Quote:
Originally Posted by saffronleaf
This is my understanding based on the video:
- Modernism refers to a school of thought where science, reasoning, facts, data, industry, etc., are given primacy, and religion is given a limited role. This went on to form what we think of as "liberalism" in the broadest sense, as in "liberal democracies". Modernism is Western Enlightenment thought.
- Post-modernism is a reaction in to Modernism. The main thing about post-modernism was going against grand narratives. For example, Marxists have a 'story' about the world. People who follow religions have a 'story'. For post-modernists, even the modern outlook that epmhasizes science is just another 'story'. This has a lot of implications. For example, most forms of nationalism are grand narratives; as is marxism; capitalism, etc. Also they didn't believe in objective truth and believed in moral relativism.
- The issue with 'deconstructing' these stories and objective things was that there was nothing that post-modernists were really doing. It's pretty nihilistic so can't use it for change.
- Post-modernism then evolved into the 'woke' movement we see today. They hold a lot of the same questioning of traditional grand narratives, moral relativism, no objective truth, etc., except that they posit the existence of power structures in every society. And these power structures have different axis; so for example feminists posited the patriarchy, a gender system that everyone participates in and is affected by and disproportionately in a manner favorable to men. Another example is systemic racism, a race system ... favorable to Whites.
These systems are presumed to be truthful and all phenomena can be analyzed from that perspective. It's like Marxism, which at first blush you may think is just an economic system. But the epistemology, metaphysics, etc. of Marxism can be applied to virtually all phenomena. E.g., you can study say, a religious riot, from the Marxist perspective by considering the class differences involved in the riot.
This is why it sometimes feels like people are literally on the hunt for things to be offended by. Critical race theory (the term used to refer to the ppl who study the race system) will look at almost everything from the angle of race, which to many feels sometimes unwarranted.
All of this has further evolved with the introduction of 'intersectionality', which tries to bind these different systems together. Although there are frictions involved -- for example, the post-modern look at gender (= gender is a construct; another grand narrative) can be at odds with critical feminism (= system of patriarchy exists and everyone is involved in it and disproportionately to the favor of men).
|
Modernism and postmodernism are infamously tricky concepts to define comprehensively, whether that be each on their own, in relation to each other or in relation to what came before and after. The terms are used differently across disciplines, schools of thought and by specific thinkers. Taking these varying definitions into consideration, however, we can formulate very general concepts of what each word tends to mean.
I would challenge you quite strongly on the idea that modernism is equivalent to Enlightenment thought or classical liberalism. Enlightenment thought is very much the idea of the individual as an observer of an objective external world, in which reason ought to be used to interpret experience.
There was, of course, a hugely profound shift following the Enlightenment that occurred before modernism developed: Romanticism. Although we can trace the evolution of romanticism back to Enlightenment thinking (e.g., through the development of sentimentalist philosophy and literature), it was in many ways a rejection of it. Instead of emphasizing the individual's role as rational observer, romanticism privileged the individual's emotional and subjective experience of the external world with a heavy emphasis on authenticity—authenticity of experience, of artistic expression and in sociopolitical organization (e.g., the authenticity of the national experience, of the rustic/folkish and of the blood-and-soil idea of culture).
As with the relationship between romanticism and Enlightenment thought, modernism grows out of romanticism while simultaneously rejecting it. This is especially true following WWI, which radically altered the West's understanding of itself and exposed (at least in many thinkers' minds) the decadence and destructive force of romantic understandings of the individual, the world, the nation, etc. Certainly, the notion of the sublime, of the glorious terror of experience, was rendered at best quaint by the horrors of the trenches and the legacy of shell shock.
Modernism, as opposed to Enlightenment thinking, has a strong focus on the individual's interior experience (e.g., the advent of stream-of-consciousness). Unlike romanticism, modernism begins to reject the notion of authenticity: the individual is not the authentic response to history but an agent capable of challenging and changing it. There is a definite sense of progress present, which comes to be tied to the idea of the genius avant-garde pushing social and cultural life ever forward. The experimental was privileged, especially given the rise of new materials and media (esp. notable on this forum regarding architecture). Reason and rationality aren't nearly as important as in the Enlightenment, and classical liberalism isn't really present at all; rather, modernism's experimentality and concern for shaping the future favoured various flavours of (largely top-down) city planning and intervention in the economy.
Postmodernism is likely the most poorly defined term here, possibly because we don't have the benefit of observing it and its legacy after the fact. As with the others, it largely grew out of what came before, and it's not exactly clear when (or even if) it diverged from modernism. It has its roots in the structuralism and poststructuralism of the mid-20th Century; certainly, semiotics is central to the postmodern understanding of the world. Essentially, there is no meaning aside from that which is signified by the symbolic order that we inhabit and reproduce through culture. This combined with postmodernism's tendency toward irony, sarcasm and political cynicism has opened it up to the criticism that it endorses nihilism and absolute moral relativism, though thinkers and creators that take those positions whole-hog are relatively few and far between, especially as time has gone on.
That said, there have been several persuasive arguments made that we've at least begun to leave postmodernism behind for what's been called postpostmodernism or the New Sincerity. While I can definitely see how intersectionality descends from a postmodernist (esp. poststructuralist) worldview, the increasing drive toward solutions-oriented political discourse, earnest artistic expression and an intolerance for "ironic" oppression/appropriation seems to be placing it farther outside the bounds of postmodernism as time goes on. Things mean things again, which is perhaps what's so off-putting about it all to earlier generations that grew up with strong pomo influences on their worldview (e.g., the "Why can't you people take a joke?" crowd).
Prev
Linear Mode
