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Postmodernism

Postmodernism has had an enormous impact on the development of theories for international analysis, such as postcolonialism. Although some argue that it provides the relativist, non-culturally specific attitudes that undergird economic globalization, it may also be viewed as a challenge to globalization. This theoretical challenge balances the importance of particularity in human life with the broader contexts—the global—in a dynamic way.

Postmodernism originated in the context of decolonization and developments in philosophy of language that severed the relationship between language and the world. However, it is fair to say that the idea was ushered in definitively by Robert Venturi and Denise Scott-Brown with the publication of Learning From Las Vegas: The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form. That is, it originated from within the field of aesthetics—particularly architecture—in reaction to the international style of architecture based on sameness, universality, and rationality. This development led to its rapid spread to other areas of academic discourse such as critical theory, normative philosophy, the arts, literature, and anthropology—and in some cases even science.

Conceptual Description

Like the term modernism, postmodernism is hard to define as a result of the cluster of opinions and interpretations on offer. Nevertheless, it is fair to say that postmodern theory sought to repudiate the systematization, rationalization, and homogenization offered by modernity and its adherent social and political constructions both within nations and internationally. The repudiation in itself nullifies any attempt at definition.

If the modern epistemological position toward the world was based on knowability, calculability, and predictability, the postmodern position has been one of skepticism. Drawing on developments in the philosophy of language, and the recognition of the principles of arbitrariness and conventionalism on which language is based, led to a sense that language and the world were not in an isomorphic relationship. Reality was no longer knowable. This skepticism was so thoroughgoing that in some cases epistemological skepticism became ontological skepticism—not only was the possibility of knowing reality and appeals to it in theoretical discourse rendered suspect, but also reality itself was strenuously denied. Hence, “truth” could no longer be claimed and all efforts toward settled “meaning” were suspect. On the postmodern view, humans live within a web of representations of truth, meaning, and knowledge constructed in the nexus of power and social and historical privilege. All forms of coherence in social relationships from the interpersonal to the international are viewed to be enmeshed in discourses generated by the powerful to legitimate their privileged positions in an unequal and radically unknowable world. The world, in sum, is linguistic and agonistic. In the philosopher and literary theorist Jean-Francois Lyotard's words, “To speak is to fight.” With truth, justice, beauty, and order collapsing under this view, and power being the only organizing principle, politics from the bedroom, to the boardroom, to the classroom provides the only possibility of action. This action, however, is representational and not direct. Hence, representations more generally, but writing in particular, are the only portals of epistemological access to the world and our place in it.

Implications

With this skepticism came a multiplication of possible representations of the world. Furthermore, since an increasingly fine-grained analysis revealed differences at ever more minute social levels, the individual, once the basic unit of social analysis, but subordinated under Marxist social theory, emerges once again. However, it does so in a different manner. The skepticism regarding foundational epistemology affects a dissolution of the individual. Subjectivity is now dispersed into networks of associations and multiple identifications. Various cultural and social formations of the self, on the postmodern view, are viewed to originate from a nexus of differing configurations of time and space. Thus, for example, one might identify with local, regional, national, and international groups depending on the temporal span within which subjectivity is being construed. The main idea here is that time and space are not fixed. Rather, various geographies and histories can be invoked in the making of the narratives within which our lives are structured, lived, and represented. Thus, one might think of 19th-century Punjab in consideration of the formation of modern Sikh identity embedded not only in its own historical narrative but also in those of the French, the English, and even the Russians; or World War II as the context within which international identifications for ordinary Sikhs were formed; or the present moment in an urban context within which a conversation with a neighbor is taking place. In other words, since the self is distributed through multiple geographical and historical networks, identity formation is an ongoing activity undertaken in response to contextual demands. On the postmodern view, narratives of self and others are kaleidoscopic in their representational realizations and possibilities. The new forms of representations such as history, for example, are freed from the demands of a linear, teleological grand narrative of development and progress, leading to histories of lack, subordination, and even erasure.

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