Postmodernism

  • changes in society, culture, and how we think about time, space, and truth since the early 1970s

  • the decentering of experience

  • the disembeddedness of time and space

  • modernity affirmed the value of Reason; the search for Truth

  • postmodernity pushes the rejection of reason; the absence of any coherence

Questioning “Truth”

  • scientific knowledge does not proceed in a linear, cumulative fashion (Thomas Kuhn) contrary to Enlightenment thinkers

  • scientific progress contingent, in part, on non-rational assumptions

  • science proceeds and gathers knowledge in environments that are shaped by history, politics, and changing worldviews

Foucault as a Postmodern Theorist

  • knowledge contingent on forces beyond itself

  • knowledge imperfect; there are many discontinuities in the accumulation of bodies of knowledge

  • there is fluidity in knowledge, not coherence

  • the canon of knowledge is not intellectually pure

Foucault: Regimes of Truth

  • truth is contaminated by politics and power

  • truth is a thing of this world

  • each society has its own discourses which it accepts as truth

  • truth itself is illusive and compromised

Truth

  • even for those who are critical of supposed accepted truths such as Marx

  • and for those who suggest that reality is reconstructed everyday like symbolic interactionists, e.g. (Berger and Luckmann)

  • but truth even if thought contested or consisting of multiple constructions is still impossible; it does not exist

Deconstruction

  • can’t accept any grand narratives, or any/all overarching stories/theories/histories

  • language: imposes foundational constraints on all knowledge cliams

  • the binary structure of language means that things are always defined by the absence of their opposite (salt is salt because it is not pepper)

Language…

  • signs, words, appear as if they “naturally” go together - but they are culturally coded

  • language is a socio-cultural reference system that orders reality

  • postmodern theorists reject the order imposed by language/sign-systems

  • dismantle the binary structure of language; post-structuralist

Post-Structuralism

  • challenges the binaries in all thinking and as seen in social organization and social relations

  • challenges traditional understandings of meaning and coherence

  • “we do not have to abandon the classical texts but we have to examine them for contradictions” (Derrida)

Derrida, Deconstruction

  • focus on tension and uncertainty in knowledge/social reality

  • deconstruct social institutions, law, etc. to unveil the binary categories of knowledge and reproduction of that knowledge

  • the United Nations - constructed on Western democratic notions of the state, human rights, power, law

Deconstruction… Reconstruction

  • once we deconstruct institutions (e.g., the U.N.), what do we do then?

  • how do we avoid institutionalizing new ideas and new practices that are not grounded in binary thinking?

  • difficult to answer

Postmodern Culture

  • literature/poetry: the abandonment of order and coherence

  • it is not the author that matters, but the interaction of the reader with the text

  • the possibility of multiple, endless meanings

  • we can use the text for our own idiosyncratic desires

Everyday Culture

  • the aesthetic (beauty and art) of reality; culture is a product in its own right

  • the commodification of culture; branding and repackaging of ordinary everyday culture for consumption and profit

  • everything can be a text; the mixing and remixing of various disparate things as commodities

Simulacra

  • postmodern reality is a simulated, lavishly imaged consumer reality (Baudrillard)

  • hyperreality: the practical and the fantastic come together in a new blended Utopian reality

  • a glossy, cinematic reality; theme parks better than the reality they reference

Reality an Illusion

  • simulated realities blur the lines between what is real and what is illusory

  • the simulated is taken as real; reality implodes; it is spectacle that is real

  • real things become virtual things

  • concepts have no meaning; no sociological reality

  • the death of sociology