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Definition:
According to Terry Eagleton, Postmodernism is “the contemporary movement
of thought, which rejects the possibility of objective knowledge and is
therefore ‘skeptical of truth, unity and progress’”. {After Theory- 2003}
Postmodernism is a movement particularly in architecture that reacted
against the modern school of thought by re-introducing classical (of relating
to or characteristic of Greek and Roman antiquity) and traditional elements
of style.
Postmodernism is a late-20th century movement in the arts, architecture, and
criticism that was a departure from modernism.
Postmodernism includes skeptical interpretations of culture, literature, art,
philosophy, history, economics, architecture, fiction and literary criticism.
It is often associated with deconstruction and post-structuralism because its
usage as a term gained significant popularity at the same time as 20 th century
post-structuralist thought.
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The term postmodernism has been applied to a host of movements mainly in
art, music and literature, that reacted against tendencies in modernism and
are typically marked by revival of historical elements and techniques.
History: Different usages of the term.
1870’s : First- John Watkins Chapman – A postmodern style of painting –
Departure from French impressionism.
1914 : J. M. Thompson – Change in religious beliefs and attitudes.
1921 & 1925 : Postmodernism had been used to describe new forms of art and
music.
1942 : H. R. Hays – New Literary form.
However, as a general theory for a historical movement, it was first used in
1939 by Arnold J. Toynbee – “Our own postmodern age has been inaugurated
by the general war of 1914-1918”.
1949 : Used to describe a dis-satisfaction with modern architectural
movement known as international style.
1971 : Mel Buchner – Used the term in a lecture delivered at the Institute of
Art, London.
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More recently, Walter Truett Anderson described postmodernism as belonging
to one of the four typological world views, which he identifies as either:
1. Postmodern-Ironist: which sees truth as socially constructed.
2. Scientific-Rational: in which truth is found through methodical-disciplined
enquiry.
3. Social-Traditional: in which truth is found in the heritage of American and
Western civilization, and
4. Neo-Romantic: in which truth is found through attaining harmony with
nature and/or spiritual exploration of inner self.
Postmodernist ideas in philosophy and the analysis of culture and society
expanded the importance of critical theory and has been the point of
departure for works of literature, architecture and design, as well as being
visible in marketing/business and the interpretation of history, law and
culture, starting in the 20th century.
Postmodernism has also been used interchangeably with the term post-
structuralism, out of which postmodernism grew.
A proper understanding of postmodernism or doing justice to the
postmodernist thought demands an understanding of the post-structuralist
movement and the ideas of its advocates.
Lyotard’s Three Senses of the Term
Postmodernism:
In the writing of Lyotard, one of the foremost thinkers associated with
postmodernism, we can identify at-least three analytically distinguishable
senses of the term, even if they shade into each other at the edges.
First Sense: Postmodernism as an Aesthetic Event! In many cases
‘postmodernism’ refers to a trend or movement in literature, cinema, art and
architecture.
This sense of postmodernism is often premised on a rupture between modern
and postmodern styles where the later represents a questioning of modern
conceptions of Teleological Time and Euclidian Space, a predilection (an
established preference for something) for diversity and difference over unity,
for irony, self-reflection and self-refrentiality and a loss of faith in avant-
grade.
Generalizing to the extreme, we might say that postmodernism highlights and
plays with the rules and limits of structuralism, formalism and orthodoxies of
any kind.
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Second Sense: Postmodernism as a Condition! Perhaps the most common
sense in which the term ‘postmodernism’ is used to signify the emergence of
a new period or distinctive social condition.
Postmodernity in this sense represents a break with the past, the arrival of
‘new times’, imputing a qualitative transformation to society or a shift in
cultural sensibility which is characterized by the rise of information
technologies.
Knowledge changes in status as it becomes just another commodity in the
circuity of post-industrial, postmodern capitalism.
There emerges in postmodernity a ‘mercantilization of knowledge, which no
longer asks, ‘Is it true?’ but ‘what use is it?’, ‘Is it saleable?’ and ‘Is it
efficient?’
Knowledge is judged in terms of its utility and technical applicability.
Knowledge in the postmodern era comes to be understood as an
‘informational commodity’ in the global network of power and wealth.
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Lyotard goes so far as to say that “It is conceivable that the nation-states will
one day fight for control of information, just as they battled in the past for
control of access to and exploitation of raw materials and cheap labor.
Third Sense: Postmodernism as Crisis of Narratives! Apart from using the
term ‘postmodernism’ to denote an ‘aesthetic event’ or the transformation in
the ‘use value of knowledge’, Lyotard also uses it to denote the ‘general
cultural context of nihilism’, in which this transformation takes place.
Postmodernism in this sense evokes a ‘crisis of narratives’ or more specifically
an ‘incredulity towards meta-narratives’, i.e., disbelief, doubt, skepticism,
suspicion about any grand theory with foundational grounds.
There is Lyotard perceives, a loss of confidence in the authority of the grand
narratives, which function to legitimate the rules and procedures for making
and judging knowledge claims.
The grand narrative is thus an external support to which appeal is made, so
as, to ground and legitimate knowledge claims.
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In more political terms, the importance of narrative is that it bears a
legitimation function for knowledge claims.
At the epistemological level, grand narratives serve as a ‘means of self-
foundation’, while at the political level, they serve as a ‘means of self-
assertion or self-legislation’.
Central to each narrative is the subject who pursues self-foundation or self-
legislation.
The Operation of Grand Narratives in IR:
One can see the operation of grand narratives in IR. The dominant narratives,
realism and neorealism, legitimate their knowledge by reference to the
state’s pursuit of power and security under conditions of anarchy.
Knowledge claims are thus judged according to their usefulness for states
under such conditions.
One of the main alternative narratives, liberal internationalism, legitimates
its knowledge by reference to humanity’s gradual achievement of universal
freedom and perpetual peace by challenging the priority accorded to state
defined interests and by overcoming the spurious (false, bogus, fake) moral
boundaries policed by sovereign states.
Each narrative places the epistemological and the political dimensions in a
mutual embrace.
Self-assertion grounds self-foundation and vice-versa.
Finally each narrative marks the limits of what is possible in theory and in
practice.
Expression of Crisis of Narratives:
One of the most significant expressions of the crisis of narrative is the de-
legitimation of modernity and the West.
Stories telling of the triumph of modernity and/or the West have increasingly
come under critical scrutiny, not just by those positioned ‘outside’ the
modern West, but by those ‘within’.
The moral and political implications of such narratives, which legitimate the
domination of a set of predominantly European values at the expense of
alternatives have been amply documented by Arjun Appadurai, Chris Brown,
Roxanne Doty, Rob Walker and Robert Young.
Postmodernism as a critical discourse here shades into postcolonialism as a
critique of Euro- and ethnocentrism.
This provides an important context in which to interpret Lyotard’s call to
‘wage a war on totality’ and to be sensitive to difference.
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Postmodernism thus signifies a resistance against totalizing narratives of
morality, culture and politics, that is, narratives which function to justify or
legitimate the imposition of Western or modern norms on others.
At the risk of oversimplifying, it might be said that postmodernism in this
sense represents a resistance to totalization.
In the language of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, it is a form of thought
opposed to modes of epistemological and political capture.
It will be suggested that this sense of postmodernism, which is better called
post-structuralism, echoes the efforts of Nietzsche.
Nietzsche’s thought is an effort to avoid totalizing views of knowledge and
politics, at the centre of which is a critique of the subject.
The deployment of Nietzschean or Post-
structuralist form of Postmodernism in IR:
After Grand Narratives: Nietzsche, Perspectivism and the Critique of the
Subject:
Lyotard’s account of the de-legitimation of metanarratives can be read
alongside Nietzsche’s Genealogy of morals insofar as it is concerned with
responding to a condition of nihilism; that is, a condition where the highest
values are devalued.
According to both Nietzsche and Lyotard, humanity finds itself in a situation
where it can no longer, if ever it could, identify a transcendent ground for
knowledge claims.
The idea that transcendent values, principles and reference-points might
somehow ground knowledge claims has been rendered null and void under the
aegis of postmodernism.
There exists no overarching, transhistorical viewpoint from which judgements
regarding epistemology or politics can be made.
Continue: Nietzsche’s Perspectivism
‘God is dead’, it is declared, and no other reference-points has replaced Him
which might function as a stable ground for knowledge claims.
In the absence of a stable, universal frame of reference or grand narrative,
we are left with a plurality of perspectives, or in Lyotard’s words, ‘little
narratives’.
As Nietzsche puts it: There is only a perspective “seeing”, only a perspective
“knowing”.
The modern idea or ideal of an objective or “all encompassing perspective”
has been displaced by the Nietzschean recognition that there is always more
than one perspective and that each perspective embodies a particular set of
values.
Moreover, these perspectives do not simply offer different views of the same
‘real world’.
The very idea of the ‘real world’ has been ‘abolished’ in Nietzsche’s thought,
leaving only perspectives, only interpretations of interpretations, or in
Derrida’s terms, only ‘textuality’.
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The warp and weft of the ‘real world’ is woven out of perspectives,
interpretations and little narratives, none of which can claim to correspond to
‘reality in-in-itself’, to be a ‘view from nowhere’, or to be exhaustive.
To say that there is only a ‘perspective knowing’ does not mean, of course,
that there can be no knowledge at all.
Nietzsche and post-structuralists have never denied the possibility knowledge,
only the possibility of overcoming perspective or escaping textuality.
Equally, they have never been seduced by relativism as an alternative to
objectivism. Perspectivism does not confer equal authority on all
perspectives, nor does it relinquish the possibility of discriminating between
perspectives.
It simply confers on all perspectives an equal right to claim authority.
There is no overarching perspective, no transcendent point from which to
pass judgement.
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No perspective can thus claim to stand on unshakable foundations.
Or to repeat an earlier formulation, no perspective can claim to correspond
to ‘reality-in-itself’, to be a ‘view from nowhere’, or to be exhaustive.
Alternative criteria must thus be employed to judge between different
perspectives, as claim to truth, objectivity or exhaustiveness are no longer
tenable.
Perspectivism thus acts as an alternative to the ‘unitarian epistemologies’, to
use Paul Patton’s term, that dominate the social sciences and underpin grand
narratives.
Unitarian epistemologies assume that if a given theory provides some
knowledge of the social or political world than alternative theories can make
knowledge claims only insofar as they are consistent with the grand narrative
which legitimates the extant theory.
The extant theory acts as a benchmark or reference-point against which other
theories are judged – as if it was somehow unproblematically placed to gain
access to the ‘real world’.
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But perspectivism challenges Unitarian epistemologies by suggesting that no
knowledge claim stands outside the struggle or contestation which takes place
to impose authoritative interpretations.
Every grand narrative is thus simply one among many little narratives, each of
which is engaged in an epistemological battle to have its perspective win out.
It is important to remember that Nietzsche’s perspectivism is internally
related to his critique of subjectivity.
Unitarian epistemologies are predicated upon an objective, universal knowing
subject.
Nietzsche however warns us to be on our guard against “the dangerous old
conceptual fiction that posited a ‘pure, will-less, painless, timeless knowing
subject”’.
According to Nietzsche, the knowing subject is simply a fiction produced by
grammatical habit.
The subject-predicate distinction in language creates the ‘rude fetishism, as
Nietzsche calls it Twilight of the Idols, of the active, unified subject behind
any action.
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The problem with this ‘rude fetishism’ as Nietzsche sees it, is twofold. Firstly,
it ignores the situatedness of any knowing subject.
Knowledge is always situated, it always marks and is embedded in a particular
position.
As Nietzsche so forcefully showed, the subject does not simply denote a
perspective, but is constituted by it. A perspective thus always also posits a
subject. Nietzsche thus suggests that knowledge and subjectivity are
fundamentally entwined: knowledge is always embodied in a particular
subject, simultaneously positing that subject.
Knowledge, qua perspective, always posits or positions a subject, it is thus
always linked to ways of being-in-the-world, and indeed is a part of the
world, not somehow extraneous or removed.
Secondly, the habit of grammar that leads us to separate subject and action,
and to confuse the subject for a cause who ‘produces an effect’, fools us into
believing that there is an a priori unified subject behind human knowing and
doing.
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As Nietzsche explains, however, ‘‘there is no ‘being’ behind doing’’, effecting,
becoming; the ‘doer’ is merely a fiction added to the deed – ‘the deed is
everything’.
The subject is not a pre-existent, noumenal entity, but is constituted by the doing.
Nietzsche’s point here is, that the subject’s being is constituted by doing. Knowing
constitutes the knower.
Postmodernism qua perspectivism thus marks a suspicion towards, or a decentering
of, epistemological totalization.
This will force us to take a different perspective of perspective. It is no longer just
a neutral gaze. Instead, it is a part of the world, even as it partakes in the
constitution of the world.
As Nietzsche already hints, there are important ontological implications that
extends from this theoretical insight. At the heart of these implications is the
knowing and acting subject.
The contribution of these Nietzschean reflections, is to mistrust the will to totalize
or essentialize, that is, to question the assumption that there is a priori essence to
being or that any perspective can capture the essence or totality of the world.
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For postmodernism, totalization at the levels of epistemology and ontology is
to be resisted. In fact, for postmodernism, totalization never actually takes
place.
There are attempts at totalization, and often appearances of totalization, but
totalization is never achieved.
Lyotard’s slogan ‘wage war on totality’ usefully captures the de-centering
impulse that drives postmodernism in both its epistemological and political
concerns.
IR Theory, Perspectivism and De-centered States: