[Framework Post] Week 2: Postmodernism.

In the opening of Daniel Palmer’s lecture, Palmer remarks that the postmodern age has been referred to as “Enlightenment to the Modern Era”. If the concept of an era’s “enlightenment” mean nothing more than a revision or even complete break-away—often resultant of and—from its preceding epoch, then I would have to agree with such a label. However, historically, the concept of the humanistic Enlightenment (popularised by the 18th Century Italian Renaissance) entails a much more positive and altruistic impulse in bringing about positive change and, in fact, hope. When Jugern Habermas, in Modernity – An Incomplete Project (1989), associates the modern era as 19th Century’s answer to an Enlightenment, Habermas did rightly so as the modernity did inbue itself a hopeful and progressive aspiration, albeit often argued misguided. The result of postmodernism, on the other hand, is borne of a darker note of deep-seated distrust, so much so that David Harvey farces that “illustrious figures as Prince of Wales and Pope John Paul II [resorted] to postmodernist rhetoric and argumentation” often lamenting a regret of the products of modernity—in the case of Prince Charles, the “postwar urban redevelopment [… in] London” (40), and for Pope John the “philosophies of the twentieth century” (41).

Distrust in traditional concepts of meta-narratives, absolute truths, history, originality, etc have become the very seed that spun a great web of post- theories seeking to debase and refocus earlier bodies of knowledge. This web is a complicated one allowing parallels, disjunctions and binary opposites to sit almost comfortably in tension with each other. It was for the past few decades a liberating force that uncovered amany false processes of naturalisation and knowledge production. Context became an important background by which knowledge has to be sited to reveal hidden agendas and biases. Power was decentred and localised from previously prevailing voices of authority.

What then caused this supposedly liberating era of personal freedom and power to be deemed dead upon the devastation of the World Trade Centre in what we know today as the 9/11 episode? Why then are people beginning to reaccept overly simplistic rationales made for war and the relinquishment of some part of the freedom that the postmodern advocates have long fought to gain? Why are people relooking to forms of faith and religion to guide their actions? Is an era borne of distrust truly doomed to break down at some eventual point due to what seems like people’s intrinsic desire for an illusive unifying voice of authority? In other words, is the postmodern era of intellectual distruct and criticalness becoming a bad case of regret for its people?



References:

1. Harvey, David. “Postmodernism.” The Condition of Postmodernity. Cambridge, Massachuset: Basil Blackwell, 1989. 39-65.