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Todd,
What do you mean by the term 'gnostic' in the context of the break in literature, sometimes called 'post-modernism'?
gnosis - intuitive knowledge of various spiritual truths, esp. that said to have been possessed by ancient Gnostics . . .
Are you equating,
quote:the most decadent tendencies of modernism foregrounded, with
quote: A leap from exploring what things are knowable to creating things through knowing about them.
in your definition of PMism? Why 'decadent'? Are you saying that PM Lit is characterised by the process of (imaginatively) knowing 'things' into existence.Isn't that what fiction has always been? imagining new-worlds, people, situations into existence ?
I never really understood how artistic modernity (Picasso, Faulkner, Eliott, Pound, Joyce, Woolf) could be conflated with philosophical/ political modernity, to give a generalized term - post-modernity. The question mark put over the agency/ rationality of 'the subject' might be one way through which PMsm can have some valency as a blanket term.
Don't know whether this quite belongs on this thread, but there is below a quite lengthy discussion on PMsm and periodization that seems to focus more on the philosophical/political dimensions than artistic ones (closer to Giddens than Derrida?) . . . Cornelius Castoriadis on Postmodernism, whose periodization hinges on the project of social/individual autonomy (don't know how much I really understand below, but makes a fair amount of sense,and I do like a writer with a combative/ decisive tone: it makes for good dialogue.)
"The retreat from Autonomy: Postmodernism as Generalized Conformism."
quote:"The label postmodernismcertainly does not and cannot define or characterise the present period. But it very adequately expresses it. It manifests the pathetic inability of the epoch to conceive of itself as something positive - or as something ... [simply/ briefly] - leading to its self-definition as simply" post-something,"that is, through a reference to that which was but is not anymore, and to its attempt at a self-glorification by means of the bizarre contention that its meaning is no-meaning and its style the lack of any style."
quote: . . . without neglecting the fantastically rich and polyphonic complexity of the historical universe unfolding in Western Europe from the twelth century onwards, the most appropriate way to grasp its specificity is to relate it to the signification and the project of (social and individual) autonomy. The emergence of this project marks the break with the "true" Middle Ages. In this perspective, one may distinguish three periods: the emergence (constitution) of the West; the critical ("modern") epoch; and the retreat into conformism.
Castoriadis summarising Johann Arnason's summary of 3 tenets of'postmodernism':
quote:1. The rejection of an overall vision of history as progress or liberation. In itself, this rejection is correct. It is not new, but it serves, in the hands of the postmodernists, to eliminate the question: Are, therefore, all historical periods and all social-historical regimes equivalent? This, in turn, leads to political agnosticism, or to the funny acrobatics performed by the post-modernists or their bretheren when they feel obliged to defend freedom, democracy, human rights, and so on.
2. The rejection of the idea of a uniform and universal reason. Here again, in itself the rejection is right; it is by far not new; and it serves to cover up the question that opened up the Greco-Western creation of Logos and Reason: What are we to think? Are all ways of thinking equivalent or indifferent?
3. The rejection of the strict differentiation of cultural spheres (philosophy and art, say)on the basis of a single underlying priciple of rationality or functionality. This is at best muddled, and it cuts through many important questions. To name but one: the differentiation of cultural spheres (or lack of it)is, each time, a social-historical creation, part and parcel of the whole institution of life in the society considered. It cannot be approved or rejected in the abstract. Nor has the process of differentiation of the cultural spheres in, say,the Greco-Western stretch of human history expressed the implications of a single underlying principle of rationality, whatever that may mean. This would be, strictly speaking, the Hegelian construction. The unity of the differentiated cultural spheres, in ancient Athens as well as in Western Europe, is not to be found in any underlying principle of rationality or functionality but in the fact that all spheres embody, in their own way and in the very guise of their differentitation, the same core of imaginary significaitons of the given society."
"Waht we have here is a collection of half-truths perverted into strategems of evasion. The value of postmodernity as "theory" is that it mirrors the prevailing trends. Its misery is that it simply rationalizes them through a high-brow apologetics of conformity and banality. Complacently mixed up with loose but fashionable talk about "pluralism" and "respest for the difference of the other" it ends up glorifying ecclecticism, covering up sterility, and providing a generalised view of the 'anything goes' principle, so fittingly celebrated in another field by [Paul] Feyerabend. To be sure, conformity, sterility, banality, and 'anything goes' are the characteristic traits of the period. Postmodernism, the ideology adorning them with a 'solemn complement of justification,' is the latest case of intellectuals abandoning their critical function and enthusiastically adhering to that which is there just because it is there. Postmodernism, both as an effective historical trend, and as a theory, truly is the negation of modernism."
quote: It is . . .not sufficient to say that 'modernity is an unfinished project' (Habermas). Insofar as modernity embodied the capitalist imaginary signification of the unlimited expansion of (pseudo-)rational(pseudo-)mastery, it is more alive than ever, and it is engaged in a frantic course pregnant with the severest dangers for humankind. But insofar as the development of capitalism has been decisively conditioned by the simultaneous deployment of the project of social and individual autonomy, modernity is finished. Capitalism developing while forced to face a continuous struggle against the status quo, on the floor of the factory as well as in the sphere of ideas or of art, and capitalism expanding without any effective internal opposition are two different social-historical animals. The project of autonomy itself is not finished. But its trajectory during the last two centuries has proved the radical inadequacy, to say the least, of the progams in which it has been embodied - be it the liberal republic or Marxist-Leninist 'socialism'. That the demonstration of this inadequacy in actual historical fact is one of the roots of present political apathy and privatization hardly needs stressing. For the resurgence of the project of autonomy, new political objectives and new human attitudes are required. For the time being, however, there are but few signs of such changes. Meanwhile, it would be absurd to try to decide whether we are living through a long parenthesis or we are witnessing the beginning of the end of Western history as a history essentially linked with the project of autonomy and codetermined by it. |
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