Barebones postmodernism
Enlightenment values and legacies that postmodernism challenges:
- universalism
- rationalism and neutrality
- certainty (fact and truth), validity, and objective
reality
- coherence and unity
- centrality and centeredness
- trust in cumulative knowledge (authority) and sense of progress
- assumption that time is chronological or linear
- individual selfhood (identity): single, unified, coherent,
stable, rational
Postmodern preoccupations:
relativism, plurality, ambiguity, tentativeness, fragmentation,
dispersal, skepticism, opacity, contingency
IDENTITY
- fragmented and fluctuating, always in process; never
complete
- historically specific; never essential or immutable
- constructed through the complex interaction of categories
(race, class, gender, sexuality, age. . .) and through difference (Otherness, alterity)
- framed by representations (images of, attitudes toward,
and assumptions about another person or group) and structured in relations
of power
POWER
- dispersed and multilayered
- multiplicity of forms
DISCOURSES AND TEXTS
- discourses: the variety of different linguistic structures
in which we engage in dynamic interchanges of beliefs, attitudes, sentiments
and other expressions of consciousness, underpinned as they are by specific
configurations of historical, social, and cultural power (Woods, Beginning
Postmodernism, 14-5)
- texts: all phenomena and events
- focus on language, which constructs rather than
reflects meaning
- multiplicity of interpretations of any given text
- deconstruction: a way of reading texts in order to
uncover meaning and values and to reveal its contradictions and assumptions;
in short, unraveling the power relations behind texts
- intertexutuality: the relationships texts have with
other texts or discourses
- meta-narrative: a hegemonic or totalizing discourse
that assumes the validity of its own truth claims
MARGINALITY
- investigate and celebrate voices from the margin (e.g.
the subaltern)
- emphasis on de-centering; on silences, absences, and
voids
HISTORY
- we cannot find and write about historical reality,
only various constructions of an unrecoverable reality
- extreme view: history is nothing more than a text,
a meta-narrative, that is relevant only to the reader and not reflective
of any past reality