Postmodernism Essay, Research Paper In recent old ages, multiculturalism, tolerance and political rightness have been integrated into how American society thinks. America seems to be seeking to larn more about the ingredients of her thaw pot. These attempts can be best understood by analyzing post-modernism Post-modernism emerged in the 20th century to displace and undermine values introduced by modernism. Postmodernism can be interpreted as “the cultural logic of late capitalism” emphasising his Marxist and post-industrial perspective. Therefore, the stiffness of modernism evolved into the indeterminacy of the post-modern aesthetic that · Essays and criticism on Postmodernism - Postmodernism. The term postmodernism has been defined in many different ways, and many critics and authors disagree on even its most basic precepts
Postmodernism Essays: Examples, Topics, Titles, & Outlines
One of the most outspoken critics of postmodern theory has been the German philosopher, Jurgen Habermas. Further, essays on postmodernism criticizing the Derridian deconstructionist principle, Habermas said essays on postmodernism deconstruction understood language as a series of signs, essays on postmodernism, which create a set of relations, essays on postmodernism, which we mistakenly take to be putative things, but which is in fact nothing more than a chain of infinite references to other signs, thus forestalling the possibility of a definite interpretation of a text.
Habermas, on the contrary, develops a theory based on rational consensus, which opposes the positive position truth based upon scientific, empirical, objective observationbut which does not resort to the radical textuality of postmodernism where the text is understood as an open-ended, infinite process of disruptive signification. Discourse for Habermas is not simply the interplay that signifies with no touchstone for making truth claims. Habermas has sought to defend many essays on postmodernism the essays on postmodernism principles, while making a more detailed critique of the ideas of postmodernist theorists in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity.
Like that of Habermas, Frederic Jameson also criticizes the theory of essays on postmodernism from the Leftist perspective, essays on postmodernism. He argues that postmodernism ought to be thought of as the apologetic or justificatory cultural discourse of the third stage of capitalism, namely, late or multinational capitalism.
In fact, Jameson periodizes capitalism into various phases, essays on postmodernism. He suggests that essays on postmodernism first two phases are classical capitalism and high capitalism.
Each new phase of capitalism has brought with it a concomitant distancing of the social. In postmodernism, people are removed from the economic system of production which they serve.
According to Jameson, the principal characteristics of this discourse of postmodernism are that it is a new kind of flatness or depthlessness, a new kind of superficiality in the most literal sense — perhaps the supreme formal feature of all the postmodernisms.
The effacement of a personal, unique style and a sense of history itself, and their replacement by pastiche not parody, but the rewriting or trans-coding of typical modernist idioms into jargon, badges and other decorative codes essays on postmodernism nostalgia, there by instituting a celebration of surfaces which denies the hermeneutics of depth.
This is an attempt to resist the obliteration of differences, the effort to make unlike things the same, and the imposition of an overall identity on radically dissimilar concepts, ideas, or persons. Like other consumer goods cultures are also producing and discriminating by new kind of capitalist groups in this market economy.
Consequently, in postmodernist society, every moment new cultures are begetting by different kinds of representative groups, like political community, regional community, artistic group, or group of painters or archaeologist etc. and each or every group demands separate and individual representations.
In such a situation clashes of civilization are very much natural. There is not anything original. It is a new kind of flatness or depthlessness, a new kind of superficiality. Due to this superficiality, there is a great tendency of alienation, essays on postmodernism.
Further, Jameson also criticizes another facet of postmodernist society, i. He suggests:. Parody, plays on the uniqueness of a style; it seizes on [its] idiosyncrasies and eccentricities to produce on imitation which mocks the original… Pastiche, on the other hand, whilst sharing many of these features, is a neutral essays on postmodernism. Similarly, postmodernist technology and distribution and production relationship, which is emerging there in the postmodernist society, is also criticized by Jameson.
He argues that during the modem days the technology was oriented towards production according to the demand of the society; on the contrary, in the essays on postmodernism society, technologies are increasing the demands of the society.
Market is essays on postmodernism directed by individuals, but individuals are controlled by markets. In modernist society individuals were identified by thinking being but the postmodernist individualists are characterized by their consumption capacity.
This experience finds aesthetic representation through the related concepts of pastiche and schizophrenic temporality. Marx has described the concept of essays on postmodernism in relation to means and modes of production. In Marxist philosophy society should be studied or analysed only through economic perspective, which is called super-structure by Marx.
On the contrary, Jameson represented it as a partial concept. Capitalism is not simplistic in nature. A form of capitalism would always be there in every society. In postmodernist society the tendency of capitalism is coming in the form of culture. Culture now is becoming an accessory of production. Signs, symbols, idioms etc. are now new means of essays on postmodernism in this market society. The commodification of culture and language is affecting each and every aspect of our life.
Economics, politics, psychology, music, dance, literature everything has now become the part of market and they are being purchased and bought.
Yet, in the final analysis, although Jameson utilizes modernist Marxism to combat what he feels to be the alienating and deliberating effects of postmodernist logic, he appears to harbour a grudging penchant for many of the cultural artifacts of postmodern culture.
Similarly, Terry Eagleton has also criticized the concept of postmodernism. He argues against the notion of binary oppositions. He further says:. One may, by and large, speak of human culture but not human nature, gender but not class, the body but not biology, jouissance but not justice, post-colonialism but not the petty bourgeoisie.
It is a thoroughly orthodox heterodoxy, essays on postmodernism, which like any imaginary form of identity needs its bogeymen essays on postmodernism straw targets in order to stay in business. But, it is not possible to propound a theory in the absence of any kind of coherence. According to Eagleton, by nature, history is a dynamic subject.
It is based on differences and plurality. Thus, one cannot say that here history has lost its importance. History not only means the subject which is already made, but also the process of making and also is something which is to be made.
Sir Muhammad Iqbal, a Muslim thinker, essays on postmodernism, argues that a community is like a child. It shows that historical tradition is not static; it must be reinvented by each new generation as it takes over its cultural inheritance from those preceding it, essays on postmodernism. Only through the interweaving of past and present can change attain a meaningful form.
For Oriental thinkers, postmodernism celebrates egoism — and it is the ego that ultimately leads to the demonization of the other and the ensuring conflict. While traditionalism sentimentalises a manufactured past, tradition requires non-western cultures to be true to their Self.
But this Self is not the T of western individualism, what is known in Islamic parlance as nafs: subservience to nafs leads to selfishness, greed, perpetual desire and cynicism. The Self non-western cultures must seek out is an inclusive identity that is, first and foremost, above individual ego.
What all others share today is what separates them from and impels their resistance to postmodernism, essays on postmodernism.
Each non-western tradition has to recover the self that enables it to begin making its present and future anew within the continuity of its own history, essays on postmodernism.
This is not an isolated or lonely struggle: culturally alive non-western writers, academics and activists share many premises in their struggle for cultural renewal, though the cultural premises they draw from are different for each, according to the tradition from which they come. It is not a homogenization of all others that one is talking about, but a kind of solidarity through difference, compatibility through plurality, which can strengthen them in their contest with the massed forces of postmodernism.
The cultures of resistance that the non-West must seek to create are not about eradicating the individual in the search to re-establish the community as a viable thriving entity, essays on postmodernism.
It is rather the rejection of notion that human beings can find and are fulfilled through the existential loneliness and angst of postmodern existence. The quest is to find a new dispensation, their own multiple and diverse cultural means beyond the straitjacket of western modernity and postmodernism where individual and community form a symbiotic whole.
According to famous Islamic thinker, essays on postmodernism, Iqbal, the moral and ethical framework of values, origin and purpose endures self and by implication, community must be created, striven for, reforged in each generation. But, the postmodernist thinkers nowhere seem to be oriented towards a coherent society with the help of different representative groups like feminity, subaltern etc.
Actually, these postmodernist thinkers, by rejecting the ideas of history and traditions, try to dominate the Oriental or non-western countries where history or tradition has its own relevance or importance. Ziauddin Sardar writes:. It places the inhuman and degrading on a par with the humane and ethical. The postmodernist thinkers further argue that postmodernism simply does not tolerate cultural autonomy, nor do the totalitarian reflexes of free market capitalism and liberal democracy.
Creating the space, resources and empowerment needed to nurture the cultural autonomy that will permit cultural authenticity to mature will be hard. It is the only battlefield, essays on postmodernism, and the most definitely cannot be won with landmines, small arms or artillery, let alone long-range bombers and high octane explosives.
It is a work of imaginative reconstruction. For Shaprio, on the one hand, postmodernism discusses its life through the notion of hyper-reality or the concept of simulacra and on the other, it demands for the end of history.
Again, on the one side, essays on postmodernism is against the concept of structuralism, and on the other it demands for the end of any kind of uniformity. But, it is not possible at all, arguing Essays on postmodernism, even to think about any society in the absence of coherent principle. Further, Christopher Norris also criticizes the postmodernist principle by saying it as a-moral or unethical principle.
He says that in fact the concept of postmodernism cannot be actualized in the real sense of the term, essays on postmodernism. He writes:. And this be it noted at a time when fundamentalist creeds of various description — Christian, Islamic, Nationalist, free-market capitalist, and so forth- are vigorously asserting their claim to supersede not only the secular discourse of Enlightenment but also its associated values of participant democracy, liberty of conscience, social welfare, and egalitarian reform.
Thus, the whole critical analysis of the postmodernist philosophy depicts that it is an illusionary concept. It is an effort to create such a deconstructed, history-less, foundationless society where there is not any direction.
It is an effort to build a society where there is not any structure or reality. Hence, it is an abstract concept. That is why; the Marxist philosophers and the philosophers from the Third World countries say that it is a new kind of ideology of domination.
It is not possible to live in a deconstructed essays on postmodernism society at all. Individual development or group development would not- be meaningful in the absence of a society. Therefore, a coherent theory is required where each and every member of the society could able to get their representation, both individual as well as societal.
But, unfortunately, postmodernist thinkers are not doing any work in this direction. You must be logged in to post a comment. Your Article Library Home Static Main Menu Home Share Your Files Disclaimer Privacy Policy Contact Us Prohibited Content Prohibited Content Image Guidelines Plagiarism Prevention Content Filtrations Terms of Service Account Disabled.
Related Articles: Fredric Jameson: Postmodernity is the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism Postmodernity, Postmodernism and Postmodern Social Theory. Characteristics of Postmodernism: Localism, Rejection of Essays on postmodernism and Anti-Essentialism.
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Postmodernism is not identity politics
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Essay on Postmodernism: Critical Analysis of Postmodernism. One of the most outspoken critics of postmodern theory has been the German philosopher, Jurgen Habermas. Reacting specifically to the argument about a legitiniation crisis (the collapse of our grand narratives) in Lyotard’s philosophical critique of Enlightenment, Habermas’ most frequently cited critique of Estimated Reading Time: 8 mins Postmodernism takes a lot of concepts from the modernism era. Both modernism and post modernism focus on Style, Social analysis, Cultural Context, Philosophy, Politics, Human experience, Machine aesthetics, and the constant transformation of the “New”. An interesting fact of the Modernism and Postmodernism is the use of the psychology and philosophy themes 1 · Postmodernism is a philosophy and an aesthetic that has become increasingly popular in both mass culture and academia alike. It is characterized in its style by pastiche, self-referential humor, and often parodies the art form it is attempting to create
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