Most Influential Writer In Postmodern Thought example essay topic

"Modernity" is that period roughly associated with twentieth century Western ideas about art (although traces of it in emergent forms can be found in the nineteenth century as well), in which science established facts, political theory established the social state, secularism overcame religious opinion, and the notion of shame was denied or explained away with various social conventions. It was an era dominated by the thought of Freud and Marx. Its tendency was toward the legitimacy of the social welfare state. Steven Connor (1989) says that the "concept of postmodernism cannot be said to have crystallized until about the mid-1970's... ". Modernity had received some strong criticism, and it was becoming more and more viable to assert that the postmodern had come to stay.

Postmodernism is characterized by the emergence of the postindustrial information economy, replacing the previous classes of aristocracy, middle class, and working class with the new paradigm: information elite, middle class, and underclass. The phrase also implies a nation-state challenged by new world views: feminism, multiculturalism, environmentalism, etc; with old scientific certainties called into question. Postmodernism rejects the modernist ideals of rationality and individualism, it is in favor of being anti-capitalist and contemptuous of traditional morality. The most recent feature of postmodernism is the rise of political correctness. Postmodernism is anti-worldview. It denies the existence of any universal truth or standards.

Postmodern theorists move away from the notions of the Enlightenment which believed that the world and the self were somehow "whole" and graspable through the exercise of reason. Postmodernity is seen as involving an end of the dominance of an overarching belief in scientific rationality, the replacement of theories of representation and truth, and increased emphasis on the importance of the unconscious, on free-floating signs and images, and a plurality of viewpoints. Jean-Francois Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979) is often said to represent the beginning of postmodern thought. Lyotard, perhaps the most influential writer in postmodern thought, defines postmodernism as "incredulity towards metanarratives". A metanarrative is a worldview: a network of basic assumptions of which every aspect of our experience and knowledge is interpreted. Lyotard argues that all aspects of modern societies rely on 'grand narratives'.

Totality, and stability, and order, Lyotard argues, are maintained in modern societies through the means of "grand narratives" which are stories a culture tells itself about its practices and beliefs, a sort of meta-theory that searches to explain the belief system that exists. These metanarratives represent totalizing explanations of things like Christianity or Marxism - dominant modes of thought. Modernity and Christianity debated as to which view was true; postmodernism attacks both Christianity and modernity because they claim to be "true". The "grand narrative", upon which science and other knowledge-producing activities are based, "has lost its credibility" according to Lyotard. He believes that the post modern world is characterised by a spreading cynicism about 'metanarratives' (or general belief systems), including world religions, political ideologies, and even science and reason. We have become disillusioned and no longer expect the world to become a better place.

Metanarratives have partly been discredited because, in an era of global media in which we learn more and more about other peoples' beliefs and lifestyles, it becomes less and less possible to regard one lifestyle or one belief system as the 'true one'. Lyotard is of the opinion that the modern project of 'Great Narratives' is not unfinished; it has been destroyed. (1) There is no longer a highest form of theory, a culminating point of culture and reflection. There is no Ideality that gives meaning to our lives. Connor states that "Lyotard argues modern science is characterised by its refusal or suppression of forms of legitimation which rely on narrative". (1989: 24) Lyotard argues that, with the collapse of the modern metanarrative of reality, science has begun to sustain itself more and more by the ability of its theories to generate more and more work.

However, he also argues that "science inevitably returns to narrative, since in the end it is by narratives alone that scientific work can be given authority and purpose. However, Lyotard also believes that scientists are not out to find truth, but rather to build up power. Language is the way we express our experiences of the world, therefore to understand the world, as best we can, we must look to what is said about reality. But subjectivism is all we can have since the best we can do is experience and interpret what others have experienced and interpreted reality to be, and so the spiral continues downward. Thus, for the postmodernists, any assertion of absolute knowledge is seriously questioned and ultimately rejected. Therefore history is seen as a series of metaphors rather than an account of events as they actually happened.

After all, the one recording the events was writing and recording the events as they saw them. Someone else may have seen it differently had they been there. Lyotard says that the important question for postmodern societies is who decides what knowledge is, and who knows what needs to be decided. The whole Enlightenment project, argued Lyotard, has come to an end, how can we still meaningfully speak of human progress and the rational control of the life world after what happened in Auschwitz and Stalin's gulags. Lyotard makes central to postmodernity, a shift from a 'productive' to a 'reproductive's social order, in which simulations and models-and more generally, signs-increasingly constitute the world, so that any distinction between the appearance and the 'real' is lost. As Kearney states in his book The Continental Reader, "Lyotard suggests that these (grand narratives) must give way to less ambitious 'petits recits', little narratives that resist closure and totality, stressing the singularity of every 'event'".

(1996: 426) Lyotard argues that all aspects of modern societies, including science as the primary form of knowledge, depend on these grand narratives. Postmodernism then is the critique of grand narratives, the awareness that such narratives serve to mask the contradictions and instabilities that are inherent in any social organization or practice. In other words, every attempt to create "order" always demands the creation of an equal amount of "disorder", but a "grand narrative" masks the constructed ness of these categories by explaining that "disorder" really is chaotic and bad, and that "order" really is rational and good. Postmodernism, in rejecting grand narratives, favors "mini-narratives", stories that explain small practices, local events, rather than large-scale universal or global concepts. Postmodern "mini-narratives" are always situational, provisional, contingent, and temporary, making no claim to universality, truth, reason, or stability. As Lyotard states in Kearney's book (1996: 436) " a postmodern artist or writer is in the position of a philosopher... the work he produces are not in principle governed by p reestablished rules and they cannot be judged according to a determining judgement".

In fact, one of the consequences of postmodernism seems to be the rise of religious fundamentalism, as a form of resistance to the questioning of the "grand narratives" of religious truth. This is perhaps most obvious in Muslim fundamentalism in the Middle East, which ban postmodern books - like Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses - because they deconstruct such grand narratives. To be sure modernity's assertion that logic and science alone are certain methods for acquiring truth, and that man is a passive "subject" of knowledge was wrong. We cannot, in light of the developments in the philosophy of logic, science, and ethics conclude any longer that these are unquestionable, uniform disciplines for us to simply fall in line with. This extreme should be rejected.

But postmodernism, with its rejection of modernity's claims, pushes another extreme. All the while denying being a worldview, it is in effect a worldview. Postmodernism is marked by a scepticism that rejects modernism as an ideal defining twentieth-century culture as we have known it. Postmodernism rejects the idea of any universal truth, whether it is history or logic. In challenging tradition, however, postmodernism refuses to define a new meaning or impose an alternative order in its place. Postmodernism sprang from postindustrial society, which is passing rapidly deep into the Information Age.

Postmodernism celebrates the death of modernism, which it regards as not only arrogant in its claim to universality but also responsible for the evils of contemporary civilization. Truth is rejected as neither possible nor desirable on the grounds that it can be used by its creators for their own power and ends. Postmodernism makes no attempt to provide new answers to replace the old ideas it destroys. Postmodernism does not try to make the world a better place. It is socially and politically ambivalent at best, self-contradictory at worst. In the end, Postmodernism remains essentially a form of cultural activism motivated by intellectual theory.

As Lyotard himself states in Kearney's book (1996: 436) "the postmodern would be that which, in the modern, puts forward the unpresentable in presentation itself".

Bibliography

Essay Title: Outline Lyotard's theory on the meaning of the postmodern. Connor, Steven (1989) Postmodernist Culture: an introduction to theories of the contemporary.
Oxford: Basil Blackwell. (pp 23-43) Kearney, Richard and Mara Rainwater (1996) The Continental Philosophy Reader.