Lecture 1/Term 3:
Postmodernity/Postmodernism
Dr Claudia Stein
What are we talking about? Definition, definition, definition….
Postmodernity:
This term refers to a set of perceived (sociological, political, economical,
technological, etc.) conditions of everyday life, which are perceived as distinctly
different from the conditions of ‘modernity’ (sets in the 1960s).
Postmodernism:
describes a broad late-20th century movement that occurred across philosophy, the arts and
humanities, architecture, and criticism and marked a departure from modernism (although it has some
intellectual links to it).
Postmodernism is the intellectual (cultural, artistic, academic, and philosophical) response to the
conditions of postmodernity.
While encompassing a broad range of ideas and projects, postmodernism is typically defined by an
attitude of scepticism or distrust toward all forms of grand narratives and ideologies (e.g. the grand
narrative of progress, Marxism). It questioned Enlightenment morals and beliefs in rationality,
objective reality and the existence of absolute truth. Instead, it asserts that all knowledge and truth
are the product of unique systems of socio-cultural, economic and political discourse at a particular
moment in time, and are therefore contextual and constructed. Postmodernism challenged and
undermined the certainty over knowledge and morality that characterised modernity and most of
modernism (roughly between 1800-1960s).
Accordingly, postmodern thought is broadly characterised by tendencies to epistemological and moral
relativism, pluralism, and a focus in subjectivity.
What stands at the core of postmodernism critique?
‘….postmodernism is typically defined by an attitude of scepticism … it
questioned Enlightenment morals and beliefs in rationality, objective
reality and the existence of absolute truth.’
So, what did the Enlightenment believe in and which became
problematic for postmodern thinkers?
• Belief in the power of human reason in all areas of human
individual and collective life.
• The belief in the power of reason brings about a new intellectual
virtue rationality that was supposed to guide all investigations
into the natural and human world.
• This rational enquiry was based on the empirical method, a way
of gaining knowledge by means of direct and indirect observation
or other sensual experience.
• The knowledge gained through the empirical method was
deemed to be neutral.
• Because empirically gained knowledge was neutral, it was
believed that absolute and universal truth about the world
around us could be achieved by humans.
• Reality could be assessed and discovered by humans
Very core of all postmodern critique of the Enlightenment is based on:
•
fundamentally different understanding of how knowledge is gained
• And this different understanding is based on a new understanding of how
language is constituted and used
A good and comprehensible introduction to the influence of linguistics and
semiotics on postmodern thinking is:
Callum G. Brown, Postmodernism for Historians (Harlow, 2005)
Available for free on:
http://bookzz.org/s/?q=postmodernism+for+historians+&yearFrom=&yearTo=&l
anguage=&extension=&t=0
Cours de linguistique générale (1916)
Ferdinand de Saussure, 18571913, Swiss linguist
Linguistics: scientific study of language in
broadly three aspects: language form,
language meaning, and language in context
Each work is a sign and a sign consist of:
Sign, signifier, signified: These three come as a trilogy in semiology. The sign is
constituted by the relationship of a signifier (a medium, such as a road sign, a word, a
gesture) to a signified (also known as the referent, the ‘thing’ being signed.) The signified
is not the thing itself, only a concept of it. Anything is a sign that stands for something
other than itself.
Saussure’s Central Claims:
1.
Languages are not confined to words but include any
system of communication that uses signs.
2.
A sign is composed of a ‘signifier’ (vocal sound, image)
and a ‘signified’ (the mental concept or structure that
speaker and listener share). The mental
concept/structure precedes the ‘signifier’in existence
3.
A ‘signifier’ is established quite arbitrarily and bears no
resemblance to the signified. (Different language use
different signifiers for the same mental concepts)
4.
Every sign acquires meaning by belonging to a network
of other signs. There is in every sign a suggestion of
another, oppositional sign. (if you say ‘women’ you
immediately also think of ’man’ or ‘child’, anything a
‘women’ is not. To think about the differences gives
meaning to the term ‘women’).
Why do these claims allow postmodernist to critique the
Enlightenment ideas of how knowledge is produced:
 Our relationship to knowledge becomes uncertain because the
‘meaning’ (‘concept’ or ‘signified’) and the ‘signifier’
(sound/image/written word) are separated and their link is
arbitrary. They are ‘made-up’ by humans and rely the internal
structure of a language which only allows you to say certain things
at a certain moment in time.
 The notion of arbitrariness of the sign deeply challenges the
correspondence theory of truth: if words relate only to each other
within an own structure, how could language be deemed to refer
to the world out there? How could language ever refer to a
‘universal reality’?
How does this affect academic history writing? Why was the
idea of a ‘constructed’ reality so frightening for historians in
the 1980s and 1990s?
It disturbed their confidence that they were able to get at the
‘reality’ of the past through the empirical study of their
‘neutrally’ collected sources. And it therefore also affected their
professional identity as ‘bearers of the truth’ about the past.
Where did their confidence come from?
‘…wants to show what really
happened’
Leopold von Ranke, 1795-1886, the ‘father’ of modern history writing
What did postmodernism do to the ’reality’ and ‘truth’ of the modern
historian?
 Reality is unrepresentable in any form of human culture (whether written,
spoken, visual or dramatic). All ‘reality’ and ‘truth’ is a construction or a
represention of the time it is spoken/written/painted about.
 What ‘reality’ is changes from period to period and from culture to culture,
and is also dependent on the perspective of the person who constructs
‘reality’ in past and present. What we think ‘reality’ is --- in the past and
present – is thus culturally determined and NOT universal. What humans
consider as ‘truth’ is also not universal but also culturally determined -’truths’ change through time.
 Any representation of ‘reality’ therefore can never be complete and no
person or technology can replicate the complexity of relations between
things or human beings. Therefore there cannot be a universal ‘truth’ about
things.
 No authoritative account can exists of anything. Nobody can know
everything, and there is never one authority on a given subject. No human
can ever speak or discover a ‘universal truth’.