1. Postmodernity/Postmodernism Dr Claudia Stein

2. 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 everyday life in ‘modernity’.
These new conditions of everyday life were related to the move of Western societies from industrial societies focussed on production to post-industrial service and consumer-orientated global economies and societies in the 1960s.

3. ….definitions, definitions, definitions….
Postmodernism:
A term that describes a broad 20th century intellectual movement that occurred across philosophy, the arts and humanities, architecture, and literary criticism etc. and marked a departure from modernism (although it has some intellectual links to it).
Note: Postmodern-ism is the intellectual (cultural, artistic, academic, and philosophical) response to the conditions of postmoder-nity.
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 (e.g. the grand narrative of progress, or Marxism).
Fundamentally it questioned modern morals and beliefs in rationality, objective reality and the existence of absolute truth which are rooted in the Enlightenment.
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 always contextual and constructed. There is no universal truth and no human can speak universal truth.
Postmodernism challenged and undermined the certainty over knowledge and morality that characterised modernity and most of modernism (roughly between s).

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

5. So, are these modernist beliefs 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 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
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.

6. Postmodernist critique of modernist beliefs is based on:
a fundamentally different understanding of language and how it works.
It all goes back to the turn of the 20th century...

7. 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, , Swiss linguist

8. 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.

9. 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). The mental concept/structure precedes the ‘signifier’in existence
A ‘signifier’is established quite 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 ‘women’ is not. To think about the differences gives meaning to the term ‘women’).

10. 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, reality is always merely a representation of language

11. 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?
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 and authority as ‘bearers of the truth’ about the past.
Who do history if you cannot get at the truth of the past? Why bother if all ‘facts’ are just ‘representations’?

12. Where did they get their confidence and authority from
Where did they get their confidence and authority from? Why do they believe in the power of ‘facts’?
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.
‘…wants to show what essentially happened’
Leopold von Ranke,

13. What did postmodernism do to the ’reality’ and ‘truth’ 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’.

14. Questions:
Can historians ever get at the ‘experiences’ of the past?
Are the ‘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’? Is it only a game of language played within rules and norms of the society in which I live?
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?