Postmodernity and Postmodernism
Intro
• What was/is Modernity?
• Why is ,postmodernity’ different?
• Theory: some main themes in
poststructuralism/ postmodernism
• Some criticisms
Intellectual background to
Modernity
• Renaissance: human-centeredness
and the decline of religion
• ENLIGHTENMENT: Reason,
science, progress, universalism
Modernity
• Humans can transform world; humanity is
perfectible
• Rationalisation, standardisation, uniformity
• Industrial production and market economy
• Particular institutions: nation-state and mass
(parliamentary) democracy
• A society which, for first time, lives in the future,
rather than the past (Giddens)
• (first Telegram 1844)
• 1877 Edison - phonograph
• 1879 Edison – incandescant filament bulb
• 1889 – Eiffel Tower completed
• 1895 Lumiere brothers – camera/projector
• 1898 Skłodowska-Curie –
Radium/radioactivity
• 1901 Marconi - radio
• 1903 Wright brothers – flight
Darwin (Origin 1859) & Marx
(Kapital 1867)
Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection undermined
religious certainty
Human beings were driven by the same impulses as "lower
animals" - difficult to reconcile with the idea of an
ennobling spirituality
Marx’s theory problematised capitalism and debunked the
bourgeoisie & bourgeois culture
Important strands in establishing modernism
Freud (the Unconscious,1899) and Einstein
(Relativity,1905)
The psyche/the person
and
The cosmos
far more complex than previously
understood
•The cultural response to
the new world:
Modernism
Postmodernity
• Postmodernity is characterized by a
perceived general breakdown of the
conditions of production of modernity as
capitalism enters a new phase
• From production to consumption
(Baudrillard)
• WW1 – technological civilisation = progress?
• Since 1945 harder to defend the assumptions
of modernity, modernism and progress after
the holocaust (Bauman, Derrida).
• Weakening of faith in humanity/humanism?
Characteristics of
‘postmodernity’
• Decline of modernity’s grand narratives
• Weakening of the authority of modern institutions
• The Information Age and the 2
nd
Industrial Revolution: a
world of signs
• Mass media saturation distorts/produces new reality –
representations and surfaces
• Decontextualization, randomness, heterogeneity
• Time and space distortion – the shrinking world
Postmodern forms?
• Cultural eclecticism and no basis for high/low distinction
• Architecture: eclecticism (historical style-mixing), irony, jokiness
• Cinema : pastiche and intertextuality
• TV: as inherently postmodern
• Advertising: self parody, irony, representations rather than the
things themselves
• Popular music: collage (cut and paste), pastiche, remix,
quotation, mashups replace pop-modernism (Ray Charles,
Beatles, Dylan…)
Modern and Postmodern
Culture?
• Seriousness - Irony
• Striving for coherence - embracing
fragmentation
• Development - Pastiche
• Integrity – Eclecticism
• Reality – No ‘reality’
Extremely influential theories a) across
academic disciplines, and b) ‘progressive’
political thinking
Intellectual foundations of PC - relativism &
anti-foundationalism
The ‘Linguistic Turn’
Social Construction
‚Posts’
Legacy of May ‘68
University radicalisation,
US counterculture &
French theory
• From a critique of capitalism to a
• Critique of modern culture &
• Condemnation of The Enlightenment
Scepticism about Reason
• From (Frankfurt School style)
AMBIVALENCE (reason has been
corrupted)
To
• REJECTION (reason itself is the
problem – pessimism)
(1844-1900)
Repudiating Marx
• Marx as Enlightenment figure
• The unconscious forces that pervade
human life cannot be overcome –
Marx is not pessimistic enough
Nietzsche becomes the new guru:
Reason is oppressive and modern society is
sick
• The Apollonian: discipline, control,
restraint, orderliness
suppresses
• The Dionysian: impulsiveness,
adventurousness, creativity, imagination
Dionysus suppressed
= an imbalanced, sick civilisation:
People remained dual-natured & the Dionysian aspect became
supressed
The mind is DIVIDED AGAINST ITSELF: culture is the product of
the ‘higher mental powers’
Nietzsche questions this opposition between rationality and
impulse/passion
Rationality and science =
• Science is an example of the will to power, not the ‘neutral’
triumph of reason over unreason
• (Christianity = sheeplike docility)
• Foucault – discipline, passivity and the manipulable modern
person; spiritual desolation and disenchantment (after Weber)
• The critique of a dominant but spiritually impoverished bourgeois
culture (Freud – Civilisation and its Discontents)
• Science is ideological and must therefore
be exposed knowledge itself examined
and exposed (anti-foundationalism, radical
scepticism)
• Science is mentalistic (mind/body
dualism) and disciplining
Science
Michel Foucault
(1926-1984)
Foucault
• Examines historical circumstances that
gave rise to the modern type of person
• Madness, Punishment, Government, and
Sexuality and Subjectivity – disciplining
the ‘Dionysian’ subject
• Discourses of ‘otherness’
.
Jacques Derrida (1930-2004)
Deconstruction
• Linguistic (and other) structures must be undone, desedimented
• A text is not a separate whole but contains a number of
irreconcilable and contradictory meanings
• Deconstructions work entirely within the studied text to expose
and undermine the frame of reference, assumptions, and
ideological underpinnings of the text – SUB-TEXT
Jean-Francois Lyotard
(1924-
1998)
The Postmodern Condition: A Report
on Knowledge (1979)
• Meta- or grand- narratives -
sometimes 'grand narratives'
• Large-scale, totalising theories and
philosophies of the world, such as
the progress of history, the
knowability of everything by science
Jean Baudrillard (1929-)
Hyperreality and Simulacra
Our inability to distinguish reality from fantasy in
technologically advanced postmodern cultures.
How consciousness defines what is actually "real" in
a world where a multitude of media can radically
shape and filter an original event or experience.
The Gulf War did not happen…
Virtual Reality
Simulacra
Pre-modern period: the image is clearly an
artificial marker for the real item
Industrial Revolution: distinctions between image
and reality blur due to the proliferation of mass-
produced copies. The item's ability to imitate
reality threatens to replace the original version
Postmodernity: simulacrum precedes or replaces
the original and the distinction between reality and
representation breaks down
Postmodernism (or anti-
foundationalism)
Pluralism of value
No objective truth; relativism
Rejection of the "modern" scientific mentality
Rejection of ‘grand narratives’
In opposition to modernity
Qs
• Deliberate lack of clarity?
• Complex ideas for a complex world?
• Academic careers – ‘tenured radicals’
• PC, diversity and bourgeois self loathing?
• Excessive individualism
• Is it all gibberish?
The Sokal Hoax (’96)
Purpose: to see if Social Text would “publish an article
liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b)
it flattered the editors’ ideological preconceptions.”
Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative
Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity
Argument: quantum gravity is a social and linguistic
construct
Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals'
Abuse of Science,
Sokal and Bricmont (1997)
Three articles of Julia Kristeva contain excessive use of
mathematical or physical technical terms
Also found in the writings of Lacan, Deleuze, Baudrillard etc.,
intended to impress a reader who does not have
knowledge that would permit judging whether the use of
these terms is well-grounded
Anti-Humanism?
• Part of a longer term assault on:
• coherence, meaningfulness, value, objectivity, integrity of
character…Humanism
• Collapse of confidence in progress, science, truth and the whole,
dignified person… the ‘minimal self’
• A two-pronged attack (Heartfield, The ‘Death of the Subject’
Explained):
1) on objective knowledge
2) on the Enlightenment concept of the human subject; the ability to
possess knowledge and use it rationally
Concerning the human
subject…
Identities are ‘fragmented’, or ‘fractured’, or ‘multiple’
Political person and pessimism about the person
Individuals as weak, fragmented, anxious, insecure, vulnerable…
minimal selves (and groups) in need of continual therapeutic
support
(Lasch, The Minimal Self. Furedi, Therapy
Culture)