Postmodernism

Postmodernism is in general the era that follows Modernism.It

frequently serves as an ambiguous overarching term
for skeptical interpretations of culture, literature, art, philosophy,
economics,architecture, fiction, and literary criticism. Because
postmodernism is a reactionary stereotype, it is often used pejoratively to
describe writers, artists, or critics who give the impression they believe in
noabsolute truth or objective reality.For example, it may derogatorily refer
to "any of various movements in reaction to modernism that are typically
characterized by... ironic self-reference and absurdity (as in literature)" or to
"a theory that involves a radical reappraisal of modern assumptions about
culture, identity, history, or language". It is also confused
with deconstruction and post-structuralism because its usage as a term
gained significant popularity at the same time as twentieth-century poststructural thinkers.

Postmodernism and Structuralism

Structuralism was a philosophical movement developed by French
academics in the 1950s, partly in response to French Existentialism. It has
been seen variously as an expression of Modernism, High modernism, or
postmodernism. "Post-structuralists" were thinkers who moved away from
the strict interpretations and applications of structuralist ideas. Many
American academics consider post-structuralism to be part of the broader,
less well-defined postmodernist movement, even although many poststructuralists insisted it was not. Thinkers who have been called
structuralists include the anthropologist Claude Lvi-Strauss, the
linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, the Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser,
and the semioticianAlgirdas Greimas The early writings of the
psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan and the literary theorist Roland Barthes have

also been called structuralist. Those who began as structuralists but

became post-structuralists include Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Jean
Baudrillard, Gilles Deleuze. Other post-structuralists include Jacques
Derrida, Pierre Bourdieu, Jean-Franois Lyotard, Julia Kristeva, Hlne
Cixous, and Luce Irigaray. The American cultural theorists, critics and
intellectuals they influenced include Judith Butler, John Fiske, Rosalind
Krauss, Avital Ronell, Hayden White).
Post-structuralism is not defined by a set of shared axioms or
methodologies, but by an emphasis on how various aspects of a particular
culture, from its most ordinary, everyday material details to its most abstract
theories and beliefs, determine one another. Post-structuralist thinkers
reject Reductionism and Epiphenomenalism and the idea that cause-andeffect relationships are top-down or bottom-up. Like structuralists, they start
from the assumption that people's identities, values and economic
conditions determine each other rather than having intrinsic properties that
can be understood in isolation.[6] Thus the French structuralists considered
themselves to be espousing Relativism and Constructionism. But they
nevertheless tended to explore how the subjects of their study might be
described, reductively, as a set of essential relationships, schematics, or
mathematical symbols. (An example is Claude Lvi-Strauss's algebraic
formulation of mythological transformation in "The Structural Study of
Myth"[7]). Post-structuralists thinkers went further, questioning the existence
of any distinction between the nature of a thing and its relationship to other
things.
Post-structuralism
Post-Structuralists generally reject the notion of formulations of essential
relations in primitive cultures, languages, or descriptions of psychological
phenomena being forms of Aristotelianism, Rationalism, or Idealism.
Another common thread among thinkers associated with the PostStructuralist movement is the criticism of the absolutist, quasi-scientific
claims of Structuralist theorists as more reflective of the mechanistic
bias[8] inspired by bureaucratization and industrialization than of the innerworkings of actual primitive cultures, languages or psyches. Generally,
Post-structuralists emphasize the inter-determination and contingency of
social and historical phenomena with each other and with the cultural
values and biases of perspective. Such realities were not to be dissected,
in the manner of some Structuralists, as a system of facts that could

exist independently from values and paradigms (either those of the

analysts or the subjects themselves), but to be understood as both causes
and effects of each other.[9] For this reason, most Post-structuralists hold a
more open-ended view of function within systems than did Structuralists
and were sometimes accused of circularity and ambiguity. Poststructuralists countered that, when closely examined, all formalized claims
describing phenomena, reality, or truth, rely on some form or circular
reasoning and self-referential logic that is often paradoxical in nature. Thus,
it was important to uncover the hidden patterns of circularity, self-reference
and paradox within a given set of statements rather that feign objectivity, as
such an investigation might allow new perspectives to have influence and
new practices to be sanctioned or adopted. In this latter respect, Poststructuralists were, as a group, continuing the philosophical project initiated
by Martin Heidegger, who saw himself as extending the implications
of Friedrich Nietzsche's work.
Post-structuralist writing tends to connect observations and references from
many, widely varying disciplines into a synthetic view of knowledge and its
relationship to experience, the body, society and economy - a synthesis in
which it sees itself as participating. Structuralists, while also somewhat
inter-disciplinary, were more comfortable within departmental boundaries
and often maintained the autonomy of their analytical methods over the
objects they analyzed. Post-structuralists, unlike Structuralists, did not
privilege a system of (abstract) "relations" over the specifics to which such
relations were applied, but tended to see the notion of the relation or of
systemization itself as part-and-parcel of any stated conclusion rather than
a reflection of reality as an independent, self-contained state or object. If
anything, if a part of objective reality, theorization and systemization to
Post-structuralists was an exponent of larger, more nebulous patterns of
control in social orders patterns that could not be encapsulated in theory
without simultaneously conditioning it. For this reason, certain Poststructural thinkers were also criticized by more Realist, Naturalist or
Essentialist thinkers of anti-intellectualism or anti-Philosophy. Poststructuralists, in contrast to Structuralists, tend to place a great deal of
skepticism on the independence of theoretical premises from collective bias
and the influence of power, and reject the notion of a "pure" or "scientific"
methodology in social analysis, semiotics or philosophical speculation. No
theory, they said especially when concerning human society or
psychology was capable of reducing phenomena to elemental systems or
abstract patterns, nor could abstract systems be dismissed as secondary

derivatives of a fundamental nature: systemization, phenomena, and

values were part of each other.