POSTMODERNI

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Presentation By: Xiaoyun (Mia) Zhang & Sierra Welth

Postmodernism Defined

The rejection of the scientific canon, of

the idea there there can be a single
coherent rationality or that reality has a
unitary nature that can be definitively
observed or understood
 Jacques Derrida (1930- )
 Born in El-Biar, Algeria
 French philosopher and essayist (not a
sociologist)
 Used a deconstructive approach
 Illustrated in his three 1967 works
 Of grammatology, Writing and Difference,
Speech and Phenomena

Developed the concept of discourse

“emphasizes the primacy of the words we use, the concepts they
embody, and the rules that develop within a group about what are
appropriate ways of talking about things”
Logocentrism
 Logocentrism: modes of thinking that apply truth
claims to universal propositions
 Our knowledge of the social world is grounded in a belief
that we can make sense of our ever-changing and highly
complex societies by referring to certain unchanging
principles or foundations

 ^ Derrida rejected this definition (what postmodernists call

an anti-foundational stance)
Hermeneutical Method

 The understanding and interpretation of published

writings

 From Hermeneutics came the German word

“Verstehen” which meant “to understand”
 Sociologists should look at actions of individuals and
examine the meanings attached to behaviors
David Riesman (1909-2002)
 Born in Philadelphia
 Graduated from Harvard Law School in 1934
 Taught at University of Chicago in 1949
 1950 he co-authored the book “The Lonely Crowd”
 “Faces in the Crowd” written in 1952
 Taught at Harvard University
(for over 30 years)
 “The Lonely Crowd”

 discussed dramatic social changes that were

reshaping American society (specifically the
changing of American character)

 The upper middle classes was shifting from

“inner-directed” people to “other-directed”
people
“The Lonely Crowd”
 Suggests that society ensures some degree of
conformity from the individuals who make it up
“in every society, a mode of ensuring conformity is built
into the child, and then either encouraged or frustrated in
later adult experience”
 Used term mode of conformity and social
character interchangeably
“Faces in the Crowd”
 Individuals attempt to be both a part of society and alone

 By moving about both in crowds and in the wilderness, we

assure ourselves that we still have room “inside” and
“outside” us.

 Someone may be just as alone and lonely in Los Angeles as in

rural Montana
 Jean-Francois Lyotard (1924-1998)

 Born in Versailles, France

 One of the world’s foremost philosophers
and a noted postmodernist
 Taught at many universities
 Covered a variety of topics such as
postmodern conditions, modernist
and post modernist art, knowledge
and communication, language
metanarratives, and legitimization.
Art, Architecture, and Postmodernism

 Believed that the postmodern artist or writer is in

the position of a philosopher because the text she or
he creates is not governed by pre-established rules
and cannot be judged according to the applications
of given categories

 Defined postmodernity as a product, or an effect, of

the development of modernity itself
Postmodernism and Knowledge
 Societies that have computer knowledge are at the forefront
in the transformation process to postmodernity

 Advancing technology has a direct effect on knowledge

(economically powerful nations have exerted their will on
less-developed nations)

 Knowledge and power are two sides of the same question:

Who decides what knowledge is, and who knows what
needs to be decided?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-o308cW0hKI
Legitimation, Language,
Narratives
 Believed that grand narratives of knowledge had lost
their credibility in the postmodern society and their
claims of legitimacy
 Believed narratives are an integral aspect of culture
and directly affect the language of any given society
 Used language games to contrast narrative and
scientific knowledge
 Defines modernism as the attempt to legitimate science
by appeal to ‘metanarratives’, or philosophical
accounts of the progress of history in which the hero or
knowledge struggles toward a great goal
Language Games
 Rules do not carry within themselves their own
legitimation, but are object of a contract between
players
 If there are no rules, there is no game, so even one
modification of one rule alters the nature of the
game
 Every utterance should be thought of as a ‘move’ in
a game
Language Games
 Language shows an example of the first efforts of
legitimacy
 Each human born into the world is born into a
place that has already been labeled or constructed
by past events and/or by those in power
 It is an infants responsibility to emancipate
themselves (become an owner of themselves)
 Language is that tool of emancipation
 JEAN BAUDRILLARD (1929~2006)
 • He was born in 1929, in the northern French town of Reims.
 • He was the first member of his family to attend university.
 • 1966: became a professor of Nanterre University of Paris.
 • 1968: started publishing: System of Objects; Consumer society,
Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, The Mirror
Production, Symbolic Exchange and Death, America, On the
Beach, and Cool Memories.
 • His work changed: 1960’s modernist and Marxist
1980’s postmodernist and critic of Marxism
Postmodernism

 Baudrillard was a part of the French tradition

challenging traditional sociological thought.
 He refers to France as a “consumer society” (A
culture of consumption has so much taken over our
ways of thinking that all reality is filtered through
the logic of exchange value and advertising. As
Baudrillard writes, "Our society thinks itself and
speaks itself as a consumer society. As much as it
consumes anything, it consumes itself as consumer
society, as idea. Advertising is the triumphal paean
to that idea". )
Postmodernism (Cont.)

• Dedifferentiation: “If modern societies, for classical social theory,

were characterized by differentiation, postmodern societies are
characterized by dedifferentiation, the "collapse" of (the power of)
distinctions, or implosion).”
• Simulacra and simulation. Above all else, Baudrillard keeps
returning to his concepts, simulacra and simulation, to explain how
our models for the real have taken over the place of the real in
postmodern society.
• He argued that society in the postmodern era is dominated by
simulacra and simulation and falls into the domain of a hyperreal
sociality (hyperreal world signs have acquired a life to their own
and serve no other purpose than symbolic exchange. This exchange
involves the continuous cycle of taking and returning, giving and
receiving.)
Beyond Marxism

• “His relation to Marxism is extremely complex

and volatile.” From Marxism to Postmodernism
and beyond
• He think the ideas about work and value,
labor power, production from Marx is a leftover
product of an era long gone.
• “Baudrillard rejects Marxism both as a
“mirror”, or reflection, of a “producrivist”
capitalism and as a “classical” mode of
representation that purports to mirror “the
real”
Contemporary Society
 Baudrillard argues in his book In the Shadow of the
Silent Majorities (1983) that contemporary society
has entered into a phase of implosion.
 He believed that our society is no longer dominated
by production, but by developments of
consumerism, the media, entertainment, and
information technologies.
 Mass media and entertainment led our society
undergone a “catastrophic” revolution that has led
to the death of “social” society. The postmodern
society is bombard by too many massages and
means and so on.
Mass Media & Entertainment
 • He believed that mass media are so powerful that they
have created a culture characterized by hyperreality.
(they are no longer mirror reality. Disagree with Marxs)
 • The over simplification of events by the media are
packaged as to appeal to the largest audience of
consumers.
 • Mass media are not the only social institution
responsible for hyperreality, so as all aspects of
postmodern culture and entertainment.
 • New technologies have replaced industrial production
and political economy as the organizing principle of
society.
Fredric Jameson (1934- )
Fredric Jameson
 • Fredric Jameson was born in April 14, 1934 Born in Cleveland, Ohio. He is generally
considered to be one of the foremost contemporary English-language Marxist literary and
cultural critics.
 • After intense study of Marxian literary theory in the 1960s, when he was influenced by
the New Left and antiwar movement, Jameson published Marxism and Form, which
introduced a tradition of dialectical neo-Marxist literary theory to the English-speaking
world (1970). Since articulating and critiquing the structuralist project in The Prison-House
of Language (1972), Jameson has concentrated on developing his own literary and cultural
theory in works such as Fables of Aggression: Wyndham Lewis, the Modernist as Fascist
(1979), The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (1981), and
Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991). He has also published
several volumes of essays--The Ideologies of Theory (vol. 1, Situations of Theory, and vol.
2, Syntax of History, both 1988). Two other books, Signatures of the Visible (1991) and The
Geopolitical Aesthetic (1992) collect studies of film and visual culture, while The Cultural
Turn (1998) presents Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983-1998. . Studies of Theodor
W. Adorno, Late Marxism (1990) and Brecht and Method (2000) continue his intensive
work in Marxist theory and aesthetics.
“Jameson has had an enormous influence,
perhaps greater than that of any other single
figure of any nationality, on the theorization of
the postmodern in China.”
“Cultural Fever”
Postmodernism
 • Like Jean Baudrillard, Jameson believed that culture
dominants are a pattern of representation that appears across
different media and art forms.
 • In late capitalism, culture is dominated by consumerism and
mass media.
 • He used the example of Las Vegas to explain that with late
capitalism, aesthetic production has become integrated into
commodity production, and it spilled over into architecture as
well.
 • Hyperspace: an area where modern conceptions of space are
useless in helping us to orient ourselves. People develop
cognitive maps in order to maneuver in the complexity of
society (cannot find the exit in casino/hotel). And hyperspace
does not just exist in postmodern society, it also can be found in
history.
Modernism and Capitalistic Imperialism
(book 1990)

 • He focuses on imperialism not as the

relationship between metropolis and colony,
but as the competition of the various imperial
and metropolitan nation-states.
 • Imperialism has always been about
expanding markets and spreading culture. The
terrorist attack on 911 is an alarm to wake-up
the world that the danger of late-capitalistic
imperialism is expanding military modes of
destruction.
The Political Unconscious 1981

 • Our understanding of the world is influenced

by the concepts and categories that we inherit
from our culture’s interpretive tradition.
 • Question: how people can understand the
literature which is written in different culture
background?”
 • History is a single collective narrative that
links past and present.
Michel Foucault (1926~1984)
Michel Foucault
 • Foucault was born on Oct. 15, 1926, in Poitiers, France
and named after his father. He died of AIDs in 1984.
 • He became academically established during the 1960s,
when he held a series of positions at French universities
 • His most famous work, Discipline and Punish 1975
describe a new way to see the prison system. In this book,
Foucault explained the history and purpose of prison. His
other major works include: Madness and Civilization; the
Birth of the Clinic; Death and the Labyrinth; the Order of
Things; The Archaeology of Knowledge; and The History
of Sexuality.
Foucault’s theories
 • It is hard to say was he a Marxist, a structuralism or a
semiotician.
 • Ritzer described Foucault’s theories as processing a
phenomenological influence, element of structuralism and an
adoption of Nietzsche’s interest in the relationship between power
and knowledge. Foucault is thought of as poststructuralist.
 • David Shumway thought Foucault finds the new ways to write
history. Foucault’s work is much broader impact than other
poststructuralists.
 • Foucault’s theories are difficult to understand because of his wide
range of historical reference and his use of new concepts and most of
his theories do not fit very well into any of the established
disciplines.
Methodology
 • He insisted that human sciences can be
treated as autonomous systems of discourse.
 • In methodological approaches, researcher
must remain neutral as to the truth and
meaning of the discursive system studies.
 • All human sciences should be “discourse-
object”.
 • He did not value the hermeneutic approach
because he did not attempt to uncover any
hidden meanings behind written words.
Discipline & Punishment

 • His most famous work, Discipline and Punish 1975

describe a new way to see the prison system. In this
book, Foucault explained the history and purpose of
prison.
 • There were three primary techniques of control:
hierarchical observation, normalizing judgment, and the
examination. The “power”, in which means the
“control” of people can be achieved by observing them.
 • His structural analysis of total institutions led him to
conclude that modern prisons reflect modern views of
appropriate forms of discipline, especially as determined
by those who possess power.
Sexuality
• In the book the history of sexuality (1978) “Foucault
challenges the hermeneutic belief in deep meaning by
tracing the emergence of sexual confession and relating
it to practices of social domination” (Dreyfus and
Rebinow)
• What is “normal” and how one “should” feel.
• “Technologies of all kind are designed to control the
freethinking behavior of individuals.”
• Education system is controlled and people be taught to
self-control.
• “in short, the modern worlf attempts to suppress
impulses of al kinds, especially sexual, violent, and
unruly ones” (Garner, 2000)
Power
• When he talked about power, he mentioned the intransigence of
freedom and control (disciplinary power and punishment).
There are many visible and invisible powers in our society to
control people. “In contrast to monarchial power, there is
disciplinary power, a system of surveillance which is
interiorized to the point that each person is his or her overseer.”

• Modern power (disciplinary control) only focuses on the

nonobservance and to correct the deviant behaviors (crime).

• For his ideas about power, he argued that people do not “have”
power implicitly. People only can engage with “power” because
power is a technique or action. Furthermore, resistance will
always exist with power (Power Theory is based on Marxism
ideas but focuses on a new direction as he rejects Marx’s ideas).
Relevancy
• Modernism: 1890s~about 1945
• Postmodernism: after WWII, after 1968
• Modern and postmodern are vague and have been
applied to different aspects.
• Modernism and postmodernism are usually used to
refer the technological advancements and new
modes of thinking. (Is a theory or not)
• “Modernist thinking is about search of an abstract
truth of life; postmodernist thinkers believe that
there is no universal truth, abstract or otherwise.”
Postmodernist believe the power from hyper-reality
and they get highly influenced by mass media.
Your Turn!

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