Postmodernist anthropology

Postmodern theory (PM) in anthropology originated in the 1960s along with the literary postmodern movement in general. Anthropologists working in this vein of inquiry seek to dissect, interpret and write cultural critiques.

One issue discussed by PM anthropologists is about subjectivity; because ethnographies are influenced by the disposition of the author, should their opinions be considered scientific? Clifford Geertz, considered a founding member of postmodernist anthropology, advocates that, “anthropological writings are themselves interpretations, and second and third ones to boot” In the 21st century, some anthropologists use a form of standpoint theory; a person's perspective in writing and cultural interpretation of others is guided by their own background and experiences.

Other major tenets of postmodernist anthropology are:

an emphasis on including the opinions and perspectives of the people being studied,
cultural relativism as a method of inquiry
skepticism towards the claims of science to producing objective and universally valid knowledge
the rejection of grand, universal schemes or theories which explain other cultures (Barrett 1996).
A critique by non-anthropologists has been to question whether anthropologists may speak/write on behalf of cultural others. Margery Wolf states that, “it would be as great a loss to have first-world anthropologists confine their research to the first world as it is (currently) to have third-world anthropologists confine theirs to the third world”. In the 21st century, the question has been resolved by pointing out that all cultural descriptions are of cultural others. All ethnographic writing is done by a person from one standpoint writing about others living in a different standpoint. Thus, the notion of anthropologists as 'culture brokers' (see Richard Kurin) has been adopted to explain why anthropologists from any given country write about cultural others.

Postmodernism in anthropology
The postmodern anthropological approach focuses primarily on the belief that there is no real objectivity, and thus it is not possible to develop (and apply) an authentic scientific method. It also assumes the negation of all previous trends understood as "modern". Modernity in terms of representatives of this trend is what is considered holistic (for example, that one can examine some aspect in its entirety and in depth). The rejection of "the great theory of anthropology and the concept of completeness of the ethnographic description" also plays a large role. A fairly large variation from other trends is the treatment of an anthropologist (researcher) as a person who has no authorityanthropological. Thus, the most important element of postmodernist anthropology is reflexivity and all its implications. To a large extent, it is based on the foundations of a critical approach to Orientalism according to Edward Said. Criticism created by postmodernist anthropologists, was directed against ethnographic descriptions, constructed on the principle of dichotomy"I-different" (where "I" means the researcher, and "other" is the subject of the study). The negation concerned the issue of constructing the description of "another" (and, consequently, the appearance of the opposition "I") by anthropologists who were representatives of all previous trends. An important element of postmodernist anthropology is the concept of "entering the body". Postmodernist anthropologists also draw inspiration from trends such as relativism and interpretationism (in the sense that the dichotomy mentioned above can be separated at the level of ethnographic description, with the indication that such a division will be quite superficial). Such criticism has two levels: epistemological and ideological(both distinguish subjectivity, in contrast to earlier trends that assumed ruthless objectivism). Anthropology, according to the epistemological argument, can not be an exact science.

For anthropologists such as Clifford Geertz, research on culture should rely on its "reading" - the community is seen, described and interpreted in accordance with the analogy of the book.

Different researchers tended to look at culture fragmentarily: what is observed during ethnographic research are "shreds and scraps" of what is actually. The postmodernist anthropologists' view is closer to the fact that there is no one big theory, and the only one that could qualify is that culture is "similar to text" (according to Geertz's view).

In turn, such researchers as Paul Rabinow began to seriously undermine the legitimacy of an anthropologist's work in the field, and thus, there was a doubt in the sense of conducting field research.

The milestone of the postmodern breakthrough was a deep skepticism about the researcher. Anthropologists wondered if the researcher could properly and honestly read the cultural context in an appropriate way and, as a result, describe the community properly.

Main assumptions
According to Marcin Lubas, postmodern anthropologists agree on general issues regarding the general assumptions of this direction. What distinguishes them are different views on more detailed issues, which are individual for each of the representatives. Lubaś also claims that:

"
The conceptual foundations of postmodernist anthropology are built of four concepts. Each of them, taken separately, is an expression of a more general view.

"
- Marcin Lubaś
These concepts for postmodernist anthropologists are four issues: nominalism, idiography, historicism, anti-essentialism - and an additional, fifth element distinguished by Lubas as emerging from previous - criticism by decentration.

Nominalism
Nominalism can be called an ideology that assumes that there are only individual and individual aspects. It is also a denial that there are common property of objects. The goal of anthropology is to study specific and unique aspects of social life, not to deal with processes that are observed for a long time (that is, aspects that are repetitive and universal).

Idiography
Anthropology is idiographic. Describes multiple, changeable and, above all, specific historical forms of cultural differences. According to this assumption, research should be based primarily on observing such areas of social life, which commonly accepted patterns are not able to capture them. The proponent of this theory was earlier, the American researcher Franz Boas. Boas's skepticism (based on distrust of ethnographic data) was subsequently intercepted by postmodernist anthropologists.

Historicism
Historicism in this context means the classification according to which everything that is part of the broadly understood culture is a historical and cultural phenomenon. On the other hand, these phenomena arose in unique and unique conditions. In other words, postmodern anthropologists try to understand the world around them by explaining the historical conditions of a given phenomenon.

Anti-essentialism
By definition, anti-essentialism contradicts views that there are "more" and "less" accurate descriptions of reality. Proponents say that we never speak about objects as such, but about the attributes attributed to objects on the basis of certain theories or discourses. This means that antyesencjaliści explain the "truth" as the theory of pragmatic (checking the assertion in terms of its usefulness) tudzież as perspectivism - is considered to be true views, the correctness of which has been accepted in the "creative action".

Criticism through decentration
The aim of distinguishing "criticism by decentration" is to say that each (individual) point of view is one of many possibilities of existence of a given reference system (perspectives). There is an unlimited number of ways to look at the world, so there is no single, universal way of understanding. There is also no distinction between "worse" and "better".

Other anthropologists associated with the postmodern trend
Lila Abu-Lughod
Johannes Fabian
F. Allan Hanson
Kirsten Hastrup
Mark Hobart
Dennis Tedlock
A breakthrough work
In 1984, The Making Ethnographic Texts conference was held in Santa Fe, New Mexico. It presents groundbreaking papers of postmodern anthropology of well-known representatives of this trend, such as: James Clifford (anthropology historian), George E. Marcus, Vincent Crapanzano, Talal Asad, Michael MJ Fischer, Paul Rabinow, Stephen A. Tyler, Robert Thornton and literary critic Mary Louise Pratt. After the conference in New Mexico, the papers included in the book, which is considered the first work representing postmodern anthropology - Writting Culture (Writing Culture). The authors mentioned above, discussed the place of literary methods in the anthropological discourse. Due to the varied research interests of the authors, Writting Culture presented a wide range of views which, despite everything, were preserved in the postmodernist spirit.

In this work, James Clifford (who wrote the introduction) initially negates the perception of ethnography as a representation of culture as a whole. He also notices the disadvantage of ethnography, which is its incomplete expression, also in the case when a researcher who comes from the same community joins the research on a given group. Clifford also claims that ethnography, as a way of writing, is rather an advantage than a flaw. What's more - the style of writing (considered literary) is also indicated in the creation of ethnographic narrative. In no case does it take away the objectivity and does not affect the fact that the facts contained in the ethnographic text (maintained in almost poetic style) are less valuable and deserve condemnation.

In turn, according to Mary Louise Pratt, the essence of understanding and the way to "real" ethnography is subjectivity and all its implications: for example a look (from a distance) and reconsideration of the results of ethnographic research in the light of historical precedents and literary genres.

Other authors, such as Vincent Crapanzano, Renato Rosaldo and Talal Asad, focus on analyzes of historical texts that are diverse in every respect. These texts were mainly analyzed for translation. And so: the first one examines the problem of translating texts from such periods as the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which differ enormously from each other in every respect. The second one looks at the styles of authority in two texts of known (on the stage of anthropology) personalities (for example, Edward Evans-Pritchard's text). Assad, however, took under the microscope the texts of the British researcher Ernest Gellner.

Michael Fisher sought to analyze changes in the ethnicity issue that occurred at the turn of the next generations.

Paul Rabinow, on the other hand, wanted to approach the aspect of " social facts ". He watched the texts of such anthropologists as Clifford Geertz (and with his interpretative texts), James Clifford (and his textual metaanthropology) and many others. Stephen A. Tyler, having contact with cognitive anthropology behind him, proves the imminent death of scientific thought (at the same time indicating that there is no real postmodernist anthropology) for the postmodern trend, which will soon become a discourse, i.e. Dialogue, opposed to ethnographic monologue « the text »of the first one.

In connection with the renowned Writting Culture, the aforementioned discourse has been continued by these anthropologists (and others who inspired it).

For example, Norman K. Denzin treats postmodern anthropology as a " moral discourse " - ethnography is not just describing peoples, and therefore it is necessary to break this convention and to move towards ethnography based on experiment and own experience (using techniques such as autobiography or performance).

The fame of this work is not unfounded, because Writting Culture was one of the most cited and bought books in the field of cultural anthropology in the 1980s. The book initiated many responses from anthropologists who contributed to this publication. All this has caused a great stir in the academic world around the world. Commentators of the new trend began to divide into groups that held specific views. The first group is the advocates of the new direction as a critic of previous trends. The other, however, was skeptical: postmodernism in anthropology turned out to be a trend that downplays political issues and the realities of today. The third group completely rejected the new trend, focusing on methodological and epistemological issues.

The Writting Culture authors belonged to the "Rice Circle". The name of the group of these anthropologists comes from the name of the place of their academic activities: Rice University in Texas. Representatives of this circle can be simultaneously included in the precursors of the postmodernist anthropology trend.

Indian New Deal
Indian reformer John Collier in 1920-22 studied the Taos Pueblo In New Mexico, with an architecture and culture stretching back centuries. It made a lasting impression on Collier. He now saw the Indian world as morally superior to American society, which he considered to be "physically, religiously, socially, and aesthetically shattered, dismembered, directionless." Collier came under attack for his romantic views about the moral superiority of traditional society as opposed to modernity. Collier became the main architect of the Indian New Deal 1933-45. He employed the perspectives we now call postmodern to reverse the long-standing national policy of compulsory assimilation of Native Americans. He enlisted numerous anthropologists in the 1930s and 1940s to support his position. Philp says after his experience at the Taos Pueblo, Collier "made a lifelong commitment to preserve tribal community life because it offered a cultural alternative to modernity....His romantic stereotyping of Indians often did not fit the reality of contemporary tribal life."

Criticism of postmodern anthropology
Criticism of the postmodern trend in anthropology presented by Ernest Gellner, published in 1992, concerned primarily subjectivism and lowering of criteria. According to this anthropologist, postmodernism, in a way not fully argued, attacks objectivity and earlier anthropological traditions. Postmodernists opposed positivist objectivism and sought for hermeneutics, and this, according to Alan Barnard Romantic Movement two centuries ago, with its demolition of the classic Enlightenment order of Europe In addition, he criticizes his critics against the authors of the postmodernist book Writting Culture, where their articles are deeply criticized for their lack of clarity. The subjectivism was negated, the view that there are no social structures and postmodernist search for meanings during research. Clifford Geertz is accused of initiating hermeneutic thinking in anthropology and defending relativism.

Robert Pool, on the other hand, criticizes postmodern anthropology in two perspectives: first, for the lack of unambiguity in the term "postmodernism" (he claims that there is no single, coherent and generally accepted definition), secondly, according to Pool, it can not be attributed, or classify individual anthropological works in the field of "postmodernism", as opposed to clear situations, as in the case of arts or architecture. It also recognizes that this term is not properly used when it comes to the scope of ethnography. He thinks that's because, what is commonly regarded as post-modernist in anthropology, in reality it is the presentation of modernismor an element that has no relevance to this term in comparison, for example, to the fields of art, where the works in essence clearly "show" that they belong to the postmodern trend. It unambiguously excludes the classifications of Marcus and Clifford's works to the category of both postmodernist and "experimental ethnographic works".

Source from Wikipedia

Post-structuralism

Post-structuralism is associated with the works of a series of mid-20th-century French, continental philosophers and critical theorists who came to be known internationally in the 1960s and 1970s. The term is defined by its relationship to the system before it—Structuralism, an intellectual movement developed in Europe from the early to mid-20th century which argues that human culture may be understood by means of a structure—modeled on language (i.e., structural linguistics)—that differs from concrete reality and from abstract ideas—a "third order" that mediates between the two.

Post-structuralist authors all present different critiques of structuralism, but common themes include the rejection of the self-sufficiency of Structuralism and an interrogation of the binary oppositions that constitute those structures. Writers whose work are often characterised as post-structuralist include: Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Judith Butler, Jean Baudrillard and Julia Kristeva, although many theorists who have been called "post-structuralist" have rejected the label.

Existential phenomenology is a significant influence; Colin Davis has argued that Post-structuralists might just as accurately be called "post-phenomenologists".

Theory
Post-structuralist philosophers like Derrida and Foucault did not form a self-conscious group, but each responded to the traditions of phenomenology and Structuralism. The idea that knowledge could be centred on the beholder is rejected by Structuralism, which claims to be a more secure foundation for knowledge. In phenomenology, this foundation is experiential in itself. In Structuralism, knowledge is founded on the "structures" that make experience possible: concepts, and language or signs. By contrast, Post-structuralism argues that founding knowledge either on pure experience (phenomenology) or systematic structures (Structuralism) is impossible. This impossibility was not meant as a failure or loss, but rather as a cause for "celebration and liberation".

A major theory associated with Structuralism is binary opposition. This theory proposes that there are frequently used pairs of opposite but related words, often arranged in a hierarchy. Examples of common binary pairs include: Enlightenment/Romantic, male/female, speech/writing, rational/emotional, signifier/signified, symbolic/imaginary. Post-structuralism rejects the notion of the dominant word in the pair being dependent on its subservient counterpart. The only way to properly understand the purpose of these pairings is to assess each term individually, and then its relationship to the related term.[clarification needed]

Post-structuralism and Structuralism
Structuralism was an intellectual movement in France in the 1950s and 1960s that studied the underlying structures in cultural products (such as texts) and used analytical concepts from linguistics, psychology, anthropology, and other fields to interpret those structures. It emphasized the logical and scientific nature of its results.

Post-structuralism offers a way of studying how knowledge is produced and critiques Structuralist premises. It argues that because history and culture condition the study of underlying structures, both are subject to biases and misinterpretations. A Post-structuralist approach argues that to understand an object (e.g., a text), it is necessary to study both the object itself and the systems of knowledge that produced the object.

Historical vs. descriptive view
Post-structuralists generally assert that Post-structuralism is the historical context surrounding the arts, while Structuralism is considered descriptive of the present. This terminology is derived from Ferdinand de Saussure's distinction between the views of historical (diachronic) and descriptive (synchronic) reading. From this basic distinction, Post-structuralist studies often emphasize history to analyze descriptive concepts. By studying how cultural concepts have changed over time, Post-structuralists seek to understand how the same concepts are understood by readers in the present. For example, Michel Foucault's Madness and Civilization is both an observation of history and an inspection of cultural attitudes about madness. The theme of history in modern Continental thought can be linked to such influences as Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Friedrich Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morals and Martin Heidegger's Being and Time.

Scholars between both movements
The uncertain distance between Structuralism and Post-structuralism is further blurred by the fact that scholars rarely label themselves as Post-structuralists. Some scholars associated with Structuralism, such as Roland Barthes and Foucault, also became noteworthy in Post-structuralism.

Controversy
Some observers from outside the Post-structuralist camp have questioned the rigor and legitimacy of the field. American philosopher John Searle argued in 1990 that "The spread of 'poststructuralist' literary theory is perhaps the best known example of a silly but noncatastrophic phenomenon." Similarly, physicist Alan Sokal in 1997 criticized "the postmodernist/poststructuralist gibberish that is now hegemonic in some sectors of the American academy." Literature scholar Norman Holland argued that Post-structuralism was flawed due to reliance on Saussure's linguistic model, which was seriously challenged by the 1950s and was soon abandoned by linguists: "Saussure's views are not held, so far as I know, by modern linguists, only by literary critics and the occasional philosopher. [Strict adherence to Saussure] has elicited wrong film and literary theory on a grand scale. One can find dozens of books of literary theory bogged down in signifiers and signifieds, but only a handful that refer to Chomsky."

David Foster Wallace wrote:

"The deconstructionists (“deconstructionist” and “poststructuralist” mean the same thing, by the way: “poststructuralist” is what you call a deconstructionist who doesn’t want to be called a deconstructionist)... see the debate over the ownership of meaning as a skirmish in a larger war in Western philosophy over the idea that presence and unity are ontologically prior to expression. There’s been this longstanding deluded presumption, they think, that if there is an utterance then there must exist a unified, efficacious presence that causes and owns that utterance. The poststructuralists attack what they see as a post-Platonic prejudice in favor of presence over absence and speech over writing. We tend to trust speech over writing because of the immediacy of the speaker: he’s right there, and we can grab him by the lapels and look into his face and figure out just exactly what one single thing he means. But the reason why poststructuralists are in the literary theory business at all is that they see writing, not speech, as more faithful to the metaphysics of true expression. For Barthes, Derrida, and Foucault, writing is a better animal than speech because it is iterable; it is iterable because it is abstract; and it is abstract because it is a function not of presence but of absence: the reader’s absent when the writer’s writing, and the writer’s absent when the reader’s reading.
For a deconstructionist, then, a writer’s circumstances and intentions are indeed a part of the “context” of a text, but context imposes no real cinctures on the text’s meaning, because meaning in language requires a cultivation of absence rather than presence, involves not the imposition but the erasure of consciousness. This is so because these guys–Derrida following Heidegger and Barthes Mallarme and Foucault God knows who–see literary language as not a tool but an environment. A writer does not wield language; he is subsumed in it. Language speaks us; writing writes; etc."
History
Post-structuralism emerged in France during the 1960s as a movement critiquing Structuralism. According to J.G. Merquior a love–hate relationship with Structuralism developed among many leading French thinkers in the 1960s.

In a 1966 lecture "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences", Jacques Derrida presented a thesis on an apparent rupture in intellectual life. Derrida interpreted this event as a "decentering" of the former intellectual cosmos. Instead of progress or divergence from an identified centre, Derrida described this "event" as a kind of "play."

In 1967, Barthes published "The Death of the Author" in which he announced a metaphorical event: the "death" of the author as an authentic source of meaning for a given text. Barthes argued that any literary text has multiple meanings, and that the author was not the prime source of the work's semantic content. The "Death of the Author," Barthes maintained, was the "Birth of the Reader," as the source of the proliferation of meanings of the text. Marshall McLuhan developed an idea very similar to Barthes. During an interview on the Tomorrow Show with Tom Snyder in 1976 McLuhan opined, "The user is the content of any situation, whether its driving a car, or wearing clothes or watching a show."

The period was marked by the rebellion of students and workers against the state in May 1968.

Major works
Barthes and the need for metalanguage
Barthes in his work, Elements of Semiology (1967), advanced the concept of the "metalanguage". A metalanguage is a systematized way of talking about concepts like meaning and grammar beyond the constraints of a traditional (first-order) language; in a metalanguage, symbols replace words and phrases. Insofar as one metalanguage is required for one explanation of first-order language, another may be required, so metalanguages may actually replace first-order languages. Barthes exposes how this structuralist system is regressive; orders of language rely upon a metalanguage by which it is explained, and therefore deconstruction itself is in danger of becoming a metalanguage, thus exposing all languages and discourse to scrutiny. Barthes' other works contributed deconstructive theories about texts.

Derrida's lecture at Johns Hopkins
The occasional designation of Post-structuralism as a movement can be tied to the fact that mounting criticism of Structuralism became evident at approximately the same time that Structuralism became a topic of interest in universities in the United States. This interest led to a colloquium at Johns Hopkins University in 1966 titled "The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man", to which such French philosophers as Derrida, Barthes, and Lacan were invited to speak.

Derrida's lecture at that conference, "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Human Sciences," was one of the earliest to propose some theoretical limitations to Structuralism, and to attempt to theorize on terms that were clearly no longer Structuralist.

The element of "play" in the title of Derrida's essay is often erroneously interpreted in a linguistic sense, based on a general tendency towards puns and humour, while social constructionism as developed in the later work of Michel Foucault is said to create play in the sense of strategic agency by laying bare the levers of historical change. Many see the importance of Foucault's work to be in its synthesis of this social/historical account of the operation of power (see governmentality).

Different Approaches of Poststructuralism

Jacques Derrida's Theory of Writing
acques Derrida is a particularly influential author. He calls his method (he himself prefers the term "practice") deconstruction.

His early main work Grammatology tries to show that it is a baseless assumption to be able to grasp the singular meaning intuition of the other person in direct conversation. In fact, these remain as withdrawn as in the "dead letter" written form. The subject of the study are primarily classical theories of language.

His equally early and fundamental work The Voice and Phenomenon seeks to show that individual (singular intuition) and general (meaning intention) are necessarily immediate. The reason for this is, inter alia, the time-shifted nature of the formulation and evaluation act.

Such differences are also intended to explain why a linguistic discrimination principle can not exist before the subject acquaintances and can serve for theoretical follow-up speculations (as in idealistic system experiments). The early Derrida tries to show this in Descartes 's Cogito scene, for example. His early essays also deal with Sigmund Freud, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Ferdinand de Saussure and Emmanuel Levinas. The latter has partly made known to Derrida's criticism (especially in his text Violence and Metaphysics ).

Derrida's later work is dedicated to almost all areas of philosophy. After a more experimental phase, his late writings put more emphasis on practical and political issues.

Derrida's interlocutors included Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Michel Foucault, Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Lacan, Ernesto Laclau and Jean-François Lyotard.

Jacques Lacan's Psychoanalysis
The French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, who played a central role in the development of psychoanalysis in France, devoted himself to revisiting the writings of Sigmund Freud in the light of the structuralist method, but also incorporated influences from fundamental ontology and the late work of mathematical topology, whose graph models he used for the representation of unconscious processes.

Lacan emphasizes, also against the background of Freud's theory of dysfunction and wit, that the unconscious is structured "like a language ". The work of the subconscious follows linguistic laws such as metaphor and metonymy, replacement and displacement. He calls the corresponding elements of psychic events signifiers, but besides the language-like structured field of the symbolic, the imaginary and the real also playa central role in the psychic apparatus. The actual structuring performance, and also the psychoanalytic cure, takes place in the field of speech. Lacan also situates phenomena of social norm, of law, of authority and of ideology in the field of linguistic or symbolic, and in this context coined the term " great other " (see also name of father ) as a symbolic figure of Authority in contrast to the "little other" or " object small a ", which plays a decisive role in the context of the drive.

Lacan's conception of the symbolic was particularly fruitful for Marxist approaches by Louis Althusser in the context of the analysis of ideology and ideological "invocation". His remarks on the view as an instinctual object as well as the important role of the phantasmatic for the psychic, but also social events are of central importance for newer theories in the field of cultural and pictorial science. The most important representative of Lacan's thinking today is the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek.

Michel Foucault's Discourse Analysis
The partly in the wake of the structuralists, v. a. but discourse analysis developed by Michel Foucault is fundamental to poststructuralist instruments. Following Foucault, the discourse analysis in the 1990s was further developed into a relatively regulated method.

It was initially developed in the methodological main work Foucault, Archeology of Knowledge. This follows his concrete studies on the birth of a " human scientific " order of knowledge in The Order of Things and the mechanisms of exclusion and the simultaneous definition of the sick and insane - an act of exclusion, which at the same time only the self-assurance of a society about their own identity, health and reasonableness stabilized. The implicitly already used method became, partly in response to critics, then by Foucault as a discourse analysisexplicated. It involves the analysis of the structure and conditions of the establishment of orders of knowledge, each of which is accompanied by its own conventions on the admissibility and value of knowledge elements, with certain "rules of discourse ". Their epoch-specific total thinking is taken in the term of the " episteme ". Factors of the context such as rules and norms are understood as fundamental to the fact that meaning is communicable, that is, that communicates can be generated. In particular, pre-discursive framework conditions are taken into consideration, such as the organization of powerRelationships about strategies of establishing stance and tactics of positioning in power relations, a level that Foucault describes as " micropolitics ".

In the second half of the 1970s, this method was u. a. introduced to the cultural, historical and literary sciences. In doing so, she sets herself apart from a subject- and author-centered concept of cognition of classical hermeneutic approaches. In the center is not an author subject and its intention. The use of an author instance is only for the purpose of marking medium-sized discursive units. The establishment of a subject itself is a discourse bound to historical and cultural changes. In particular, the author term meshes with the concept of property.

In the place of the author Foucault enters the fabric of a knowledge order that provides him with his means of expression in the first place. The relevant concept of discourse integrates precisely the aforementioned pre-discursive constitutional conditions of cultural knowledge, especially systems of control and regulation. "Discourse" is an entire field of cultural knowledge, which, as it is in the form of statements and texts as tips of an iceberg manifested. Thinking and perception are, according to Foucault's assumption, already shaped by the rules of discourse. Truth and reality are constituted by cultural meansUtterances and practices of truth-setting and a struggle to "make audible" of "voices" (opinions). Basically, knowledge is accessible only in documents, but these are to be analyzed in the context of an entire discourse formation (episteme). The self-understanding and the regulatory mechanisms of a society are therefore at least indirectly tangible. Even society is formed over texts and cultural artefacts.

The methodical inclusion of the author instance can be explained as a special case of Foucault's subject criticism. According to Foucault, a subject basically designs in the field of available self-positioning discursive strategies, in which it can make various use of creative tactical features of self-positioning. Foucault's approach to this mobility is narrowed down by a classical, substantialist subject concept. Foucault's late works focus particularly on the theme of self-design, which he calls "self-care" based on stoic theories.

Criticism
Poststructuralism has been criticized from all sides, both as a whole and in individual representatives. Well known are, for example, the objections of Jürgen Habermas and Manfred Frank and an experiment undertaken by Alan Sokal. In a journal devoted to poststructuralist theories, he published a text based on the style of some poststructuralists was, but contained only nonsense, which according to Sokal the lack of intellectual integrity of the entire movement prove.

See also the criticism sections in the main articles Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan and Jean Baudrillard.

Structuralism tried to find a level of self-sufficient and generalizable metalanguage capable of describing the configurations of anthropological, social literary, linguistic, historical or psychoanalytic variable elements to analyze their relationships without getting bogged down by the identity of these elements in themselves.

On the other hand, poststructuralism shares a general concern to identify and question the hierarchies implicit in the identification of binary oppositions that characterize not only structuralism but Western metaphysics in general. If there is a point in common between poststructuralist criticism, it is the revaluation of the structuralist interpretation of Ferdinand de Saussureabout the distinction between the study of language through time versus the study of language at a given moment (diachronic vs. synchronic). The structuralists affirm that the structural analysis is generally synchronic (at a certain moment) and therefore suppresses the diachronic or historical analysis. It is also said that poststructuralism is concerned to reaffirm the importance of history and to develop at the same time a new theoretical understanding of the subject. Hence it is also stated that the emphasis of poststructuralism consists in a reinterpretation of Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger. For example, Nietzsche's genealogy serves as a theoretical reference point in Michel Foucault's historical work of the 1970s, including his critiques of structuralism.

It is grandiloquently said that this reductionism is violent, and that poststructuralism identifies it with Western civilization and objectionable excesses of colonialism, racism, misogyny, androcentrism, homophobia and the like. The element of "play" in the title of Derrida's essay is often misunderstood as a linguistic game, based on a tendency to play on words and humor, while social constructionism, as it was developed in the later work of Michel Foucault, is considered as the creation of a kind of strategic organ when exposing the levers of historical change. The importance of Foucault's work is for many its synthesis of this historical social account of the mechanisms of power.

It is also commonly said that poststructuralists are more or less consciously postmodern, but not a few of them have shown concern for these terms or even have defined themselves as modernists.

Source from Wikipedia

Post-materialism

In sociology, post-materialism is the transformation of individual values from materialist, physical, and economic to new individual values of autonomy and self-expression.

The term was popularised by political scientist Ronald Inglehart in his 1977 book The Silent Revolution, in which he discovered that the formative affluence experienced by the post-war generations was leading some of them to take their material security for granted and instead place greater importance on non-material goals such as self-expression, autonomy, freedom of speech, gender equality and environmentalism. Inglehart argued that with increasing prosperity, such post-material values would gradually increase in the publics of advanced industrial societies through the process of intergenerational replacement.

Post-materialism is a tool in developing an understanding of modern culture. It can be considered in reference of three distinct concepts of materialism. The first kind of materialism, and the one in reference to which the word post-materialism is used most often, refers to materialism as a value-system relating to the desire for fulfillment of material needs (such as security, sustenance and shelter) and an emphasis on material luxuries in a consumerist society. A second referent is the materialist conception of history held by many socialists, most notably Marx and Engels, as well as their philosophic concept of dialectical materialism. The third definition of materialism concerns the philosophical argument that matter is the only existing reality. The first concept is sociological, the second is both philosophical and sociological, and the third is philosophical.

Depending on which of the three above notions of materialism are being discussed, post-materialism can be an ontological postmaterialism, an existentialistic postmaterialism, an ethical postmaterialism, or a political-sociological postmaterialism, which is also the best known.

History
The sociological theory of post-materialism was developed in the 1970s by Ronald Inglehart. After extensive survey research, Inglehart postulated that the Western societies under the scope of his survey were undergoing transformation of individual values, switching from materialist values, emphasizing economic and physical security, to a new set of post-materialist values, which instead emphasized autonomy and self-expression. Inglehart argued that rising prosperity was gradually liberating the publics of advanced industrial societies from the stress of basic acquisitive or materialistic needs.

Observing that the younger people were much more likely to embrace post-materialist values, Inglehart speculated that this silent revolution was not merely a case of a life-cycle change, with people becoming more materialist as they aged, but a genuine example of Generational Replacement causing intergenerational value change.

The theory of intergenerational change is based on two key hypotheses:

The scarcity hypothesis
The socialisation hypothesis
The scarcity hypothesis
Inglehart assumed that individuals pursue various goals in something akin to a hierarchical order. While people may universally aspire to freedom and autonomy, the most pressing material needs like hunger, thirst and physical security have to be satisfied first, since they are immediately linked with survival. According to Inglehart's interpretation of Maslow's hierarchy of human goals, while scarcity prevails, these materialistic goals will have priority over post-materialist goals like belonging, esteem, and aesthetic and intellectual satisfaction. However, once the satisfaction of the survival needs can be taken for granted, the focus will gradually shift to these 'non-material' goods.

The socialization hypothesis
The relationship between material conditions and value priorities is not one of immediate adjustment. A large body of evidence indicates that people's basic values are largely fixed when they reach adulthood, and change relatively little thereafter. Therefore, cohorts which often experienced economic scarcity would ceteris paribus (all things being equal) place a high value on meeting economic needs (such as valuing economic growth above protecting the environment) and on safety needs (will support more authoritarian styles of leadership, will exhibit strong feelings of national pride, will be strongly in favor of maintaining a large, strong army and will be more willing to sacrifice civil liberties for the sake of law and order). On the other hand, cohorts who have experienced sustained high material affluence start to give high priority to values such as individual improvement, personal freedom, citizen input in government decisions, the ideal of a society based on humanism, and maintaining a clean and healthy environment.

Together, these two hypotheses carry the implication that, given long periods of material affluence, a growing part of society will embrace post-materialist value systems, an implication which has been indeed borne out internationally in the past 30 years of survey data. The post-material orientations acquired by each cohort during socialisation have been observed to remain remarkably steady over the time-frame of multiple decades, being a more stable value-system in contrast to the more volatile political and social attitudes.

Characterization of postmaterialist values
The attitude scale aims to examine the degree of identification of respondents with respect to materialistic values and postmaterialist values. This scale includes 12 questions in which the respondent is asked if they are a priority for him:

(Group 1)

Maintain order in the country.
Fight against the rise in prices.
Maintain a stable economy
Fight against crime.
Maintain a high rate of economic growth.
Ensure that the country has powerful armed forces.
(Group 2)

Give people more opportunities to participate in the decisions that concern their work and their community.
Give people more opportunities to participate in important political decisions.
Protect freedom of expression.
Try to make our cities and the countryside more beautiful.
Achieve a less impersonal and more human society.
Progress towards a society in which ideas are more important than money.
The first group expresses typically materialist (material) ideals and the latter typically postmaterialist (immaterial). This questionnaire repeated from the 70s to the present has revealed a cultural change in process characterized by the preference of priorities of the first group to priorities of the second group (something that among other aspects is reflected in the electoral programs of the parties):

When the survey was applied in 1970 and repeated in 1971, the results were very similar (although only four of the 12 items were used, in 1973 the result was repeated once again with the 12 items). At that time the percentage of citizens with primarily materialistic priorities was between 20-40% according to the countries. The percentage of people with postmaterialist priorities was between 7-14%.
Some ten years later, by the 1980s, people with post-materialist priorities had increased, although no country was found where post-materialists outnumbered people with materialist priorities.
In the World Values Survey, in 1991, people with post-materialist priorities outperformed those who had materialist priorities in the countries with greater economic development, that is, in countries with higher per capita income and greater material and economic security. (This last survey comprised 43 countries that exceeded 75% of the world population).

Measuring post-materialism
There are several ways of empirically measuring the spread of post-materialism in a society. A common and relatively simple way is by creating an index from survey respondents' patterns of responses to a series of items which were designed to measure personal political priorities.

If you had to choose among the following things, which are the two that seem the most desirable to you?

Maintaining order in the nation.
Giving people more say in important political decisions.
Fighting rising prices.
Protecting freedom of speech.
... On the basis of the choices made among these four items, it is possible to classify our respondents into value priority groups, ranging from a 'pure' acquisitive type to a 'pure' post-bourgeois type, with several intermediate categories.

The theoretical assumptions and the empirical research connected with the concept of post-materialism have received considerable attention and critical discussion in the human sciences. Amongst others, the validity, the stability, and the causation of post-materialism has been doubted.

The so-called "Inglehart-index" has been included in several surveys (e.g., General Social Survey, World Values Survey, Eurobarometer, ALLBUS, Turning Points of the Life-Course). The time series in ALLBUS (German General Social Survey) is particularly comprehensive. From 1980 to 1990 the share of "pure post-materialists" increased from 13 to 31 percent in West Germany. After the economic and social stress caused by German reunification in 1990 it dropped to 23 percent in 1992 and stayed on that level afterwards (Terwey 2000: 155; ZA and ZUMA 2005). The ALLBUS sample from the less affluent population in East Germany show much lower portions of post-materialists (1991: 15%, 1992: 10%, 1998: 12%). International data from the 2000 World Values Survey show the highest percentage of post-materialists in Australia (35%) followed by Austria (30%), Canada (29%), Italy (28%), Argentina (25%), United States (25%), Sweden (22%), Netherlands (22%), Puerto Rico (22%) etc. (Inglehart et al. 2004: 384). In spite of some questions raised by these and other data, measurements of post-materialism have prima facie proven to be statistically important variables in many analyses.

As increasing post-materialism is based on the abundance of material possessions or resources, it should not be mixed indiscriminately with asceticism or general denial of consumption. In some way post-materialism may be described as super-materialism. German data show that there is a tendency towards this orientation among young people, in the economically rather secure public service, and in the managerial middle class (Pappi and Terwey 1982).

Recently, the issue of a "second generation of postmateralism" appearing on the scene of worldwide civil society, to a large extent conceived as their "positive ideological embodiment", has been brought up by cultural scientist Roland Benedikter in his seven-volume book series Postmaterialismus (2001–2005).

Explanation of the postmaterialist turn
The increase of complex technology and economic and social organization in the ecosystem:

It has increased in the population the social, aesthetic and solidarity relations or system of post-material values of belonging and intellectual freedom, transmitted mainly by the means of social communication, instead of a society based primarily on material well-being, on physical security and economic survival.

Establish the priorities and relationships between people (age, educational level, economic level, social class, etc.) and the explanatory or independent variables: materialism (material goods) and postmaterialism (spiritual goods) to be measured by the attitude scale of the indicator of the change of values:

Material - Spiritual
Maintain order in the country. Give people more opportunities to participate in important political decisions.
Fight against the rise in prices. Protect freedom of expression.
Maintain a high rate of economic growth. Give people more opportunity to participate in the decisions that concern their work and their community.
Ensure that the country has powerful armed forces. Try to make our cities and the countryside more beautiful.
Maintain a stable economy Achieve a less impersonal and more human society.
Fight against crime. Progress towards a society in which ideas are more important than money.
The results for Spain in the last application, year 2000, were:

The change of orientation toward postmaterialist values is related to the social class, the higher, and that has been subjected to an information process. Spiritual values are more important the greater the social class and the exposure to information grows.

The relationship with age is negative or inverse and with education upside down.

Age is a better predictor than education.

Material well-being is not the cause of the reason (justification) of environmental movements.

As for the system of values, culture, which are instruments of adaptation in the social ecosystem. There is a certain stability in the value system with slow changes and it is due to a generational change. There is an equation between material and spiritual in the class of very high position.

Postmaterial values do not coincide with traditional religious beliefs, which are more typical of the social periphery.

Membership in volunteering is small.

Solidarity does not depend on postmaterialism or social position.

Social position is a better predictor than socioeconomic status or ideology.

The youngest are postmaterialists.

The educational level and social position have different predictive value.

The importance of the family grows with materialism.

Postmaterialism and high social status do have to do with interest in politics.

Postmaterialism has to do with discrimination as 'degree of nuisance towards a group' or rejection.

There is a negative correlation between postmaterialism and unemployment.

The study is a fixed longitudinal design, with analysis of patterns or 'path analysis', graphical analysis, matrices of correlations, regressions, with tables, priority indexes, references of objectives, diachronic and exhaustive commented literal analysis.

The change of values in Spain
In Spain, the change of orientation towards postmaterialist values is directly related to the social class, how much, higher and that has been subjected to an information process. Spiritual values are more important the greater the social class and the exposure to information grows. The relationship with age is negative. Age is a better predictor than education. Material well-being is not the cause of the reason (justification) of environmental movements. The value system, culture, are instruments of adaptation.

There is some stability in the value system with slow changes. Membership in volunteering is small. The youngest are postmaterialists. The educational level and social position have different predictive value. The importance of the family grows with materialism. Postmaterialism and social position does have to do with interest in politics. Postmaterialism and social position do not coincide. Postmaterialism has to do with discrimination, as a degree of nuisance towards a group. The number of conclusions, graphs and tables is exhaustive.

The complete basic text in Spanish and on Spain: The scale of postmaterialism as a measure of the change of values in contemporary societies, by Juan Diez Nicolas

Source from Wikipedia

Posthumanism

Posthumanism is a term with at least seven definitions according to philosopher Francesca Ferrando:

Antihumanism: any theory that is critical of traditional humanism and traditional ideas about humanity and the human condition.
Cultural posthumanism: a branch of cultural theory critical of the foundational assumptions of humanism and its legacy that examines and questions the historical notions of "human" and "human nature", often challenging typical notions of human subjectivity and embodiment and strives to move beyond archaic concepts of "human nature" to develop ones which constantly adapt to contemporary technoscientific knowledge.
Philosophical posthumanism: a philosophical direction which draws on cultural posthumanism, the philosophical strand examines the ethical implications of expanding the circle of moral concern and extending subjectivities beyond the human species
Posthuman condition: the deconstruction of the human condition by critical theorists.
Transhumanism: an ideology and movement which seeks to develop and make available technologies that eliminate aging and greatly enhance human intellectual, physical, and psychological capacities, in order to achieve a "posthuman future".
AI takeover: A more pessimistic alternative to transhumanism in which humans will not be enhanced, but rather eventually replaced by artificial intelligences. Some philosophers, including Nick Land, promote the view that humans should embrace and accept their eventual demise. This is related to the view of "cosmism" which supports the building of strong artificial intelligence even if it may entail the end of humanity as in their view it "would be a cosmic tragedy if humanity freezes evolution at the puny human level".
Voluntary Human Extinction, which seeks a "posthuman future" that in this case is a future without humans.

Philosophical posthumanism
Philosopher Ted Schatzki suggests there are two varieties of posthumanism of the philosophical kind:

One, which he calls 'objectivism', tries to counter the overemphasis of the subjective or intersubjective that pervades humanism, and emphasises the role of the nonhuman agents, whether they be animals and plants, or computers or other things.

A second prioritizes practices, especially social practices, over individuals (or individual subjects) which, they say, constitute the individual.

There may be a third kind of posthumanism, propounded by the philosopher Herman Dooyeweerd. Though he did not label it as 'posthumanism', he made an extensive and penetrating immanent critique of Humanism, and then constructed a philosophy that presupposed neither Humanist, nor Scholastic, nor Greek thought but started with a different religious ground motive. Dooyeweerd prioritized law and meaningfulness as that which enables humanity and all else to exist, behave, live, occur, etc. "Meaning is the being of all that has been created," Dooyeweerd wrote, "and the nature even of our selfhood." Both human and nonhuman alike function subject to a common 'law-side', which is diverse, composed of a number of distinct law-spheres or aspects. The temporal being of both human and non-human is multi-aspectual; for example, both plants and humans are bodies, functioning in the biotic aspect, and both computers and humans function in the formative and lingual aspect, but humans function in the aesthetic, juridical, ethical and faith aspects too. The Dooyeweerdian version is able to incorporate and integrate both the objectivist version and the practices version, because it allows nonhuman agents their own subject-functioning in various aspects and places emphasis on aspectual functioning.

Emergence of philosophical posthumanism
Ihab Hassan, theorist in the academic study of literature, once stated:

Humanism may be coming to an end as humanism transforms itself into something one must helplessly call posthumanism.

This view predates most currents of posthumanism which have developed over the late 20th century in somewhat diverse, but complementary, domains of thought and practice. For example, Hassan is a known scholar whose theoretical writings expressly address postmodernity in society. Beyond postmodernist studies, posthumanism has been developed and deployed by various cultural theorists, often in reaction to problematic inherent assumptions within humanistic and enlightenment thought.

Theorists who both complement and contrast Hassan include Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, cyberneticists such as Gregory Bateson, Warren McCullouch, Norbert Wiener, Bruno Latour, Cary Wolfe, Elaine Graham, N. Katherine Hayles, Donna Haraway, Peter Sloterdijk, Stefan Lorenz Sorgner, Evan Thompson, Francisco Varela, Humberto Maturana and Douglas Kellner. Among the theorists are philosophers, such as Robert Pepperell, who have written about a "posthuman condition", which is often substituted for the term "posthumanism".

Posthumanism differs from classical humanism by relegating humanity back to one of many natural species, thereby rejecting any claims founded on anthropocentric dominance. According to this claim, humans have no inherent rights to destroy nature or set themselves above it in ethical considerations a priori. Human knowledge is also reduced to a less controlling position, previously seen as the defining aspect of the world. Human rights exist on a spectrum with animal rights and posthuman rights. The limitations and fallibility of human intelligence are confessed, even though it does not imply abandoning the rational tradition of humanism.

Proponents of a posthuman discourse, suggest that innovative advancements and emerging technologies have transcended the traditional model of the human, as proposed by Descartes among others associated with philosophy of the Enlightenment period. In contrast to humanism, the discourse of posthumanism seeks to redefine the boundaries surrounding modern philosophical understanding of the human. Posthumanism represents an evolution of thought beyond that of the contemporary social boundaries and is predicated on the seeking of truth within a postmodern context. In so doing, it rejects previous attempts to establish 'anthropological universals' that are imbued with anthropocentric assumptions.

The philosopher Michel Foucault placed posthumanism within a context that differentiated humanism from enlightenment thought. According to Foucault, the two existed in a state of tension: as humanism sought to establish norms while Enlightenment thought attempted to transcend all that is material, including the boundaries that are constructed by humanistic thought. Drawing on the Enlightenment’s challenges to the boundaries of humanism, posthumanism rejects the various assumptions of human dogmas (anthropological, political, scientific) and takes the next step by attempting to change the nature of thought about what it means to be human. This requires not only decentering the human in multiple discourses (evolutionary, ecological, technological) but also examining those discourses to uncover inherent humanistic, anthropocentric, normative notions of humanness and the concept of the human.

Contemporary posthuman discourse
Posthumanistic discourse aims to open up spaces to examine what it means to be human and critically question the concept of "the human" in light of current cultural and historical contexts In her book How We Became Posthuman, N. Katherine Hayles, writes about the struggle between different versions of the posthuman as it continually co-evolves alongside intelligent machines. Such coevolution, according to some strands of the posthuman discourse, allows one to extend their subjective understandings of real experiences beyond the boundaries of embodied existence. According to Hayles's view of posthuman, often referred to as technological posthumanism, visual perception and digital representations thus paradoxically become ever more salient. Even as one seeks to extend knowledge by deconstructing perceived boundaries, it is these same boundaries that make knowledge acquisition possible. The use of technology in a contemporary society is thought to complicate this relationship.

Hayles discusses the translation of human bodies into information (as suggested by Hans Moravec) in order to illuminate how the boundaries of our embodied reality have been compromised in the current age and how narrow definitions of humanness no longer apply. Because of this, according to Hayles, posthumanism is characterized by a loss of subjectivity based on bodily boundaries. This strand of posthumanism, including the changing notion of subjectivity and the disruption of ideas concerning what it means to be human, is often associated with Donna Haraway’s concept of the cyborg. However, Haraway has distanced herself from posthumanistic discourse due to other theorists’ use of the term to promote utopian views of technological innovation to extend the human biological capacity (even though these notions would more correctly fall into the realm of transhumanism).

While posthumanism is a broad and complex ideology, it has relevant implications today and for the future. It attempts to redefine social structures without inherently humanly or even biological origins, but rather in terms of social and psychological systems where consciousness and communication could potentially exist as unique disembodied entities. Questions subsequently emerge with respect to the current use and the future of technology in shaping human existence, as do new concerns with regards to language, symbolism, subjectivity, phenomenology, ethics, justice and creativity.

Relationship with transhumanism
Sociologist James Hughes comments that there is considerable confusion between the two terms. In the introduction to their book on post- and transhumanism, Robert Ranisch and Stefan Sorgner address the source of this confusion, stating that posthumanism is often used as an umbrella term that includes both transhumanism and critical posthumanism.

Although both subjects relate to the future of humanity, they differ in their view of anthropocentrism. Pramod Nayar, author of Posthumanism, states that posthumanism has two main branches: ontological and critical. Ontological posthumanism is synonymous with transhumanism. The subject is regarded as “an intensification of humanism.” Transhumanism retains humanism’s focus on the homo sapien as the center of the world but also considers technology to be an integral aid to human progression. Critical posthumanism, however, is opposed to these views. Critical posthumanism “rejects both human exceptionalism (the idea that humans are unique creatures) and human instrumentalism (that humans have a right to control the natural world).” These contrasting views on the importance of human beings are the main distinctions between the two subjects.

Transhumanism is also more ingrained in popular culture than critical posthumanism, especially in science fiction. The term is referred to by Pramod Nayar as "the pop posthumanism of cinema and pop culture."

Criticism
Some critics have argued that all forms of posthumanism, including transhumanism, have more in common than their respective proponents realize. Linking these different approaches, Paul James suggests that 'the key political problem is that, in effect, the position allows the human as a category of being to flow down the plughole of history':

“
This is ontologically critical. Unlike the naming of ‘postmodernism’ where the ‘post’ does not infer the end of what it previously meant to be human (just the passing of the dominance of the modern) the posthumanists are playing a serious game where the human, in all its ontological variability, disappears in the name of saving something unspecified about us as merely a motley co-location of individuals and communities.

”
However, some posthumanists in the humanities and the arts are critical of transhumanism (the brunt of Paul James's criticism), in part, because they argue that it incorporates and extends many of the values of Enlightenment humanism and classical liberalism, namely scientism, according to performance philosopher Shannon Bell:

“
Altruism, mutualism, humanism are the soft and slimy virtues that underpin liberal capitalism. Humanism has always been integrated into discourses of exploitation: colonialism, imperialism, neoimperialism, democracy, and of course, American democratization. One of the serious flaws in transhumanism is the importation of liberal-human values to the biotechno enhancement of the human. Posthumanism has a much stronger critical edge attempting to develop through enactment new understandings of the self and others, essence, consciousness, intelligence, reason, agency, intimacy, life, embodiment, identity and the body.

”
While many modern leaders of thought are accepting of nature of ideologies described by posthumanism, some are more skeptical of the term. Donna Haraway, the author of A Cyborg Manifesto, has outspokenly rejected the term, though acknowledges a philosophical alignment with posthumanism. Haraway opts instead for the term of companion species, referring to nonhuman entities with which humans coexist.

Questions of race, some argue, are suspiciously elided within the "turn" to posthumanism. Noting that the terms "post" and "human" are already loaded with racial meaning, critical theorist Zakiyyah Iman Jackson argues that the impulse to move "beyond" the human within posthumanism too often ignores "praxes of humanity and critiques produced by black people", including Frantz Fanon and Aime Cesaire to Hortense Spillers and Fred Moten. Interrogating the conceptual grounds in which such a mode of “beyond” is rendered legible and viable, Jackson argues that it is important to observe that "blackness conditions and constitutes the very nonhuman disruption and/or disruption" which posthumanists invite. In other words, given that race in general and blackness in particular constitutes the very terms through which human/nonhuman distinctions are made, for example in enduring legacies of scientific racism, a gesture toward a “beyond” actually “returns us to a Eurocentric transcendentalism long challenged”.

Source from Wikipedia

Metamodernism

Metamodernism is a proposed set of developments in philosophy, aesthetics, and culture which are emerging from and reacting to postmodernism. One definition characterizes metamodernism as mediations between aspects of both modernism and postmodernism. Another similar term is post-postmodernism.

Origin and essence of the term
"Metamodernism: a brief introduction"
In 2015, in his article " Metamodernism: A Brief Introduction, " one of the authors of the project Notes on Metamodernism, the English artist Luke Turner argues that the prefix "meta-" comes from the term Plato metaxis, which designates the oscillation between two opposite concepts and the simultaneity of their use. The author associates the emergence of a new concept with a number of crises and changes since the early 1990s (climate change, financial recessions, the growth of the number of armed conflicts), as well as the proclamation of the so-called. end of history.

In the article, Turner describes the main features of postmodernism, which include the following concepts: deconstruction, irony, stylization, relativism, nihilism. Metamodernism revives common classical concepts and universal truths, while not returning to the "naive ideological positions of modernism" and is in a state of vacillation between aspects of the cultures of modernismand postmodernism. Thus, according to Turner, metamodernism combines enlightened naivete, pragmatic idealism and moderate fanaticism, hesitating at the same time "between irony and sincerity, construction and deconstruction, apathy and attraction." In other words, the generation of metamodern is a kind of oxymoron, in which seemingly opposing things can be combined.

Metamodernism - the concept is not prescriptive, but descriptive. As examples of metamodernism in art, Turner brings the music of artists such as Arcade Fire, Bill Callahan, Future Islands, the work of artists such as Olafur Eliasson and Peter Doig, a movie directed by Wes Anderson and Spike Johns. By the way, as the cover of his article Turner uses a frame from the film Wes Anderson " Kingdom of the Full Moon." Also in the article, Turner mentions the previously published "Metamodernist Manifesto" (Metamodernist // Manifesto), which the artist described as "simultaneously defining and supporting the spirit of metamodernism, at the same time logically consistent and absurd, serious and doomed to failure, but still optimistic and full of hope."

"Notes on metamodernism"
As noted above, the concept was based on the essays of Timothyus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akner, Notes on Metamodernism.

The authors talk about the end of the postmodern era and give two categories of reasons for this, noted by different authors: 1) Material (climate change, financial crisis, terrorist attacks, digital revolution); 2) Non-material (assignment of criticism by the market, integration of the difference into mass culture).

The article notes that most postmodern tendencies take a new form and, most importantly, a new meaning: "that history continues after its hastily declared end," scientists note, drawing a parallel between the concept of the "end of history" and the "positive" "the idealism of Hegel. Metamodern "oscillates between the enthusiasm of modernism and postmodern ridicule, between hope and melancholy, between simplicity and awareness, empathy and apathy, unity and plurality, wholeness and splitting, clarity and ambiguity" - a sort of conceptual oxymoron.

On the appointment of metamodernism, scientists say the following:

Metamodernism replaces the boundaries of the present to the limits of a futile future; and it replaces the boundaries of familiar places to the limits of the infinite. In fact, this is the "destiny" of a man of metamodernity: to pursue endlessly receding horizons.

History of the Term
The term metamodernist appeared as early as 1975, when Mas'ud Zavarzadeh isolatedly used it to describe a cluster of aesthetics or attitudes which had been emerging in American literary narratives since the mid-1950s.

In 1995, Canadian literary theorist Linda Hutcheon stated that a new label for what was coming after postmodernism was necessary.

In 1999, Moyo Okediji reused the term metamodern about contemporary afro-american art, defining it as an "extension of and challenge to modernism and postmodernism" with the aim to "transcend, fracture, subvert, circumvent, interrogate and disrupt, hijack and appropriate modernity and postmodernity."

In 2002, Andre Furlani, analyzing the literary works of Guy Davenport, defined metamodernism as an aesthetic that is "after yet by means of modernism…. a departure as well as a perpetuation." The relationship between metamodernism and modernism was seen as going "far beyond homage, toward a reengagement with modernist method in order to address subject matter well outside the range or interest of the modernists themselves."

In 2007, Alexandra Dumitrescu described metamodernism as partly a concurrence with, partly an emergence from, and partly a reaction to, postmodernism, "champion the idea that only in their interconnection and continuous revision lie the possibility of grasping the nature of contemporary cultural and literary phenomena."

The Metamodernist Manifesto
In 2011, Luke Turner published on his website "Metamodernist Manifesto" (Metamodernist // Manifesto). It consists of 8 items:

We recognize that fluctuations are a natural world order.
We must free ourselves from the century of modernist ideological naivety and the cynical insincerity of his illegitimate child.
Henceforth the movement must be carried out by means of oscillations between positions with diametrically opposed ideas acting as pulsating poles of a colossal electric machine that drives the world into action.
We recognize the limitations inherent in any movement and perception, and the futility of any attempt to break beyond the limits indicated by such. The inherent incompleteness of the system entails the need for adherence to it, not for the sake of achieving a given result and slavishly following its course, but rather for the chance of accidentally indirectly peeking out some hidden external side. Existence will be enriched if we undertake our task, as if these limits can be overcome, for such an action reveals the world.
All things are captured by an irreversible slip to the state of maximum entropic dissimilarity. Artistic creation is possible only on condition of origin from this difference or disclosure of such. At its zenith affects the direct perception of the difference as such. The role of art should be to study the promise of his own paradoxical ambitions by pushing the extreme to presence.
The present is the symptom of the dual birth of urgency and extinction. Today we are equally given to nostalgia and futurism. New technologies allow simultaneous perception and play of events from multiple positions. These emerging networks, far from signaling its extinction, contribute to democratization of history, highlighting forks along which its grandiose narrative can wander here and now.
Just as science strives for poetic elegance, artists can embark on a search for truth. All information is the basis for knowledge, whether empirical or aphoristic, regardless of its validity. We must accept the scientific-poetic synthesis and informed naivete of magical realism. The error gives rise to meaning.
We offer pragmatic romanticism, not constrained by ideological principles. Thus, metamodernism should be defined as a changeable state between and outside of irony and sincerity, naivety and awareness, relativism and truth, optimism and doubt, in search of the multiplicity of disparate and elusive horizons. We must move forward and hesitate!.

Vermeulen and van den Akker
In 2010, cultural theorists Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker proposed metamodernism as an intervention in the post-postmodernism debate. In their essay Notes on Metamodernism, they asserted that the 2000s were characterized by the return of typically modern positions that did not forfeit the postmodern mindsets of the 1980s and 1990s. According to them, the metamodern sensibility "can be conceived of as a kind of informed naivety, a pragmatic idealism", characteristic of cultural responses to recent global events such as climate change, the financial crisis, political instability, and the digital revolution. They asserted that “the postmodern culture of relativism, irony, and pastiche" is over, having been replaced by a post-ideological condition that stresses engagement, affect, and storytelling.

The prefix "meta-" here referred not to a reflective stance or repeated rumination, but to Plato's metaxy, which denotes a movement between opposite poles as well as beyond them. Vermeulen and van den Akker described metamodernism as a "structure of feeling" that oscillates between modernism and postmodernism like "a pendulum swinging between…innumerable poles". According to Kim Levin, writing in ARTnews, this oscillation "must embrace doubt, as well as hope and melancholy, sincerity and irony, affect and apathy, the personal and the political, and technology and techne." For the metamodern generation, according to Vermeulen, "grand narratives are as necessary as they are problematic, hope is not simply something to distrust, love not necessarily something to be ridiculed."

Vermeulen asserts that "metamodernism is not so much a philosophy—which implies a closed ontology—as it is an attempt at a vernacular, or…a sort of open source document, that might contextualise and explain what is going on around us, in political economy as much as in the arts." The return of a Romantic sensibility has been posited as a key characteristic of metamodernism, observed by Vermeulen and van den Akker in the architecture of Herzog & de Meuron, and the work of artists such as Bas Jan Ader, Peter Doig, Olafur Eliasson, Kaye Donachie, Charles Avery, and Ragnar Kjartansson.

The Metamodernist Manifesto
In 2011, Luke Turner published The Metamodernist Manifesto as "an exercise in simultaneously defining and embodying the metamodern spirit," describing it as "a romantic reaction to our crisis-ridden moment." The manifesto recognized "oscillation to be the natural order of the world," and called for an end to "the inertia resulting from a century of modernist ideological naivety and the cynical insincerity of its antonymous bastard child." Instead, Turner proposed metamodernism as "the mercurial condition between and beyond irony and sincerity, naivety and knowingness, relativism and truth, optimism and doubt, in pursuit of a plurality of disparate and elusive horizons," and concluded with a call to "go forth and oscillate!"

The manifesto formed the basis of LaBeouf, Rönkkö & Turner's collaborative art practice, after actor Shia LaBeouf reached out to Turner in early 2014 after reading the text, with the trio embarking on a series of metamodern performance projects exploring connection, empathy, and community across digital and physical platforms.

Cultural acceptance
In November 2011, the Museum of Arts and Design in New York acknowledged the influence of Vermeulen and van den Akker when it staged an exhibition entitled No More Modern: Notes on Metamodernism, featuring the work of Pilvi Takala, Guido van der Werve, Benjamin Martin, and Mariechen Danz.

In March 2012, Galerie Tanja Wagner in Berlin curated Discussing Metamodernism in collaboration with Vermeulen and van den Akker, billed as the first exhibition in Europe to be staged around the concept of metamodernism. The show featured the work of Ulf Aminde, Yael Bartana, Monica Bonvicini, Mariechen Danz, Annabel Daou, Paula Doepfner, Olafur Eliasson, Mona Hatoum, Andy Holden, Sejla Kameric, Ragnar Kjartansson, Kris Lemsalu, Issa Sant, David Thorpe, Angelika J. Trojnarski, Luke Turner, and Nastja Rönkkö.

In his formulation of the "quirky" cinematic sensibility, film scholar James MacDowell described the works of Wes Anderson, Michel Gondry, Spike Jonze, Miranda July, and Charlie Kaufman as building upon the "New Sincerity", and embodying the metamodern structure of feeling in their balancing of "ironic detachment with sincere engagement".

The 2013 issue of the American Book Review was dedicated to metamodernism and included a series of essay identifying authors such as Roberto Bolaño, Dave Eggers, Jonathan Franzen, Haruki Murakami, Zadie Smith, and David Foster Wallace as metamodernists. In a 2014 article in PMLA, literary scholars David James and Urmila Seshagiri argued that "metamodernist writing incorporates and adapts, reactivates and complicates the aesthetic prerogatives of an earlier cultural moment", in discussing twenty-first century writers such as Tom McCarthy.

Professor Stephen Knudsen, writing in ArtPulse, noted that metamodernism "allows the possibility of staying sympathetic to the poststructuralist deconstruction of subjectivity and the self—Lyotard’s teasing of everything into intertextual fragments—and yet it still encourages genuine protagonists and creators and the recouping of some of modernism’s virtues."

In May 2014, country music artist Sturgill Simpson told CMT that his album Metamodern Sounds in Country Music had been inspired in part by an essay by Seth Abramson, who writes about metamodernism on his Huffington Post blog. Simpson stated that "Abramson homes in on the way everybody is obsessed with nostalgia, even though technology is moving faster than ever." According to J.T. Welsch, "Abramson sees the 'meta-' prefix as a means to transcend the burden of modernism and postmodernism's allegedly polarised intellectual heritage."

In a 2017 essay on metamodernism in literary fiction, Fabio Vittorini stated that since the late 1980s, mimetic strategies of the modern have been combined with the meta-literary strategies of the postmodern, performing "a pendulum-like motion between the naive and/or fanatic idealism of the former and the skeptical and/or apathetic pragmatism of the latter."

Criticism of the concept of "Metamodernism"
In connection with the fact that the concept of metamodernism has appeared quite recently, most of the utterances are reduced to an attempt not to criticize, but to analyze the phenomenon of the postmodern epoch that comes to replace it.

Dmitry Bykov
The writer and journalist Dmitry Bykov refers to the explanation of the poet Ilya Kormiltsev, according to which, "overcoming postmodern irony, the search for a new seriousness is a task for the coming decades, which will be solved with the help of neo-romanticism and a new archaic."

Concerning the very phenomenon of the Bulls, the following is said:

Metamodernism is another way. It's like a more complex modernism, a return to modernism - I think, artificially interrupted, artificially aborted in the 1920s - a return to modernism in a mass society. The main figures of metamodernism are [Jonathan] Franzen and, of course, my great favorite David Foster Wallace. Of course, there is irony, but in general this is a serious and even tragic attitude to life. Endless complexity, complexity; network structure of narration; free navigation in time; neoromanticheskie installation, that is, the installation of the perfection of a lonely hero, to move away from the crowd, for a certain contra-dictation with it, probably. This is an interesting concept. I, in general, for metamodernism, that is, for the new smart, roughly speaking. I want postmodernist time to end as soon as possible. Yes, and it,.

Oleg Mitroshenkov
The scientist, Doctor of Philosophy Oleg Mitroshenkov singles out four components of the concept of metamodernism:

Virtualization of the space of social interactions, when the virtual world replaces reality and new opportunities arise for manipulating the mass consciousness both on the part of the authorities and the media, and on the part of individuals.
Creation of techno-images that are attractive for social interaction, created by users in the network space and modified by others. As a result, all become co-authors and subjects of social action, and the object itself, being the fruit of "collective intelligence," lives independently of the author.
"Globalization" (global + local) communities in the context of globalization, where social uniqueness is emphasized within the global space: thus, all states are present in a globalizing space, while remaining strictly national societies with their own culture and identity.
Transsexualism, or a return to obvious, traditional values.
Mitroshenkov also briefly examines the phenomenon of a mass man. According to him, "today a mass person is an active dominant of all spheres of human activity", which is not authoritative but authoritarian:

Authority gives the person respect; authoritarianism requires (in vain) respect. Personality goes deep; the mass man slides on the surface, taking for the discovery and truth the first born thought. Authority does not need extra decorations (awards, titles, reverence); authoritarianism can not do without them. Authority is open and sincere (therefore it is authority); authoritarianism is secretive and intriguing. An authoritative person puts principles above the rules, real achievements are higher than status; authoritarian - to the exact opposite. As a result, the inclination to the hypocrisy of a mass man has prevailed over openness and sincerity in the modern world, and freedom over necessity and responsibility, although it has not eliminated and is unable to eliminate them completely.
Here he criticizes not the concept of metamodernism, but analyzes the development of the phenomenon of a mass person. However, according to him, the era of metamodernism may well contribute to the positive development of the very essence of a massive man:

At the same time, the nature of a mass man has the potential of his own overcoming. The move towards post-postmodernism leaves hope for a successful solution of some of the few other problems of the modern and post-modern society discussed here. And since all these processes take place in a society that is not only self-governing, but also directly controlled (in different countries to varying degrees and with different efficiency), it would be a theoretical omission to not link these factors together.

Michael Epstein
Back in 2001, the journal "Znamya" published an article by the philosopher, culturologist and literary critic Mikhail Epstein "De'but de sieсle, or From Post-to-Proto-Manifesto of the New Century", in which he speaks of the end of the epoch with prefix "post-" and introduces a new term with the prefix "proto-" - proteism. The essence of the new era, he said, is "the fusion of the brain and the universe, engineering and organic, in the creation of thinking machines, working atoms and quanta, meaningful physical fields, in bringing all existential processes to the speed of thought." He does not talk about a cultural return to the origins and so-called. "radical openness," replacing the popular in the era of postmodernism, opposition to the concepts of the past. However, it speaks about the technological aspect of the new era,

Vladimir Eshilev
In 1998, the Ivano-Frankivsk writer Vladimir Eshkilev, close to the "Crimean Club" Igor Sid, together with Yuri Andrukhovich and Oleg Gutsulyak, implemented the project "The Return of the Demiurge: The Small Encyclopedia of Actual Literature" (Pleroma, 1998, No. 3; the publication on the website of the magazine "Ї"), in which he proposed, as an alternative to postmodernism, the metamodernist method of "nuanced demiurgy". It is realized in narrative texts such as the genre of "fantasy" or "detective", where there is such a way of artistic creation, when the author determines the plot, concept and discursive space of a literary work by constructing a specific world. In the spaces of these texts, the effect of a miraculous, contain as a substantial and non-extinct element supernatural or impossible worlds, creatures or objects with which characters or the reader find themselves in more or less close relations. The writer and artist here is an inspired "mediator", extracted his images from the ideal world and perpetuating them in the empirical. This realizes the modernist appeal of F. Nietzsche to create "ranks of life values", so that their images grow into images of being, transforming the world. Not only to create peace in the world, but to make it real for others. With the help of "nuanced demiurgy" (the type of Borkhesov's story "Troll, Ukbar, Orbis Tercius") it would seem unreal, the worlds of "fantasy" are absorbed into reality and change it. There is a kind of "expansion of the surreal" into reality: man has not yet agreed with the new dimension, but he is offered to think in certain terms - and, in the end, the world of "Roses of the World", "Matrix", "Space Wars", "Star Cruiser Galaxy", "Sailormoon", "Lord of the Rings" or "Brother / Brother 2 "And" We are from the future / We are from the future 2 "becomes a real world - its" life values "grow into images of being, make it real for others, enter into a cosmogonic struggle with non-being. The metamodernism of the "nuanced demiurgy" is that it returns such functors as the Great Hero, Great Journey, Great Dangers, Big Goal, etc., humiliated by postmodernism. That is, there is an appeal to the "firstframe" about how Hero goes to search for adventures for the "Great Meeting". This "demiurgy" seeks to restore, as Vladimir Yeshilev writes, the world of "Roses of the World", "Matrix", "Space Wars", "Star Cruiser Galaxy", "Sailormoon", "Lord of the Rings" or "Brother / Brother 2" and "We are from the future / We are from the future 2" world - his "life values" grow into images of being, make him real for others, enter into a cosmogonic struggle with non-being. The metamodernism of the "nuanced demiurgy" is that it returns such functors as the Great Hero, Great Journey, Great Dangers, Big Goal, etc., humiliated by postmodernism. That is, there is an appeal to the "firstframe" about how Hero goes to search for adventures for the "Great Meeting". This "demiurgy" seeks to restore, as Vladimir Yeshilev writes, the world of "Roses of the World", "Matrix", "Space Wars", "Star Cruiser Galaxy", "Sailormoon", "Lord of the Rings" or "Brother / Brother 2" and "We are from the future / We are from the future 2" world - his "life values" grow into images of being, make him real for others, enter into a cosmogonic struggle with non-being. The metamodernism of the "nuanced demiurgy" is that it returns such functors as the Great Hero, Great Journey, Great Dangers, Big Goal, etc., humiliated by postmodernism. That is, there is an appeal to the "firstframe" about how Hero goes to search for adventures for the "Great Meeting". This "demiurgy" seeks to restore, as Vladimir Yeshilev writes, "The Lord of the Rings" or "Brother / Brother 2" and "We are from the future / We are from the future 2" becomes a real world - his "life values" grow into images of being, make him real for others, enter into a cosmogonic struggle with non-being. The metamodernism of the "nuanced demiurgy" is that it returns such functors as the Great Hero, Great Journey, Great Dangers, Big Goal, etc., humiliated by postmodernism. That is, there is an appeal to the "firstframe" about how Hero goes to search for adventures for the "Great Meeting". This "demiurgy" seeks to restore, as Vladimir Yeshilev writes, "The Lord of the Rings" or "Brother / Brother 2" and "We are from the future / We are from the future 2" becomes a real world - his "life values" grow into images of being, make him real for others, enter into a cosmogonic struggle with non-being. The metamodernism of the "nuanced demiurgy" is that it returns such functors as the Great Hero, Great Journey, Great Dangers, Big Goal, etc., humiliated by postmodernism. That is, there is an appeal to the "firstframe" about how Hero goes to search for adventures for the "Great Meeting". This "demiurgy" seeks to restore, as Vladimir Yeshilev writes, The metamodernism of the "nuanced demiurgy" is that it returns such functors as the Great Hero, Great Journey, Great Dangers, Big Goal, etc., humiliated by postmodernism. That is, there is an appeal to the "firstframe" about how Hero goes to search for adventures for the "Great Meeting". This "demiurgy" seeks to restore, as Vladimir Yeshilev writes, The metamodernism of the "nuanced demiurgy" is that it returns such functors as the Great Hero, Great Journey, Great Dangers, Big Goal, etc., humiliated by postmodernism. That is, there is an appeal to the "firstframe" about how Hero goes to search for adventures for the "Great Meeting". This "demiurgy" seeks to restore, as Vladimir Yeshilev writes,

Cosmological coordinates, putting the "golden age" at the beginning of the linear chronology, and the Day of Judgment at the end... Fantasy also restores Nietzschean amor fati, "the smile of fate" - the being's promise of the miracle "as rewards for "and through this restoration - revives the ethos of the feat, buried by the postmodern era under the cemetery slabs ironic."

So, while postmodernism insists on two types of tolerance - formal-linguistic and ideological-axiological, demiurges of metamodernism postulates "Credo" - the loyalty of the "Great Tradition" with its great heroes, travels, adventures and victories. And at a certain stage in mass culture, this practice of the demiurgy "works". After all, if in the ancient times the Greeks were consoled-purified, "cathartized" in the theater, watching the collision of mythical deeds, and the Romans in the Colosseum, watching cosmogonic gladiatorial fights, for a modern man such a scene was television with its "soap / space operas" and " political talk show ", where mythological subjects are played by the carriers of the archetypes of modern civilization - Good, Evil, Invincible Hero, Gallant Knight, Treason-Beloved, faithful Friend,

But in the recall of this concept, Y. Kagramanov warned that over time, "demiurgic practice" does not stand up to the confrontation of the "inertia of a distinctive being".

Source from Wikipedia

Postmodernity

Postmodernity is the economic or cultural state or condition of society which is said to exist after modernity. Some schools of thought hold that modernity ended in the late 20th century – in the 1980s or early 1990s – and that it was replaced by postmodernity, while others would extend modernity to cover the developments denoted by postmodernity, while some believe that modernity ended after World War II. The idea of the post-modern condition is sometimes characterised as a culture stripped of its capacity to function in any linear or autonomous state as opposed to the progressive mindstate of Modernism.

Postmodernity can mean a personal response to a postmodern society, the conditions in a society which make it postmodern or the state of being that is associated with a postmodern society as well a historical epoch. In most contexts it should be distinguished from postmodernism, the adoption of postmodern philosophies or traits in art, literature, culture and society. In fact, today, historical perspectives on the developments of postmodern art (postmodernism) and postmodern society (postmodernity) can be best described as two umbrella terms for processes engaged in an ongoing dialectical relationship, the result of which is the evolving world in which we now live.

Uses of the term
Postmodernity is the state or condition of being postmodern – after or in reaction to that which is modern, as in postmodern art (see postmodernism). Modernity is defined as a period or condition loosely identified with the Progressive Era, the Industrial Revolution, or the Enlightenment. In philosophy and critical theory postmodernity refers to the state or condition of society which is said to exist after modernity, a historical condition that marks the reasons for the end of modernity. This usage is ascribed to the philosophers Jean-François Lyotard and Jean Baudrillard.

One "project" of modernity is said by Habermas to have been the fostering of progress by incorporating principles of rationality and hierarchy into public and artistic life. (See also postindustrial, Information Age.) Lyotard understood modernity as a cultural condition characterized by constant change in the pursuit of progress. Postmodernity then represents the culmination of this process where constant change has become the status quo and the notion of progress obsolete. Following Ludwig Wittgenstein's critique of the possibility of absolute and total knowledge, Lyotard further argued that the various metanarratives of progress such as positivist science, Marxism, and structuralism were defunct as methods of achieving progress.

The literary critic Fredric Jameson and the geographer David Harvey have identified postmodernity with "late capitalism" or "flexible accumulation", a stage of capitalism following finance capitalism, characterised by highly mobile labor and capital and what Harvey called "time and space compression". They suggest that this coincides with the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system which, they believe, defined the economic order following the Second World War. (See also consumerism, critical theory.)

Those who generally view modernity as obsolete or an outright failure, a flaw in humanity's evolution leading to disasters like Auschwitz and Hiroshima, see postmodernity as a positive development. Other philosophers, particularly those seeing themselves as within the modern project, see the state of postmodernity as a negative consequence of holding postmodernist ideas. For example, Jürgen Habermas and others contend that postmodernity represents a resurgence of long running counter-enlightenment ideas, that the modern project is not finished and that universality cannot be so lightly dispensed with. Postmodernity, the consequence of holding postmodern ideas, is generally a negative term in this context.

Postmodernism
Postmodernity is a condition or a state of being associated with changes to institutions and creations (Giddens, 1990) and with social and political results and innovations, globally but especially in the West since the 1950s, whereas postmodernism is an aesthetic, literary, political or social philosophy, the "cultural and intellectual phenomenon", especially since the 1920s' new movements in the arts. Both of these terms are used by philosophers, social scientists and social critics to refer to aspects of contemporary culture, economics and society that are the result of features of late 20th century and early 21st century life, including the fragmentation of authority and the commoditization of knowledge (see "Modernity").

The relationship between postmodernity and critical theory, sociology and philosophy is fiercely contested. The terms "postmodernity" and "postmodernism" are often hard to distinguish, the former being often the result of the latter. The period has had diverse political ramifications: its "anti-ideological ideas" appear to have been associated with the feminist movement, racial equality movements, gay rights movements, most forms of late 20th century anarchism and even the peace movement as well as various hybrids of these in the current anti-globalization movement. Though none of these institutions entirely embraces all aspects of the postmodern movement in its most concentrated definition they all reflect, or borrow from, some of its core ideas.

History
Some authors, such as Lyotard and Baudrillard, believe that modernity ended in the late 20th century and thus have defined a period subsequent to modernity, namely postmodernity, while others, such as Bauman and Giddens, would extend modernity to cover the developments denoted by postmodernity. Others still contend that modernity ended with the Victorian Age in the 1900s.

Postmodernity has been said[by whom?] to have gone through two relatively distinct phases the first beginning in the late 1940s and 1950s and ending with the Cold War (when analog media with limited bandwidth encouraged a few, authoritative media channels) and the second beginning at the end of the Cold War (marked by the spread of cable television and "new media" based on digital means of information dissemination and broadcast).

The first phase of postmodernity overlaps the end of modernity and is regarded by many[by whom?] as being part of the modern period (see lumpers/splitters, periodization). Television became the primary news source, manufacturing decreased in importance in the economies of Western Europe and the United States but trade volumes increased within the developed core. In 1967–1969 a crucial cultural explosion took place within the developed world as the baby boom generation, which had grown up with postmodernity as its fundamental experience of society, demanded entrance into the political, cultural and educational power structure. A series of demonstrations and acts of rebellion – ranging from nonviolent and cultural, through violent acts of terrorism – represented the opposition of the young to the policies and perspectives of the previous age. Opposition to the Algerian War and the Vietnam War, to laws allowing or encouraging racial segregation and to laws which overtly discriminated against women and restricted access to divorce, increased use of marijuana and psychedelics, the emergence of pop cultural styles of music and drama, including rock music and the ubiquity of stereo, television and radio helped make these changes visible in the broader cultural context. This period is associated with the work of Marshall McLuhan, a philosopher who focused on the results of living in a media culture and argued that participation in a mass media culture both overshadows actual content disseminated and is liberating because it loosens the authority of local social normative standards.

The second phase of postmodernity is defined[by whom?] by "digitality" – the increasing power of personal and digital means of communication including fax machines, modems, cable and high speed internet, which has altered the condition of postmodernity dramatically: digital production of information allows individuals to manipulate virtually every aspect of the media environment. This has brought producers into conflict with consumers over intellectual capital and intellectual property and led to the creation of a new economy whose supporters argue that the dramatic fall in information costs will alter society fundamentally.

It began to be argued[by whom?] that digitality or what Esther Dyson referred to as "being digital" had emerged as a separate condition from postmodernity. Those holding this position argued that the ability to manipulate items of popular culture, the World Wide Web, the use of search engines to index knowledge, and telecommunications were producing a "convergence" which would be marked by the rise of "participatory culture" in the words of Henry Jenkins and the use of media devices, such as Apple's iPod.

The simplest, but not necessarily most correct demarcation point of this era is [according to whom?] the collapse of the Soviet Union and the liberalisation of China in 1991. Francis Fukuyama wrote "The End of History" in 1989 in anticipation of the fall of the Berlin wall. He predicted that the question of political philosophy had been answered, that large scale wars over fundamental values would no longer arise since "all prior contradictions are resolved and all human needs satisfied." This is a kind of 'endism' also taken up Arthur Danto who in 1984 acclaimed that Andy Warhol's Brillo boxes asked the right question of art and hence art had ended.

Descriptions

Distinctions in philosophy and critical theory
The debate on postmodernity has two distinct elements that are often confused; (1) the nature of contemporary society and (2) the nature of the critique of contemporary society. The first of these elements is concerned with the nature of changes that took place during the late 20th century. There are three principal analyses. Theorists such as Callinicos (1991) and Calhoun (1995) offer a conservative position on the nature of contemporary society, downplaying the significance and extent of socio-economic changes and emphasizing a continuity with the past. Second a range of theorists have tried to analyze the present as a development of the "modern" project into a second, distinct phase that is nevertheless still "modernity": this has been termed the "second" or "risk" society by Ulrich Beck (1986), "late" or "high" modernity by Giddens (1990, 1991), "liquid" modernity by Zygmunt Bauman (2000), and the "network" society by Castells (1996, 1997). Third are those who argue that contemporary society has moved into a literally post-modern phase distinct from modernity. The most prominent proponents of this position are Lyotard and Baudrillard.

Another set of issues concerns the nature of critique, often replaying debates over (what can be crudely termed) universalism and relativism, where modernism is seen to represent the former and postmodernity the latter. Seyla Benhabib (1995) and Judith Butler (1995) pursue this debate in relation to feminist politics, Benhabib arguing that postmodern critique comprises three main elements; an anti-foundationalist concept of the subject and identity, the death of history and of notions of teleology and progress, and the death of metaphysics defined as the search for objective truth. Benhabib argues forcefully against these critical positions, holding that they undermine the bases upon which feminist politics can be founded, removing the possibility of agency, the sense of self-hood and the appropriation of women’s history in the name of an emancipated future. The denial of normative ideals removes the possibility for utopia, central for ethical thinking and democratic action.

Butler responds to Benhabib by arguing that her use of postmodernism is an expression of a wider paranoia over anti-foundationalist philosophy, in particular, poststructuralism.

A number of positions are ascribed to postmodernism – Discourse is all there is, as if discourse were some kind of monistic stuff out of which all things are composed; the subject is dead, I can never say “I” again; there is no reality, only representation. These characterizations are variously imputed to postmodernism or poststructuralism, which are conflated with each other and sometimes conflated with deconstruction, and understood as an indiscriminate assemblage of French feminism, deconstruction, Lacanian psychoanalysis, Foucauldian analysis, Rorty’s conversationalism, and cultural studies ... In reality, these movements are opposed: Lacanian psychoanalysis in France positions itself officially against poststructuralism, that Foucauldian rarely relate to Derridideans ... Lyotard champions the term, but he cannot be made into the example of what all the rest of the purported postmodernists are doing. Lyotard’s work is, for instance, seriously at odds with that of Derrida

Butler uses the debate over the nature of the post-modernist critique to demonstrate how philosophy is implicated in power relationships and defends poststructuralist critique by arguing that the critique of the subject itself is the beginning of analysis, not the end, because the first task of enquiry is the questioning of accepted "universal" and "objective" norms.

The Benhabib-Butler debate demonstrates that there is no simple definition of a postmodern theorist as the very definition of postmodernity itself is contested. Michel Foucault rejected the label of postmodernism explicitly in interviews yet is seen by many, such as Benhabib, as advocating a form of critique that is "postmodern" in that it breaks with utopian and transcendental "modern" critiques by calling universal norms of the Enlightenment into question. Giddens (1990) rejects this characterisation of "modern critique", pointing out that a critique of Enlightenment universals was central to philosophers of the modern period, most notably Nietzsche.

Postmodern society
Jameson views a number of phenomena as distinguishing postmodernity from modernity. He speaks of "a new kind of superficiality" or "depthlessness" in which models that once explained people and things in terms of an "inside" and an "outside" (such as hermeneutics, the dialectic, Freudian repression, the existentialist distinction between authenticity and inauthenticity and the semiotic distinction of signifier and signified) have been rejected.

Second is a rejection of the modernist "Utopian gesture", evident in Van Gogh, of the transformation through art of misery into beauty whereas in the postmodernism movement the object world has undergone a "fundamental mutation" so that it has "now become a set of texts or simulacra" (Jameson 1993:38). Whereas modernist art sought to redeem and sacralize the world, to give life to world (we might say, following Graff, to give the world back the enchantment that science and the decline of religion had taken away from it), postmodernist art bestows upon the world a "deathly quality… whose glacéd X-ray elegance mortifies the reified eye of the viewer in a way that would seem to have nothing to do with death or the death obsession or the death anxiety on the level of content" (ibid.). Graff sees the origins of this transformative mission of art in an attempted substitution of art for religion in giving meaning to the world that the rise of science and Enlightenment rationality had removed – but in the postmodern period this is seen as futile.

The third feature of the postmodern age that Jameson identifies is the "waning of affect" – not that all emotion has disappeared from the postmodern age but that it lacks a particular kind of emotion such as that found in "Rimbaud's magical flowers 'that look back at you'". He notes that "pastiche eclipses parody" as "the increasing unavailability of the personal style" leads to pastiche becoming a universal practice.

Jameson argues that distance "has been abolished" in postmodernity, that we "are submerged in its henceforth filled and suffused volumes to the point where our now postmodern bodies are bereft of spatial co-ordinates". This "new global space" constitutes postmodernity's "moment of truth". The various other features of the postmodern that he identifies "can all now be seen as themselves partial (yet constitutive) aspects of the same general spatial object". The postmodern era has seen a change in the social function of culture. He identifies culture in the modern age as having had a property of "semi-autonomy", with an "existence… above the practical world of the existent" but, in the postmodern age, culture has been deprived of this autonomy, the cultural has expanded to consume the entire social realm so that all becomes "cultural". "Critical distance", the assumption that culture can be positioned outside "the massive Being of capital" upon which left-wing theories of cultural politics are dependent, has become outmoded. The "prodigious new expansion of multinational capital ends up penetrating and colonizing those very pre-capitalist enclaves (Nature and the Unconscious) which offered extraterritorial and Archimedean footholds for critical effectivity". (Jameson 1993:54)

Social sciences
Postmodern sociology can be said to focus on conditions of life which became increasingly prevalent in the late 20th century in the most industrialized nations, including the ubiquity of mass media and mass production, the rise of a global economy and a shift from manufacturing to service economies. Jameson and Harvey described it as consumerism, where manufacturing, distribution and dissemination have become exceptionally inexpensive but social connectedness and community have become rarer. Other thinkers assert that postmodernity is the natural reaction to mass broadcasting in a society conditioned to mass production and mass politics. The work of Alasdair MacIntyre informs the versions of postmodernism elaborated by such authors as Murphy (2003) and Bielskis (2005), for whom MacIntyre's postmodern revision of Aristotelianism poses a challenge to the kind of consumerist ideology that now promotes capital accumulation.

The sociological view of postmodernity ascribes it to more rapid transportation, wider communication and the ability to abandon standardization of mass production, leading to a system which values a wider range of capital than previously and allows value to be stored in a greater variety of forms. Harvey argues that postmodernity is an escape from "Fordism", a term coined by Antonio Gramsci to describe the mode of industrial regulation and accumulation which prevailed during the Keynesian era of economic policy in OECD countries from the early 1930s to the 1970s. Fordism for Harvey is associated with Keynesianism in that the first concerns methods of production and capital-labor relations while the latter concerns economic policy and regulation. Post-fordism is therefore one of the basic aspects of postmodernity from Harvey's point of view.

Artifacts of postmodernity include the dominance of television and popular culture, the wide accessibility of information and mass telecommunications. Postmodernity also exhibits a greater resistance to making sacrifices in the name of progress discernible in environmentalism and the growing importance of the anti-war movement. Postmodernity in the industrialised core is marked by increasing focus on civil rights and equal opportunity as well as movements such as feminism and multiculturalism and the backlash against these movements. The postmodern political sphere is marked by multiple arenas and possibilities of citizenship and political action concerning various forms of struggle against oppression or alienation (in collectives defined by sex or ethnicity) while the modernist political arena remains restricted to class struggle.

Theorists such as Michel Maffesoli believe that postmodernity is corroding the circumstances that provide for its subsistence and will eventually result in a decline of individualism and the birth of a new neo-Tribal era.

According to theories of postmodernity, economic and technological conditions of our age have given rise to a decentralized, media-dominated society in which ideas are only simulacra, inter-referential representations and copies of each other with no real, original, stable or objective source of communication and meaning. Globalization, brought on by innovations in communication, manufacturing and transportation, is often cited as one force which has driven the decentralized modern life, creating a culturally pluralistic and interconnected global society lacking any single dominant center of political power, communication or intellectual production. The postmodernist view is that inter-subjective, not objective, knowledge will be the dominant form of discourse under such conditions and that ubiquity of dissemination fundamentally alters the relationship between reader and that which is read, between observer and the observed, between those who consume and those who produce.

In Spaces of Hope Harvey argues that postmodern political movements have been indirectly responsible for weakening class issues (in the Marxist sense) and the critical consciousness of this field of action which, in his opinion, is now more significant than during the Fordist period. For Harvey this class conflict is far from solved (something postmodern theorists ignore, according to his argument): globalization has made it more difficult for labour organisations to tackle underpaid work in poor conditions without labour rights and the amount of surplus value earned by corporations is far larger because of the differential between the high prices paid by western consumers and the low wages earned by south-east Asian labourers.

Postmodernity as a shift of epistemology
Another conceptualization has argued that postmodernity might be best described within the framework of epistemological shifts. This argument presupposes that epistemological shifts occur as a result of changes in culture, society, and technology and suggests that the political, cultural, and technological changes of the 1960s and 1970s stimulated an epistemological shift from modernity to postmodernity. Or said differently, the ways in which people communicate, receive, and justify knowledge (i.e. epistemology) change and these changes are argued to broadly influence cultures, worldviews, and people groups. French & Ehrman (2016), or Sørensen (2007).

Criticisms
Criticisms of the postmodern condition can broadly be put into four categories: criticisms of postmodernity from the perspective of those who reject modernism and its offshoots, criticisms from supporters of modernism who believe that postmodernity lacks crucial characteristics of the modern project, critics from within postmodernity who seek reform or change based on their understanding of postmodernism, and those who believe that postmodernity is a passing, and not a growing, phase in social organization.

Source from Wikipedia