This week’s attempt by me to look over some of the big ideas which float at the periphery of our world start with one of the bigger ideas (big in the sense that it has more influence over your life than you would believe…). Postmodernism is a concept I had thrust in my face when I was taking social science classes (only a few years ago). I spent more than a little time trying to get an idea what this really is from questioning professors and teachers.
I never got a clear, concise answer, as a matter of fact, most of the time I didn’t get any sort of answer…
If you were to try to parse the term ‘postmodern’, I guess you could deduce that it is some sort of a backlash regarding the post-enlightenment, modernist world we grew up in.
But before I get into this much further, here is a definition I found at PBS.org:
Postmodernism
A general and wide-ranging term which is applied to literature, art, philosophy, architecture, fiction, and cultural and literary criticism, among others. 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.
Postmodernism is “post” because it is denies the existence of any ultimate principles, and it lacks the optimism of there being a scientific, philosophical, or religious truth which will explain everything for everybody – a characteristic of the so-called “modern” mind. The paradox of the postmodern position is that, in placing all principles under the scrutiny of its skepticism, it must realize that even its own principles are not beyond questioning. As the philosopher Richard Tarnas states, postmodernism “cannot on its own principles ultimately justify itself any more than can the various metaphysical overviews against which the postmodern mind has defined itself.
I guess that I am too much of a rationalist…while this intellectual ‘movement’ has a growing impact upon academia (especially non-scientific, non-technical people), or the life of me I find it hard to see as anything other than a sort of intellectual petulance. I mean, if there is no objective reality, and that all values are fallible and impermanent…what’s the point in anything? It sounds like the death throes of European intellectualism…
For those who want more information here are a few links…
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/postmodernism/
http://www.allaboutphilosophy.org/postmodernism.htm
http://www.cla.purdue.edu/academic/engl/theory/postmodernism/modules/introduction.html
If you take the time to wade through these (excellent) articles, you might come to a different perspective about this movement that I did… In any case, as I delved deeper into looking for some sort of a better explication of what this means, I came across another (albeit smaller) big idea: The Gutenberg Parenthesis.
The Gutenberg Parenthesis: Thomas Pettitt on parallels between the pre-print era and our own Internet age
Could the most reliable futurist of the digital age be…Johannes Gutenberg? Possibly. Or, definitely, if you subscribe to the theory of the Gutenberg Parenthesis: the idea that the post-Gutenberg era — the period from, roughly, the 15th century to the 20th, an age defined by textuality — was essentially an interruption in the broader arc of human communication. And that we are now, via the discursive architecture of the web, slowly returning to a state in which orality — conversation, gossip, the ephemeral — defines our media culture.
It’s a controversial idea, but a fascinating one. And one whose back-to-the-future sensibility (particularly now, with the introduction of the iPad and other Potential Game-Changers) seems increasingly relevant: When you’re living through a revolution, it’s helpful to know what you may be turning toward.
On hand to discuss the theory further, at an MIT-sponsored colloquium late last week, was Professor Thomas Pettitt of the University of Southern Denmark, who has focused academically on the Gutenberg Parenthesis and its implications. (More on his work, including links to papers he’s presented on the subject, here.)
At the talk, Professor Pettitt discussed, among other things, the implications of the book as an intellectual object — in particular, the idea that truth itself can be contained in text. For the Lab’s purposes, I wanted to hear more about the journalistic implications of that idea — and what it means for our media if we are, indeed, moving into a post-print age.
Here are a few other links:
http://www.ischool.berkeley.edu/newsandevents/events/lec20081021
http://ludic.colophon.org/ludus/back-to-heraclitus-and-plato-the-gutenberg-parenthesis/
http://ls.berkeley.edu/ugis/cogsci/resources/Gutenberg%20California.H.pdf
http://web.mit.edu/comm-forum/mit5/papers/pettitt_plenary_gutenberg.pdf
http://web.mit.edu/comm-forum/forums/gutenberg_parenthesis.html
I guess that you could see the thesis of the Gutenberg Parenthesis as a sort of intellectual justification for post modernity (I know, it is ironic that post modernity would need to be justified in modernist terms…). In any case, I find all of these articles interesting, mostly for the benign perspective they have regarding what might be the end of literacy, and almost all of the other cultural changes wrought since the 1480’s… For instance, as I have covered (ad nauseum), we are on the cusp of having a stratified culture (much like the middle ages) where there are technical haves and have-nots. The Gutenberg Parenthesis would seem to describe the same thing…just in some rosier terms.
This post has a lot of reading attached to it (sorry), but it may be to your advantage to go through some of these documents. If you come to some sort of a perspective on this ‘big idea’, I would love to hear from you…
