Postmodernism

[Oscillation]

I thought this thread could be about everything postmodernistic, and for initial thoughts upon it I've lately encountered the opinion that "you shouldn't listen to authorities", or something like it. What I've since then realized - or my intuition whispers - is that they are part of this postmodernistic society, but unaware of it and thus being led by some kind of authority - they're not thinking for themselfs, as they're thinking just as everyother in this period.

I should probably not speak about "them". I know I'm part of the postmodernistic society and thinking just as much as the ones I speak of. The more reason to think and talk about it then! It's good to be examin your own thoughts and way of percieving the world at.

Any thoughts upon "postmodernism and the anti-authority"-paradox? It may not be a paradox. I don't know! What do you think?

 

[invisible]

i think that my way of discriminating between modernism and postmodernism has been that modernism questions meaning, but postmodernism questions whether questioning meaning is meaningful. because there is no possibility of meaning in postmodernism, there is more room for possibilities that may or may not be meaningful, but do not need to be meaningful - the degree to which the possibilities are meaningful is irrelevant; possibility justifies itself. we can play with possibilities of meaning.

in my undergraduate degree, one of my literature teachers told me that postmodernism is over now, and that it was never something that replaced modernism, but it was always just a part of modernism that has now been properly reincorporated into modernism. i dont agree with that. i think that postmodernism shows that there is no need for linear continuity, or for a master narrative. postmodernism does not stop any more than modernism stops, or classicism stops, or romanticism stops. everything messily persists.

 

[Faye]

The philosophy of postmodernism is that the state of knowledge in the world today has shifted from being dominated by 'grand meta-narratives' to 'micro-narratives' instead. It is the idea that nobody can claim to have the whole truth or the whole picture. The grand meta-narratives still exist in western society (i.e. religion, or political movements like Liberalism, Marxism, etc.), but they've been undermined by the information age and the commercialization of education (once upon a time, all universities were religious).

The irony of postmodernism is that it itself is a grand-metanarrative, so it is inherently self-contradictory. Saying that there is no single truth is just as much of an absolute as claiming that there is a single truth, after all.

As for authority, I suppose it is a paradox because, on one hand, you have people (politicians, religious leaders, professors) who sometimes try to speak with authority, but at the same time, their authority is always a question. Like, if you went back a few hundred years, you probably weren't going to get into serious debates over the existence of God in the western world. That was pretty much taken as a known, and belief didn't play a part in it. These days, everything comes down to the individual, their beliefs, views, and opinions. We're sort of left without anything greater to root our views in while simultaneously needed to appeal to something greater if we're to make any sort of convincing case for things like moral behavior, how we should organize our government, and the place of science in society.

I mean, nobody thinks there is anything divine about our government anymore- whereas pretty much everywhere in the world in the past it was taken as a given that the king/emperor/pope or whoever ruled with the sanction of divinity.