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The Forum > Article Comments > A potted guide > Comments

A potted guide : Comments

By Margaret Sankey, published 29/5/2006

Modernism and postmodernism: everything you ever wanted to know but were afraid to ask.

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PK's comments are very valid, especially JWH's moral relativism.

As for Ponder, if postmodernism meant no truth or total relativism then you might have a point. But i doesn't mean those things, as Professor Sankey's piece tries to argue. Post-modernism is a critical response to modernism, and modernism has never been as full of certainties as you seem to think. What certainties it held have been shattered by some of modernism's results, such as the depredations of colonization, WW1, nuclear weapons, and more. Postmodernism is a rational, critical response to those disasters, and is a project to renew our civilization, not destroy it.
Posted by mhar, Tuesday, 30 May 2006 2:46:53 AM
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Not too bad an article, but Sankey is responsible for one glaring oversight. When she described the "othered" voices of colonialism, feminism etc, she forgot to mention the original "othered" group, whose emergence through long struggle enabled the conditions for feminist, gender and anti-racial criticism to occur: the working classes.
I admit that drawing attention to the overall historical record, which identifies the process and ALL victims of historical change, to relations of ownership and production, division of labour; alienation, ideology, reification and commodification, attention does tend to draw focus away from the proposition of middle-class (women) as exclusive or sole victimised (and entitled) "other".
Personally, I would reject this new Aristotelianism, which perpetrates a new timelesssness that encourages preoccupation with the wants of a small, cossetted group, the privileged bourgeoisie. This new "understanding" arises of the dislocation and and decoupling of the nature and fact and narrative of historical origins and processes privilging an elite whose position has been gained at the expense of so many others: workers, women, aborigines-just about everyone.
It ignores the current problems of globalisation; hetero and homogeneity, hegemony and the relation of these to the arisen structures and pathologies of capitalism, as to the world's current real miseries, threats and problems. Think of Timor; think of I.R.-think of our Aborigines after the vile slanders heaped upon them by the government last week. All of this to ideologically justify tax cuts to the rich (again!).
Posted by funguy, Tuesday, 30 May 2006 2:58:05 AM
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Ah, at last a real response! One could argue that Marxism shares a certain critical response to social life with what can be labeled "postmodernism", but yes, postmodern theory as just another mechanism for resinscribing privilege is a strong and telling criticism. One that (forgive me) I have made in a very different context: http://mharrison.wordpress.com/2006/03/17/theory-and-identity-in-taiwan/
Posted by mhar, Tuesday, 30 May 2006 3:17:02 AM
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I think when I use 'just' I mean able to think in a balanced and fair manner, able to discriminate in the sense of being able to balance and query information critically. But I would be prepared to admit that this was a fairly glib statement, sorry. I do, however, think that the loudest voices are the ones that we hear, not the the wisest. Unfortunately.
Posted by Piper, Tuesday, 30 May 2006 9:56:27 AM
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Whatever happened to aesthetic appreciation of literary works? Discussion of aesthetics within postmodernism is entirely absent. Why is this? Why have qualities of beauty become the 'new taboo' in critical theory? Postmodernism creates and promotes just as many taboos as it seeks to destroy.
Posted by Virginia, Tuesday, 30 May 2006 10:28:24 AM
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If the postmodern from the late 1950s represented learning as a move from the centre, a move to deny a centre, a move from the grand narrative, a move from the linear ...........AND to consider the relativism of culture, identity, environment, gender, etc then it says that learning is inherently nomadic rather than homogenous, ....... that learning relies on relevance and curiosity far more than memory or the system (even if that system is promoted as the most complete, profound and magnificent tradition in the world).

When quite young, I can remember looking at modern art where it was said literally that form was the content. The content was reduced to the formal arrangement of visual elements and principles that spoke of the aesthetics of the object. This gave us, through the system of reductionism, the object. We had painters like Ad Reinhart with his black square on black paintings. It seemed that modernism in this purity had lost relevance to life.

It was at that time that my thoughts were more with an environment than a system hence artists like Andy Warhol and Joseph Beuys offered relevance and curiosity beyond the linear. Mostly I considered this post-object rather than the ubiquity of the lateral ‘postmodern’ that floats free and seemingly today is appropriated to stand in for everything and anything.

It also seems that deeply within the body of modernism was postmodernism.
e.g.
From 1995, with the birth proper of the www it now makes sense that "postmodern" has mutated the modern to reflect a change into the movement it always wanted to be ...... i.e. a hyperlink to the 360 degrees of an infinite meta-narrative with its global network of moderators and always connected. (lateral plus lineal and neither a system but an environment) .......... and coax out of chaos the rudiments of a civility without borders. Perhaps, after all, postmodernism can be “defined” as a continuous inquiry into self-definition.
Posted by Keiran, Tuesday, 30 May 2006 2:42:47 PM
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