User:Patrick Welsh/sandbox

Theoretical generalization

Although postmodern criticism and thought drew on philosophical ideas from early on, "postmodernism" was only introduced to the expressly philosophical lexicon by Jean-François Lyotard in his 1979 The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. This work served as a catalyst for many of the subsequent intellectual debates around the term.

In the 1990s, postmodernism became increasingly identified with critical and philosophical discourse directly about postmodernity or the postmodern idiom itself. No longer centered on any particular art or even the arts in general, it instead turns to address the more general problems posed to society in general by a new proliferation of cultures and forms. It is during this period that it also comes to be associated with postcolonialism and identity politics.

Around this time, postmodernism also begins to be conceived in popular culture as a general "philosophical disposition" associated with a loose sort of relativism. In this sense, the term also starts to appear as a "casual term of abuse" in non-academic contexts. Others identify it as an aesthetic "lifestyle" of eclecticism and playful self-irony.

In philosophy

Main article: Postmodern philosophy

Poststructuralist precursors

Main article: Poststructuralism

In the 1970s, a disparate group of French theorists – often grouped together as "poststructuralists" – developed a critique of modern philosophy with roots discernible in Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger's critique of metaphysics. Although few themselves relied upon the term, they became known to many as postmodern theorists. And, while their ideas exerted a great influence on debates about the postmodern, they themselves did not intervene or attempt to provide their own definitions of the postmodern.

Poststructuralists, like structuralists, start from the assumption that people's identities, values, and economic conditions determine each other rather than having intrinsic properties that can be understood in isolation. While structuralism explores how meaning is produced by a set of essential relationships in an overarching quasi-linguistic system, poststructuralism accepts this premise, but rejects the assumption that such systems can ever be fixed or centered. Instead, they stress the various ways that cultural structures are produced in history. They also emphasize how meaning is produced, rather than discovered, and replace the traditional concept of "representation" (according to which meaning is determined by the objected signified) to focus instead upon the elastic potentialities of language to generate new meanings.

Jacques Derrida and deconstruction

Deconstruction is a practice of philosophy, literary criticism, and textual analysis developed by Jacques Derrida. It is based on the assumption, which it seeks to validate by textual analysis, that any text harbors inherent points of "undecidability" that undermine any stable meaning intended by the author. The process of writing inevitably, he aims to show, reveals suppressed elements, challenging the oppositions that are thought to sustain the text. Nevertheless, Derrida does not wish to do away with such concepts as "origin" or "truth". Instead he challenges their claims to finality. They are, as he puts it, "under erasure", and this makes deconstructive reading a kind of "double play".

Derrida argues that the practice of metaphysics establishes hierarchies and orders of subordination within various dualisms. It prioritizes presence and purity over the contingent and complicated, dismissing them as aberrations irrelevant to philosophical analysis. In essence, metaphysical thought prioritizes one side of an opposition while ignoring or marginalizing the alternative. He uses the term metaphysics of presence to describe the foundationalist approach to knowledge, taking himself to have demonstrated that we do not have unmediated access to reality. This project of deconstructing modern philosophy influenced many postmodern thinkers.

Michel Foucault on power relations

French philosopher and social theorist Michel Foucault argued that power operates according to the logics of social institutions that have become unmoored from the intentions of any actual individuals. Individuals, according to Foucault, are both products and participants in these dynamics. In the 1970s, Foucault employed a Nietzsche-inspired "genealogical method" to analyze power-relations across their historical permutations.

Both his political orientation and the consistency of his positions continue to be debated among critics and defenders alike. Nevertheless, Foucault's political works share two common elements: a historical perspective and a discursive methodology. He analyzed social phenomena in historical contexts and focused on how they have evolved over time. Additionally, he employed the study of texts, usually academic texts, as the material for his inquiries. In this way, Foucault sought to understand how the historical formation of discourses has shaped contemporary political thinking and institutions.

Gilles Deleuze on productive difference

The work of Gilles Deleuze develops a concept of difference as a productive mechanism, rather than as a merely negative phenomenon. He advocates for a critique of reason that emphasizes sensibility and feeling over rational judgment. Following Nietzsche, Deleuze argues that philosophical critique is an encounter between thought and what forces it into action, and that this requires training, discipline, inventiveness, and even a certain "cruelty". He believes that thought cannot activate itself, but needs external forces to awaken and move it. Art, science, and philosophy can provide such activation through their transformative and experimental nature.

Jean Baudrillard on hyperreality

Although trained in sociology, Jean Baudrillard worked across many disciplines. Drawing upon some of the technical vocabulary of the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, Baudrillard argues that production has shifted from creating real objects to producing signs and symbols. This system of symbolic exchange, detached from the real, constitutes hyperreality. In the words of one commentator, "the hyperreal is a system of simulation that simulates itself."

Postmodernity, he says, is the condition in which the domain of reality has become so heavily mediated by signs as to become inaccessible in itself, leaving us entirely in the domain of the simulacra, images that bears no relation to anything outside of themselves. This hyperreality is presented as the terminal stage of simulation, where signs and images become entirely self-referential.

A crisis of legitimacy

The Postmodern Condition

Jean-François Lyotard is credited with being the first to use the term "postmodern" in a philosophical context, in his 1979 work The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. In this influential work, Lyotard offers the following definition: "Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity towards metanarratives". (Examples would be Enlightenment progress, according to which society will steadily advance by the use of reason, or Marxist dialectics, according to which the contradictions of capitalism will generate its collapse and produce a more just society.) In a society with no unifying narrative, he argues, we are left with heterogeneous, group-specific narratives (or "language games", as adopted from Ludwig Wittgenstein) with no universal perspective from which to adjudicate among them.

Philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard, photo by Bracha L. Ettinger, 1995

According to Lyotard, this introduces a general crisis of legitimacy, a theme he adopts from the philosopher Jürgen Habermas, whose theory of communicative rationality Lyotard rejects. While he was particularly concerned with the way that this insight undermines claims of scientific objectivity, Lyotard's argument undermines the entire principle of transcendent legitimization. Instead, proponents of a language game must make the case for their legitimacy with reference to such considerations as efficiency or practicality. Far from celebrating the apparently relativistic consequences of this argument, however, Lyotard focused much of his subsequent work on how links among games could be established, particularly with respect to ethics and politics.

The philosophical criticism of Jürgen Habermas

The philosopher Jürgen Habermas, a prominent critic of philosophical postmodernism, argues in his 1985 work The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity that postmodern thinkers are caught in a performative contradiction, more specifically, that their critiques of modernism rely on concepts and methods that are themselves products of modern reason.

Habermas criticizes these thinkers for their rejection of the subject and their embrace of experimental, avant-garde strategies. He asserts that their critiques of modernism ultimately lead to a longing for the very subject they seek to dismantle. Habermas also takes issue with postmodernists' leveling of the distinction between philosophy and literature. He argues that such rhetorical strategies undermine the importance of argument and communicative reason.

Habermas's critique of postmodernism set the stage for much of the subsequent debate by clarifying some of its key underlying issues. Additionally, according to scholar Gary Aylesworth, "that he is able to read postmodernist texts closely and discursively testifies to their intelligibility", against those who would dismiss them as simple nonsense. His engagement with their ideas has lead some postmodern philosophers, such as Lyotard, to similarly engage with Habermas's criticisms.

Frederic Jameson's Marxist rejoinder

Nevertheless, the appearance of linguistic relativism inspired an extensive rebuttal by the Marxist critic Fredric Jameson. Building upon the theoretical foundations laid out by the Marxist economist Ernst Mandel and observations in the early work of the French sociologist Jean Baudrillard, Jameson develops his own conception of the postmodern as "the cultural logic of late capitalism" in the form of an enormous cultural expansion into an economy of spectacle and style, rather than the production of goods. Because the postmodernism is result of political and historical circumstances that make up the social world, it is not something that can be simply embraced or condemned. Instead, it must be analyzed and understood so that we may confront the world as it is.

Jameson analyzes a variety of features as expressions of the postmodern. One is the elision of the distinction between high culture and mass culture. Because of our loss of a unified "bourgeois ego", subjectivity is less focused, and we experience what he terms a "waning of the affect", an emotional disengagement. This loss of significance leads to what he calls "depthlessness", a difficulty in getting beneath the surfaces of cultural objects to find any deeper significance than is offered directly to the subject. Also significant for Jameson is the way that this mode of experience covers over the historical "depth" of an object. Reduced to a set of styles, history looses its political force. This phenomenon also find expression in the shift from "parody", in which styles are mixed in the interest of making a point, to "pastiche", in which styles are mixed together without attention to their original contexts.

Richard Rorty's neopragmatism

Richard Rorty was an American philosopher known for his linguistic form of neopragmatism. Initially attracted to analytic philosophy, Rorty later rejected its representationalism. His major influences include Charles Darwin, Hans Georg Gadamer, G. W. F. Hegel, and Martin Heidegger.

In his Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Rorty challenged the notion of a mind-independent, language-independent reality. He argued that language is a tool used to adapt to the environment and achieve desired ends. This naturalistic approach led him to abandon the traditional quest for a privileged mental power that allows direct access to things-in-themselves.

Instead, Rorty advocated for a focus on imaginative alternatives to present beliefs rather than the pursuit of well-grounded truths. He believed that creative, secular humanism, free from authoritarian assertions about truth and goodness, is the key to a better future. Rorty saw his neopragmatism as a continuation of the Enlightenment project, aiming to demystify human life and replace traditional power relations with those based on tolerance and freedom.

• Roberts, Adam (2000). Frederic Jameson. Routledge.
• Reynolds, Jack. "Jacques Derrida (1930—2004)". Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Retrieved 23 September 2024.

Extra

According to scholar Stuart Sim, one of the best ways to describe a specifically philosophical conception of postmodernism is as an anti-foundational "scepticism about authority, received wisdom, cultural and political norms and so on", which he says places it within a tradition dating back to ancient Greece.

vs. Buchannon mentioning critics

Postmodernism in architecture was initially marked by a re-emergence of surface ornament, reference to surrounding buildings in urban settings, historical reference in decorative forms (eclecticism), and non-orthogonal angles. Most scholars today agree postmodernism began to compete with modernism in the late 1950s, and gained ascendancy over it in the 1960s.

general characteristics of art (Brooker p.203

Notable figures include Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jean-François Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard, and others. By the 1980s, this spread to America in the work of Richard Rorty and others.

Scholars, however, disagree about whether his later works are intended as science fiction or truthful theoretical claims.