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>> Postmodernism- An Outline Download PDF file

What are we doing here? What is the meaning of life? What is the meaning of meaning? What can we count on knowing? If nothing is knowable, what then?

MODERNITY: Stemming from the Enlightenment forward, there was a sense of dynamism involved in our movement toward answers to fundamental questions. Progress was based on a discounting of old traditional ways of handling problems, with a firm sense that reason was the ground from which freedom would arise. Specialization, uniformity, standardization were the hallmarks of a commitment to, and faith in, the results of reason.

Then along came Nietzsche and Heidegger. Nietzsche claimed, among other things, that reason was a chimera - that the results of reason were not the products of an independent, world-oriented rationality that brooked no opposition. Rather, reason was the result of persuasion. Truth, error, morality -- all are illusory; there is no ground on which to claim that one's sense of morality is final, absolute, irrevocable. There is no guarantee of anything. Extreme nihilism ends in perpetual skepticism. Heidegger accepted the general sense of no ground, but removed the skepticism by focusing on Being rather than Truth. Difference arises from pre-existent Being--that which we become is premised not on Truth but on our Being in the world. Heidegger sees not despair but opportunity arising from the fundament of difference.

POSTMODERN:
ISM -- cultural, intellectual side of the postmodern;
non -- foundational, hierarchical, universal, logocentric
thus: relative, leveling, local, and iconocentric
ITY -- sociality - changes due to technology, information, consumerism
replacement of production/labor at center.

Various strands of the Postmodern evolve......
Lyotard: the Postmodern is premised on the absence or denial of metanarratives governing social existence. The legitimacy of science --its unity -- is denied/challenged--if science can no longer provide answers, what is left? The atomization of the social is the alternative.
Derrida: The locus of meaning is in language, not in the world. Thus the text provides all meaning and is divorced from the world. If this were not enough, the text is not stable - meaning fluctuates, is inherently unstable. The indeterminancy of language is given priority. Hence the need, from Heidegger, to deconstruct meaning to eliminate confusions.
Baudrillard: The cynic of the postmodern era: we exist only in a hyperreality with similacra as our reference - "The TV is the world" - there is no meaning beyond the image's own self-referentiality. America is a 'highway in the desert'
Zygmunt Bauman: Taking his cue from Heidegger, there is opportunity, not ruin, in our future. All is a language game; difference, not sameness, defines who we are and will become. The consumer culture that is evolving is a new culture replacing that of production.
Bourdieu: there is a seduction to the new consumerism - "for the fun of it" "just do it"; express the desire to live.
Gianni Vattimo: The Babel of voices is not disconcerting but ultimately emancipatory. Disorientation -- the unfixedness of things -- is a virtue.
Foucault: What we know -- we know only locally.
What is the result: chaos abounds; either the helplessness in the face of an unremitting nihilism or the positive dynamism of a new consumerism is the CHOICE. Either disaster awaits or hope abounds.

A THIRD ALTERNATIVE: MODERNITY RETURNED
Ernest Gellner and Habermas represent this option - return to the roots of reason. Proclaim universality is once more alive and capable of instantiating reason in the world Taylor -- finds in the modern ideal of authenticity - of clinging to the self's commitment to being true - a hope for the future (and confuses one with Foucault's late move toward the self).

A FOURTH ALTERNATIVE: PRE-MODERNITY ECLIPSES THE MODERN AND THE POSTMODERN
Alisdair MacIntyre - After Virtue - revise the pre-modern in seeking, in Aristotle, the clue to a better tomorrow. Tom Farrell - in Norms of Rhetorical Culture - recaptures Aristotle as a means of correcting Habermas - merges the pre and modern worlds as a means of saving humanity from itself.