Postmodernity/Postmodernism Dr Claudia Stein

What is the difference between ‘postmodernity and postmodernism? 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 everyday life in ‘modernity’. These new conditions of everyday life were related to the move of past-WWII Western societies from industrial societies focussed on industrial production, post-industrial service and consumer-orientated global economies and societies in the 1960s. Postmodernism Postmodern-ism is the intellectual (cultural, artistic, philosophical etc.) response to the conditions of postmodernity. It describes a broad intellectual movement that occurred across philosophy, the arts and humanities, architecture, and literary criticism etc. and marked a departure from modernism. Postmodernism challenged and undermined the certainty over knowledge and morality that characterised modernity and most of modernism (roughly between 1800-1960s). There were already critics of modernity at the turn of the 20th century (Nietzsche, for example) but postmodernism gained speed in the post-WWII period (called postmodernity).

What stands at the core of postmodernist critique of modernity? ‘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.’

So, what were postmodernists skeptical about? 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 rationality that was supposed to guide all investigations into the natural and human world. Through rational thinking human ere able to understand themselves and the world around them. How? This rational enquiry was based on the empirical method, a way of gaining knowledge by means of direct and indirect observation and the empirical collection of facts. The knowledge gained through the empirical method was deemed to be neutral and objective; Because empirically gained knowledge was neutral, it was believed that absolute and universal truth about the world around us could be achieved by humans. In sum: there is reality out there and it can be could discovered and controlled by mankind.

Core of postmodern critique At the centre of all knowledge production stands communication and language. Postmodernists began to redefine what language is, how it is used, and what the value of the knowledge is that is produced through language. It all goes back to the turn of the 20th century...

Cours de linguistique générale (1916) Linguistics: scientific study of language in broadly three aspects: language form, language meaning, and language in context Ferdinand de Saussure, 1857-1913, Swiss linguist

Each word is a ‘sign’ and a ‘sign’ consist of... Sign, signifier, signified: 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.

Saussure’s Central Claims: Languages are not confined to written or spoken words but include any system of communication. A sign is composed of a ‘signifier’ (vocal sound, image) and a ‘signified’ (the mental concept or structure that speaker and listener share). A ‘signifier’is established arbitrarily and bears no resemblance to the signified. (Different languages, for example, use different signifiers for the same mental concepts) 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 ‘woman’ 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 (languages changes throughout time !) The notion of arbitrariness of the sign deeply challenges the modernist understanding of truth: if signs 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’ if the speaker is locked into a system and structure of language? Thus, there is no reality; there is merely a representation of language

How does this affect academic history writing How does this affect academic history writing? Why was the idea of a ‘constructed’ reality so frightening for historians in the 1970s and 1980s when postmodern thinking hit academia? It disturbed their confidence that they were able to get at the ‘reality’ of the past through the empirical study of ‘neutrally’ collected sources. And it therefore also affected their professional identity and authority as ‘bearers of the truth’ about the past. Why do history if you cannot get at the truth of the past? Why bother if all ‘facts’ are just ‘representations’ of language?

Where did historians get their confidence and authority from Where did historians get their confidence and authority from? Why do they believe in the power of ‘facts’ and the neutrality of their enterprise? Ranke sets up the academic study of history in the mid-nineteenth century (seminars, source critique; footnotes) ‘Facts’ is what Ranke believe stood at the core of all academic history writing. ‘this work...only wants to show what essentially happened.’ The founder of academic history writing, Leopold von Ranke, 1795-1886

What did postmodernism do to the ’reality’ and ‘truth’ and ‘neutrality’ of the modern historian? Reality is not representable in any form of human culture (whether written, spoken, visual or dramatic). All ‘reality’ and ‘truth’ is a construction or a represention. 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 or transhistorical. 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’.

Questions about knowledge which developed with the postmodernist critique: Can historians ever get at the ‘experiences’ of the past? Aren’t ‘experiences’ of the past, expressed in a different language fundamentally different from our own? Are my own experiences simply ‘representation’ of language? Or are they ‘real’? What am I if language rules my life? Is there anything ‘real’ in my life or is all in the hands of language? If I feel happy or sad, is that not ‘real’? Are my feelings only a result of a game of language played within rules and norms of the society in which I live? Are feelings transhistorical or universal? Do I need to believe in a ‘reality’? What am I in Facebook? ‘Real or ‘made up’? Am I playing a language game or am I creating a reality here? Is there a ‘core’ to my own being which I do not present on Facebook?