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Jeg har et ufærdigt essay om postmodernisme som jeg da lige kan citere nogle passager fra:
Many people have problems defining the concept of postmodernism. It is, nonetheless, an extant and extremely significant phenomenon that, on closer analysis, makes a great deal of sense. It breaks with tradition and convention - a kind of radical “innovationism”. But, it also gets carried away with its own radicalism and tends to become irresponsibly irreverent of the past, forgetting to distinguish between the good and the bad, the benign and the harmful, the progessive and the obsolete, and even fact and fiction, to the extent - in extreme cases - that history is forgotten or cynically considered irrelevant. At this point postmodernism becomes an extremity of ignorance.
Postmodernism is a literary theory and a popular movement which is charaterized more by the absence than by the presence of rules; by tearing down theories rather than erecting them.
Even so, two very significant rules can be defined which most postmodernist literature and theory adhere to:
1) Breaking with the traditional value systems of the past, and 2) focusing on the perceived meaninglessness that follows therefrom.
These two aspects are frequently combined, but, if kept apart, they can each demonstrate very different things.
While the famous "nothingness" perspective proceeds from the combination of the two - using 1) as foundation and 2) as conclusion -, and produces texts and interpretations which emphasize the absence of meaning, a number of readings can manifest themselves through 1) alone, indeed exposing obsolete value systems, but not concluding that value per se is therefore non-existent. In the broadest sense, every critic can choose his or her most recent value system as that which replaces those of the past, which is what leads to the great variety of views expressed under the umbrella term of "postmodernism".
The postmodernist movement has in large part developed as a commentary on, as well as an integral part of, the discipline of linguistics (which is defined as “the scientific study of language and its structure”), and to trace the origin of postmodernism therefore means tracing the development of linguistics. Linguistics as a discipline in itself splits off from philology in the early 20th century when Ferdinand de Saussure’s ideas are published in 1915 and has in retrospect been hailed as one of the most important works since the Renaissance on human cultural activity. Saussure essentially concludes that language is form and not substance [because he cannot identify/define the emotional substance that give words their real meaning], and curiously stops taking the reasoning any further, or explaining it. This gets the ball rolling until Jacques Derrida systematizes the idea in the mid-to-late ‘60s, and provides an analytical thesis by which all meaning in a text - i.e. the implied center from which meaning allegedly proceeds - can be exposed as but “a philosophical fiction”. This is *deconstruction*. Deconstruction does what you might expect from its name: it deconstructs. It purports to demonstrate how all structure is composed of fallacious opposites, "proving" that there is no real structure after all; that all structure (which includes meaning, reason, common sense; everything) is ultimately artificial, and an illusion.
While modernism, in extension of the Enlightenment, confidently advocates and promotes science and rationality, postmodernism rebels against the “alleged objectivity” of rationality, the natural sciences and scientific knowledge in general. Postmodernism places emphasis instead on the influence of the soft sciences, especially linguistics, which is used to “deconstruct” narrative structure and meaning in order to show that all meaning, up to and including objective reality itself, is (at least potentially) an illusion. A stable of postmodernist literature is therefore “metafiction”: fiction whose subject is its own fictitiousness - thus exposing its own illusory nature -, and which prides itself in breaching conventional modes of plot and narrative structure.
In some quarters much has been made of how difficult postmodernism is to understand. And indeed it sometimes seems dauntingly complex. There are postmodernist trends in nearly all fields of study; a postmodernist style in nearly all crafts, and in each area the postmodernist aspect manifests itself differently. Postmodernism is a fluctuating structure of moods which permeates most of contemporary culture and counter-culture, jumping gleefully from one area to another, deconstructing, disrupting and desecrating everything it encounters. But it also kills lies, cleans up chaos, discards out-dated conservatism and - though mainly unwittingly - clears a path for reconstruction by throwing out the mess wholesale and showing us what is real enough to remain the objects of our attention and interest. The extreme postmodernist (/nihilist) will claim that nothing of that sort remains; that nothing at all has meaning. This is the “logic” of the suicidal, since life itself in that case has no shred of meaning either. Evolution will take care of that mindset: it is unfit for a world that requires survival; it will destroy itself.
:-) - Tue
Tue Sørensen
23. juli, 2009
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Tak for bidraget! Jeg kan godt lide idéen om at koge det ned til to helt simple kendetegn. Så kan man altid bagefter finde ud af, at to kendetegn ikke var nok, men så er man dog startet et sted.