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/home/karlrees/public_html/gallery2/bla introduction to postmodern theory | Wayne and Rebecca Madsen

introduction to postmodern theory

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I have been reading Steven Best and Douglas Kellner's Postmodern Theory over the past week. I believe I will be able to retain this information if I put some of my thoughts down into writing.

To explain Postmodern Theory, it is very important to explain when Modern Theory began and ended in order to help quantify what characteristics construct Modern Theory (hereafter Modern theory). Modern theory was the age of reason and enlightenment, a period of time when western civilization strove to attain a utopian ideal through reason and truth. This age began after the upset of the imposed truth through the Catholic church during the age of Enlightenment, when characters like Rousseau and Descartes defined truth as attainable through Aristotelian systems of inquiry. As we see in the writings of the Modern age, there was a standard lifted up by Reason and this standard was the ultimate goal for society to reach peace and universality through science and facts and a Marxist socialist dream.

Then came the World Wars and the cynicism of the 1960s to authority and traditional methods of understanding the world around us. This was the beginning of the Postmodern age for most, because of the obvious breakdown of the Modern theory to function without killing millions of people.

Why Postmodern? There isn't any coherent Postmodern theory which encompasses the past 70 years (or more, depending on which historian you talk to), but currently the recurring theme which threads between all Postmodern theories is the attack on Modern theories of totality, universalism and macrosystemic understanding. Instead, the Postmodernist focuses on evaluating a micropolitical way of life, a Nietzschean system of paradoxes and a cynical evaluation of "what went wrong." There also exists a number of Postmodern theorists who talk about society as a system where the currency is language systems. This is where most of my interests lie.

I'm not certain how I could break down Postmodern theory or Modern theory anymore than this. One of my last (and by far, favorite) classes during my undergraduate degree was a critical thinking class in Psychology which compared the possible theoretical approaches to psychology - the postmodern and the modern - in an attempt to help us see how the modern influences much of our society's thinking as biases, not conscious decisions. Now that I understand better the holistic approaches to both, I'm pretty sure that neither theory functions as an adequate model.

Here is a breakdown of some interesting points:

I disagree with Loytard (as well as some others) about hermeneutics. I am definitely a (partial) hermeneuticist, in that I believe that some events have significance despite culture and beyond microsystems of thought: if a child is suddenly hit by a bus and killed, that event has inherent meaning which breaches micropolitical systems (even sadists feel the same thing, but they only enjoy that sensation and crave more of it, whereas "normal" people desire to avoid that sensation at all costs...at any rate, it's the same inherent meaning which is placed on certain events). That being said, there are very few experiences/events which can be chalked up to universality; even those events which have communal meaning across language-sign borders contain minute differences due to the philosophical base rooted within the language-system (see Derrida). I hate to be a fence-hopper on this one, but the reality of many of these theories is their limited ability to appropriately model much of the human condition - things are much more complex than any simplified model can give credit for.

One of the strongest points of postmodern theory is the recontextualizing of known ideas, by critiquing the Aristotelian systems which have governed Western society since the Enlightenment. With this re-evaluation of thought (from 'what is beauty?' to 'can we even prove the scientific method works?') comes a harsh criticism of the utopian ideals that come with the dialectic of Knowledge-as-Truth. One of the most profound thoughts I was given by a professor was the heretical notion that laws possibly don't exist (physical, not societarian): but what if matter acts as it does because it chooses to. Sound crazy? I still think it really is nuts, but it is a liberating thought because it questions our belief in the system of physical normatives. What if we only know what is going on around us because we are limited to our semiotically-based belief system which requires the physical laws to be fact? I know many religious people would concur with this idea and as a result many Enlightenment-based-Aristotelian thinkers would respond counteractively to it. This postmodern idea of critiquing our thoughts by evaluating where they came from is a very pertinent direction that postmodernism offers us.

On tolerance:

One of the greatest exemplifications of postmodern theory in society is the notion of tolerance for "differing lifestyles." The postmodernists are big on the idea of tearing down a Marxist belief in utopian ideals and class/culture systems' unity. Whether we adopted this belief as a society through an organic response to the forces which created postmodernism or whether we have taken a liking to tolerance because of the postmodern academic influences could be debated. Either way, tolerance is still yet to be seen if it will avoid the consequences viewed through the postmodernists as caused by modernist and Marxist ideologies (i.e. World Wars, nationhood strife). Sixty years after World War II, we can postulate very little about the causes of war. According to many postmodern theorists, utopian ideals of uniformication and homogeneity led to nations attacking other nations; ergo, to avoid conflict, we need to be accepting of all choices made by all people.

I think that tolerance has its positives, but also some clear negatives. We do need to be accepting of other lifestyles and forms of life, other than our own because they have the justified right to life and control of their life, just as we do. However, by propagating the acceptance of other lifestyles, that means you are accepting of belief systems which are in direct conflict with your own. And those two belief systems believe that they are both correct. And this leads to war.

I don't believe the 'war on terror' can ever be won for many reasons, most of which are obvious in the field of anthropology. But this system of accepting beliefs which are in direct conflict with our own, these two diametrically opposed forces collide to produce war. So instead of overcoming the glaring shortcoming of Modernist thought, the postmoderns have created a new reason for people to kill each other.

As far as tolerance goes, there is not going to be peace on Earth. I'm sorry to all of those people who believe in Peace on Earth, and may you be comforted in finding your own small slice of Peace on Earth. But peace has no place in a world society like ours. You ultimately have a few choices about how to respond to our global social atmosphere: you can be a jerk and tear other people down, you can be a nice person and not tear other people down. Me, I'm non-confrontational. But that's just my off-topic rambling.

"Postmodern theory in its more extreme forms tends to be exactly what it accuses modern theory of being: one-sided, reductionist, essentializing, excessively prohibitive, and politically disabling."