Jan 5, 2017 10:46 PM
(This post was last modified: Jan 5, 2017 10:53 PM by C C.)
"In the past decade, theorists have attempted to tackle the question of what comes after modernism and post-modernism. Only recently a new terminology has emerged to situate and explain recent developments across current affairs, critical theory, philosophy, architecture, art, cinema, music and literature: metamodernism." --Notes on Metamodernism
Metamodernism: A Brief Introduction
http://www.metamodernism.com/2015/01/12/...roduction/
EXCERPT: Whereas postmodernism was characterised by deconstruction, irony, pastiche, relativism, nihilism, and the rejection of grand narratives (to caricature it somewhat), the discourse surrounding metamodernism engages with the resurgence of sincerity, hope, romanticism, affect, and the potential for grand narratives and universal truths, whilst not forfeiting all that we’ve learnt from postmodernism. Thus, rather than simply signalling a return to naïve modernist ideological positions, metamodernism considers that our era is characterised by an oscillation between aspects of both modernism and postmodernism. We see this manifest as a kind of informed naivety, a pragmatic idealism, a moderate fanaticism, oscillating between sincerity and irony, deconstruction and construction, apathy and affect, attempting to attain some sort of transcendent position, as if such a thing were within our grasp. The metamodern generation understands that we can be both ironic and sincere in the same moment; that one does not necessarily diminish the other.
- - - - - - - -
"The optimism favored by metamodernists is of a brand that celebrates the erasing of boundaries and treats the indistinguishability of reality and unreality — or other supposed opposites, like irony and sincerity — as a creative rather than destructive force. If postmodernism urged us to 'deconstruct' reality by dividing thought and experience into so many subcategories that we all felt more distant from one another and “truth” than ever before, metamodernism self-consciously reconstructs those scattered pieces to form new and inspiring wholes. [...] After decades of postmodern irony, cynicism, and the sort of despair that comes from thinking that everything is coming apart and that our collective problems are insolvable, metamodernism advocates hope, dialogue, collaboration, sincerity, and optimism by showing that these latter practices and attitudes need not ignore history to survive. That is, we can be mindful of the complexities of the past and the present without feeling incapable of meeting the challenges they pose; we can create new guiding narratives for ourselves and our communities without falsely pretending that any narrative is altogether 'true' or universal." --How David Foster Wallace Started a Cultural Revolution
Postmodernism
http://www.pbs.org/faithandreason/genglo...-body.html
EXCERPT: Postmodernism is largely a reaction to the assumed certainty of scientific, or objective, efforts to explain reality. In essence, it stems from a recognition that reality is not simply mirrored in human understanding of it, but rather, is constructed as the mind tries to understand its own particular and personal reality. For this reason, postmodernism is highly skeptical of explanations which claim to be valid for all groups, cultures, traditions, or races, and instead focuses on the relative truths of each person. In the postmodern understanding, interpretation is everything; reality only comes into being through our interpretations of what the world means to us individually. Postmodernism relies on concrete experience over abstract principles, knowing always that the outcome of one's own experience will necessarily be fallible and relative, rather than certain and universal. [In Depth]
- - - - - - - - -
"As an intellectual movement postmodernism was born as a challenge to several modernist themes that were first articulated during the Enlightenment. These include scientific positivism, the inevitability of human progress, and the potential of human reason to address any essential truth of physical and social conditions and thereby make them amenable to rational control. The primary tenets of the postmodern movement include: (1) an elevation of text and language as the fundamental phenomena of existence, (2) the application of literary analysis to all phenomena, (3) a questioning of reality and representation, (4) a critique of metanarratives, (5) an argument against method and evaluation, (6) a focus upon power relations and hegemony, (7) and a general critique of Western institutions and knowledge. For his part, Lawrence Kuznar labels postmodern anyone whose thinking includes most or all of these elements. Importantly, the term postmodernism refers to a broad range of artists, academic critics, philosophers, and social scientists that Christopher Butler has only half-jokingly alluded to as like 'a loosely constituted and quarrelsome political party'." --Postmodernism and Its Critics
- - - - - - - - -
What is Postmodernity? (Florida International University): [...] Critics of postmodernism come mainly from the Marxist camp. They feel that postmodernism is a diversionary tactic, the last ditch of a late capitalism in the process of dying. They dislike fervently the way that postmodern aesthetics rejects socialist realism - and, for that matter, epistemological realism. They often point out how semiotics and the postmodern idea that everything is image and nothing is substance are used cynically by advertising agencies - which, unable to sell us real goods of real production, can now only sell us images of satisfaction and packaged happiness. Marxists also dislike postmodernism's relativist treatment of science, since as they see 'criticism' (the critical method) and science as being identical. And they are not all too pleased by postmodernism's rejection of the proletariat and industrialism as liberators, nor its insistence (dating from the Situationists) that liberation of leisure may be more important than liberation of work... the way postmodernism intertwines with Nietzschean thought, deep ecology, mysticism, and libertarian individualism makes many Marxists view it as right-wing, reactionary, perhaps even fascist!
Non-Marxist critics of postmodernism abound, too. The right wing foams at the mouth at the way it dovetails with multiculturalism, feminism, 'direct democracy,' the "communitarian" movement, and some concerns they see as left-wing. The right-wingers feel that postmodernism is the last-ditch effort of a dying left wing... that left-wing academics, disappointed with Papa Joe Stalin and Pol Pot, have found a new weapon with which to smash Western civilization and rationalism. Other critics of postmodernism feel it is trying to have its cake and eat it too. From the modern world, it wants to take McLuhan's electronic technology and the 'global village' it allows while ditching other parts of modernity; without acknowledging that, sans modernity, such communication would not be possible. From the premodern world, it wants to recover the 'religious sensibility' and 'traditional values' of the past while jettisoning the intolerance and fundamentalism of religion or the "crushing weight" of tradition upon free thought. The postmodernists, their critics claim, do not see that both tradition and religion can be both liberating and stultifying, but you cannot "pick and choose" from both and claim to be doing anything but generating fictions.
Modernism
http://www.philosophybasics.com/movement...rnism.html
EXCERPT: Modernism was essentially conceived of as a rebellion against 19th Century academic and historicist traditions and against Victorian nationalism and cultural absolutism, on the grounds that the "traditional" forms of art, architecture, literature, religious faith, social organization and daily life (in a modern industrialized world) were becoming outdated. The movement was initially called "avant-garde", descriptive of its attempt to overthrow some aspect of tradition or the status quo. The term "modernism" itself is derived from the Latin "modo", meaning "just now".
It called for the re-examination of every aspect of existence, from commerce to philosophy, with the goal of finding that which was "holding back" progress, and replacing it with new, progressive and better ways of reaching the same end. Modernists believed that by rejecting tradition they could discover radically new ways of making art, and at the same time to force the audience to take the trouble to question their own preconceptions. It stressed freedom of expression, experimentation, radicalism and primitivism, and its disregard for conventional expectations often meant startling and alienating audiences with bizarre and unpredictable effects (e.g. surrealism in art, atonality in music, stream-of-consciousness literature).
Some Modernists saw themselves as part of a revolutionary culture that also included political revolution, while others rejected conventional politics as well as artistic conventions, believing that a revolution of political consciousness had greater importance than a change in actual political structures.
- - - - - - - - -
"Modernity first came into being with the Renaissance. Modernity implies 'the progressive economic and administrative rationalization and differentiation of the social world'. In essence this term emerged in the context of the development of the capitalist state. The fundamental act of modernity is to question the foundations of past knowledge, and Boyne and Rattansi characterize modernity as consisting of two sides: 'the progressive union of scientific objectivity and politico-economic rationality . . . mirrored in disturbed visions of unalleviated existential despair'." --Postmodernism and Its Critics
Age of Enlightenment
http://www.philosophybasics.com/historic...nment.html
EXCERPT: In general terms, the Enlightenment was an intellectual movement, developed mainly in France, Britain and Germany, which advocated freedom, democracy and reason as the primary values of society. It started from the standpoint that men's minds should be freed from ignorance, from superstition and from the arbitrary powers of the State, in order to allow mankind to achieve progress and perfection. The period was marked by a further decline in the influence of the church, governmental consolidation and greater rights for the common people. Politically, it was a time of revolutions and turmoil and of the overturning of established traditions.
- - - - - - - -
"The Enlightenment is the period in the history of western thought and culture, stretching roughly from the mid-decades of the seventeenth century through the eighteenth century, characterized by dramatic revolutions in science, philosophy, society and politics; these revolutions swept away the medieval world-view and ushered in our modern western world. Enlightenment thought culminates historically in the political upheaval of the French Revolution, in which the traditional hierarchical political and social orders (the French monarchy, the privileges of the French nobility, the political power and authority of the Catholic Church) were violently destroyed and replaced by a political and social order informed by the Enlightenment ideals of freedom and equality for all, founded, ostensibly, upon principles of human reason. The Enlightenment begins with the scientific revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The rise of the new science progressively undermines not only the ancient geocentric conception of the cosmos, but, with it, the entire set of presuppositions that had served to constrain and guide philosophical inquiry. The dramatic success of the new science in explaining the natural world, in accounting for a wide variety of phenomena by appeal to a relatively small number of elegant mathematical formulae, promotes philosophy (in the broad sense of the time, which includes natural science) from a handmaiden of theology, constrained by its purposes and methods, to an independent force with the power and authority to challenge the old and construct the new, in the realms both of theory and practice, on the basis of its own principles. D'Alembert, a leading figure of the French Enlightenment, characterizes his eighteenth century, in the midst of it, as “the century of philosophy par excellence”, because of the tremendous intellectual progress of the age, the advance of the sciences, and the enthusiasm for that progress, but also because of the characteristic expectation of the age that philosophy (in this broad sense) would dramatically improve human life." --Enlightenment
Metamodernism: A Brief Introduction
http://www.metamodernism.com/2015/01/12/...roduction/
EXCERPT: Whereas postmodernism was characterised by deconstruction, irony, pastiche, relativism, nihilism, and the rejection of grand narratives (to caricature it somewhat), the discourse surrounding metamodernism engages with the resurgence of sincerity, hope, romanticism, affect, and the potential for grand narratives and universal truths, whilst not forfeiting all that we’ve learnt from postmodernism. Thus, rather than simply signalling a return to naïve modernist ideological positions, metamodernism considers that our era is characterised by an oscillation between aspects of both modernism and postmodernism. We see this manifest as a kind of informed naivety, a pragmatic idealism, a moderate fanaticism, oscillating between sincerity and irony, deconstruction and construction, apathy and affect, attempting to attain some sort of transcendent position, as if such a thing were within our grasp. The metamodern generation understands that we can be both ironic and sincere in the same moment; that one does not necessarily diminish the other.
- - - - - - - -
"The optimism favored by metamodernists is of a brand that celebrates the erasing of boundaries and treats the indistinguishability of reality and unreality — or other supposed opposites, like irony and sincerity — as a creative rather than destructive force. If postmodernism urged us to 'deconstruct' reality by dividing thought and experience into so many subcategories that we all felt more distant from one another and “truth” than ever before, metamodernism self-consciously reconstructs those scattered pieces to form new and inspiring wholes. [...] After decades of postmodern irony, cynicism, and the sort of despair that comes from thinking that everything is coming apart and that our collective problems are insolvable, metamodernism advocates hope, dialogue, collaboration, sincerity, and optimism by showing that these latter practices and attitudes need not ignore history to survive. That is, we can be mindful of the complexities of the past and the present without feeling incapable of meeting the challenges they pose; we can create new guiding narratives for ourselves and our communities without falsely pretending that any narrative is altogether 'true' or universal." --How David Foster Wallace Started a Cultural Revolution
Postmodernism
http://www.pbs.org/faithandreason/genglo...-body.html
EXCERPT: Postmodernism is largely a reaction to the assumed certainty of scientific, or objective, efforts to explain reality. In essence, it stems from a recognition that reality is not simply mirrored in human understanding of it, but rather, is constructed as the mind tries to understand its own particular and personal reality. For this reason, postmodernism is highly skeptical of explanations which claim to be valid for all groups, cultures, traditions, or races, and instead focuses on the relative truths of each person. In the postmodern understanding, interpretation is everything; reality only comes into being through our interpretations of what the world means to us individually. Postmodernism relies on concrete experience over abstract principles, knowing always that the outcome of one's own experience will necessarily be fallible and relative, rather than certain and universal. [In Depth]
- - - - - - - - -
"As an intellectual movement postmodernism was born as a challenge to several modernist themes that were first articulated during the Enlightenment. These include scientific positivism, the inevitability of human progress, and the potential of human reason to address any essential truth of physical and social conditions and thereby make them amenable to rational control. The primary tenets of the postmodern movement include: (1) an elevation of text and language as the fundamental phenomena of existence, (2) the application of literary analysis to all phenomena, (3) a questioning of reality and representation, (4) a critique of metanarratives, (5) an argument against method and evaluation, (6) a focus upon power relations and hegemony, (7) and a general critique of Western institutions and knowledge. For his part, Lawrence Kuznar labels postmodern anyone whose thinking includes most or all of these elements. Importantly, the term postmodernism refers to a broad range of artists, academic critics, philosophers, and social scientists that Christopher Butler has only half-jokingly alluded to as like 'a loosely constituted and quarrelsome political party'." --Postmodernism and Its Critics
- - - - - - - - -
What is Postmodernity? (Florida International University): [...] Critics of postmodernism come mainly from the Marxist camp. They feel that postmodernism is a diversionary tactic, the last ditch of a late capitalism in the process of dying. They dislike fervently the way that postmodern aesthetics rejects socialist realism - and, for that matter, epistemological realism. They often point out how semiotics and the postmodern idea that everything is image and nothing is substance are used cynically by advertising agencies - which, unable to sell us real goods of real production, can now only sell us images of satisfaction and packaged happiness. Marxists also dislike postmodernism's relativist treatment of science, since as they see 'criticism' (the critical method) and science as being identical. And they are not all too pleased by postmodernism's rejection of the proletariat and industrialism as liberators, nor its insistence (dating from the Situationists) that liberation of leisure may be more important than liberation of work... the way postmodernism intertwines with Nietzschean thought, deep ecology, mysticism, and libertarian individualism makes many Marxists view it as right-wing, reactionary, perhaps even fascist!
Non-Marxist critics of postmodernism abound, too. The right wing foams at the mouth at the way it dovetails with multiculturalism, feminism, 'direct democracy,' the "communitarian" movement, and some concerns they see as left-wing. The right-wingers feel that postmodernism is the last-ditch effort of a dying left wing... that left-wing academics, disappointed with Papa Joe Stalin and Pol Pot, have found a new weapon with which to smash Western civilization and rationalism. Other critics of postmodernism feel it is trying to have its cake and eat it too. From the modern world, it wants to take McLuhan's electronic technology and the 'global village' it allows while ditching other parts of modernity; without acknowledging that, sans modernity, such communication would not be possible. From the premodern world, it wants to recover the 'religious sensibility' and 'traditional values' of the past while jettisoning the intolerance and fundamentalism of religion or the "crushing weight" of tradition upon free thought. The postmodernists, their critics claim, do not see that both tradition and religion can be both liberating and stultifying, but you cannot "pick and choose" from both and claim to be doing anything but generating fictions.
Modernism
http://www.philosophybasics.com/movement...rnism.html
EXCERPT: Modernism was essentially conceived of as a rebellion against 19th Century academic and historicist traditions and against Victorian nationalism and cultural absolutism, on the grounds that the "traditional" forms of art, architecture, literature, religious faith, social organization and daily life (in a modern industrialized world) were becoming outdated. The movement was initially called "avant-garde", descriptive of its attempt to overthrow some aspect of tradition or the status quo. The term "modernism" itself is derived from the Latin "modo", meaning "just now".
It called for the re-examination of every aspect of existence, from commerce to philosophy, with the goal of finding that which was "holding back" progress, and replacing it with new, progressive and better ways of reaching the same end. Modernists believed that by rejecting tradition they could discover radically new ways of making art, and at the same time to force the audience to take the trouble to question their own preconceptions. It stressed freedom of expression, experimentation, radicalism and primitivism, and its disregard for conventional expectations often meant startling and alienating audiences with bizarre and unpredictable effects (e.g. surrealism in art, atonality in music, stream-of-consciousness literature).
Some Modernists saw themselves as part of a revolutionary culture that also included political revolution, while others rejected conventional politics as well as artistic conventions, believing that a revolution of political consciousness had greater importance than a change in actual political structures.
- - - - - - - - -
"Modernity first came into being with the Renaissance. Modernity implies 'the progressive economic and administrative rationalization and differentiation of the social world'. In essence this term emerged in the context of the development of the capitalist state. The fundamental act of modernity is to question the foundations of past knowledge, and Boyne and Rattansi characterize modernity as consisting of two sides: 'the progressive union of scientific objectivity and politico-economic rationality . . . mirrored in disturbed visions of unalleviated existential despair'." --Postmodernism and Its Critics
Age of Enlightenment
http://www.philosophybasics.com/historic...nment.html
EXCERPT: In general terms, the Enlightenment was an intellectual movement, developed mainly in France, Britain and Germany, which advocated freedom, democracy and reason as the primary values of society. It started from the standpoint that men's minds should be freed from ignorance, from superstition and from the arbitrary powers of the State, in order to allow mankind to achieve progress and perfection. The period was marked by a further decline in the influence of the church, governmental consolidation and greater rights for the common people. Politically, it was a time of revolutions and turmoil and of the overturning of established traditions.
- - - - - - - -
"The Enlightenment is the period in the history of western thought and culture, stretching roughly from the mid-decades of the seventeenth century through the eighteenth century, characterized by dramatic revolutions in science, philosophy, society and politics; these revolutions swept away the medieval world-view and ushered in our modern western world. Enlightenment thought culminates historically in the political upheaval of the French Revolution, in which the traditional hierarchical political and social orders (the French monarchy, the privileges of the French nobility, the political power and authority of the Catholic Church) were violently destroyed and replaced by a political and social order informed by the Enlightenment ideals of freedom and equality for all, founded, ostensibly, upon principles of human reason. The Enlightenment begins with the scientific revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The rise of the new science progressively undermines not only the ancient geocentric conception of the cosmos, but, with it, the entire set of presuppositions that had served to constrain and guide philosophical inquiry. The dramatic success of the new science in explaining the natural world, in accounting for a wide variety of phenomena by appeal to a relatively small number of elegant mathematical formulae, promotes philosophy (in the broad sense of the time, which includes natural science) from a handmaiden of theology, constrained by its purposes and methods, to an independent force with the power and authority to challenge the old and construct the new, in the realms both of theory and practice, on the basis of its own principles. D'Alembert, a leading figure of the French Enlightenment, characterizes his eighteenth century, in the midst of it, as “the century of philosophy par excellence”, because of the tremendous intellectual progress of the age, the advance of the sciences, and the enthusiasm for that progress, but also because of the characteristic expectation of the age that philosophy (in this broad sense) would dramatically improve human life." --Enlightenment
