevalent than activities of radical aesthetic modernism.
 
   
 
   
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Twentieth-century aesthetic modernism took diverse forms such as surrealism, dadaism, cubism, expressionism, and pimitivism. These forms were apparently immediate reactions against the Victorian valuse such as bourgeois domesticity, duty, work, decorum, referentiality, utilitarianism, industry, and realism. Some of the forms of aesthetic modernism naturally resemble Romanticism, which was rejected in the Victorian period. According to Dino Felluga, some of the features of modernist aesthetic work include:<ref>Dino Felluga, [http://www.cla.purdue.edu/English/theory/postmodernism/ "Introduction to Postmodernism."] Retrieved March 5, 2008.</ref>
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Twentieth-century aesthetic modernism took diverse forms such as [[surrealism]], [[dadaism]], [[cubism]], [[expressionism]], and [[primitivism]]. These forms were apparently immediate reactions to the [[Victorian Era|Victorian]] values such as bourgeois domesticity, duty, work, decorum, referentiality, [[utilitarianism]], industry, and [[realism]]. Some of the forms of aesthetic modernism naturally resemble [[Romanticism]], which was rejected in the Victorian period. According to Dino Felluga, the features of modernist aesthetic work include:<ref>Dino Felluga, [http://www.cla.purdue.edu/English/theory/postmodernism/ "Introduction to Postmodernism."] Retrieved March 5, 2008.</ref>
  
 
# Self-reflexivity (as in [[Pablo Picasso|Picasso]]'s painting "Women in the Studio").
 
# Self-reflexivity (as in [[Pablo Picasso|Picasso]]'s painting "Women in the Studio").
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# An exploration of psychological and subjective states (as in expressionism or stream-of-consciousnesswritings such as [[Virginia Woolf]]'s ''To the Lighthouse'').
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# An exploration of [[psychology|psychological]] and subjective states (as in [[expressionism]] or stream-of-consciousness writings such as [[Virginia Woolf]]'s ''To the Lighthouse'').
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# Alternative ways of thinking about representation (as in cubism).
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# Alternative ways of thinking about representation (as in [[cubism]]).
 
# A breakdown in generic distinction (as in between poetry and prose).
 
# A breakdown in generic distinction (as in between poetry and prose).
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# Fragmentation in form and representation (as in [[T. S. Eliot]]'s poem "The Waste Land").
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# [[Fragmentation]] in form and representation (as in [[T. S. Eliot]]'s poem "The Waste Land").
 
# Extreme ambiguity and simultaneity in structure (as in [[William Faulkner]]'s multiply-narrated stories such as ''The Sound and the Fury'').
 
# Extreme ambiguity and simultaneity in structure (as in [[William Faulkner]]'s multiply-narrated stories such as ''The Sound and the Fury'').
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# Some experimentation in the breakdown between high and low forms (as in Eliot's and [[James Joyce]]'s inclusion of folk and pop-cultural material).
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# Some experimentation in the breakdown between high and low forms (as in [[dadaism]] or [[T.S. Eliot]]'s and [[James Joyce]]'s inclusion of folk and pop-cultural material).
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# The use of parody and irony (as in surrealism, dadaism, or Joyce's ''Ulysses'').
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# The use of [[parody]] and [[irony]] (as in [[surrealism]], [[dadaism]], or James Joyce's ''Ulysses'').
  
 
==="Modernity" since the Enlightenment===
 
==="Modernity" since the Enlightenment===
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Modernism in this second definition can be traced back to the Enlightenment, which was a humanistic reaction in the eighteenth century against the premodern, medieval type of religious dogmatism which could still be found in Lutheran and Calvinist scholasticism, Jesuit scholasticism, and the theory of the divine right of kings in the Church of England in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. If this religous dogmatism was centering on its authoritarian use of God, the Enlightenment was centering on the dignity of human beings. The Enlightenment tradition has involved a long history of philosophical, cultural, social and political development since its beginning, much longer and older than twentieth-century aesthetic modernism, and it is quite often called "modernity."<ref>David Lyon, ''Postmodernity'' (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1994.</ref> Mary Klages lists basic features of the Enlightenment as follows:<ref>Marry Kalages [http://www.colorado.edu/English/courses/ENGL2012Klages/pomo.html "Postmodernism."] Retrieved March 5, 2008.</ref>
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{{main|Modernity}}
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In order to grasp an idea of what the "postmodernism" movement (in all its variations) is reacting against, one must first have an understanding of the definitive elements of "modernism."
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Modernism in the second definition can be traced back to the Enlightenment, which was a humanistic reaction in the eighteenth century to the premodern, medieval type of religious [[dogmatism]] which could still be found in [[Lutheranism|Lutheran]] and [[Calvinism|Calvinist]] scholasticism, [[Society of Jesus|Jesuit]] scholasticism, and the theory of the [[divine right of kings]] in the [[Church of England]] in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Of course, against this premodern type of religious dogmatism, there was another, religiously more profound, reaction in the eighteenth century, expressing itself in [[Pietism]] and [[John Wesley]]'s [[Methodism]]. But the humanistic tradition of the Enlightenment was more influential than that.  
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Since its beginning, this Enlightenment tradition has a long history of [[philosophy|philosophical]], cultural, social and [[politics|political]] development until most of the twentieth century, much longer and older than twentieth-century aesthetic modernism, and it is quite often called "modernity."<ref>Lyon, 1994</ref> <ref>Klages, [http://www.colorado.edu/English/courses/ENGL2012Klages/pomo.html "Postmodernism."] Retrieved March 8, 2008.</ref> This "modernity" tradition of the Enlightenment stressed the importance of the rational human self, objective [[truth]] or [[law]], order, progress, etc., and it was behind most of the nineteenth century traditions. So, when the limitations of the nineteenth century were felt, "modernity" served as an indirect background against which twentieth-century aesthetic modernism sprang. When the limitations of "modernity" were more directly felt later in the twentieth century, it issued in a reaction called postmodernism, which, as will be explained below, is of a second kind, i.e., "postmodernity."
  
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# There is a stable, coherent, knowable self. This self is conscious, rational, autonomous, and universal — no physical conditions or differences substantially affect how this self operates.  
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Clear thinking professor [[Mary Klages]], author of ''Literary Theory: A Guide for the Perplexed,'' lists basic features of "modernity" since the Enlightenment as follows:<ref>Mary Klages [http://www.colorado.edu/English/courses/ENGL2012Klages/pomo.html "Postmodernism."] Retrieved March 8, 2008.</ref>
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# This self knows itself and the world through reason, or rationality, posited as the highest form of mental functioning, and the only objective form.
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# The mode of knowing produced by the objective rational self is "science," which can provide universal truths about the world, regardless of the individual status of the knower.
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# There is a stable, coherent, knowable self. This self is conscious, rational, [[autonomy|autonomous]], and universal—no physical conditions or differences substantially affect how this self operates.  
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# This self knows itself and the world through [[reason]], or rationality, posited as the highest form of mental functioning, and the only objective form.
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# The mode of knowing produced by the objective rational self is "[[science]]," which can provide universal truths about the world, regardless of the individual status of the knower.
 
# The knowledge produced by science is "truth," and is eternal.
 
# The knowledge produced by science is "truth," and is eternal.
 
# The knowledge/truth produced by science (by the rational objective knowing self) will always lead toward progress and perfection. All human institutions and practices can be analyzed by science (reason/objectivity) and improved.
 
# The knowledge/truth produced by science (by the rational objective knowing self) will always lead toward progress and perfection. All human institutions and practices can be analyzed by science (reason/objectivity) and improved.
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# Reason is the ultimate judge of what is true, and therefore of what is right, and what is good (what is legal and what is ethical). Freedom consists of obedience to the laws that conform to the knowledge discovered by reason.  
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# Reason is the ultimate judge of what is true, and therefore of what is right, and what is good (what is legal and what is ethical). [[Freedom]] consists of obedience to the laws that conform to the knowledge discovered by reason.  
 
# In a world governed by reason, the true will always be the same as the good and the right (and the beautiful); there can be no conflict between what is true and what is right (etc.).
 
# In a world governed by reason, the true will always be the same as the good and the right (and the beautiful); there can be no conflict between what is true and what is right (etc.).
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# Science thus stands as the paradigm for any and all socially useful forms of knowledge. Science is neutral and objective; scientists, those who produce scientific knowledge through their unbiased rational capacities, must be free to follow the laws of reason, and not be motivated by other concerns (such as money or power).
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# Science thus stands as the paradigm for any and all socially useful forms of [[knowledge]]. Science is neutral and objective; scientists, those who produce scientific knowledge through their unbiased rational capacities, must be free to follow the laws of reason, and not be motivated by other concerns (such as money or power).
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# Language, or the mode of expression used in producing and disseminating knowledge, must be rational also. To be rational, language must be transparent; it must function only to represent the real/perceivable world which the rational mind observes. There must be a firm and objective connection between the objects of perception and the words used to name them (between signifier and signified).
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# [[Language]], or the mode of expression used in producing and disseminating knowledge, must be rational also. To be rational, language must be transparent; it must function only to represent the real/perceivable world which the rational mind observes. There must be a firm and objective connection between the objects of perception and the words used to name them (between signifier and signified).
  
 
==Two Senses of Postmodernism==
 
==Two Senses of Postmodernism==
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Correstponding to the two distinct facets of modernism, there are two different senses of postmodernism: 1) postmodernism as a reaction to twentieth-century aesthetic modernism; and 2) postmodernism as a reaction to the "modernity" tradition of the Enlightenment. In order to be distinguished from the former, the latter is quite often called "postmodernity."<ref>David Lyon, ''Postmodernity'' (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1994), 7.</ref>
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Corresponding to the two different facets of modernism, there are two distinguishable senses of postmodernism: 1) postmodernism as a reaction to twentieth-century [[aesthetics|aesthetic]] [[modernism]]; and 2) postmodernism as a reaction to the "[[modernity]]" tradition of the [[Enlightenment]]. In order to be distinguished from the former, the latter is quite often called "postmodernity."<ref>Klages, [http://www.colorado.edu/English/courses/ENGL2012Klages/pomo.html "Postmodernism."] Retrieved March 8, 2008.</ref>
  
 
===A reaction to aesthetic modernism===
 
===A reaction to aesthetic modernism===
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Postmodernism as a reaction to twentieth-century aesthetic modernism emerged soon after [[World War II]]. It still carried most of the features of twentieth-century aesthetic modernism. So, some have argued that it is essentially just an outgrowth of modernism, and not a separate movement. But, there is a fundamental difference. It is that while aesthetic modernism had presented fragmentation, for example, as something tragic to be lamented (as in Eliots' "The Waste Land"), postmodernism no longer laments it but rather celebrates it. Thus, postmodernism is inclined to stay with meaninglessness, playing with nonsense. Dino Felluga sees this difference and lists some of the things "that distinguish postmodern aesthetic work from modernist work" as follows:<ref>Felluga, [http://www.cla.purdue.edu/English/theory/postmodernism/ "Introduction to Postmodernism."] Retrieved March 5, 2008.</ref>
  
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# Extreme self-reflexivity, more playful and even irrelevant (as in pop artist Roy Lichtenstein's "Masterpiece" or architect Frank Gehry's Nationale-Nederlanden Building in [[Prague]]).
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# Irony and parody (many examples in pop culture and media advertising). Regarding how to assess it, postmodern theorists are divided. While Linda Hutcheon, for example, values parody as a postmodern way to resist all ideological positions,<ref>Linda Hutcheon. ''The Politics of Postmodernism.'' (New York: Routledge, 1989).</ref> [[Marxism|Marxist]] critic Fredric Jameson characterizes it as "blank parody" or "pastiche" without any motive or impulse in the dystopic postmodern age in which we have lost our connection to history.<ref>Fredric Jameson. ''Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.'' {Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991).</ref> 
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# A breakdown between high and low [[culture|cultural]] forms in more immediately understandable ways (as in [[Andy Warhol]]'s painting for Campbell's Tomato Soup cans).
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# Retro. It is to use styles and fashions from the past with fascination but completely out of their original context (as in postmodern [[architecture]] in which medieval, [[baroque]], and modern elements are often juxtaposed). Fredric Jameson and [[Jean Baudrillard]] tend to regard it as a symptom of our loss of connection to [[history]] in which the history of aesthetic styles and fashions displaces real history.
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# A further questioning of grand narratives (as in Madonna videos such as "Like a Prayer" and "Material Girl," which question the grand narratives of traditional [[Christianity]], [[capitalism]], etc.).
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# Visuality and the simulacrum vs. temporality. The predominance of visual [[media]] (tv, film, media advertising, the [[computer]]) has lead to the use of visual forms (as in Art Spiegelman's graphic novel ''Maus: A Surviver's Tale'' through the medium of comics). Visuality also explains some other related features of aesthetic postmodernism: a more breakdown between high and low cultural forms, and a retro. Baudrillard and others have argued that a retro involves copies ("simulacra") of the past without any connection to real past history, blurring the distinction between representation and temporal reality.<ref>Jean Baudrillard. ''Simulacra and Simulation,'' trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1994).</ref>
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# Late capitalism whose dominance is generally feared (as in the predominance of [[paranoia]] narratives in [[movie]]s such as "Blade Runner" and "the Matrix"). This fear is aided by advancements in technology, especially surveillance technology, which creates the sense that we are always being watched.
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# Disorientation (as in MTV or those films that seek to disorient the viewer completely through the revelation of a truth that changes everything that came before).
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# Return of orality (based on an influx of oral media sources such as tv, film, and radio).
  
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Postmodernism in this sense was much discussed in the 1960s and 1970s by theorists such as Leslie Fielder and [[Ihab Hassan]],<ref>See, for example, Leslie Fiedler, "The New Mutants," ''Partisan Review'' 32 (4) (Fall 1965); Ihab Hassan, "The Literature of Silence," ''Encounter'' 28 (1) (January 1967).</ref> although Hassan gradually extended his discussion to a general critique of Western [[culture]], somewhat dealing with postmodernism in the other sense as well. Many other theorists such as Baudrillard, Jameson, and Hutcheson later joined the discussion on postmodernism in the first sense, perhaps having in mind postmodernism in the other sense as well.
  
 
==="Postmodernity": a reaction to modernity===
 
==="Postmodernity": a reaction to modernity===
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Up until the 1970s the discussion on postmodernism was generally confined to postmodernism in its first sense. In 1980, however, [[Jürgen Habermas]]'s lecture on "Modernity: An Unfinished Project"<ref>Jürgen Habermas, "Modernity: An Unfinished Project," in ''Habermas and the Unfinished Project of Modernity: Critical Essays on The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity,'' ed. Maurizio Passerin d'Entrèves and Seyla Benhabib. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997).</ref> helped bring a shift in the discussion from postmodernism in its first sense (i.e., a reaction to twentieth-century aesthetic modernism) to postmodernism in the second sense (i.e., postmodernity), ironically because of its strong defense of modernity against postmodernity. Of course, the debate on modernity versus postmodernity had already started with the involvement of critics such as [[Martin Heidegger]], [[Michel Foucault]], [[Jean-François Lyotard]], [[Richard Rorty]], and [[Jacques Derrida]] in favor of postmodernity, as they felt that the modernity tradition of the [[Enlightenment]] was in crisis because of the emergence of problems such as [[alienation]] and exploitation within that tradition in spite of its original promise of positive cultural and social development. But, when Habermas was trying to defend modernity as an "unfinished project" we should not abandon yet, it prompted those who were in favor of postmodernity to react. Since then, a large volume of [[literature]] has continued to snowball, focusing on postmodernity as the more important facet of postmodernism.
  
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==Origins in architecture==
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Habermas now became the target of criticism especially from Lyotard, who published ''The Postmodern Condition'' in English in 1984, his best-known and most influential work.<ref>Jean-François Lyotard. ''The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge,'' trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).</ref> Lyotard declared the end of the Enlightenment and rejected its tradition of "grand narrative," a totalistic, universal theory which promises to explain and solve all problems by one set of ideas.
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{{Main|Postmodern architecture}}
 
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The movement of Postmodernism began with [[architecture]], as a reaction against the perceived blandness and hostility present in the Modern movement. [[Modern Architecture]] as established and developed by masters such as [[Walter Gropius]] and [[Philip Johnson]] was focused on the pursuit of an ideal perfection, harmony of form and function<Ref>Sullivan, Louis. "The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered,” published Lippincott's Magazine (March 1896).</ref> and dismissal of frivolous ornament<Ref>Loos, Adolf. "Ornament and Crime,” published 1908.</ref>. Critics of modernism argued that the attributes of perfection and minimalism themselves were subjective, and pointed out anachronisms in modern thought and questioned the benefits of its philosophy.<ref>Venturi, et al.</ref> Definitive postmodern architecture such as the work of [[Michael Graves]] rejects the notion of a 'pure' form or 'perfect' [[architectonic]] detail, instead conspicuously drawing from all methods, materials, forms and colors available to architects. Postmodern architecture began the reaction against the almost totalizing qualities of Modernist thought, favoring personal preferences and variety over objective, ultimate truths or principles. It is this atmosphere of criticism, skepticism and subjectivity that defines the postmodern philosophy.
 
  
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Later, the term was applied to several movements, including in art, music, and literature, that reacted against modern movements, and are typically marked by revival of traditional elements and techniques.<ref>Merriam Webster's Collegiate Dictionary 2004</ref> [[Postmodernism in architecture]] is marked by the re-emergence of surface ornament, reference to surrounding buildings in urban architecture, historical reference in decorative forms, and non-orthogonal angles. It may be a response to the modernist architectural movement known as the [[International Style]].  
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After summarizing modernity in terms of order and rationality, Mary Klages lists some of the basic characteristics of postmodernity over against it, as follows:<ref>Klages [http://www.colorado.edu/English/courses/ENGL2012Klages/pomo.html "Postmodernism."] Retrieved March 8, 2008.</ref>
  
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When used in other contexts, it is a concept without a universally accepted, short and simple definition; in a variety of contexts it is used to describe social conditions, movements in the arts, and scholarship (including criticism) in ''reaction to [[modernism]]''.
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# Postmodernity is, as is expressed especially by Lyotard, the critique of grand narratives, the awareness that such narratives in favor of "order" serve to mask the contradictions and instabilities that are inherent in any social organization or practice even including Marxist society. It rejects grand narratives about large-scale or global universal concepts in favor of more situational and provisional "mini-narratives" about small practices and local events.
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# There are only signifiers. Signifieds do not exist.
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# This means that there are only copies, i.e., what [[Baudrillard]] calls "simulacra," and that there are no originals. For example, cds and music recordings have no original. Related to this is the concept of [[virtual reality]], a reality created by a computer [[simulation]] game, for which there is no original.
 +
# [[Knowledge]] is not good for its own sake. Its functionality or utility is more important.
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# Knowledge is also distributed, stored, and arranged differently thought the emergence of computer technology, without which it ceases to be knowledge. The important thing about knowledge is not to assess it as [[truth]] (its technical quality), as goodness or [[justice]] (its ethical quality), or as [[beauty]] (its aesthetic quality), but rather to see who decides what knowledge is, and who knows what needs to be decided. In other words, says Lyotard, knowledge follows the paradigm of a [[language]] game, as laid out by [[Wittgenstein]].
  
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===Notable philosophical and literary roots===
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'''Deconstruction:'''
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{{main|postmodern literature}}
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{{Main|Deconstruction}}
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Thinkers in the mid and late 19th century and early 20th century, like [[Søren Kierkegaard]] and [[Friedrich Nietzsche]], through their argument against objectivity, and emphasis on skepticism (especially concerning social morals and norms), laid the groundwork for the [[existentialism|existentialist]] movement of the 20th century. Other notable precursors of postmodernism include [[Laurence Sterne]]'s novel ''[[Tristram Shandy]]'', [[Alfred Jarry]]'s [['Pataphysics]], and the work of [[Lewis Carroll]]. Art and literature of the early part of the 20th century play a significant part in shaping the character of postmodern culture.  [[Dadaism]] attacked notions of high art in an attempt to break down the distinctions between high and low culture; [[Surrealism]] further developed concepts of Dadaism to celebrate the flow of the subconscious with influential techniques such as [[surrealist automatism|automatism]] and nonsensical juxtapositions (evidence of Surrealisms influence on postmodern thought can be seen in Foucault's and Derrida's references to [[Rene Magritte]]'s experiments with signification). Some other significant contributions to postmodern culture from literary figures include the following: [[Jorge Luis Borges]] experimented in [[metafiction]] and [[magical realism]]; [[William S. Burroughs]] wrote the prototypical postmodern novel, ''Naked Lunch'' and developed the [[cut up]] method (similar to [[Tristan Tzara]]'s "How to Make a Dadaist Poem") to create other novels such as ''[[Nova Express]]''; [[Samuel Beckett]] attempted to escape the shadow of [[James Joyce]] by focusing on the failure of language and humanity's inability to overcome its condition, themes later to be explored in such works as ''[[Waiting for Godot]]''. Writers such as [[Jean-Paul Sartre]] and [[Albert Camus]] drew heavily from Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, and other previous thinkers, and brought about a new sense of subjectivity, and forlornness, which greatly influenced contemporary thinkers, writers, and artists. [[Karl Barth]]'s [[fideist]] approach to theology and lifestyle, brought an irreverence for [[reason]], and the rise of [[subjectivity]]. [[Postcolonialism]] after [[World War II]] contributed to the idea that one cannot have an objectively superior lifestyle or belief. This idea was taken further by the [[anti-foundationalism|anti-foundationalist]] philosophers: [[Martin Heidegger|Heidegger]], then [[Ludwig Wittgenstein]], then [[Jacques Derrida|Derrida]], who examined the fundamentals of knowledge; they argued that rationality was neither as sure nor as clear as [[modernists]] or [[rationalism|rationalists]] assert.  Both World Wars contributed to postmodernism; it is with the end of the [[Second World War]] that recognizably postmodernist attitudes begin to emerge.
 
  
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==Overview==
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What should be added to the list as an important aspect of postmodernity is [[Jacques Derrida]]'s project of [[deconstruction]] as an attempt to criticize what is called logocentrism beyond text.
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{{main|Modernism}}
 
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Postmodernism is a movement of ideas arising from, but also critical of elements of [[modernism]]. Modernism describes a series of reforming cultural movements in [[art]] and [[architecture]], [[music]], [[literature]], and the [[applied arts]] which emerged in the three decades before 1914.
 
  
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It is possible to identify the burgeoning anti-establishment movements of the 1960s as the constituting event of postmodernism. The theory gained some of its strongest ground early on in French academia. In 1971, the Arab-American Theorist [[Ihab Hassan]] was one of the first to use the term in its present form (though it had been used by many others before him, [[Charles Olson]] for example, to refer to other literary trends) in his book: ''The Dismemberment of Orpheus: Toward a Postmodern Literature''; in it, Hassan traces the development of what he called "literature of silence" through [[Marquis de Sade]], [[Franz Kafka]], [[Ernest Hemingway]], Beckett, and many others, including developments such as the [[Theatre of the Absurd]] and the [[nouveau roman]]. In 1979 [[Jean-François Lyotard]] wrote a short but influential work ''[[The Postmodern Condition|The Postmodern Condition: A report on knowledge]]''. Also, [[Richard Rorty]] wrote ''[[Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature]]'' (1979). [[Jean Baudrillard]], [[Michel Foucault]], and [[Roland Barthes]] are also influential in 1970s postmodern theory.
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The term "deconstruction," coined by Derrida, came from [[Heidegger]], who called for the destruction or deconstruction (the German "Destruktion" connotes both English words) of the history of [[ontology]]. In later usage, "deconstruction" became an important textual "occurrence." According to Derrida, the project of deconstruction implies that there is no intrinsic essence to a text, merely the "play" of difference (which he dubbed ''différance'' to capture the French sense of the term meaning both "to differ" and "to defer").  
  
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Post-modernism has been described as sharing the same essential project as Modernism, but without sharing the same optimism in accomplishment of those goals. Because it shares much of the same perspective, some have argued that it is essentially just an outgrowth of modernism, and not a separate movement. They view it as simply a period following upon modernism; a hybrid variety of it; or an extension of modernism into contemporary times; and therefore not a separate period or idea which represents a departure from the theories of art familiar to us from [[Igor Stravinsky|Stravinsky]], [[Thomas Mann|Mann]], [[Wassily Kandinsky|Kandinsky]], [[Piet Mondrian|Mondrian]] and [[Charles Baudelaire|Baudelaire]].
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A deconstruction is created when the "deeper" substance of text opposes the text's more "superficial" form. This idea is not unique to Derrida but is related to the idea of [[hermeneutics]] in literature; intellectuals as early as [[Plato]] asserted it and so did modern thinkers such as [[Leo Strauss]]. Derrida's argument is that deconstruction proves that texts have multiple meanings, and that the "violence" between the different meanings of text may be elucidated by close textual analysis. According to Derrida, deconstruction is not a method or a tool but an occurrence within the text itself. Writings ''about'' deconstruction are therefore referred to in academic circles as ''deconstructive readings.''
  
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Those who emphasize the break between the two focus on the element within postmodernism that is critical of the modernist belief in progress and the ultimate achievement of its [[humanism|humanist]] goals, arguing either that there is something fundamentally different about the transmission of meaning in postmodern works of art; or else that there inheres in modernism certain fundamental flaws in its epistemology.
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Deconstruction is far more important to postmodernism than its seemingly narrow focus on ''text'' might imply. According to Derrida, therefore, one consequence of deconstruction is that the text may be defined so broadly as to encompass not just written words but the entire spectrum of [[symbol]]s and [[phenomenon|phenomena]] within Western thought. To Derrida, a result of deconstruction is that no [[Western philosophy|Western philosophers]] have been able to escape successfully from this large web of text and reach that which is "signified," which they have imagined to exist "just beyond" the text.
  
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In this regard, postmodernism shares a similar relationship to modernism as [[post-structuralism]] shares wtih [[structuralism]]. It is a shift in orientation. The term applies particularly well to revisionist and deconstructive literature and visual art. Postmodernist scholars argue have noted the shift from belief in a modernist progressive [[narrative]] to [[meta-narrative]] and from belief in the "grand theories" such as [[Marxism]] to a recognition of the problem of [[hegemony]]; in the arts it emphasizes the breaking of traditional frames of genre, structure and stylistic unity; and the overthrowing of categories that are the result of [[logocentrism]] and other forms of artificially imposed order. Scholars who accept the division of postmodernity as a distinct period believe that society has collectively eschewed modern ideals and instead adopted ideas that are rooted in the reaction to the restrictions and limitations of those ideas, and that the present is therefore a new historical period. While the characteristics of postmodern life are sometimes difficult to grasp, most postmodern scholars point to concrete and visible technological and economic changes that they claim have brought about the new types of thinking.
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===Relationship of the two: the same postmodern pie===
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The two different senses of postmodernism are reactions to the two different facets of modernism, respectively. One can observe that the reaction of postmodernity to modernity seems to be more radical than that of aesthetic postmodernism to twentieth-century aesthetic modernism, for whereas postmodernity is a big leap from modernity, aesthetic postmodernism still resembles twentieth-century aesthetic modernism at least in some external ways. Aesthetic modernism was already a very progressive movement in the first half of the twentieth century; so, aesthetic postmodernism, reacting to it, does not have to be a very big leap.  
  
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Still, there is a great deal of disagreement over whether or not recent technological and cultural changes represent a new historical period, or merely an extension of the modern one. Complicating matters further, others have argued that even the postmodern era has already ended, with some commentators asserting culture has entered a [[post-postmodern]] period. In his essay "[http://www.philosophynow.org/issue58/58kirby.htm The Death of Postmodernism and Beyond]," Alan Kirby has argued that we now inhabit an entirely new cultural landscape, which he calls "pseudo-modernism".<ref>{{cite journal | last= Kirby | first = Alan | authorlink = Alan Kirby | title = The Death of Postmodernism And Beyond | journal = Philosophy Now | issue = 58 | pages = 34-37 | date = November/December 2006 | publisher = Philosophy Documentation Center | url = http://www.philosophynow.org/issue58/58kirby.htm | id = ISSN: 0961-5970 | accessdate = 2007-03-27 }} Retrieved December 18, 2007.</ref> This idea has been extended by A. Carlill and S. Willis, with the latter describing postmodernism as "more the rough outline of a set of self-referential ideals than a genuine cultural movement." <ref>{{cite journal | last= Willis| first = S.| authorlink = S. Willis | title = Cultural Disparity and the Rise of the Individual | journal = Warwick Philosophy Review | issue = 12 | pages = 42-51 | date = August 2007 | publisher = Warwick University}}</ref>
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However, it is safe to say that the two different senses of postmodernism cohere and are not separate, even though they are originally two different reactions to the two different facets of modernism, respectively. Timewise, they both started soon after [[World War II]]. In terms of content as well, they concur in many respects. They interact, and "the postmodern turn can result from the interaction between" the two "in the postmodern pie."<ref>Craig Bartholomew, [http://www.biblicalstudies.org.uk/pdf/scholarship_bartholomew.pdf "Post/Late? Modernity as the Context for Christian Scholarship Today."] Retrieved March 10, 2008.</ref> One good example of this interaction is references made by Foucault and Derrida to Belgian artist [[René Magritte]]'s experiments with signification, with their appreciative understanding of Magritte's suggestion that no matter how realistically the artist can depict an item, verisimilitude is still an artistic strategy, a mere representation of the thing, not the thing itself.<ref>For example, Michel Foucault, ''This Is Not a Pipe,'' trans. James Harkness (University of California Press, 1983); and Jacques Derrida, ''The Truth in Painting,'' trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 1987).</ref>
  
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==Development of postmodernism==
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The interaction of the two has resulted in a convergence of them also. Today, as some of the general characteristics of postmodernism as a whole, the following points in more popular terms are mentioned:
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{{main|The development of postmodernism}}
 
  
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# No absolute truth.
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# No absolute [[ethics|ethical]] standard. Hence the cause of [[feminism|feminists]] and [[homosexuality|homosexuals]] should also be tolerated.
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# No absolute [[religion]]. This means to promote religious inclusivism. It usually leans toward the [[New Age]] religion.
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# Globalization. There is no absolute nation. National boundaries hinder human communication.
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# Pro-environmentalism. Western society is blamed for the destruction of the environment.
  
 +
==Criticizing Postmodernism==
  
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Interestingly, postmodernism has invited a wide spectrum of criticisms, not only from conservatives but also from [[Marxism|Marxist]] scholars and other intellectuals.
  
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====Philosophical Movements and contributors====
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===Conservative criticisms===
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<blockquote style="background: white; border: 0px solid black; padding: 1em;">
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The term "postmodernism" is sometimes used to describe tendencies in society that are held to be antithetical to traditional systems of [[morality]]. Elements of the [[Christian Right]], in particular, have interpreted postmodern society to be synonymous with moral [[relativism]] and contributing to deviant behavior. Conservative [[Christianity|Christians]] also criticize postmodernism of being a serious challenge to scripture, [[creed]]s and confessions, and ecclesiastical tradition, which they regard as foundations of their [[faith]]. [[Islam|Muslim]] [[fundamentalism]], too, dislikes postmodernity in much the same way, even banning postmodern books such as [[Salman Rushdie]]'s ''The Satanic Verses.''
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{| border="1" cellpadding="1" cellspacing="0" align="center"
 
−
|-
 
−
! style="background:#ECE9EF;" | Influencer
 
−
! style="background:#FFF6D6;"|Year
 
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! colspan="2" style="background:#EEF6D6;" | Influence
 
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|-
 
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|'''[[Karl Barth]] '''
 
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|c.1930
 
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|[[Fideism|fideist]] approach to theology brought a rise in subjectivity
 
−
|-
 
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|'''[[Martin Heidegger]] '''
 
−
|c.1930
 
−
|rejected the philosophical grounding of the concepts of "subjectivity" and "objectivity"
 
−
|-
 
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|'''[[Ludwig Wittgenstein]]'''
 
−
|c.1950
 
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|[[anti-foundationalism]], on [[certainty]], a [[philosophy of language]]
 
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|-
 
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|'''[[Thomas Samuel Kuhn]]'''
 
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|c.1962
 
−
|posited the rapid change of the basis of scientific knowledge to a provisional consensus of scientists, popularized the term "[[paradigm shift]]"
 
−
|-
 
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|'''[[W.V.O. Quine]]'''
 
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|c. 1962
 
−
|developed the theses of indeterminacy of translation and ontological relativity, and argued against the possibility of [[A priori and a posteriori (philosophy)|a priori]] knowledge
 
−
|-
 
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|'''[[Jacques Derrida]]'''
 
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|c.1970
 
−
|re-examined the fundamentals of writing and its consequences on philosophy in general; sought to undermine the language of western [[metaphysics]] ([[deconstruction]])
 
−
|-
 
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|'''[[Michel Foucault]]'''
 
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|c.1975
 
−
|examined discursive power in ''[[Discipline and Punish]]'', with Bentham's panopticon as his model, and also known for saying "language is oppression" (Meaning that language was developed to allow only those who spoke the language not to be oppressed. All other people that don't speak the language would then be oppressed.)
 
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|-
 
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|'''[[Jean-François Lyotard]]'''
 
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|c.1979
 
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|opposed universality, meta-narratives, and generality
 
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|-
 
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|'''[[Richard Rorty]]'''
 
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|c.1979
 
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|philosophy mistakenly imitates scientific methods; argues for dissolving traditional philosophical problems; [[anti-foundationalism]] and anti-essentialism
 
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|-
 
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|'''[[Matthew Barnard]]'''
 
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|c.1980
 
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|argues that Postmodernism is merely a state of mind, in comparison to Modernism claiming that both forms don't actually even exist in fundamental terms.
 
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|-
 
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|'''[[Jean Baudrillard]] '''
 
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|c.1981
 
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|''[[Simulacra and Simulation]]'' - reality created by [[mass media|media]]
 
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|}
 
−
</blockquote>
 
  
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==Deconstruction==
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===Marxist criticisms===
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{{Main|Deconstruction}}
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[[Jürgen Habermas]], a member of the [[Frankfurt School]] who is somewhat connected to Marxism, has an interesting criticism of postmodernity, saying that it is "[[neoconservatism|neo-conservative]]."<ref>Jürgen Habermas, "Modernity: An Unfinished Project," in ''Habermas and the Unfinished Project of Modernity: Critical Essays on The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity,'' ed. Maurizio Passerin d'Entrèves and Seyla Benhabib (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997).</ref> According to him, postmodernity is neo-conservative because it is irrational and potentially [[Fascism|fascist]] in its abandonment of the [[reason|rational]] program of the modernity tradition of the [[Enlightenment]]. Postmodernity, says Habermas, comes from the problematic tradition of what is called the "Counter-Enlightenment," which belittles autonomous rationality of the individual, scientific objectivity, rationalistic universalism, and public [[law]] in favor of [[will]], [[spirit]], and [[imagination]]. He argues that even though the Enlightenment may not have been perfect, we have to rehabilitate it.
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Deconstruction is a term which is used to denote the application of postmodern ideas of criticism, or theory, to a "text" or "artifact," based on the architecture [[deconstructivism]]. A deconstruction is meant to undermine the frame of reference and assumptions that underpin the text or the artifact.
 
  
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The term "deconstruction" comes from Martin Heidegger, who calls for the destruction or deconstruction (the German "Destruktion" connotates both English words) of the history of ontology. The point, for Heidegger, was to describe Being prior to its being covered over by Plato and subsequent philosophy. Thus, Heidegger himself engaged in "deconstruction" through a critique of post-Socratic thought (which had forgotten the question of Being) and the study of the pre-Socratics (where Being was still an open question).  
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Frederic Jameson, a Marxist, has offered an influential criticism of postmodernism.<ref>Frederic Jameson. ''Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.''</ref> According to him, what lies behind postmodernism is the [[logic]] of "late [[capitalism]]," i.e., [[consumer capitalism]], with its emphasis on marketing and consuming commodities, and not on producing them. One serious symptom of postmodernism today, therefore, is that the [[history|historical]] past has been shallowly transformed into a series of emptied-out stylizations, which are then consumed as commodities easily. Jameson relates this symptom to what he calls "pastiche" as contrasted from "parody." While parody can still make a strong [[politics|political]] critique to the establishment based on its norms of [[judgment]], pastiche as a juxtaposition of emptied-out stylizations without a normative grounding is "amputated of the satiric impulse, devoid of laughter." This also means a loss of our connection to real history. His criticism of postmodernism resembles [[Jean Baudrillard]]'s based on his notion of "simulacra" (copies) of the past without any connection to real past history.
  
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In later usage, a "deconstruction" is an important textual "occurrence" described and analyzed by many postmodern authors and [[philosopher]]s. They argue that aspects in the text itself would undermine its own authority or assumptions and that internal contradictions would erase boundaries or categories which the work relied on or asserted. [[Post-structuralism|Post-structuralists]] beginning with [[Jacques Derrida]], who coined the term, argued that the existence of deconstructions implied that there was no intrinsic essence to a text, merely the "play" of difference (which he dubbed ''differance'' to capture the French sense of the term meaning both "to differ" and "to defer." A deconstruction is created when the "deeper" substance of text opposes the text's more "superficial" form. This idea is not isolated to poststructuralists but is related to the idea of [[hermeneutics]] in literature; intellectuals as early as [[Plato]] asserted it and so did modern thinkers such as [[Leo Strauss]]. Derrida's argument is that deconstruction proves that texts have multiple meanings and the "violence" between the different meanings of text may be elucidated by close textual analysis.
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Alex Callinicos, not quite satisfied with the criticisms by Habermas and Jameson, has presented a stronger criticism.<ref>Alex Callinicos. ''Against Postmodernism: A Marxist Critique.'' (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1990).</ref> Callinicos blames the irrationalism and tepid relativism of [[Derrida]] and others, saying that it is simply constituted by a [[nihilism|nihilistic]] reaction of those disillusioned bourgeois academics who experienced the failure of the [[student insurrection of Paris 1968]] which ruled out any chance of a "people's revolution." Thus, it carries no sense of political resistance at all. Callinicos also attacks the theory of "post-industrial" society, which claims that "post-industrial" society with its mystified structures of global or disorganized capital in the postmodern age is beyond the ken of Marxism. For him, there is no such thing as post-industrial society, and worldwide revolution is still necessary. Still another criticism from him is directed toward the alleged existence of aesthetic postmodernism; according to him, it actually does not exist as it is nothing more than a refinement of aesthetic modernism.
  
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Popularly, close textual analyses describing deconstruction within a text are often themselves called ''deconstructions''. Derrida argued, however, that deconstruction is not a method or a tool but an occurrence within the text itself. Writings about deconstruction are therefore referred to in academic circles as ''deconstructive readings''.
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===Meaningless and disingenuous===
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The [[linguistics|linguist]] [[Noam Chomsky]] has suggested that postmodernism is meaningless because it adds nothing to analytical or [[empiricism|empirical]] knowledge. He asks why postmodernist intellectuals won't respond as "people in physics, math, biology, linguistics, and other fields are happy to do when someone asks them, seriously, what are the principles of their theories, on what evidence are they based, what do they explain that wasn't already obvious, etc. These are fair requests for anyone to make. If they can't be met, then I'd suggest recourse to Hume's advice in similar circumstances: to the flames."<ref>Noam Chomsky, [http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/chomsky-on-postmodernism.html "On Postmodernism."] Retrieved December 18, 2007.</ref>
  
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Deconstruction is far more important to postmodernism than its seemingly narrow focus on ''text'' might imply. According to Derrida, one consequence of deconstruction is that the text may be defined so broadly as to encompass not just written words but the entire spectrum of [[symbol]]s and [[phenomenon|phenomena]] within Western thought. To Derrida, a result of deconstruction is that no Western philosopher has been able to escape successfully from this large web of text and reach that which is "signified," which they imagined to exist "just beyond" the text.
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<blockquote>There are lots of things I don't understand—say, the latest debates over whether neutrinos have mass or the way that Fermat's last theorem was (apparently) proven recently. But from 50 years in this game, I have learned two things: (1) I can ask friends who work in these areas to explain it to me at a level that I can understand, and they can do so, without particular difficulty; (2) if I'm interested, I can proceed to learn more so that I will come to understand it. Now Derrida, Lacan, Lyotard, Kristeva, etc.—even Foucault, whom I knew and liked, and who was somewhat different from the rest—write things that I also don't understand, but (1) and (2) don't hold: no one who says they do understand can explain it to me and I haven't a clue as to how to proceed to overcome my failures. That leaves one of two possibilities: (a) some new advance in intellectual life has been made, perhaps some sudden genetic mutation, which has created a form of "theory" that is beyond quantum theory, topology, etc., in depth and profundity; or (b) … I won't spell it out. Noam Chomsky </blockquote>
  
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===Social constructionism and postmodernism===
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The criticism of postmodernism as ultimately meaningless [[rhetoric|rhetorical]] gymnastics was demonstrated in the [[Sokal Affair]], where physicist [[Alan Sokal]] proposed and delivered for publication an article purportedly about interpreting [[physics]] and [[mathematics]] in terms of postmodern theory, which he had deliberately distorted to make it nonsensical. It was nevertheless published by ''Social Text'' a postmodernist [[culture|cultural]] studies journal published by Duke University. Interestingly, editors at ''Social Text'' never acknowledged that the article's publication had been a mistake but supported a counter-argument defending the "interpretative validity" of Sokal's article, despite the author's later rebuttal of his own article.
  
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Another key element of postmodernism is social constructionism. A major focus of social constructionism is to uncover the ways in which individuals and groups participate in the creation of their perceived social [[reality]]. It involves looking at the ways [[social phenomena]] are created, institutionalized, and made into [[tradition]] by humans. Socially constructed reality is seen as an ongoing, dynamic [[process]]; reality is reproduced by people acting on their [[interpretation (logic)|interpretation]]s and their [[knowledge]] of it. The term was first used in sociologists [[Peter Berger]] and [[Thomas Luckmann]]'s book [[The Social Construction of Reality]].
+
==Beyond the End of the Postmodern Era==
  
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Social constructionism shares with postmodernism a skepticism in absolute truths and an anti-essentialism which holds that reality is socially constructed. Within the social constructionist strand of postmodernism, the concept of socially constructed reality stresses the on-going mass-building of [[worldview]]s by [[individual]]s in [[dialectic]]al interaction with [[society]] at any time. The numerous [[reality|realities]] so formed comprise, according to this view, the [[Imagined communities|imagined worlds]] of human social existence and activity, gradually crystallized by [[habituation|habit]] into [[institution]]s propped up by [[language]] conventions, given ongoing legitimacy by [[mythology]], [[religion]] and [[philosophy]], maintained by therapies and [[socialization]], and [[subjectivity|subjectively]] [[internalization|internalized]] by [[upbringing]] and [[education]] to become part of the [[identity (social science)|identity]] of social [[citizen]]s.
+
Among the many criticisms, strictly speaking, there are some who have actually stated against postmodernism that the postmodern era has already ended, suggesting the coming of a new age of "post-postmodernism," which is a return of many of the features of modernity. British photographer David Bate observes that postmodernism has been replaced with what he calls "neo-realism" in which the postmodern type of representation no longer exists and instead "descriptive" works as in the [[photography]] exhibition in 2003 at the [[Tate Modern]] in [[London]] called ''Cruel and Tender: The Real in the Twentieth Century'' have emerged "to produce a reality as though this is 'as it really is', to make reality certain through realism and without interrogating it."<ref>David Bate[http://www.lensculture.com/bate1.html "After Modernism?"] ''www.lensculture.com''. Retrieved March 12, 2008.</ref> In his essay "The Death of Postmodernism and Beyond," literary critic [[Alan Kirby]] argues that we now inhabit an entirely new cultural landscape, which he calls "pseudo-modernism": "Postmodernism conceived of contemporary culture as a spectacle before which the individual sat powerless, and within which questions of the real were problematised. It therefore emphasised the television or the cinema screen. Its successor, which I will call ''pseudo-modernism,'' makes the individual's action the necessary condition of the cultural product."<ref>Alan Kirby, 2006.[http://www.philosophynow.org/issue58/58kirby.htm "The Death of Postmodernism and Beyond."].''Philosophy Now- A magazine of Ideas''. Retrieved March 12, 2008.</ref>
  
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==Criticism==
+
==Accommodating Postmodernism==
−
The term ''postmodernism'', when used pejoratively, describes tendencies perceived as [[relativism|relativist]], [[counter-enlightenment]] or [[Antimodernism|antimodern]], particularly in relation to critiques of [[rationalism]], [[Universality (philosophy)|universalism]] or [[science]]. It is also sometimes used to describe tendencies in a society that are held to be antithetical to traditional systems of [[morality]]. Elements of the [[Christian Right]], in particular, have interpreted postmodern society to be synonymous with [[moral relativism]] and contributing to [[deviant behavior]].<ref>[http://www.probe.org/radio-program/truth-decay.html "Truth Decay," Probe Ministries] Retrieved December 18, 2007.</ref><ref> Wells, David F. [http://www.leaderu.com/ftissues/ft9901/reviews/charles.html Losing Our Virtue: Why the Church Must Recover Its Moral Vision] 1998. Retrieved December 18, 2007.</ref>
 
  
−
===Sokal Affair===
+
Postmodernism has also been appreciated by various schools leaning toward [[liberalism]] such as [[feminism]] and accommodated even by [[religion|religious]] and [[theology|theological]] people especially in [[Christianity]].
−
The '''Sokal Affair''' was a [[hoax]] by [[physics|physicist]] [[Alan Sokal]] perpetrated on the editorial staff and readership of the  [[postmodern]] [[cultural studies]] journal ''[[Social Text]]'' (published by [[Duke University]]).  In [[1996]], Sokal, a professor of physics at [[New York University]], submitted a paper of nonsense camouflaged in jargon for publication in Social Text, as an experiment to see if a  journal in that field would, in Sokal's words: "publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions."<ref>{{cite web
 
−
| url = http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/lingua_franca_v4/lingua_franca_v4.html
 
−
| title = A Physicist Experiments With Cultural Studies
 
−
| accessmonthday = April 3
 
−
| accessyear = 2007
 
−
| author = Alan D. Sokal
 
−
| last = Sokal
 
−
| first = Alan
 
−
| authorlink = Alan Sokal
 
−
| work = [[Lingua Franca (magazine)|]]
 
−
| year = 1996
 
−
| month = May
 
−
}}</ref>
 
  
−
The paper, titled "'''''Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative [[Hermeneutics]] of [[Quantum Gravity]]'''''"<ref>{{cite web
+
===Feminist appreciation===
−
| url = http://www.physics.nyu.edu/~as2/transgress_v2/transgress_v2_singlefile.html
+
Some feminists such as [[Julia Kristeva]], Jane Flax, and Judith Butler have found postmodernism to be in support of their cause. According to them, the categorization of the male/female binary in society came from the modernity tradition of the [[Enlightenment]], and therefore it must be deconstructed. The gender difference is not naturally given. This position has built on the ideas of not only [[Simone de Beauvoir]] but also [[Michel Foucault]], [[Jacques Derrida]], etc., and it can be called "postmodern feminism" to be distinguished from other branches of [[feminism]].  
−
| title = Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity
 
−
| accessmonthday = April 3
 
−
| accessyear = 2007
 
−
| author = Alan D. Sokal
 
−
| last = Sokal
 
−
| first = Alan
 
−
| authorlink = Alan Sokal
 
−
| date = 1994-11-28, revised 1995-05-13, published May 1996
 
−
| work = [[Social Text]] #46/47 (spring/summer 1996)
 
−
| publisher = [[Duke University]] Press
 
−
| pages = pp. 217-252
 
−
}}</ref>, was published in the Spring/Summer 1996 "[[Science Wars]]" issue of ''[[Social Text]]'', which at that time had no peer review process, and so did not submit it for outside review. On the day of its publication, Sokal announced in another publication, ''[[Lingua Franca (magazine)|Lingua Franca]]'', that the article was a [[hoax]], calling  his paper "a [[pastiche]] of [[left-wing politics|left-wing]] [[Cant (language)|cant]], fawning references, grandiose quotations, and outright nonsense", which was "structured around the silliest quotations I could find about mathematics and physics" made by humanities academics.  
 
  
−
The resulting debate focused on the relative scholarly merits or lack thereof of sociological commentary on the physical sciences and of postmodern-influenced sociological disciplines in general, as well as on academic ethics, including both whether it was appropriate for Sokal to deliberately defraud an academic journal, as well as whether ''Social Text'' took appropriate precautions in publishing the paper.
+
===Religious and theological accommodations===
 +
Some religious people welcome the [[relativism|relativist]] stance of postmodernism that says that there is no universal religious [[truth]] or [[law]], for they believe that it provides an opportunity for interreligious dialogue with a spirit of [[pluralism]]. For a completely different reason, conservative believers, who are otherwise far from appreciative of postmodernism, welcome the condition of postmodern vacuum as a good context for evangelism: "A growing number of these Christians are embracing some postmodern ideas—- not uncritically, but believing they offer an authentic context for Christian living and fresh avenues of evangelism."<ref>Six postmodern Christians discuss the possibilities and limits of postmodernism. A forum with Carlos Aguilar, Vincent Bacote, Andy Crouch, Catherine Crouch, Sherri King, and Chris Simmons [http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2000/november13/7.74.html "The Antimoderns: Six Postmodern Christians Discuss the Possibilities and Limits of Postmodernism."]. November 13, 2000. ''Christianity Today''. Retrieved March 13, 2008.</ref>
  
−
Interestingly, Social Text never acknowledged that the article's publication had been a mistake but supported a counter-argument defending the "interpretative validity" of Sokal's article, despite the author's later rebuttal of his own article. (''see the online Postmodernism Generator''<ref>[http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo Postmodernism Generator] Retrieved December 18, 2007.</ref>)
+
There are also theologically ambitious Christians who accommodate the challenge of postmodernism in such a creative way as to come up with a more understandable and even convincing, new theology in the midst of postmodern uncertainty. ''The Cambridge Companion to Postmodern Theology'' lists seven types of such theologians:<ref>Kevin J. Vanhoozer, ed., ''The Cambridge Companion to Postmodern Theology.'' (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).</ref>  
−
 
 
−
===Radical critique===
 
−
The linguist [[Noam Chomsky]] has suggested that postmodernism is meaningless because it adds nothing to analytical or empirical knowledge. He asks why postmodernist intellectuals won't respond as "people in physics, math, biology, linguistics, and other fields are happy to do when someone asks them, seriously, what are the principles of their theories, on what evidence are they based, what do they explain that wasn't already obvious etc? These are fair requests for anyone to make. If they can't be met, then I'd suggest recourse to Hume's advice in similar circumstances: to the flames."<ref>[http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/chomsky-on-postmodernism.html Noam Chomsky on Post-Modernism] Retrieved December 18, 2007.</ref>
 
−
 
 
−
{{Quotation| There are lots of things I don't understand—say, the latest debates over whether neutrinos have mass or the way that Fermat's last theorem was (apparently) proven recently. But from 50 years in this game, I have learned two things: (1) I can ask friends who work in these areas to explain it to me at a level that I can understand, and they can do so, without particular difficulty; (2) if I'm interested, I can proceed to learn more so that I will come to understand it. Now Derrida, Lacan, Lyotard, Kristeva, etc. --- even Foucault, whom I knew and liked, and who was somewhat different from the rest --- write things that I also don't understand, but (1) and (2) don't hold: no one who says they do understand can explain it to me and I haven't a clue as to how to proceed to overcome my failures. That leaves one of two possibilities: (a) some new advance in intellectual life has been made, perhaps some sudden genetic mutation, which has created a form of "theory" that is beyond quantum theory, topology, etc., in depth and profundity; or (b) ... I won't spell it out.|Noam Chomsky}}
 
−
 
 
−
 
 
−
 
 
−
===The problematic nature of the term ‘postmodernism’===
 
−
The term has been used to express many disparate ideas.
 
−
Dick Hebdige, in his ‘Hiding in the Light’ illustrates this problem:
 
−
 
 
−
:When it becomes possible for people to describe as ‘postmodern’ the décor of a room, the design of a building, the diegesis of a film, the construction of a record, or a ‘scratch’ video, a television commercial, or an arts documentary, or the ‘intertextual’ relations between them, the layout of a page in a fashion magazine or critical journal, an anti-teleological tendency within epistemology, the attack on the ‘metaphysics of presence’ a general attenuation of feeling, the collective chagrin and morbid projections of a post-War generation of baby boomers confronting disillusioned middle-age, the ‘predicament of reflexitivity, a group of rhetorical tropes, a proliferation of surfaces, a new phase in commodity fetishism, a fascination for images, codes and styles, a process of cultural, political or existential fragmentation and/or crisis, the ‘de-centring’ of the subject, an ‘incredulity towards metanarratives’, the replacement of unitary power axes by a plurality of power/discourse formations, the ‘implosion of meaning’, the collapse of cultural hierarchies, the dread engendered by the threat of nuclear self-destruction, the decline of the university, the functioning and effects of the new miniaturized technologies, broad societal and economic shifts into a ‘media’, ‘consumer’ or ‘multinational’ phase, a sense (depending on who you read) of ‘placelessness’ or the abandonment of ‘placelessness’ (critical regionalism) or (even) a generalized substitution of spatial for temporal coordinates: when it becomes possible to describe all these things as ‘postmodern’ (or more simply using a current abbreviation as ‘post’ or ‘very post’) then it’s clear we are in the presence of a buzzword.<ref name="Hebdige:410">’Postmodernism and “the other side”’, in Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A reader, edited by John Storey, London, : Pearson Education .2006</ref>
 
  
 +
# Theology of communal practice, which enables us to see the patterns of [[God]] in communities not through any theoretical foundations of modernism (John Howard Yoder, Nicholas Lash, etc.).
 +
# Postliberal theology, which involves [[Bible|biblical]] narratives to make the characters in the stories come alive, avoiding reaching any timeless core doctrine (George Lindbeck, etc.).
 +
# Postmetaphysical theology, which expresses God not in terms of being but rather in terms of goodness or [[love]] (Jean-Luc Marion, etc.).
 +
# Deconstructive theology, which goes through [[Derrida]]'s deconstruction, but which ends up being a way of longing for God after deconstruction (John D. Caputo, etc.)
 +
# Reconstructive theology, which is [[Alfred North Whitehead|Whiteheadian]] postmodernism, pursuing a non-dogmatic theological reconstruction after deconstruction (David Ray Griffin, John B. Cobb, Jr., etc.).
 +
# Feminist theology (Judith Butler, etc.).
 +
# Radical orthodoxy, which presents classical Christianity as a genuine alternative not only to modernity but also to postmodernity (John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock, Graham Ward, etc.).
  
 +
From above, it seems that postmodernism that may have brought a lot of challenges to many people is not necessarily an unpleasant thing but rather a good thing from which something new, truthful, and reliable can be expected to come.
  
 
==Notes==
 
==Notes==
Line 217: Line 168:
  
 
==References==
 
==References==
−
* Anderson, Walter Truett. ''The Truth about the Truth (New Consciousness Reader)''. New York: Tarcher. 1995. ISBN 0-87477-801-8
+
 
−
* Ashley, Richard and Walker, R. B. J. “Speaking the Language of Exile.” ''International Studies Quarterly'' v 34, no 3 259-68. 1990. ISSN 0020-8833
+
* Baudrillard, Jean. ''Simulacra and Simulation,'' Translated by Sheila Faria Glaser. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1994. ISBN 0472065211
−
* [[Zygmunt Bauman|Bauman, Zygmunt]]  ''Liquid Modernity''. Cambridge: Polity Press. 2000. ISBN 9780745624105
+
* Bauman, Zygmunt. ''Liquid Modernity.'' Cambridge: Polity Press. 2000. ISBN 9780745624105
−
* [[Ulrich Beck|Beck, Ulrich]] ''Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity''. London; Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1992. ISBN 9780803983465
+
* Beck, Ulrich. ''Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity.'' London; Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1992. ISBN 9780803983465
−
* Benhabib, Seyla. 'Feminism and Postmodernism' in (ed. Nicholson) ''Feminism Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange''. New York: Routledge. 1995. ISBN 9780415910866
+
* Benhabib, Seyla, et al. ''Feminism Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange.'' New York: Routledge. 1995. ISBN 9780415910866
−
* [[Peter L. Berger|Berger, Peter L.]] and [[Thomas Luckmann|Luckmann, Thomas]], ''[[The Social Construction of Reality|The Social Construction of Reality : A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge]]'' (Anchor, 1967; ISBN 0-385-05898-5).
+
* Berman, Marshall. ''All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity.'' New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982. ISBN 0140109625.
−
* Berman, Marshall. ''All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity''. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982. ISBN 0-14-010962-5.
+
* Bertens, Hans. ''The Idea of the Postmodern: A History.'' London: Routledge. 1995. ISBN 0145060125
−
* [[Hans Bertens|Bertens, Hans]]. ''The Idea of the Postmodern: A History''. London: Routledge. 1995. ISBN 0-145-06012-5
+
* Bielskis, Andrius. ''Towards a Postmodern Understanding of the Political: From Genealogy to Hermeneutics.'' New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. ISBN 9781403995995
−
* Bielskis, Andrius. ''Towards a Postmodern Understanding of the Political: From Genealogy to Hermeneutics''. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. ISBN 9781403995995
+
* Brass, Tom. ''Peasants, Populism and Postmodernism.'' London: F. Cass, 2000. ISBN 9780714680002
−
* Brass, Tom, ''Peasants, Populism and Postmodernism'' London: F. Cass, 2000. ISBN 9780714680002
+
* Callinicos, Alex. ''Against Postmodernism: A Marxist Critique.'' New York: St. Martin's Press, 1990. ISBN 9780312042257
−
* [[Judith Butler|Butler, Judith]] 'Contingent Foundations' in (ed. Nicholson) ''Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange''. New Yotk: Routledge, 1995. ISBN 9780415910866
+
* Castells, Manuel. ''The Rise of the Network Society.'' Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 1996. ISBN 9781557866165
−
* Callinicos, Alex, ''Against Postmodernism: A Marxist Critique''. New York, N.Y.: St. Martin's Press, 1990. ISBN 9780312042257
+
* Coupland, Douglas. ''Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture.'' New York: St. Martin's Press, 1991. ISBN 9780312054366
−
* Castells, Manuel. ''The Rise of the Network Society''. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 1996. ISBN 9781557866165
+
* D'Entrèves, Maurizio Passerin, and Seyla Benhabib, eds. ''Habermas and the Unfinished Project of Modernity: Critical Essays on The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity.'' Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997. ISBN 0262540800
−
* Farrell, John. "Paranoia and Postmodernism," the epilogue to ''Paranoia and Modernity: Cervantes to Rousseau'' Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2006. pp. 309-327. ISBN 9780801444104
+
* Derrida, Jacques. ''The Truth in Painting,'' Translated by Geoffrey Bennington and Ian McLeod. Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 1987. ISBN 0226143244
−
* [[Anthony Giddens|Giddens, Anthony]]  ''Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age'', Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1991. ISBN 9780804719438
+
* Foucault, Michel. ''This Is Not a Pipe,'' Translated by James Harkness. University of California Press, 1983. ISBN 0520049160
−
* Groothuis, Douglas. ''Truth Decay: Defending Christianity Against the Challenges of Postmodernism''. Downers Grove, Illinois: InterVarsity Press, 2000. ISBN 9780851115245
+
* Giddens, Anthony. ''Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age.'' Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1991. ISBN 9780804719438
−
* Harvey, David. ''The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change''. Cambridge, Mass., USA: Blackwell, 1989. ISBN 9780631162940
+
* Groothuis, Douglas R. ''Truth Decay: Defending Christianity Against the Challenges of Postmodernism.'' Downers Grove, Illinois: InterVarsity Press, 2000. ISBN 0830822283
−
* Hicks, Stephen R. C.; ''Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault''. Tempe, Ariz.: Scholargy Pub., 2004. ISBN 9781592476428
+
* Hassan, Ihab. "From Postmodernism to Postmodernism," ''Philosophy and Literature'' 25(1)(2001).
−
* Jameson, Fredric. ''[[Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism]]'' Durham: Duke University Press, 1991. ISBN 9780822309291
+
* Harvey, David. ''The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change.'' Cambridge, Mass.: USA: Blackwell, 1989. ISBN 9780631162940
−
* Lyon, David. ''Postmodernity''. Buckingham: Open University Press, 1994.  
+
* Hicks, Stephen R.C. ''Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault.'' Tempe, Ariz.: Scholarly Pub., 2004. ISBN 9781592476428
−
* Lyotard, Jean-François. ''[[The Postmodern Condition]]: A Report on Knowledge''. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. ISBN 9780816611737
+
* Hutcheon, Linda. ''The Politics of Postmodernism.'' New York: Routledge, [1989] 2002. ISBN 0415280168
−
* Lyotard, Jean-François. ''The Postmodern Explained: Correspondence 1982-1985''. Ed. Julian Pefanis and Morgan Thomas. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. ISBN 9780816622115
+
* Jameson, Fredric. ''Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.'' Durham: Duke University Press, 1991. ISBN 9780822309291
−
* MacIntyre, Alasdair, ''[[After Virtue]]: A Study in Moral Theory''. University of Notre Dame Press, 1984 ISBN 9780268005948
+
* Lyon, David. ''Postmodernity.'' Buckingham: Open University Press, 1994. ISBN 978-0816632268
−
* Manuel, Peter. "Music as Symbol, Music as Simulacrum: Pre-Modern, Modern, and Postmodern Aesthetics in Subcultural Musics," Popular Music 1/2, 1995, pp. 227-239. ISSN 0261-1430
+
* Lyotard, Jean-François. ''The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge,'' Translated by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. ISBN 9780816611737
−
* Murphy, Nancey, ''Anglo-American Postmodernity: Philosophical Perspectives on Science, Religion, and Ethics''. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1997. ISBN 9780813328690
+
* Lyotard, Jean-François. ''The Postmodern Explained: Correspondence, 1982-1985.'' Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. ISBN 9780816622115
−
* Natoli, Joseph. ''A Primer to Postmodernity''. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 1998. ISBN 9781577180609
+
* Murphy, Nancey. ''Anglo-American Postmodernity: Philosophical Perspectives on Science, Religion, and Ethics.'' Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1997. ISBN 9780813328690
−
* Norris, Christopher. ''What's Wrong with Postmodernism: Critical Theory and the Ends of Philosophy''. Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991. ISBN 9780745009742
+
* Natoli, Joseph. ''A Primer to Postmodernity.'' Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 1998. ISBN 9781577180609
−
* Pangle, Thomas L., ''The Ennobling of Democracy: The Challenge of the Postmodern Age'', Baltimore, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991 ISBN 0-8018-4635-8
+
* Norris, Christopher. ''What's Wrong with Postmodernism: Critical Theory and the Ends of Philosophy.'' Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991. ISBN 9780745009742
−
* Sokal, Alan and Jean Bricmont. ''[[Fashionable Nonsense]]: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science''. New York: Picador USA, 1998. ISBN 9780312195458
+
* Pangle, Thomas L. ''The Ennobling of Democracy: The Challenge of the Postmodern Age.'' Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991. ISBN 0801846358
−
* Taylor, Alan. ''We, the media. Pedagogic Intrusions into US Film and Television News Broadcasting Rhetorics'', Peter Lang, 2004. pp. 418 ISBN 9780820465302
+
* Sokal, Alan, and Jean Bricmont. ''Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science.'' New York: Picador USA, 1998. ISBN 9780312195458
−
* Vattimo, Gianni. ''The Transparent Society'' Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992. ISBN 9780801845284
+
* Vanhoozer, Kevin J., ed. ''The Cambridge Companion to Postmodern Theology.'' Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. ISBN 0521793955
−
* Veith Jr., Gene Edward. ''Postmodern Times: A Christian Guide to Contemporary Thought and Culture'' Wheaton, Ill.: Crossway Books, 1994. ISBN 9780891077688
+
* Vattimo, Gianni. ''The Transparent Society.'' Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992. ISBN 9780801845284
−
* Woods, Tim, Beginning Postmodernism, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999,(Reprinted 2002)(ISBN 0-7190-5210-6 Hardback,ISBN 0-7190-5211-4 Paperback) .
+
* Veith, Jr., Gene Edward. ''Postmodern Times: A Christian Guide to Contemporary Thought and Culture.'' Wheaton, Ill.: Crossway Books, 1994. ISBN 9780891077688
−
* Coupland, Douglas. ''Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture''. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1991. ISBN 9780312054366
+
* Woods, Tim. ''Beginning Postmodernism.'' Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999. ISBN 0719052106
−
* Alexie, Sherman. ''The Toughest Indian in the World''. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2000. ISBN 9780871138125
 
  
 
==External links==
 
==External links==
−
All links Retrieved December 18, 2007.
+
All links retrieved November 30, 2022.
−
{{Wiktionary}}
+
 
−
* [http://www.toronto-h.schools.nsw.edu.au/postmodernism.htm Postmodernism Guide from Toronto High School]
 
−
* [http://www.colorado.edu/English/courses/ENGL2012Klages/pomo.html A simpler description of Postmodernism]
 
 
* [http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/postmodernism/ Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's entry on postmodernism]
 
* [http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/postmodernism/ Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's entry on postmodernism]
−
* [http://christiancadre.org/topics/postmodern.html The Christian Cadre's Postmodernism Page]
 
−
* [http://www.umass.edu/complit/aclanet/SyllPDF/JanuList.pdf Discourses of Postmodernism. Multilingual Bibliography (PDF file)]
 
−
* [http://www.tasc.ac.uk/depart/media/staff/ls/Modules/Theory/PoMoDis.htm Modernity, postmodernism and the tradition of dissent, by Lloyd Spencer (1998)]
 
 
* [http://www.critcrim.org/critpapers/milovanovic_postmod.htm Dueling Paradigms: Modernist V. Postmodernist Thought]
 
* [http://www.critcrim.org/critpapers/milovanovic_postmod.htm Dueling Paradigms: Modernist V. Postmodernist Thought]
−
* [http://fleetwood.baylor.edu/certain_doubts/?p=453 Keith DeRose (Philosophy, Yale): Characterizing a Fogbank: What Is Postmodernism, and Why Do I Take Such a Dim View of it?]
 
−
* [http://www.info.ucl.ac.be/~pvr/decon.html How to Deconstruct Almost Anything—My Postmodern Adventure]
 
−
* [http://www.postmodernist.com Postmodernist.com]
 
−
* [http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com/articleprint.php?num=13 Postmodernism and truth] by philosopher [[Daniel Dennett]]
 
 
* [http://www.economist.com/world/displaystory.cfm?story_id=8401159 Postmodernism is the new black]: How the shape of modern retailing was both predicted and influenced by some unlikely seers (<CITE>The Economist</CITE> Dec 19th 2006)
 
* [http://www.economist.com/world/displaystory.cfm?story_id=8401159 Postmodernism is the new black]: How the shape of modern retailing was both predicted and influenced by some unlikely seers (<CITE>The Economist</CITE> Dec 19th 2006)
 
* [http://www.criticarte.com/Page/ensayos/text/ModernPostmodern.html Postmodernism and art | La crisis de las vanguardias y el debate modernidad-postmodernidad] by Adolfo Vasquez Rocca PhD.
 
* [http://www.criticarte.com/Page/ensayos/text/ModernPostmodern.html Postmodernism and art | La crisis de las vanguardias y el debate modernidad-postmodernidad] by Adolfo Vasquez Rocca PhD.
 +
  
 
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Latest revision as of 05:50, 30 November 2022

Postmodernism
preceded by Modernism

Postmodernity
Postchristianity
Postmodern philosophy
Postmodern architecture
Postmodern art
Postmodernist film
Postmodern literature
Postmodern music
Postmodern theater
Critical theory
Globalization
Consumerism
Minimalism in art
Minimalism in music

Postmodernism (sometimes abbreviated as Po-Mo) is a term applied to a wide-ranging set of developments in critical theory, philosophy, architecture, art, literature, and culture, which are considered to have emerged from, or superseded, modernism, in reaction to it, soon after the end of World War II, which caused people much disillusionment.

Many theorists agree that we can distinguish between two senses of postmodernism: 1) postmodernism as a reaction to the aesthetic "modernism" of the first half of the twentieth century in architecture, art, and literature; and 2) postmodernism as a reaction to the long-standing "modernity" tradition of the Enlightenment from the eighteenth century. To be distinguished from the former which is more aesthetic, the latter is quite often called "postmodernity," referring to more historical and social aspects of postmodernism. The latter is closely linked with post-structuralism (cf. Jacques Derrida's deconstruction), insinuating a rejection of the bourgeois, elitist culture of the Enlightenment. Without this distinction, postmodernism may lack a clear central hierarchy or organizing principle, embodying extreme complexity, contradiction, ambiguity, diversity, and interconnectedness or interreferentiality. But, its general features are usually considered to include: a rejection of grand narratives; a rejection of absolute and universal truth; non-existence of signified; disorientation; a use of parody; simulation without the original; late capitalism; and globalization.

Postmodernism has invited a wide spectrum of criticisms, from conservatives who feel threatened by its rejection of absolute truth, from Marxists who may tend to be allied with the Enlightenment, and from intellectuals who cannot make sense of it. It, however, is welcomed by schools such as feminism. It is even accommodated by Christian theologians as a good opportunity to develop a more convincing, new theology, and some of the examples include Jean-Luc Marion's postmetaphysical theology and John D. Caputo's deconstructive theology in search of a true God.

A Brief History of the Term "Postmodernism"

The question of what postmodernism means is problematic because the notion is complex. Ihab Hassan, one of the first to discuss about postmodernism in the 1960s and 1970s, writes in 2001: "I know less about postmodernism today than I did thirty years ago, when I began to write about it… No consensus obtains on what postmodernism really means."[1]

The historical origins of the term lead back at least to English painter John Watkins Chapman, who was probably the first to use the term "postmodernism." He used it in the 1870s to simply mean what is today understood to be post-impressionism. In 1934, Spaniard Federico de Onis used the word postmodernismo as a reaction against modernist poetry. In 1939, British historian Arnold Toynbee adopted the term with an entirely different meaning: the end of the "modern" Western bourgeois order of the last two- or three-hundred-year period. In 1945, Australian art historian Bernard Smith took up the term to suggest a movement of social realism in painting beyond abstraction. In the 1950s in America, Charles Olson used the term in poetry. Only in the 1960s and 1970s was the term more popularized through theorists such as Leslie Fielder and Ihab Hassan.

Two Facets of Modernism

Since postmodernism emerged from modernism, it is essential to have some understanding of modernism first, but modernism itself is not a single entity. If we carefully look at modernism, we realize that it has two different facets, or two different definitions: 1) twentieth-century aesthetic modernism, which emerged during the first half of the twentieth century as a reaction to nineteenth-century traditions such as the Victorian tradition; and 2) the much longer historical tradition of "modernity," which started from the humanistic rationalism of the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, and which was still continuously influential till the twentieth century. Theorists such as David Lyon and Mary Klages have made this distinction between the two facets of modernism, and also a resultant distinction between two senses of postmodernism as well.[2][3]

Twentieth-century aesthetic modernism

Main article: Modernism

Modernism was a series of aesthetic movements of wild experimentation in visual arts, music, literature, drama, and architecture in the first half of the twentieth century. It flourished especially between 1910 to 1930, the period of "high modernism."

Modernism in this sense was rooted in the changes in Western society at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. It was a trend of thought that affirmed the power of human beings to create, improve, and reshape their environment, with the aid of scientific knowledge, technology, and practical experimentation. Embracing change and the present, it encompassed the works of thinkers who rebelled against nineteenth-century academic and historicist traditions, believing that the traditional forms of art, architecture, literature, religious faith, social organization, and daily life were becoming "outdated." They directly confronted the new economic, social, and political aspects of an emerging fully industrialized world.

The older ideas that history and civilization are inherently progressive, and that progress is always good, came under increasing attack. Arguments arose that not merely were the values of the artist and those of society different, but that society was antithetical to progress, and could not move forward in its present form. Philosophers called into question the previous optimism.

Two of the most disruptive thinkers of the period were, in biology, Charles Darwin and, in political science, Karl Marx. Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection undermined religious certainty of the general public, and the sense of human uniqueness among the intelligentsia. The notion that human beings were driven by the same impulses as "lower animals" proved to be difficult to reconcile with the idea of an ennobling spirituality. Marx seemed to present a political version of the same proposition: that problems with the economic order were not transient, the result of specific wrongdoers or temporary conditions, but were fundamentally contradictions within the "capitalist" system. Both thinkers would spawn defenders and schools of thought that would become decisive in establishing modernism.

Of course, there actually were a few reforming spiritual and theological movements around the same time which also reacted against the nineteenth-century traditions. They include Neo-orthodoxy by Karl Barth in Europe, and pentecostalism and fundamentalism in America. But, they seem to have been less visible and less prevalent than activities of radical aesthetic modernism.

Twentieth-century aesthetic modernism took diverse forms such as surrealism, dadaism, cubism, expressionism, and primitivism. These forms were apparently immediate reactions to the Victorian values such as bourgeois domesticity, duty, work, decorum, referentiality, utilitarianism, industry, and realism. Some of the forms of aesthetic modernism naturally resemble Romanticism, which was rejected in the Victorian period. According to Dino Felluga, the features of modernist aesthetic work include:[4]

  1. Self-reflexivity (as in Picasso's painting "Women in the Studio").
  2. An exploration of psychological and subjective states (as in expressionism or stream-of-consciousness writings such as Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse).
  3. Alternative ways of thinking about representation (as in cubism).
  4. A breakdown in generic distinction (as in between poetry and prose).
  5. Fragmentation in form and representation (as in T. S. Eliot's poem "The Waste Land").
  6. Extreme ambiguity and simultaneity in structure (as in William Faulkner's multiply-narrated stories such as The Sound and the Fury).
  7. Some experimentation in the breakdown between high and low forms (as in dadaism or T.S. Eliot's and James Joyce's inclusion of folk and pop-cultural material).
  8. The use of parody and irony (as in surrealism, dadaism, or James Joyce's Ulysses).

"Modernity" since the Enlightenment

In order to grasp an idea of what the "postmodernism" movement (in all its variations) is reacting against, one must first have an understanding of the definitive elements of "modernism."

Modernism in the second definition can be traced back to the Enlightenment, which was a humanistic reaction in the eighteenth century to the premodern, medieval type of religious dogmatism which could still be found in Lutheran and Calvinist scholasticism, Jesuit scholasticism, and the theory of the divine right of kings in the Church of England in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Of course, against this premodern type of religious dogmatism, there was another, religiously more profound, reaction in the eighteenth century, expressing itself in Pietism and John Wesley's Methodism. But the humanistic tradition of the Enlightenment was more influential than that.

Since its beginning, this Enlightenment tradition has a long history of philosophical, cultural, social and political development until most of the twentieth century, much longer and older than twentieth-century aesthetic modernism, and it is quite often called "modernity."[5] [6] This "modernity" tradition of the Enlightenment stressed the importance of the rational human self, objective truth or law, order, progress, etc., and it was behind most of the nineteenth century traditions. So, when the limitations of the nineteenth century were felt, "modernity" served as an indirect background against which twentieth-century aesthetic modernism sprang. When the limitations of "modernity" were more directly felt later in the twentieth century, it issued in a reaction called postmodernism, which, as will be explained below, is of a second kind, i.e., "postmodernity."

Clear thinking professor Mary Klages, author of Literary Theory: A Guide for the Perplexed, lists basic features of "modernity" since the Enlightenment as follows:[7]

  1. There is a stable, coherent, knowable self. This self is conscious, rational, autonomous, and universal—no physical conditions or differences substantially affect how this self operates.
  2. This self knows itself and the world through reason, or rationality, posited as the highest form of mental functioning, and the only objective form.
  3. The mode of knowing produced by the objective rational self is "science," which can provide universal truths about the world, regardless of the individual status of the knower.
  4. The knowledge produced by science is "truth," and is eternal.
  5. The knowledge/truth produced by science (by the rational objective knowing self) will always lead toward progress and perfection. All human institutions and practices can be analyzed by science (reason/objectivity) and improved.
  6. Reason is the ultimate judge of what is true, and therefore of what is right, and what is good (what is legal and what is ethical). Freedom consists of obedience to the laws that conform to the knowledge discovered by reason.
  7. In a world governed by reason, the true will always be the same as the good and the right (and the beautiful); there can be no conflict between what is true and what is right (etc.).
  8. Science thus stands as the paradigm for any and all socially useful forms of knowledge. Science is neutral and objective; scientists, those who produce scientific knowledge through their unbiased rational capacities, must be free to follow the laws of reason, and not be motivated by other concerns (such as money or power).
  9. Language, or the mode of expression used in producing and disseminating knowledge, must be rational also. To be rational, language must be transparent; it must function only to represent the real/perceivable world which the rational mind observes. There must be a firm and objective connection between the objects of perception and the words used to name them (between signifier and signified).

Two Senses of Postmodernism

Corresponding to the two different facets of modernism, there are two distinguishable senses of postmodernism: 1) postmodernism as a reaction to twentieth-century aesthetic modernism; and 2) postmodernism as a reaction to the "modernity" tradition of the Enlightenment. In order to be distinguished from the former, the latter is quite often called "postmodernity."[8]

A reaction to aesthetic modernism

Postmodernism as a reaction to twentieth-century aesthetic modernism emerged soon after World War II. It still carried most of the features of twentieth-century aesthetic modernism. So, some have argued that it is essentially just an outgrowth of modernism, and not a separate movement. But, there is a fundamental difference. It is that while aesthetic modernism had presented fragmentation, for example, as something tragic to be lamented (as in Eliots' "The Waste Land"), postmodernism no longer laments it but rather celebrates it. Thus, postmodernism is inclined to stay with meaninglessness, playing with nonsense. Dino Felluga sees this difference and lists some of the things "that distinguish postmodern aesthetic work from modernist work" as follows:[9]

  1. Extreme self-reflexivity, more playful and even irrelevant (as in pop artist Roy Lichtenstein's "Masterpiece" or architect Frank Gehry's Nationale-Nederlanden Building in Prague).
  2. Irony and parody (many examples in pop culture and media advertising). Regarding how to assess it, postmodern theorists are divided. While Linda Hutcheon, for example, values parody as a postmodern way to resist all ideological positions,[10] Marxist critic Fredric Jameson characterizes it as "blank parody" or "pastiche" without any motive or impulse in the dystopic postmodern age in which we have lost our connection to history.[11]
  3. A breakdown between high and low cultural forms in more immediately understandable ways (as in Andy Warhol's painting for Campbell's Tomato Soup cans).
  4. Retro. It is to use styles and fashions from the past with fascination but completely out of their original context (as in postmodern architecture in which medieval, baroque, and modern elements are often juxtaposed). Fredric Jameson and Jean Baudrillard tend to regard it as a symptom of our loss of connection to history in which the history of aesthetic styles and fashions displaces real history.
  5. A further questioning of grand narratives (as in Madonna videos such as "Like a Prayer" and "Material Girl," which question the grand narratives of traditional Christianity, capitalism, etc.).
  6. Visuality and the simulacrum vs. temporality. The predominance of visual media (tv, film, media advertising, the computer) has lead to the use of visual forms (as in Art Spiegelman's graphic novel Maus: A Surviver's Tale through the medium of comics). Visuality also explains some other related features of aesthetic postmodernism: a more breakdown between high and low cultural forms, and a retro. Baudrillard and others have argued that a retro involves copies ("simulacra") of the past without any connection to real past history, blurring the distinction between representation and temporal reality.[12]
  7. Late capitalism whose dominance is generally feared (as in the predominance of paranoia narratives in movies such as "Blade Runner" and "the Matrix"). This fear is aided by advancements in technology, especially surveillance technology, which creates the sense that we are always being watched.
  8. Disorientation (as in MTV or those films that seek to disorient the viewer completely through the revelation of a truth that changes everything that came before).
  9. Return of orality (based on an influx of oral media sources such as tv, film, and radio).

Postmodernism in this sense was much discussed in the 1960s and 1970s by theorists such as Leslie Fielder and Ihab Hassan,[13] although Hassan gradually extended his discussion to a general critique of Western culture, somewhat dealing with postmodernism in the other sense as well. Many other theorists such as Baudrillard, Jameson, and Hutcheson later joined the discussion on postmodernism in the first sense, perhaps having in mind postmodernism in the other sense as well.

"Postmodernity": a reaction to modernity

Up until the 1970s the discussion on postmodernism was generally confined to postmodernism in its first sense. In 1980, however, Jürgen Habermas's lecture on "Modernity: An Unfinished Project"[14] helped bring a shift in the discussion from postmodernism in its first sense (i.e., a reaction to twentieth-century aesthetic modernism) to postmodernism in the second sense (i.e., postmodernity), ironically because of its strong defense of modernity against postmodernity. Of course, the debate on modernity versus postmodernity had already started with the involvement of critics such as Martin Heidegger, Michel Foucault, Jean-François Lyotard, Richard Rorty, and Jacques Derrida in favor of postmodernity, as they felt that the modernity tradition of the Enlightenment was in crisis because of the emergence of problems such as alienation and exploitation within that tradition in spite of its original promise of positive cultural and social development. But, when Habermas was trying to defend modernity as an "unfinished project" we should not abandon yet, it prompted those who were in favor of postmodernity to react. Since then, a large volume of literature has continued to snowball, focusing on postmodernity as the more important facet of postmodernism.

Habermas now became the target of criticism especially from Lyotard, who published The Postmodern Condition in English in 1984, his best-known and most influential work.[15] Lyotard declared the end of the Enlightenment and rejected its tradition of "grand narrative," a totalistic, universal theory which promises to explain and solve all problems by one set of ideas.

After summarizing modernity in terms of order and rationality, Mary Klages lists some of the basic characteristics of postmodernity over against it, as follows:[16]

  1. Postmodernity is, as is expressed especially by Lyotard, the critique of grand narratives, the awareness that such narratives in favor of "order" serve to mask the contradictions and instabilities that are inherent in any social organization or practice even including Marxist society. It rejects grand narratives about large-scale or global universal concepts in favor of more situational and provisional "mini-narratives" about small practices and local events.
  2. There are only signifiers. Signifieds do not exist.
  3. This means that there are only copies, i.e., what Baudrillard calls "simulacra," and that there are no originals. For example, cds and music recordings have no original. Related to this is the concept of virtual reality, a reality created by a computer simulation game, for which there is no original.
  4. Knowledge is not good for its own sake. Its functionality or utility is more important.
  5. Knowledge is also distributed, stored, and arranged differently thought the emergence of computer technology, without which it ceases to be knowledge. The important thing about knowledge is not to assess it as truth (its technical quality), as goodness or justice (its ethical quality), or as beauty (its aesthetic quality), but rather to see who decides what knowledge is, and who knows what needs to be decided. In other words, says Lyotard, knowledge follows the paradigm of a language game, as laid out by Wittgenstein.

Deconstruction:

Main article: Deconstruction

What should be added to the list as an important aspect of postmodernity is Jacques Derrida's project of deconstruction as an attempt to criticize what is called logocentrism beyond text.

The term "deconstruction," coined by Derrida, came from Heidegger, who called for the destruction or deconstruction (the German "Destruktion" connotes both English words) of the history of ontology. In later usage, "deconstruction" became an important textual "occurrence." According to Derrida, the project of deconstruction implies that there is no intrinsic essence to a text, merely the "play" of difference (which he dubbed différance to capture the French sense of the term meaning both "to differ" and "to defer").

A deconstruction is created when the "deeper" substance of text opposes the text's more "superficial" form. This idea is not unique to Derrida but is related to the idea of hermeneutics in literature; intellectuals as early as Plato asserted it and so did modern thinkers such as Leo Strauss. Derrida's argument is that deconstruction proves that texts have multiple meanings, and that the "violence" between the different meanings of text may be elucidated by close textual analysis. According to Derrida, deconstruction is not a method or a tool but an occurrence within the text itself. Writings about deconstruction are therefore referred to in academic circles as deconstructive readings.

Deconstruction is far more important to postmodernism than its seemingly narrow focus on text might imply. According to Derrida, therefore, one consequence of deconstruction is that the text may be defined so broadly as to encompass not just written words but the entire spectrum of symbols and phenomena within Western thought. To Derrida, a result of deconstruction is that no Western philosophers have been able to escape successfully from this large web of text and reach that which is "signified," which they have imagined to exist "just beyond" the text.

Relationship of the two: the same postmodern pie

The two different senses of postmodernism are reactions to the two different facets of modernism, respectively. One can observe that the reaction of postmodernity to modernity seems to be more radical than that of aesthetic postmodernism to twentieth-century aesthetic modernism, for whereas postmodernity is a big leap from modernity, aesthetic postmodernism still resembles twentieth-century aesthetic modernism at least in some external ways. Aesthetic modernism was already a very progressive movement in the first half of the twentieth century; so, aesthetic postmodernism, reacting to it, does not have to be a very big leap.

However, it is safe to say that the two different senses of postmodernism cohere and are not separate, even though they are originally two different reactions to the two different facets of modernism, respectively. Timewise, they both started soon after World War II. In terms of content as well, they concur in many respects. They interact, and "the postmodern turn can result from the interaction between" the two "in the postmodern pie."[17] One good example of this interaction is references made by Foucault and Derrida to Belgian artist René Magritte's experiments with signification, with their appreciative understanding of Magritte's suggestion that no matter how realistically the artist can depict an item, verisimilitude is still an artistic strategy, a mere representation of the thing, not the thing itself.[18]

The interaction of the two has resulted in a convergence of them also. Today, as some of the general characteristics of postmodernism as a whole, the following points in more popular terms are mentioned:

  1. No absolute truth.
  2. No absolute ethical standard. Hence the cause of feminists and homosexuals should also be tolerated.
  3. No absolute religion. This means to promote religious inclusivism. It usually leans toward the New Age religion.
  4. Globalization. There is no absolute nation. National boundaries hinder human communication.
  5. Pro-environmentalism. Western society is blamed for the destruction of the environment.

Criticizing Postmodernism

Interestingly, postmodernism has invited a wide spectrum of criticisms, not only from conservatives but also from Marxist scholars and other intellectuals.

Conservative criticisms

The term "postmodernism" is sometimes used to describe tendencies in society that are held to be antithetical to traditional systems of morality. Elements of the Christian Right, in particular, have interpreted postmodern society to be synonymous with moral relativism and contributing to deviant behavior. Conservative Christians also criticize postmodernism of being a serious challenge to scripture, creeds and confessions, and ecclesiastical tradition, which they regard as foundations of their faith. Muslim fundamentalism, too, dislikes postmodernity in much the same way, even banning postmodern books such as Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses.

Marxist criticisms

Jürgen Habermas, a member of the Frankfurt School who is somewhat connected to Marxism, has an interesting criticism of postmodernity, saying that it is "neo-conservative."[19] According to him, postmodernity is neo-conservative because it is irrational and potentially fascist in its abandonment of the rational program of the modernity tradition of the Enlightenment. Postmodernity, says Habermas, comes from the problematic tradition of what is called the "Counter-Enlightenment," which belittles autonomous rationality of the individual, scientific objectivity, rationalistic universalism, and public law in favor of will, spirit, and imagination. He argues that even though the Enlightenment may not have been perfect, we have to rehabilitate it.

Frederic Jameson, a Marxist, has offered an influential criticism of postmodernism.[20] According to him, what lies behind postmodernism is the logic of "late capitalism," i.e., consumer capitalism, with its emphasis on marketing and consuming commodities, and not on producing them. One serious symptom of postmodernism today, therefore, is that the historical past has been shallowly transformed into a series of emptied-out stylizations, which are then consumed as commodities easily. Jameson relates this symptom to what he calls "pastiche" as contrasted from "parody." While parody can still make a strong political critique to the establishment based on its norms of judgment, pastiche as a juxtaposition of emptied-out stylizations without a normative grounding is "amputated of the satiric impulse, devoid of laughter." This also means a loss of our connection to real history. His criticism of postmodernism resembles Jean Baudrillard's based on his notion of "simulacra" (copies) of the past without any connection to real past history.

Alex Callinicos, not quite satisfied with the criticisms by Habermas and Jameson, has presented a stronger criticism.[21] Callinicos blames the irrationalism and tepid relativism of Derrida and others, saying that it is simply constituted by a nihilistic reaction of those disillusioned bourgeois academics who experienced the failure of the student insurrection of Paris 1968 which ruled out any chance of a "people's revolution." Thus, it carries no sense of political resistance at all. Callinicos also attacks the theory of "post-industrial" society, which claims that "post-industrial" society with its mystified structures of global or disorganized capital in the postmodern age is beyond the ken of Marxism. For him, there is no such thing as post-industrial society, and worldwide revolution is still necessary. Still another criticism from him is directed toward the alleged existence of aesthetic postmodernism; according to him, it actually does not exist as it is nothing more than a refinement of aesthetic modernism.

Meaningless and disingenuous

The linguist Noam Chomsky has suggested that postmodernism is meaningless because it adds nothing to analytical or empirical knowledge. He asks why postmodernist intellectuals won't respond as "people in physics, math, biology, linguistics, and other fields are happy to do when someone asks them, seriously, what are the principles of their theories, on what evidence are they based, what do they explain that wasn't already obvious, etc. These are fair requests for anyone to make. If they can't be met, then I'd suggest recourse to Hume's advice in similar circumstances: to the flames."[22]

There are lots of things I don't understand—say, the latest debates over whether neutrinos have mass or the way that Fermat's last theorem was (apparently) proven recently. But from 50 years in this game, I have learned two things: (1) I can ask friends who work in these areas to explain it to me at a level that I can understand, and they can do so, without particular difficulty; (2) if I'm interested, I can proceed to learn more so that I will come to understand it. Now Derrida, Lacan, Lyotard, Kristeva, etc.—even Foucault, whom I knew and liked, and who was somewhat different from the rest—write things that I also don't understand, but (1) and (2) don't hold: no one who says they do understand can explain it to me and I haven't a clue as to how to proceed to overcome my failures. That leaves one of two possibilities: (a) some new advance in intellectual life has been made, perhaps some sudden genetic mutation, which has created a form of "theory" that is beyond quantum theory, topology, etc., in depth and profundity; or (b) … I won't spell it out. Noam Chomsky

The criticism of postmodernism as ultimately meaningless rhetorical gymnastics was demonstrated in the Sokal Affair, where physicist Alan Sokal proposed and delivered for publication an article purportedly about interpreting physics and mathematics in terms of postmodern theory, which he had deliberately distorted to make it nonsensical. It was nevertheless published by Social Text a postmodernist cultural studies journal published by Duke University. Interestingly, editors at Social Text never acknowledged that the article's publication had been a mistake but supported a counter-argument defending the "interpretative validity" of Sokal's article, despite the author's later rebuttal of his own article.

Beyond the End of the Postmodern Era

Among the many criticisms, strictly speaking, there are some who have actually stated against postmodernism that the postmodern era has already ended, suggesting the coming of a new age of "post-postmodernism," which is a return of many of the features of modernity. British photographer David Bate observes that postmodernism has been replaced with what he calls "neo-realism" in which the postmodern type of representation no longer exists and instead "descriptive" works as in the photography exhibition in 2003 at the Tate Modern in London called Cruel and Tender: The Real in the Twentieth Century have emerged "to produce a reality as though this is 'as it really is', to make reality certain through realism and without interrogating it."[23] In his essay "The Death of Postmodernism and Beyond," literary critic Alan Kirby argues that we now inhabit an entirely new cultural landscape, which he calls "pseudo-modernism": "Postmodernism conceived of contemporary culture as a spectacle before which the individual sat powerless, and within which questions of the real were problematised. It therefore emphasised the television or the cinema screen. Its successor, which I will call pseudo-modernism, makes the individual's action the necessary condition of the cultural product."[24]

Accommodating Postmodernism

Postmodernism has also been appreciated by various schools leaning toward liberalism such as feminism and accommodated even by religious and theological people especially in Christianity.

Feminist appreciation

Some feminists such as Julia Kristeva, Jane Flax, and Judith Butler have found postmodernism to be in support of their cause. According to them, the categorization of the male/female binary in society came from the modernity tradition of the Enlightenment, and therefore it must be deconstructed. The gender difference is not naturally given. This position has built on the ideas of not only Simone de Beauvoir but also Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, etc., and it can be called "postmodern feminism" to be distinguished from other branches of feminism.

Religious and theological accommodations

Some religious people welcome the relativist stance of postmodernism that says that there is no universal religious truth or law, for they believe that it provides an opportunity for interreligious dialogue with a spirit of pluralism. For a completely different reason, conservative believers, who are otherwise far from appreciative of postmodernism, welcome the condition of postmodern vacuum as a good context for evangelism: "A growing number of these Christians are embracing some postmodern ideas—- not uncritically, but believing they offer an authentic context for Christian living and fresh avenues of evangelism."[25]

There are also theologically ambitious Christians who accommodate the challenge of postmodernism in such a creative way as to come up with a more understandable and even convincing, new theology in the midst of postmodern uncertainty. The Cambridge Companion to Postmodern Theology lists seven types of such theologians:[26]

  1. Theology of communal practice, which enables us to see the patterns of God in communities not through any theoretical foundations of modernism (John Howard Yoder, Nicholas Lash, etc.).
  2. Postliberal theology, which involves biblical narratives to make the characters in the stories come alive, avoiding reaching any timeless core doctrine (George Lindbeck, etc.).
  3. Postmetaphysical theology, which expresses God not in terms of being but rather in terms of goodness or love (Jean-Luc Marion, etc.).
  4. Deconstructive theology, which goes through Derrida's deconstruction, but which ends up being a way of longing for God after deconstruction (John D. Caputo, etc.)
  5. Reconstructive theology, which is Whiteheadian postmodernism, pursuing a non-dogmatic theological reconstruction after deconstruction (David Ray Griffin, John B. Cobb, Jr., etc.).
  6. Feminist theology (Judith Butler, etc.).
  7. Radical orthodoxy, which presents classical Christianity as a genuine alternative not only to modernity but also to postmodernity (John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock, Graham Ward, etc.).

From above, it seems that postmodernism that may have brought a lot of challenges to many people is not necessarily an unpleasant thing but rather a good thing from which something new, truthful, and reliable can be expected to come.

Notes

  1. ↑ Ihab Hassan, "From Postmodernism to Postmodernism," Philosophy and Literature 25:1 (2001).
  2. ↑ David Lyon. Postmodernity. (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1994)
  3. ↑ Mary Klages, "Postmodernism." English Department, University of Colorado. Retrieved March 8, 2008.
  4. ↑ Dino Felluga, "Introduction to Postmodernism." Retrieved March 5, 2008.
  5. ↑ Lyon, 1994
  6. ↑ Klages, "Postmodernism." Retrieved March 8, 2008.
  7. ↑ Mary Klages "Postmodernism." Retrieved March 8, 2008.
  8. ↑ Klages, "Postmodernism." Retrieved March 8, 2008.
  9. ↑ Felluga, "Introduction to Postmodernism." Retrieved March 5, 2008.
  10. ↑ Linda Hutcheon. The Politics of Postmodernism. (New York: Routledge, 1989).
  11. ↑ Fredric Jameson. Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. {Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991).
  12. ↑ Jean Baudrillard. Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1994).
  13. ↑ See, for example, Leslie Fiedler, "The New Mutants," Partisan Review 32 (4) (Fall 1965); Ihab Hassan, "The Literature of Silence," Encounter 28 (1) (January 1967).
  14. ↑ Jürgen Habermas, "Modernity: An Unfinished Project," in Habermas and the Unfinished Project of Modernity: Critical Essays on The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, ed. Maurizio Passerin d'Entrèves and Seyla Benhabib. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997).
  15. ↑ Jean-François Lyotard. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).
  16. ↑ Klages "Postmodernism." Retrieved March 8, 2008.
  17. ↑ Craig Bartholomew, "Post/Late? Modernity as the Context for Christian Scholarship Today." Retrieved March 10, 2008.
  18. ↑ For example, Michel Foucault, This Is Not a Pipe, trans. James Harkness (University of California Press, 1983); and Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 1987).
  19. ↑ Jürgen Habermas, "Modernity: An Unfinished Project," in Habermas and the Unfinished Project of Modernity: Critical Essays on The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, ed. Maurizio Passerin d'Entrèves and Seyla Benhabib (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997).
  20. ↑ Frederic Jameson. Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.
  21. ↑ Alex Callinicos. Against Postmodernism: A Marxist Critique. (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1990).
  22. ↑ Noam Chomsky, "On Postmodernism." Retrieved December 18, 2007.
  23. ↑ David Bate"After Modernism?" www.lensculture.com. Retrieved March 12, 2008.
  24. ↑ Alan Kirby, 2006."The Death of Postmodernism and Beyond.".Philosophy Now- A magazine of Ideas. Retrieved March 12, 2008.
  25. ↑ Six postmodern Christians discuss the possibilities and limits of postmodernism. A forum with Carlos Aguilar, Vincent Bacote, Andy Crouch, Catherine Crouch, Sherri King, and Chris Simmons "The Antimoderns: Six Postmodern Christians Discuss the Possibilities and Limits of Postmodernism.". November 13, 2000. Christianity Today. Retrieved March 13, 2008.
  26. ↑ Kevin J. Vanhoozer, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Postmodern Theology. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

References
ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

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  • Vattimo, Gianni. The Transparent Society. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992. ISBN 9780801845284
  • Veith, Jr., Gene Edward. Postmodern Times: A Christian Guide to Contemporary Thought and Culture. Wheaton, Ill.: Crossway Books, 1994. ISBN 9780891077688
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External links

All links retrieved November 30, 2022.


Sub-fields of and approaches to Human geography
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Waking up on a sidewalk in Bijapur, India.
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Behavioral · Critical · Culture theory · Feminist · Marxist
Modernism (Structuralism • Semiotics) · Postmodernism (Post-structuralism • Deconstruction)

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