Lecture 1/Term 3: Postmodernity/Postmodernism Dr Claudia Stein

What are we talking about? Definition, definition, definition…. Postmodernity: This term refers to a set of perceived (sociological, political, economical, technological, etc.) conditions of everyday life, which are perceived as distinctly different from the conditions of ‘modernity’ (sets in the 1960s). Postmodernism: describes a broad late-20th century movement that occurred across philosophy, the arts and humanities, architecture, and criticism and marked a departure from modernism (although it has some intellectual links to it). Postmodernism is the intellectual (cultural, artistic, academic, and philosophical) response to the conditions of postmodernity. While encompassing a broad range of ideas and projects, postmodernism is typically defined by an attitude of scepticism or distrust toward all forms of grand narratives and ideologies (e.g. the grand narrative of progress, Marxism). It questioned Enlightenment morals and beliefs in rationality, objective reality and the existence of absolute truth. Instead, it asserts that all knowledge and truth are the product of unique systems of socio-cultural, economic and political discourse at a particular moment in time, and are therefore contextual and constructed. Postmodernism challenged and undermined the certainty over knowledge and morality that characterised modernity and most of modernism (roughly between s). Accordingly, postmodern thought is broadly characterised by tendencies to epistemological and moral relativism, pluralism, and a focus in subjectivity.

‘….postmodernism is typically defined by an attitude of scepticism … it questioned Enlightenment morals and beliefs in rationality, objective reality and the existence of absolute truth.’ What stands at the core of postmodernism critique?

So, what did the Enlightenment believe in and which became problematic for postmodern thinkers? Belief in the power of human reason in all areas of human individual and collective life. The belief in the power of reason brings about a new intellectual virtue rationality that was supposed to guide all investigations into the natural and human world. This rational enquiry was based on the empirical method, a way of gaining knowledge by means of direct and indirect observation or other sensual experience. The knowledge gained through the empirical method was deemed to be neutral. Because empirically gained knowledge was neutral, it was believed that absolute and universal truth about the world around us could be achieved by humans. Reality could be assessed and discovered by humans

A good and comprehensible introduction to the influence of linguistics and semiotics on postmodern thinking is: Callum G. Brown, Postmodernism for Historians (Harlow, 2005) Available for free on: anguage=&extension=&t=0 Very core of all postmodern critique of the Enlightenment is based on: fundamentally different understanding of how knowledge is gained And this different understanding is based on a new understanding of how language is constituted and used

Ferdinand de Saussure, , Swiss linguist Cours de linguistique générale (1916) Linguistics: scientific study of language in broadly three aspects: language form, language meaning, and language in context

Sign, signifier, signified: These three come as a trilogy in semiology. The sign is constituted by the relationship of a signifier (a medium, such as a road sign, a word, a gesture) to a signified (also known as the referent, the ‘thing’ being signed.) The signified is not the thing itself, only a concept of it. Anything is a sign that stands for something other than itself. Each work is a sign and a sign consist of:

Saussure’s Central Claims: 1.Languages are not confined to words but include any system of communication that uses signs. 2.A sign is composed of a ‘signifier’ (vocal sound, image) and a ‘signified’ (the mental concept or structure that speaker and listener share). The mental concept/structure precedes the ‘signifier’in existence 3.A ‘signifier’ is established quite arbitrarily and bears no resemblance to the signified. (Different language use different signifiers for the same mental concepts) 4.Every sign acquires meaning by belonging to a network of other signs. There is in every sign a suggestion of another, oppositional sign. (if you say ‘women’ you immediately also think of ’man’ or ‘child’, anything a ‘women’ is not. To think about the differences gives meaning to the term ‘women’).

Why do these claims allow postmodernist to critique the Enlightenment ideas of how knowledge is produced:  Our relationship to knowledge becomes uncertain because the ‘meaning’ (‘concept’ or ‘signified’) and the ‘signifier’ (sound/image/written word) are separated and their link is arbitrary. They are ‘made-up’ by humans and rely the internal structure of a language which only allows you to say certain things at a certain moment in time.  The notion of arbitrariness of the sign deeply challenges the correspondence theory of truth: if words relate only to each other within an own structure, how could language be deemed to refer to the world out there? How could language ever refer to a ‘universal reality’?

How does this affect academic history writing? Why was the idea of a ‘constructed’ reality so frightening for historians in the 1980s and 1990s? It disturbed their confidence that they were able to get at the ‘reality’ of the past through the empirical study of their ‘neutrally’ collected sources. And it therefore also affected their professional identity as ‘bearers of the truth’ about the past. Where did their confidence come from? Leopold von Ranke, , the ‘father’ of modern history writing ‘…wants to show what really happened’

What did postmodernism do to the ’reality’ and ‘truth’ of the modern historian?  Reality is unrepresentable in any form of human culture (whether written, spoken, visual or dramatic). All ‘reality’ and ‘truth’ is a construction or a represention of the time it is spoken/written/painted about.  What ‘reality’ is changes from period to period and from culture to culture, and is also dependent on the perspective of the person who constructs ‘reality’ in past and present. What we think ‘reality’ is --- in the past and present – is thus culturally determined and NOT universal. What humans consider as ‘truth’ is also not universal but also culturally determined -- ’truths’ change through time.  Any representation of ‘reality’ therefore can never be complete and no person or technology can replicate the complexity of relations between things or human beings. Therefore there cannot be a universal ‘truth’ about things.  No authoritative account can exists of anything. Nobody can know everything, and there is never one authority on a given subject. No human can ever speak or discover a ‘universal truth’.