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I must confess that I didn’t really notice postmodernism at its
peak in the early 1990’s, and perhaps I shouldn’t write about
it, but it provides thecontext for Michel
Foucault, who I am very interested in. Although Foucault died
in 1984, he remains the most influential figure (debatably) along
with Baudrillard, Derrida and Lyotard – the roots of the ‘movement’
are generally French. It interests me that he is almost unknown
to the ‘new age’ people, and that, though the two movements have
their similarities, they generally ignore each other. By this
I mean that they are both vague movements which people ‘enlist
in’ – mostly middle class people in the case of the new age, generally
young intellectuals, aesthetes, radicals (and gays?) in the case
of postmodernism.
I can only give a few quotes from the book I read, “Beginning
Postmodernism”, by Tim Woods, Manchester University Press, 1999
:-
The origins of postmodernism appear to be completely confused
and underdetermined; and perhaps appropriately so, since postmodernism
denies the idea of knowable origins. Postmodernism has acquired
a semantic instability or a shifting meaning that shadows and
echoes its notes of indeterminacy and insecurity. The establishment
of its relativistic cultural policies as a new orthodoxy, coupled
with the complexity of grasping all the philosophical discourses
and terminology, means it has the potential for discursive ambiguity
and metaphoric appropriation …… (p. 3)
…..have described postmodernism using the metaphor of the rhizome.
This is the lateral root structure of certain plants, and the
metaphor describes how all social and cultural activities in postmodernism
are dispersed, divergent, and acentred systems or structures.
This contrasts with the organised, hierarchical, ‘trunk-and-branch’
structure of modernism. Others talk about the ‘doubleness’ of
postmodernism, meaning its ironic, self-reflexive or parodic,
imitative action. In all definitions, postmodernism has proved
to be a snake-like concept whose twists and turns are difficult
to pin down. (p. 6)
Postmodernism pits reasons in the plural – fragmented and incommensurable
– against the universality of modernism and the long-standing
conception of the self as a subject with a single, unified reason.
(p. 9)
…….postmodernism seems to appeal to societies in which the demise
of their former economic, cultural and political superiority has
led to a responsiveness to nostalgia and frustration. ………. “Beginning
Postmodernism” embraces the works, ideas and concepts from these
disciplines both within and outside the humanities, where the
impact of ‘postmodernism’ has manifested itself and influenced
the discourse of these subjects. These cover such subjects as
literature, film, visual and plastic art, ‘classical’ and popular
music, cultural theory, sociology, law, anthropology, psychology,
feminism, architecture and geography, …….. (p. 11)
But it is not all academic …… one of the shortest statements
of what postmodernism is taken from Lyotard (The Differend, Manchester
UP), where his most important conceptualisations are summarised
(by Woods, p. 23) as:-
- It is first and foremost ‘an incredulity towards metanarratives’
and an anti-foundationalism
- Although it presents the unpresentable, it does not do so
nostalgically, nor does it seek to offer solace in so doing
- It contains pleasure and pain, in a reintroduction of the
sublime
- It does not seek to give reality but to invent allusions to
the conceivable which cannot be presented. In this respect there
is something theological in his concept of representational
art
- It actively searches out heterogeneity, pluralism, constant
innovation
- It is to be thought of not as a historical epoch, but rather
as an aesthetic practice
- It challenges the legitimation of positivist science
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