Postmodernism: Origins and Critique

Postmodernism and its Origins

• The movement emerged in the 1960s, challenging Enlightenment ideals and gaining popularity later, peaking in academic journals around 1997 and in popular press around the same time.
• It is characterized as a sharp break from the past, involving ironic handling of themes and playing Nietzsche's idea of "the playful science".

Critique of Enlightenment Principles

• Postmodernism denies the Enlightenment theses of universal truth, objective knowledge, reason as the primary tool for attaining knowledge, and the concept of progress through reason.
• Postmodernists deny the existence of universal and absolute truths.
• Objective knowledge cannot be attained according to postmodernists.
• Postmodernists reject reason in favor of emotions and experience, especially for oppressed people.
• They refute progress, but promote liberation by fighting oppression by exposing the categories by which the empowered retain hegemony.

Two-Level Theory

• Enlightenment thinkers postulated a manifest image (everyday experience) and a scientific image (an underlying level explaining manifest behavior).
• The scientific image suggests objects and experiences are fictions determined by a hidden level (micro-particles, random mutation, subconscious, will to power).
• This idea evolved into structuralism and post-structuralism by the 1960s, emphasizing the role of social structures in determining roles and actions.

Manifest Image

• The surface level where individuals perceive themselves as free, responsible, and capable of virtuous or vicious actions.

Scientific Image

• A deeper, hidden level that determines human actions.
• It suggests individuals aren't truly free and hold no genuine responsibility.

Hegel's Critique of Immediacy

• He critiques the idea of a direct link between thought, language, and the world.
• Thought and language are mediated by concepts.
• Perception involves a complex synthesis of sensations unified by concepts.
• The mind organizes perceptions, feelings, thoughts, and sensations into a unified perception of an object
• Objects aren't simply "given" but are products of conceptual activity.

D-Centering the Self

• Postmodernists reject the Cartesian idea of direct access to one's own mind.
• The self is considered no more directly accessible than external objects.
• Self-knowledge is mediated by concepts, emotions, and other factors.
• People use concepts to understand their own states of mind (e.g., anger, fear, clarity).
• Concepts are derived from language and society, which challenges direct perception of the self.
• Concepts are inherited from society, so society gives individual concepts to understand themselves.

Language as a System

• Postmodernists view language as a system of differences that establishes a structure.
• Language gives a system of differences to carve up the world into objects.
• The ability to differentiate and recognize objects determines an individual's world.
• Theories expressed in language establish structures, but they can't define the nodes or elements of the structure

Derrida and Deconstruction

• Derrida is known for saying that everything is a text and promoted the idea of deconstruction.
• He understands that language is a system of differences.
• Language allows us to identify objects, so your world consists of objects you can identify through this system.
• His postmodernism really put post-modernism on the map in intellectual terms

Fiction and Nonfiction

• Postmodernists believe there's no major difference between fiction and nonfiction.
• There is no principled distinction between describing and imagining, reporting and storytelling.
• Postmodernists relate two descriptions, so they consider that language is always relating a text to a text, but nothing else.
• There is no way to get at an underlying world and talk about the correspondence between your structure and the world it self.

Criticisms of Postmodernism

• Postmodernism is self-refuting.
• Logic is considered a tool of oppression.
• Postmodernism is often unintelligible.
• It can be difficult to differentiate a generated article from a genuine article.
• It may lead to a fascist way of thinking where power dominates over reason

Quine's Relativism and Skepticism

• Quine was a relativist and a skeptic, especially when it came to the question of what is there.
• He believed language is a system of difference.
• He argued there is no fact of the matter about what there is.
• There is indeterminacy about what we, or others, believe exists in the world.
• He says you cannot determine what native means by just observing what is happening.
• He is radical relativist, therefore concludes there is no fact of the matter what there is within language.
• He believes people are stuck in their own conceptual scheme.

Explore the origins of Postmodernism in the 1960s, its rise to popularity, and its challenge to Enlightenment ideals. It denies universal truth and objective knowledge, favoring experience over reason. It refutes progress, promoting liberation by fighting oppression.