Understanding the Postmodern Culture and Philosophy (original) (raw)
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Postmodernism: A "New Movement" Beyond Modernism, or an Oxymoron
The term postmodernism quickly implies being beyond modernity. Yet, the question remains: is it truly beyond modernism? It is a question that brings to light the interrelations of time and history. In full retrospect, even the leading thinkers associated with postmodernism, Foucault and Derrida, neglect many of the fruitful elements of a reconceptualization of both time and history. They also ignore any contemplation on the ancient cosmological and cyclical view of history of eternal return. This re-configuration of time and history was re-introduced by Nietzsche. The main purposes of the works of Nietzsche was to disrupt modernity, and to formulate a divergence sense of time and history with the notion of eternal return, where ancient values are to be re-validated for contemporary times. The divergent educational focus will be on "eternal return," an element that corrects the flaws in modernism and postmodernism and provides a means of clarity in combining a cooperative understanding of these essential concepts in the respectable fields within the faculty of human social sciences.
Introduction: postmodernism and postmodernity
Cambridge University Press eBooks, 2009
There is an episode of The Simpsons in which the barman, Moe Szyslak, tries to transform his dingy bar into somewhere 'cool' and futuristic, decorating it with randomly chosen objects such as suspended rabbits and eyeballs. His regulars don't get it. Faced with their non-comprehending stares, Moe explains: 'It's po-mo!. .. Post-modern!. .. Yeah, all right-weird for the sake of weird' ('Homer the Moe' , Simpsons Archive). The Simpsons is widely considered one of the most exemplary postmodern texts because of its self-reflexive irony and intertextuality. But postmodernism is not weird for the sake of being weird. Nor is it simply 'the contemporary' or 'the experimental'. It may be 'avant-garde' (though many critics, myself included, think it isn't), or it may be a continuation of the values and techniques of modernism (but then again it may just as plausibly be a break with modernism). It may be an empty practice of recycling previous artistic styles. .. or a valid form of political critique. Postmodernism is a notoriously slippery and indefinable term. It was originally coined in the 1940s to identify a reaction against the Modern movement in architecture. However, it first began to be widely used in the 1960s by American cultural critics and commentators such as Susan Sontag and Leslie Fiedler who sought to describe a 'new sensibility' in literature which either rejected modernist attitudes and techniques or adapted or extended them. In the following decades the term began to figure in academic disciplines besides literary criticism and architecture-such as social theory, cultural and media studies, visual arts, philosophy, and history. Such wide-ranging usage meant that the term became overloaded with meaning, chiefly because it was being used to describe characteristics of the social and political landscape as well as a whole range of different examples of cultural production. This begs the question: why has an obviously problematic term continued to be used? I think the reason is that there has been a genuine feeling amongst theorists, cultural commentators, artists and writers that our age, has, since the 1950s and 1960s onward (opinions vary as to when exactly), been shaped by significant alterations in society as a result of technology, economics and the 1
Myth & Mayhem
conservative pundit Roger Kimball wrote that college students had become "committed to an ethic of cultural relativism," and that "in order to realize the freedom that postmodernism promises, culture must be transformed into a field of arbitrary options."[4] Even though conservatives characterized postmodernism as a problem with the left, the rise of "fake news" and media spectacle associated with Donald Trump caused left-leaning thinkers to depict postmodernism as a problem with the right. Literary critic Jeet Heer called Trump "America's First Postmodern President," saying that the president "is the product not just of a fluke election or a racist and sexist backlash, but the culmination of late capitalism."[5] Journalist Ryan Cooper argued that the politics of the right represented "a load of cynical gobbledygook," and that "if there is any political faction that behaves like the most hysterically exaggerated caricature of postmodernism, it is the current Republican Party."[6] That both sides of the political spectrum blame postmodernism for society's ills points to an issue of definition. Postmodernism is not so much a problem of the left or the right, but rather, the problem lies in its vague terminology and the common theoretical misunderstandings associated with it. In other words, when the left or the right speaks of postmodernism, they usually mean different things. Postmodernism is better understood as an umbrella term that houses a wide range of political, economic, and aesthetic ideas under it. To get to the heart of postmodernism's consequences, it is first necessary to take a step back and determine what postmodernism actually is. Postmodernism and Its Relationship to Modernism As its name suggests, postmodernism is often considered the era that comes after modernism. Like postmodernism, modernism is a broad category that contains a collection of twentieth-century ideas, and it is replete with its own contradictions and varying perspectives. In some ways, postmodernism is a reaction against modernism, yet in other ways, postmodernism is an extension of it.
POSTMODERNISM: ISSUES AND PROBLEMS
Hossain, D.M. and Karim, M. M. S. (2013), Postmodernism: Issues and Problems, Asian Journal of Social Sciences and Humanities, Vol. 2, No. 2, pp. 173-181. (Japan)
“POSTMODERNISM”: Is the contemporary state of affairs correctly described as ‘postmodern’?
The present study probes into the controversial issue of postmodernism. More specifically, it is an attempt to answer the question of whether our era has enough distinctive features to be described as ‘postmodern’. According to some commentators, the postmodern era is characterized by three features that distinguish it from the modern era: the failure of the Enlightenment project, the growth of intracommunal ethnic diversity and the ever-growing pace of social, economic and technological change. By a closer inspection of the contemporary state of affairs, especially from an educational point of view, the researchers tried to answer the above-mentioned question. At the end of the study, some educational implications and criticisms of postmodernism have been provided.
Richard Devetak, Anthony Burke, Jim George (eds), An Introduction to International Relations (Cambridge University Press), 2012
Notions of Postmodernism In this paper I would like to present a response to the three major notions of postmodernism which I have identified as having an important impact in human thinking in the twenty-first century.