The Body, Late Capitalism, and the Postmodern Novel (original) (raw)
Related papers
Review: A Poetics of Postmodernism
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. This content downloaded from 131.172.
Postmodernity, Transhumanism, and the Spirit of the Enlightenment
2013
This essay is a reflection on the nature of technology and agency in postmodernity. It was triggered by the recent book The Techno-Human Condition, by Braden Allenby and Daniel Sarewitz, in which the authors critically take up the claims of transhumanism to radically change what it means to be human. They see in this claim only the latest version of the hubris of Enlightenment rationality. In a different vocabulary, they thus contribute to the "ontology of actuality" that postmodern philosopher Gianni Vattimo tries to capture with his philosophy of weak thought. For Vattimo, technology has brought about a situation where the strong claims of Enlightenment rationality must give way to a conflict of interpretations. At the same time, there is no alternative to "Enlightenment 2.0"-if only as the practice of "muddling through," as Allenby and Sarewitz put it. I read the necessity of muddling through, which results from the impossibility of finding a stable foundation to guide communal action, as evidence of Vattimo's description of the present as the "weakening of the principle of reality": this is our postmodern state of affairs, due to the lack of any ultimate foundation, belief, or narrative.
Philosophical-Anthropological Meanings of Postmodernism: qMediatizingq Human
Proceedings of the 2016 International Conference on Contemporary Education, Social Sciences and Humanities, 2016
The author considers philosophicalanthropological images of a human of late modernism and postmodernism in the context of socio-cultural and technological changes of these periods. The authors analyzes principles of media information influence on a postmodern individual; social, personal and anthropological consequences of said influence are marked. Particular attention is paid to the allocation of the information society features, social media,-second‖ (A. Giddens)-mediareality, in which a person is included by the information producers and transmitters regardless of his own will and consciousness. The author addresses the issue of obtaining objective knowledge in an endless consistent flow of information. The author analyses Jean Baudrillard's concept of a simulation of the world, Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle, Zygmunt Bauman's modernism and postmodernism, Roland Barthes' concept of a mythological media world. The author stresses human rational and identification capabilities, who is found under the constant influence of the media.
As an intellectual movement postmodernism was born as a challenge to several modernist themes that were first articulated during the Enlightenment. These include scientific positivism, the inevitability of human progress, and the potential of human reason to address any essential truth of physical and social conditions and thereby make them amenable to rational control (Boyne and Rattansi 1990). The primary tenets of the postmodern movement include: (1) an elevation of text and language as the fundamental phenomena of existence, (2) the application of literary analysis to all phenomena, (3) a questioning of reality and representation, (4) a critique of metanarratives, (5) an argument against method and evaluation, (6) a focus upon power relations and hegemony, (7) and a general critique of Western institutions and knowledge (Kuznar 2008:78). For his part, Lawrence Kuznar labels postmodern anyone whose thinking includes most or all of these elements. Importantly, the term postmodernism refers to a broad range of artists, academic critics, philosophers, and social scientists that Christopher Butler (2003:2) has only half-jokingly alluded to as like “a loosely constituted and quarrelsome political party.” The anthropologist Melford Spiro defines postmodernism thusly: The postmodernist critique of science consists of two interrelated arguments, epistemological and ideological. Both are based on subjectivity. First, because of the subjectivity of the human object, anthropology, according to the epistemological argument cannot be a science; and in any event the subjectivity of the human subject precludes the possibility of science discovering objective truth. Second, since objectivity is an illusion, science according to the ideological argument, subverts oppressed groups, females, ethnics, third-world peoples. [Spiro 1996: 759] Postmodernism has its origins as an eclectic social movement originating in aesthetics, architecture and philosophy (Bishop 1996). In architecture and art, fields which are distinguished as the oldest claimants to the name, postmodernism originated in the reaction against abstraction in painting and the International Style in architecture (Callinicos 1990: 101). However, postmodern thinking arguably began in the nineteenth century with Nietzsche’s assertions regarding truth, language, and society, which opened the door for all later postmodern and late modern critiques about the foundations of knowledge (Kuznar 2008: 78). Nietzsche asserted that truth was simply: a mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms – in short, a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are. [Nietzsche 1954: 46-47] According to Kuznar, postmodernists trace this skepticism about truth and the resulting relativism it engenders from Nietzsche to Max Weber and Sigmund Freud, and finally to Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault and other contemporary postmodernists (2008:78).
Counterlight: Mimesis, Potentia, and Praxis in the Making of the Postmodern Subject
Philologia Hispalensis
In his introduction to the English edition of Deleuze and Guattari 's Anti-Oedipus, Foucault writes that it "is the connection of desire to reality (and not its retreat into the forms of representation) that possesses revolutionary force ... " (xiii-xiv). We would like to consider the possibility that what Foucault means by this connection is the labor involved in the construction of the world via the imagination. Our argument consists of paradoxical movements. To begin with, we focus on the political aspect of the postmodern by reading a distinctly pre-modern text: Lope de Vega' s Fuente Ovejuna. We argue here that in Lope's play about a collective rebellion of the multitude, one already discerns the con tours of a certain 'postmodern' conception of the subject in terms of a productive and collective praxis. Next, we take up the discussion of the postmodern at the point of crossing of philosophy and poetics, as we examine the role of mimesis in subject formation as a passage from dynamis to energeia (potentia to actuality). Both lines of inquiry-on the concepts of multitudo and mimesis-converge, finally, at the point which marks the political crux of all aesthetics, which is the problem of agencythat is, of the subject. In his book on Spinoza, L 'Anomalía Selvaggia, Antonio Negri writes, Poli tics is the metaphysics of the imagination, the metaphysics of the human constitution of reality, the world. The truth lives in the world of the imagination; it is possible to have adequate ideas that are not exhaustive reality but open to and constitutive of reality, which are intensively true; consciousness is constitutive; being is not only something found (not only a possession) but also activity, power; there is not only Nature, there is also second nature, nature of the proximate cause, constructed being. (97)
The posthuman : philosophical posthumanism and its others
2013
As Rosi Braidotti in "Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming" (2002), puts it: Postmodernity is notoriously the age of proliferating differences. The devalued "others" which constituted the specular complement of the modern subjectwoman, the ethnic or racialized other and nature or 'earth-others'-return with a vengeance. They are the complement to the modern subject, who constructed himself as much through what he excluded. (174) Posthumanism may arise once the need for such a "vengeance" has been fulfilled, and the voices of subjectivities who have been historically reduced to the realm of the "Other", have been regained. Posthumanism is inextricably related to the Studies of the Differences, referring to the fields of research which developed out of the deconstruction of the "neutral subject" of Western onto-epistemologies 9. The deconstruction enacted, within the historical and philosophical frame of Postmodernism, by Feminist, Black, Gay and Lesbian, Postcolonial and Chicana theorists, together with differently abled activists and other outsiders, pointed out the partiality of the construction of the Discourse 10 , historically formulated by one specific subject, which finally appeared in its embodied vestiges, as: Western, white, male, heterosexual, propertied and abled, among other specific terms. In order to postulate a post-to the human, the differences which are constitutive to the human, and which have been historically erased by the self-claimed objectivity of hegemonic accounts, have to be taken into account. Posthumanism is indebted to the reflections developed out of the "margins" of such a centralized human subject, which emphasized the human as a process, more than as a given, inherently characterized by differences and shifting identities: Women's and Gender Studies, Gay 9 Such a genealogical location of the posthuman is already pointed out by William Spanos in his pioneer text "End Of Education: Toward Posthumanism", published in 1993. 10 Note that the notion of "Discourse" is intended here not only in the foucaultian use of the term as a way of constituting knowledge, social practices and power relations (Foucault 1976), but also as the phallogocentric logos (Irigaray 1974), and the symbolic order (Kristeva 1974).
THE SUBLIME TROUBLES OF POSTMODERNISM
This essay interweaves Stefan Morawski's critique of postmodernism and Jean-François Lyotard's expression of the postmodern sublime as "the presentation of the unpresentable" in a wide-ranging appraisal of the culmination of the postmodern age. This juxtaposition finds expression in the concept of the two modes of a negative sublime: the negative dynamical sublime exemplified in the stockpiles of nuclear warheads scattered widely across the globe, and the negative mathematical sublime represented by the omniscient electronic informational web that increasingly entangles individuals and societies. KEY WORDS Lyotard, Morawski, negative sublime, popular culture, postmodern culture, postmodern episteme, postmodern sublime I Postmodernism refers to a phase in Western intellectual culture that became prominent during the final decades of the twentieth century. As a complex period with distinctive cognitive traits, it could be called, to use Foucault's language, an episteme. 2 A number of influential though disparate writers contributed to identifying a cultural trend they called postmodernism. They differed from one another so much that commentators named them as a group by their temporal period in intellectual history-after modernism-rather than by a shared principle or style. What seemed common to all was a skepticism toward the basic tenets of high modernism and a critique of its articles of faith. Postmodernist writers questioned, in particular, the social stabilities and values, primarily identified with rational order in material and cultural progress through science that had governed the post-World War II period. This was a time that saw the