Post-Modernism: Concept and Contributions

 

 Postmodernist Sensibility: Portraying the contributions toward postmodernism

 

“Postmodernism was a reaction to modernism. Where modernism was about objectivity, postmodernism was about subjectivity. Where modernism sought a singular truth, postmodernism sought the multiplicity of truths”.

-   Miguel Syjuco

Postmodernism is a late 20th-century movement in philosophy and literary theory that generally questions the basic assumptions of Western philosophy in the modern period and subscribes many approaches within itself. It can be described as a set of critical, strategic and rhetorical practices employing concepts such as difference, repetition, the trace, the simulacrum, and hyperreality to destabilize other concepts such as presence, identity, historical progress, epistemic certainty, and the univocity of meaning (Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy). Postmodern philosophy is characterized by broad skepticism or relativism and a general suspicion of reason. Many postmodernists hold one or more of the following views:

1.       There is no objective reality;

2.       There  is no scientific or historical truth (objective truth);

3.      Science and technology (and even reason and logic) are not vehicles of human progress but suspect instruments of established power;

4.      Reason and logic are not universally valid;

5.      There is no such thing as human nature (human behaviour and psychology are socially determined or constructed);

6.      Language does not refer to a reality outside itself;

7.      There is no certain knowledge; and

8.      No general theory of the natural or social world can be valid or true (all are illegitimate “metanarratives”).

Many postmodernists deny that there are aspects of reality that are objective or that there are statements about reality that are objectively true or false (implying metaphysical relativism), that it is possible to have knowledge of such statements (implying epistemological skepticism or relativism), and that there are objective, or absolute, moral truths or values (implying ethical subjectivism or relativism). Instead, reality, knowledge, and value are constructed by “discourses” (shared linguistic practices) and can vary with them. Some of the famous thinkers and contributors associated with postmodernism who made influence in anthropology are,

1.      Michel Foucault;

2.      Jean-François Lyotard;

3.      Jacques Derrida;

4.      Jacques Lacan;

5.      Jean Baudrillard;

6.      Gilles Deleuze;  

7.      Fredric Jameson;

8.      Richard Rorty; and

9.      Mikhail Bakhtin

1.         Michel Foucault (1936-1984) :

 

“Knowledge is not objective – rather it is distorted by power”.

—             Michel Foucault

Michel Foucault was a French historian and philosopher associated with the structuralist,  post structuralist and post-modernist movements. He has had strong influence not only in philosophy but also in a wide range of humanistic and social scientific disciplines. For Foucault philosophy involved the project of questioning the accepted knowledge. The focus of his questioning was modern human sciences (biological, social and psychological). According to Foucault, the universal truths are nothing but the outcome of historical forces and are not scientifically grounded truths. Foucault‘s critique of modernity and humanism along with his proclamation of the death of man and development of new perspective on society, knowledge, discourse, and power has made him a major source of postmodern thought. Foucault‘s constant emphasis on power and discourse provides an unifying core on his work. In his view complex differential power relationship extend to every aspect of our social, cultural and political lives involving all manner of subject positions by persuading readers to internalize the norms and values that prevail within social order. Foucault, however, opposed the materialist tendency to construe science. Even stated the most dubious science as the simple handmaiden of power. He opposed any identification of knowledge, even the most mistaken knowledge with power. Rather, he called for an appreciation of the ways in which knowledge and power are always entangled with each other in historically specific circumstances, forming complex dynamics of what he termed pouvoir-savoir, or “power-knowledge.”  Foucault also questioned the power and its relation to knowledge. According to him genuine knowledge or truth can only be produced in the absence of power and according to conventional wisdom, power must not be allowed to corrupt the production of knowledge. Foucault challenges this notion and develops the idea that power cannot corrupt knowledge because knowledge is already the product of power.

 

2.      Jean-François Lyotard (1924-1999) :

The postmodern condition of Lyotard may be regarded as a critic of Enlightenment meta-narratives or grand recites. Lyotard is best known for his seminal work “the post-modern condition: A report on knowledge” (1984). The book crystallizes a study of the status and development of knowledge, science and technology in advanced capitalist societies. It developed a philosophical interpretation of the changing state of knowledge, science and technology in the most highly developed societies, reviewing and synthesizing research on contemporary science within the broader context of the sociology of post-industrial society and studies of postmodern culture. Lyotard‘s major working hypothesis is that the status of knowledge is altered as societies enter what is known as the post industrial age and the culture enter what is known as the postmodern age. He uses the term ‘postmodern condition’ to describe the state of knowledge and the problem of its legitimation in the most highly developed societies. Lyotard‘s ideas reflect the status and role of education and knowledge in the postmodern condition. According to him, the postmodern condition provides an understanding and critique of the neo-liberal marketisation of education in terms of the systematic, self- regulatory nature of global capitalism.

3.      Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) :

Derrida‘s philosophy is often described as ‘deconstruction’ and his ideas may be considered as an ideal representative of postmodern philosophy in general. According to Derrida, all identities, presences and predictions depend for their existence on something outside themselves, something which is absent and different from them. Reality itself is a kind of free play of differences. No identity, no reality exist at this level, identities are simply constructs of the mind and essentially of language. Derrida‘s thesis may distinguish between two realms, the realm of reality and the realm of identities. Derrida believes that there are no identities, no self-contained presences, no fixed settled meanings at the level of difference. The realm of difference is non-cognitive, it cannot be fully captured or described by means of any set of concepts or logical systems which makes objects present to the mind. This notion has been exemplified in his work ‘Margins of philosophy’. Derrida further states that although the realm of difference is non-cognitive in nature, it never occurs without cognitive knowledge. This is because of our contact with human experience; our involvement with it through language always takes place by means of concepts and predictions. Thus all knowledge is contextual in the sense that the relations of an object in any system of object or meanings are always changing and hence meaning is continually being deferred.

Derrida‘s ideas may be used for evaluating particular world views and for the purpose of textual analysis and Deconstruction can be seen as a method to understand that how some world views are oppressive in nature as they privilege some and marginalize others. Although Derrida‘s deconstruction may not be regarded as a philosophical theory about language and reality but can be treated as a new method for reading text.

  

4.      Jacques Lacan (1901–1981) :

“All sorts of things in this world behave like mirrors.” — Jacques Lacan

Lacan’s centre of attention was principally on Freud’s work on deep structures and infant sexuality, and how the human subject develops into an ‘other’ through unconscious repression and stemming from the Mirror phase. The conscious ego and unconscious desire are thus thoroughly divided through his view point. According to Lacan, no signifying word can be uttered that does not have overlapping signification with other words. The signified slides under the signifier follows the basic rules of post-structuralism. 

Lacan tried to treat the unconscious, by simultaneously applying Ferdinand de Saussure’s linguistics, structural anthropology and post-structural theories. The initial project and authentically maintained principle of Jacques Lacan, identified as a post-Structuralist psychoanalyst, was to reinterpret Freud. Lacan always called himself a Freudian, leaving to others the option of labelling themselves Lacanian. Furthermore, Lacan’s own style can be called post-structuralist and post-modernist as well. He revises Freud’s theory of the unconscious by means of linguistic terminology and posits three stages of human mental disposition: 1. the imaginary order;  2. the symbolic order; and 3. the real. According to Lacan ‘the unconscious is the discourse of the Other’. It that means that the passion of a human being is structured by the desire of others. A person expresses deep feelings through the ‘relay’ of others. He thus saw desire as a social phenomenon and psychoanalysis as a theory of how the human subject is created through social interaction and claims that the desire appears through a combination of language, culture and the spaces between people.

 

5.     Jean Baudrillard  (1929-2007) :

French sociologist and cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard has been referred to as "the high priest of postmodernism" . Baudrillard's key ideas include two that are often used in discussing postmodernism:  "simulation" and "the hyperreal." A "simulation" is a copy or imitation that substitutes for reality and the hyperreal is "more real than real": something fake and artificial comes to be more definitive of the real than reality itself.Examples include high fashion (which is more beautiful than beauty), the news ("sound bites" determine outcomes of political contests), and Disneyland. Baudrillard often writes in an exaggerated or hyperbolic style, following his philosophical forefather Friedrich Nietzsche. Baudrillard has also written about our society's fascination with immediate images of violence and disaster (soccer game riots, the Gulf War, the Waco shoot-out, etc.).  He says that in such cases, the spectacle is hyperreal, the depiction of violence sets the standard for the reality.  Even horrific disasters like Chernobyl or the Challenger explosion are, in Baudrillard's view, "mere holograms or simulacra."  

At times, however, Baudrillard adopts a less cynical position and envisions the masses options for ironic and antagonistic resistance to the ongoing mediated spectacle of violence and also speaks for instance about "an original strategy" of "subtle revenge" and a "refusal of will." (Baudrillard, 1988) which means that sometimes, Baudrillard downplays the ideological functions of the television industry and questions its control over the audience.

 

6. Gilles Deleuze (1921-1995) :

French writer an d antirationalist philosopher Gilles Deleuze in the former argued against the devaluation of “difference” in Western metaphysics and tried to show that difference inheres in repetition itself. A central theme of Deleuze’s work during the post-modernist period was what he called the “Eleatic-Platonic bias” of Western metaphysics, i.e., the preference, which originated with the pre-Socratic school of Eleaticism and the subsequent philosophy of Plato, for unity over multiplicity (“the one” over “the many”) and for sameness over difference. According to Deleuze,this bias, which manifests itself in the characteristic philosophical search for the abstract “essences” of things, falsifies the nature of experience, which consists of multiplicities rather than unities. In order to do justice to reality as multiplicity, therefore, a completely new set of philosophical concepts is required. Deleuze also criticized traditional metaphysics for its “arboreal” or “treelike” character, i.e., its conception of reality in terms of hierarchy, order, and linearity—and compared his own thought, by contrast, to the structure of a rhizome, an underground plant stem whose growth is aimless and disordered.

7.      Fredric Jameson (Born in 1934) :

“Postmodernism is the cultural logic of our current stage of capitalist expansion and implies that everything produced within it is postmodern in character. The postmodern culture is intimately related to certain technological, economic and political changes”

-Fredric Jameson.

Fredric Jameson was a non-sociologist postmodernist who followed Marxian theory and tried to interpret from postmodern perspective. Jameson, thus, was attributed to be a neo-Marxist. The postmodern culture for Jameson is integrated into commodity production. In other words, culture is commodified where the culture is subordinated to class analysis. In many respects, Jameson shares his views about postmodernity with other postmodernists, but what makes him distinct is that he supports the metanarratives of conflict theory and argues that even today Marxian conflict theory has totalizing or universalizing relevance.Despite Jameson’s several contributions to postmodernity, his cultural logic of late capitalism ranks him to the top position among postmodernists. for Jameson, postmodernity is capitalism though in its late phase. Unlike most of the postmodernists, Jameson accepts the grand narrative because it even today offers the best theoretical explanation of postmodernity. Jameson’s understanding of postmodernity is given in the following key points:

1. Postmodernity is the cultural logic of late capitalism. There is a distinct postmodern culture.

2. Postmodernity gives rise to plurality of social groups. New political movements, which have emerged in postmodern period, have subordinated the class war.

3. Jameson supports the metanarratives and considers Marxian metanarratives quite useful and relevant.

4. Jameson finds both positive and negative features in postmodernity: postmodernity is both catastrophe and progress altogether.

5. Postmodernity is characterized by consumer, late or post- industrial capitalism. In postmodernity, we witness the growth of an international market in images and information. This is a phase of the world of global telecommunication networks and huge media webs spanning continents. Here representations and data became commodities circulated electronically in vertical super­highways. Information networks run over national boundaries and a vast network of multinational business corporations hold more power than individual nation-states. And

6. Capital expansion has created ever-smaller groups of consumers – with specialized tastes and interests – for their ever-growing range of different commodities. As a result of these changes, the population might seem to have fragmented into a bewildering diversity of markets for consumer goods.

As Jameson argues, individual and national identities have been shattered by a global image market, which reflects the absence of any great collective project. However, these are ultimately ruled by one global totality (late capitalism), which has relentlessly spread its tentacles across all nations and into all aspects of life.

8.      Richard Rorty (1931-2007) :

American pragmatist philosopher and public intellectual Richard Rorty is noted for his wide-ranging critique of the modern conception of philosophy as a quasi-scientific enterprise aimed at reaching certainty and objective truth. In politics he argued against programs of both the left and the right in favour of what he described as a meliorative and reformist “bourgeois liberalism.” In epistemology he opposed foundationalism,the view that all knowledge can be grounded, or justified, in a set of basic statements that do not themselves require justification. According to his “epistemological behaviourism” Rorty held that no statement is epistemologically more basic than any other, and no statement is ever justified “finally” but only relative to some circumscribed and contextually determined set of additional statements. In the philosophy of language, Rorty rejected the idea that sentences or beliefs are “true” or “false” in any interesting sense other than being useful or successful within a broad social practice. He also opposed ‘representationism’, the view that the main function of language is to represent or picture pieces of an objectively existing reality. Finally, in metaphysics he rejected both realism and antirealism, or idealism, as products of mistaken representationalist assumptions about language. 

As Rorty did not believe in certainty or absolute truth, he believed that the role of philosophy is to conduct an intellectual “conversation” between contrasting but equally valid forms of intellectual inquiry including science, literature, politics, religion, and many others with the aim of achieving mutual understanding and resolving conflicts. This general view is reflected in Rorty’s political works, which consistently defend traditional left-liberalism and criticize newer forms of “cultural leftism” as well as more conservative positions.

 

9.      Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975) :

Mikhail Bakhtin, the Russian philosopher, literary critic, semiotician and scholar who worked on literary theory, ethics, and the philosophy of language, became a prominent figure during the postmodern age, with his highly influential concepts of dialogism, polyphony, the carnivalesque, the chronotope, heteroglossia and “outsidedness”. Together all these concepts outline a distinctivephilosophy of language and culture that has at its centre the claims that all discourse is in essence a dialogical exchange and that this endows all language with a particular ethical/political force. In Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, Bakhtin introduces three important concepts – the unfinalizable self, relationship between the self and others, and, polyphony. Bakhtin’s conception of unfinalizability respects the possibility that a person can change, and that a person is never fully revealed or fully known in the world. About the relationship between the self and others, Bakhtin argues that every person is influenced by others in an inescapably intertwined way, and consequently no voice can be said to be isolated. In Dostoevsky‘s work, Bakhtin found a true representation of “polyphony“, that is, multiple voices. Each character in Dostoevsky’s work represents a voice that speaks for an individual self, distinct from others. This idea of polyphony is related to the concepts of unfinalizability and self-and-others, since it is the unfinalizability of individuals that creates true polyphony. Bakhtin briefly outlined the polyphonic concept of truth. For Bakhtin, truth is not a statement, a sentence or a phrase. Instead, ‘truth is a number of mutually addressed, although contradictory and logically inconsistent statements’. Truth needs a multitude of carrying voices. It cannot be held within a single mind, it also cannot be expressed by “a single mouth”. Through these concepts, Bakhtin anticipates the postmodern engagement with the concepts of constructedness of reality, truth and human subjectivity.

 

Concluding remarks :

Not all the above discussed thinkers are anthropologists, but they made impact in anthropological knowledge and social formations. Anthropologically post modernism was a movement, post structuralism is a broader concept within the sphere of post modernism paradigm, but post-structuralists refused to call them as post modernists as for them the term post-modernism is highly controversial. The philosophical and social scientific debate between the postmodern critique of reason and enlightened defenders of reason get under way in the 1980s and reached the sphere of educational discussion in the 1990s. Metaphysically post modernism is anti-realist, holding that it is impossible to speak meaningfully about an independent existing reality. Post modernism instead substitutes a socio linguistic constructionist account of reality. Epistemologically post modernists deny that reason or any method is a means of acquiring objective knowledge. Postmodern accounts of human nature are consistently collectivist holding that individual’s identities are constructed largely by social groups. All these could be understand from the viewpoints of the postmodernist contributors mentioned above like the Foucault’s concept of power, Lyotard’s concept of global capitalism, Derrida’s model of deconstruction, Lacan’s psychoanalyst concept, Baudrillard’s concept of ‘simulation’ and ‘the hyperreal’, the Eleatic-Platonic bias by Deleuze, Jameson’s concept of ‘commodification of culture’, Rorty’s ‘epistemological behaviourism’ and all the influential concepts on “dialogism, polyphony, the carnivalesque, the chrono tope, heteroglossia and “outsidedness” given by Bakhtin. In anthropology, the high point of beginning of postmodernist views was the book “Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography” edited by James Clifford and George G. Marcus , which gave rise to a new theory or approach in the field of ethnography. Postmodern ethics are again based on the notion of developing a ground for the oppressed and marginalized. Thus the term ‘postmodern’ situates the movement historically and philosophically against modernism and engages in understanding what the movement sees itself as rejecting and moving beyond gives us a definition of post modernism.

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