Initial Research on Postmoderism - 14th April

what is 'postmodernism', what is 'postmodernist'?

"Postmodernism can be read as modernism taken to its extremes - that is, its extremes of individuality in relation to market choice underpinned by the ever quickening pace of technological change. Rather than the individual acting under a principle of freedom as a critical reflective centre, individuality becames re-packaged for advertising advertising terms of life-style shopping under a principle of market choice where branding becomes more important than content. A feature of modernism, as succintly put by Marx and Engles in the Communist manifesto, was that 'all that is solid melts into air.' Where there had been stability, industrialisation brought change. where it had taken weeks to reach by walking, horse or sail, it took days or mere hours. With the telephone communication across continents became instantaneous. With the internet globalisation increased in pace, reach and complexity. What kind of art, philosophy, research is then appropriate to such conditions? Where postmodernism may be a term to describe contemporary social, economic, cultural and political conditions, a postmodernist perspective seeks to formulate approaches that are appropriate in some way to such conditions.

For Lytotard (1984) what characterises postmodernity is a skepticism or incredulity towards all 'grand narratives', or 'metanarratives', that is, narratives that claim to encompass everything and explain everything. If this is so, then Desartes is not only an architect of modernity through his systematic use of reason but also an architect of postmodernism in his methodical use of doubt towards all prior forms of knowledge, traditional beliefs and views concerning 'truth'. Thus any grand narrative about the purpose of History as progress towards the full realisation of Reason as the basis for a new world of 'freedom' is to be critiqued, whether it is ambitions of Science, Politics or the Economy to bring everything under its control, is to be critiqued as a form of totalitarianism:

One of the main features of postmodernist theory is its suspicion of (and in some cases direct hostility towards) Marxism as a radical theory of social explanation. As a 'mirror image' of capitalism, Marxism is attacked for its modernist assumptions of rationality, social coherence and 'productivism' (that is, its over-reliance on the model of production and the labour-process as an explanatory basis of social life), as well as for its 'macro-theoretical', universalising and totalising methods".

Source: http://www.enquirylearning.net/ELU/content%20resources/Postmod.html