Postmodernism”, entry for Encyclopaedia of Postmodernism, London; NY: Routledge, 2001, pp. 119-123, by Robert F. Barsky
Postmodernity
Derived from the etymologically baffling combination of “post” (after) and “modo” (just now), and with attributes which can be traced through the *history of modern thought but which take present shape after WWII, postmodernity now loosely encompasses or relates to a series of movements, sometimes incompatible, that emerged in affluent countries in Europe and of European descent in art, *architecture, literature, music, the social sciences and the humanities. Postmodern approaches, or descriptions of the “postmodern condition”, which describe our current knowledge state, emerge in the face of the modernist search for *authority, progress, universalization, rationalization, systematization, and a consistent criteria for the evaluation of knowledge claims. As such, postmodernity involves a radical questioning of the grounds upon which knowledge claims are made, and is thereby linked to a sense of liberation from limiting earlier practices. Its rise has spawned whole new approaches such as *cultural studies, feminist studies (cf. Heckman), *women’s studies, *gay and lesbian studies, *gender studies, *queer theory, science studies, and *postcolonial theory (cf. Edward *Said), although it has now become the dominant paradigm which is itself being questioned for its limiting practices. Andreas *Huyssen suggests that postmodernity emerges from a schism between two modernist enterprises, the consciously exclusionary “high” modernism, and the historical avantgarde which, like postmodernity, questioned the aesthetic notions that underwrite the idea that high culture is self-sufficient. Postmodernity is one of the many “post” movements including *postcolonial studies and *postmarxism; it is often confounded with postmodernism, which is more a period label ascribed to cultural products that manifest or display reflexivity, irony, the sometimes playful mixture of high and low elements. Postmodernity has affinities as well to *poststructuralism, which undertook a radical critique of *structuralists (Greimas, Goldmann, Kristeva, Todorov), *narratologists (Bal, Genette) and *semioticians (*Eco, *Peirce), who, in the 1960s and 70s, described linguistic structures as ostensibly stable, and able to mirror the movement of the mind.
Origins and Usages
Postmodernity is strongly defended by those who find within it a more reflexive approach to the rigid morals and norms that are the legacy of Modernity’s more *totalizing approaches to politics, philosophy, law, psychology, sociology, and theology. A number of persons have become associated with the postmodern project, notably Jacques Attali, Jean *Baudrillard, Hélène *Cixous, Gilles *Deleuze, Jacques *Derrida, Michel *Foucault, Félix *Guattari, Luce *Irigaray, Fredric *Jameson, Charles *Jencks, Julia *Kristeva, Jacques *Lacan, Jean-François *Lyotard, and Robert *Venturi. These theorists claim as intellectual forefathers the likes of Friedrich *Nietzsche, Martin *Heidegger, Theodor *Adorno, Max *Horkheimer and Walter *Benjamin, whose relations to specific characteristics of postmodernity are tenuous and variously described. It’s interesting to note that these ‘precursors’ are German thinkers, most associated with *philosophy, while those ideas against which a significant portion of movement is directed can be linked to French or Scottish Enlightenment thought and classical liberalism. The number of French intellectuals represented on the list of contemporary postmodern theorists gives grounds for further pause, because their work was originally directed to quite a specific paradigm occupied by elite French intellectuals in post-war Paris. Figures like *Althusser or *Derrida, whose stars were falling (for different reasons) in the 1980s in France, were subsequently appropriated and elevated to a high level of “star status” on account of an American Academy which, since the 1970s, has recruited and promoted their work as antidotes to the New Critical and formalist approaches which had dominated the American scene since the 1940s. As a result, postmodern texts are read out of context and in (sometimes iffy) translations, which has created considerable difficulties for scholars and students.
Most theorists and practitioners would reject or problematize the postmodern label, and clear overlaps between their respective projects would be difficult to pinpoint. Nevertheless, by virtue of association between these theorists and a range of ideas and practices, they can be broadly classified as representatives of one of two approaches. The first emphasizes the fragmented, unstable, indeterminate, discontinuous, migratory, *hyperreal nature of existence, which leads them to propose various versions of non- or anti-totalizing *transgressive or disruptive practices. This makes their work resistant to, and incredulous of, *‘meta’ or ‘grand’ narratives, systematicicity, or coherence in art or interpretation. The second approach speaks from Fredric *Jameson’s Marxist economic perspective and emphasizes a crisis of representation, an increasingly monolithic (late-) capitalism dominated by an ever-smaller group of multinationals, and the valuation of utility and marketability rather than *ethics in the domain of knowledge. From this standpoint, postmodernity is an historical period, a stage of capitalism, even a “mode of production”. Culture offers some terrain for the exploration of this phenomenon, a space for tracing out the “symptomology” of this stage and the study of its conspicuous characteristics, often described against a backdrop of *globalization, capitalist universalization, or the *end of history.
The sociologist Zygmunt *Bauman discusses postmodernity’s “institutionalized pluralism, variety, contingency and ambivalence”, which were unwanted by-products of the modernist quest for “universality, homogeneity, monotony, and clarity”. “Postmodernity”, says Bauman, “may be interpreted as fully developed modernity; as modernity that acknowledged the effects it was producing throughout its history, yet producing inadvertently, by default rather than design, as unanticipated consequences, by-products often perceived as waste; as modernity conscious of its true nature – modernity for itself”. Postmodernity is “modernity emancipated from false consciousness”, the institutionalization of the characteristics deemed during the modern period as unfortunate upshots of failed efforts at modernist objectives (149). This “false consciousness” was presumably undermined by recognition of the murderous legacy of twentieth century totalitarianism in the guise of Leninism, Stalinism, Bolshevism, Maoism, and the lingering oppression of capitalism. Although the politics of postmodernity are conspicuously inconsistent and ill-defined, there a postmodern suspicion about totalizing social programs, attempts at solving all of society’s ills with an overriding *ideology or agenda. The most significant myth for the shift towards postmodernity in the all-important domain of French philosophy surrounds events in 1956, notably Khrushchev’s secret speech to the Twentieth Party Conference in Moscow in November, and the suppression of the Hungarian revolt. According to Mark Lilla, these events “brought an end to many illusions: about Sartre, about communism, about history, about philosophy, and about the term “humanism.” It also established a break between the generation of French thinkers reared in the Thirties, who had seen the war as adults, and students who felt alien to those experiences and wished to escape the suffocating atmosphere of the cold war. The latter therefore turned from the “existential” political engagement recommended by Sartre toward a new social science called structuralism. And (the story ends) after this turn there would develop a new approach to philosophy, of which Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida are perhaps the most distinguished representatives”. Lilla questions the degree to which illusions about communism shifted at this point, but does echo the belief that structuralism altered the terms in which political matters were henceforth discussed, a point that leads into the critical area of language studies.
Language theories figure prominently in the project of postmodernity, through studies of non-referentiality, the expressive peculiarities of postmodernity’s language, as well as problems relating to intention, reception and representation. For poststructuralists, informed by Derrida’s work on *deconstruction, all *discourse is bricolage, literally tinkering or puttering around, the only activity possible because there is no center, no originary or stable meaning. This has implications for all disciplines, notably in the social sciences and humanities, both in its emphasis upon heterogeneity and multi-directedness, and in its insistence upon the central role of language and discourse. There are those who claim that this in itself doesn’t make poststructuralism into an exclusively postmodern phenomenon, despite certain points of overlap; in fact, far from being a radical rupture and discontinuity, Huyssen describes poststructuralism as “a discourse of and about *modernism, and… if we are to locate the postmodern in poststructuralism it will have to be found in the ways various forms of post structuralism have opened up new problematics in modernism and have reinscribed modernism in the discourse formations of our own time” (Huyssen 207).
Disciplines
There are many disciplines affected by the postmodern conception of, and approach to, the study of language. *Psychology and *psychoanalysis rely heavily upon Jacques Lacan’s work, notably his elaboration of an approach based upon the precept that the unconscious is structured like a language. The postmodern shift in approach to the mind is palpable, in that it rebuts the formalist or behaviorist dreams of systematic and predictable results, in favor of a lack of center, “deterritorialization” and connections through *rhizomes”. These terms are explored in the complex work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, who, for example, celebrate *schizophrenia (*schizoanalysis) for its inventiveness and its refusal of totalizing approaches.
In the field of law, the emphasis is not so much upon postmodernity in terms of language *theory, though there are examples of deconstructionist law, but upon a re-orientation of the field in favor of exceptions over norms in decisionmaking. This idea is associated with Carl Schmitt, the architect of Nazi law, but it has been appropriated in the postmodern period by the left (Paul Piccone and G.L. Ulman in Telos), the right (William Buckley and Paul Gottfried in the National Review), by various ‘postmodern’ historians and writers such as Chantal *Mouffe and Ernst *Laclau , and by mainstream writers including Joseph Bendersky and George Schwab. Opponents to the idea like William Scheuerman recall other critiques of postmodernity’s apparent arbitrariness by calling attention to the inherent dangers of a *justice system that relies upon situation-specific administrative decrees, or upon interpretations of claims that depend upon notions such as custom, indwelling right, morality, fairness, or discretion. Taking his cue from *Frankfurt School legal theorists Kirchheimer and Neuman, Scheuerman suggests that although this kind of approach does recognise and act upon diversity in ways that an inflexible rule of law cannot, it also demands extensive state intervention in an unprecedented variety of spheres of social and economic activity, undermining the division between state and society, and reducing the degree to which government action can be deemed normalised, cogent, and predictable.
In the domain of literature, we find *literary theorists, including Harry Levin, Irving Howe, Leslie Fiedler, Frank Kermode, and Ihab Hassan, who used the term postmodern in the 1960s as a way of distinguishing post WWII works by Samuel Beckett, Jorge Luis Borges, John Barth, Donald Barthelme and Thomas *Pynchon. Debate has raged about pre-WWII literary experimenters who seem to have worked in a framework that seems postmodern avant la lettre, notably Laurence Sterne, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Dorothy Richardson, not to mention the dadaists. Postmodern literature is also a rebellion against values distant from the disenfranchised who in the 1950s formed literary movements including the Beats, the Angry Young Men, and a range of women’s writings which sought to liberate the creative individual from the straightjacket of the moderns, and rebellion continues through experimentation in form, function and mediums (notably cybertexts) in the literary domain and in literary criticism (cf. Linda Hutcheon).
From architecture comes the earliest reference to “post-modern”, which was first used by Joseph Hudnut, who entitled his 1945 article “the post-modern house”. Postmodernity is in evidence in the historical citations found on façades of buildings by Philip Johnson and Michael Graves. Architectural postmodernity appears following the realization that the modernist ideals of the Congress of International Modern Architects (CIMA), based upon rationalism, behaviorism, and pragmatism, are, as Charles Jencks suggests, “as irrational as the philosophies themselves” (470-1). Jencks dates the death of modernism in architecture as July 15, 1972 when the 1951 Pruitt-Igoe scheme in St. Louis Missouri, the archetypal example of CIMA ideas in practice, was dynamited. Post-modernism, he says, is a “double coding: the combination of Modern techniques with something else (usually traditional building) in order for architecture to communicate with the public and a concerned minority, usually other architects” (472).
Resistance
Postmodernity is pervasive and ever-present, and theorists have found ways of making it fit most tendencies in the artistic and political trends in contemporary society. This all-encompassing quality means as well that icons of postmodernity can seem to have used up their cultural capital, and hence the current decline in its stock, and in the stock of approaches which are deemed to flow from, or contribute to, its (il)logic, notably deconstruction. This process arguably began in earnest in 1987 when, first, Victor Farías published a book on Martin Heidegger's involvement with the Nazis and its alleged roots in his philosophy, and, second, when it was revealed that Derrida’s friend and collaborator Paul *De Man had published collaborationist and anti-Semitic articles in two Belgian newspapers in the early Forties. Derrida and other sympathizers, notably colleagues in Yale’s prestigious literature department, tried to explain away the offending passages, confirming many people’s worst fears about deconstruction’s nefarious dark side: its politics. “No wonder a tour through the post-modernist section of any American bookshop is such a disconcerting experience”, writes Mark Lilla. “The most illiberal, anti-enlightenment notions are put forward with a smile and the assurance that, followed out to their logical conclusion, they could only lead us into the democratic promised land, where all God's children will join hands in singing the national anthem. It is an uplifting vision and Americans believe in uplift. That so many of them seem to have found it in the dark and forbidding works of Jacques Derrida attests to the strength of Americans' self-confidence and their awesome capacity to think well of anyone and any idea. Not for nothing do the French still call us les grands enfants”.
Postmodernity’s ir- or anti-rationalism had already been noted variously by Jurgen *Habermas, and received an extended battering in the hands of Christopher *Norris who attacked Jean Baudrillard’s “The Gulf War Has Not Taken Place” as a *symptom of a larger (postmodern) phenomenon which creates “a half-baked mixture of ideas picked up from the latest fashionable sources, or a series of slogans to the general effect that ‘truth’ and ‘reality’ are obsolete ideas, that knowledge is always and everywhere a function of the epistemic will-to-*power, and that history is nothing but a fictive construct out of the various ‘discourses’ that jostle for supremacy from one period to the next” (31). Taking his cue from Norris, Noam *Chomsky takes aim at postmodernity’s purposeful obfuscation undertaken from careerist purposes (“I await some indication that there is something here beyond trivialities or self-serving nonsense” 197), undue intellectualization (“I can perceive certain grains of truth hidden in the vast structure of verbiage, but those are simple indeed” 198), and, most poignantly, the politically stifling quality of postmodern practices (“the fact that it absorbs elements that consider themselves ‘on the left’ – the kind of people who years earlier would have been organizing and teaching in worker schools” 168). A range of these points are at issue in the Levitt and Gross book Higher Superstition and, more recently, in the “[Alan] Sokal Hoax”, the publication in Social Text by a physicist of an article containing purposeful inaccuracies, both of which focused attention upon the misappropriation by postmodern theorists of scientific theories, with the suggestion that to the obscurity is added the problem of inaccuracy, a lack of rigor, and a generalized misinformed tomfoolery. These latter projects may move us into a new era, postmodern or not, of informed inter-disciplinarity and productive political action sometimes sadly lacking from a professional setting in which careers seem variously linked to the “cutting-edge”.
Bibliography
Barsky, Robert F. (1998) NoamChomsky: A Life of Dissent. Cambridge: MIT P.
Bauman, Zygmunt (1992) “A Sociological Theory of Postmodernity”. Between Totalitarianism and Postmodernity, Peter Beilharz, Gillian Robinson, and John Rundell (eds.), Cambridge: MIT P, 1992.
Habermas, Jurgen (1987) Lectures on the Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. Cambridge: MIT P.
Hassan, Ihab (1987) The Postmodern Turn: Essays in Postmodern Theory and Culture, Ohio: Ohio State UP.
Hekman, Susan J. (1990) Gender and Knowledge: Elements of a Postmodern Feminism, Boston: Northeastern UP.
Hutcheon, Linda (1988) A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction, NY: Routledge Kegan and Paul.
Huyssen, Andreas (1986) After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP.
Jameson, Fredric (1991) Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke UP.
Jencks, Charles (1996) “What is Post-Modernism”, Laurence Cahoone (ed), From Modernism to Postmodernism: An Anthology, Cambridge MA; Oxford UK: Blackwell, pp. 471-80.
Lilla, Mark (1998) “Derrida’s Politics”, New York Review of Books June 25.
Lyotard, Jean-François (1984) The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minn: U of Minnesota P.
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