Shane Lore

Lawrence E. Cahoone, From Modernism to Postmodernism (Hoboken, New Jersey: Wiley-Blackwell, 1996).

Notes from this book that relate to postmodernism are as follows…

Edmund Husserl, from The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenlogy, edited by Lawrence E. Cahoone (Hoboken, New Jersey: Wiley-Blackwell, 1996): 226-242.

• Husserl showed how modernity is in crisis because it was founded on a project of universal human reason that never materialized, while its children the specific sciences spread out and excelled and grew up. Thus the question becomes not what is this universal system but can there even be one? Science is advancing without having a foundation. The foundation is just as much a mystery as ever. The discoverers then are more practitioners of techne. This leads to it being more about the mathematical theories explaining phenomena than the phenomena as we experience them. We regard the latter as faulty and merely pointing to the real. Mathematically ideal being is then the real (233-237).
• Always this tension between the ideal world of math and the inductive world of science. How do they relate? (238)
• Husserl: scientists reject any inquiry into foundations of their science as “metaphysical” (239).

Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, from Dialectic of Enlightenment, in From Modernism to Postmodernism, edited by Lawrence E. Cahoone (Hoboken, New Jersey: Wiley-Blackwell, 1996): 243-258.

• Hegel fell into the trap of enlightenment by positing dialectics because it closes the system, leaving no room for mystery or humility (243).
• Enlightenment is a totalitarian straitjacket on thought (244).
• They pick up on Husserl’s thread and show how logical formalism subjects everything to itself except life itself, which it cannot penetrate. What is directly given is lost for what is arrived at abstractly (244).
• Formalism: same as mythic history because both capture reality as a repetition of a schema (244).
• As a mechanistic fatalism akin to the fates, enlightenment likewise justifies all its barbarities with “science” (247).
• By its very nature reason presumed to unify knowledge but does so by reconciling or one could say steamrolling contradictions. That’s the whole point of reason: unity under a system. Reason assumes a priori that all of reality can be reduced to its system and operations. It forces us to see the world this way (248).
• Reason subjugates everything to the schematic system and crushes things into its system. “Enlightenment, however, is the philosophy which equates the truth with scientific systematization” BUT “the notion of the self-understanding of science contradicts the notion of science itself.” Kant’s work is condemned as dogmatic because it attempted this (249). And Kant’s morals were grounded in nothing. It was a vain attempt to ignore the law of the jungle for something supposedly more noble. But the true end result of rationalization is fascism (251).
• Marquis de Sade predicted this: liberalism posits a false equality: the elites never experience justice but the theory that they may permits the shackling of the people. Justice under liberalism is a tool used by those with force and strength (252).
• In Enlightenment “all the power of nature was reduced to mere indiscriminate resistance to the abstract power of the subject” (254).
• Enlightenment is one new set of taboos substituted for a previous set, but with a fatal flaw: Instrumentalization of reason, because it has no metaphysical basis, cannot resist anything adequately, even the perversion of its principle of anti-authoritarianism by fascism. This is because “theory itself becomes and incomprehensible concept” (256).
• Enlightenment enthronement of the subject (subjective rationality) leads to Sartre’s idea of the subject creating his own essence and all of mankind. Entails the absolute freedom of man to create free of God and nature (259).
• They seem to be opposed to postmodernism in that even though they say man makes his own values, the true value above all is freedom.

Martin Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” in From Modernism to Postmodernism, edited by Lawrence E. Cahoone (Hoboken, New Jersey: Wiley-Blackwell, 1996): 274-308.

• He says that thinking has been held captive to logic by philosophy’s desire to be considered a science. This has cut us off from a full engagement of being through thinking (275).
• Thinking of being is both “subjective” and “objective genitive.” “Thinking is of Being inasmuch as thinking, coming to pass from Being, belongs to Being” (276).
• Metaphysics straitjacketed a dichotomy between possibility and logic. Being does not fit into these categories (276).
• Being is beyond the comprehensibility of scientific proofs of rationality or irrationality, and language has been constrained to act in service of metaphysical science (or what Derrida would call logocentrism) instead of in service to the mystery of being (278).
• Dwelling in Silence and nameless-ness is the first step toward nearness with Being (279).
• Whether Marxism, Sartrean existentialism, or Christianity, they all define humanism according to a preconceived metaphysics (280).
• Thus we need a metaphysics of metaphysics. Humanisms all ignore this question of being (280).
• Metaphysics until now has not questioned itself, not asked as to its own truth. And the essence of man depends on the Truth of being. Currently whatever is apprehended is apprehended under a presupposition. And so the question is not thoroughly thought (281).
• Reducing man to rational animal or biology ignores his essence as thrown-ness. As “ek-sistence.” Outside is “ek,” like in ecstasy (282).
• Language is not straightforward symbol but the lighting-concealing of being. It is shifting (283).
• Dasein or what a human being is is not a question of essence vs existence. It’s a being thrown-ness that doesn’t fit into this paradigm (284).
• But this dichotomy is what all metaphysics has thought from Plato on, even Sartre though he reverses it. It’s the oblivion on being (285).
• Man in his ek-sistence which means he stands outside himself while also being in himself in Being, is the shepherd of being in the sense that his outside-ness of himself allows him a unique role in care with regard to Being. But this does not mean man stands as universal subject and designated all other beings as the field of objectivity, as if it were just a question of scientific observation (286).
• Language has to be similarly rethought as the house of being rather than phonemes enlivened by rhythm and melody that denote meanings (288). This could be said to Foreshadow the fluid slippage of language Derrida postulated.
• Being is what is given and what is given into (288). [An aside: is philosophy just the circling back round to the pre-Socratics after the platonic and Christian route had been abandoned? Look into Derrida and Heraclitus to understand this.]
• We are stuck at the esti gar einai “for there is being” of Parmenides because true thinking of being cannot progress outside of this place without being a mistake. [This mistake would be the presuppositions Derrida highlights.] Metaphysical arguments are useless, mere “lover’s quarrels” (289).
• Oblivion of being is caused by preoccupation with beings and confusion between them (292). Metaphysics aids this oblivion (295). There is a hint that silence is the way toward the truth of being (295).
• Logic requires that any questioning of a positive must be a negative. Therefore thought is channeled along the same worn paths. People react in horror when Heidegger questions this form because logic has labeled anything else nihilism. But the presupposed and straightforward assertion of a positive necessarily creates a negative as its only opposition (297).
• To think being in its essence requires tracing the logic that has obscured it (298).
• Valuing things doesn’t let them simply be. It makes them be valid. There is a subjectivizing obfuscation that occurs when a value is proclaimed (298).
• [Living in the light of being involves the humility Derrida hints at.]
• “There is a thinking more rigorous than the conceptual” (303).
• True thinking of being is not like philosophy or praxis or science. It “is as if nothing at all happens” (306). Its simplicity surprises us. [This is akin to the unknowingness Derrida gets at.] “Thinking is on the descent to the poverty of its provisional essence” (308). It has to enter humbly into contact with Being (308). This is opposed to existentialism because man is Being’s Shepherd rather than master (274).

Thomas Kuhn, “The Nature and Necessity of Scientific Revolutions,” in From Modernism to Postmodernism, edited by Lawrence E. Cahoone (Hoboken, New Jersey: Wiley-Blackwell, 1996): 309-324.

• Thomas Kuhn shows convincingly that scientific paradigms shift not because of rational progress within the thought structure playing according to the accepted rules, but because individuals consciously step outside those existing structures and propose new ones. This “stepping out of” necessitates a situation in which there is no supra- governing framework. Therefore it is not rational or logical or scientific deductivity that governs this process but pure persuasion or often times force. Outside of the rational structure of thought, “there is no standard higher than the assent of the relevant community” (311).
• “Paradigms provide all phenomena except anomalies with a theory-determined place in the scientist’s field of vision.” It is these anomalies that break paradigms and cause shifts (313).
• Some attack this conception of science by saying old paradigms aren’t overthrown, they’re just relativized. They say Einstein’s theory didn’t overthrow Newton, it just relegated it to certain conditions. But that would mean paradigms wouldn’t be paradigms—they’d only apply to things already observed. They are by definition universalized or they’re not paradigms (316).
• Newton made Aristotle look like a tautological word game or occult speculation (318).
• But not all occultism was jettisoned. Gravity for instance as an innate mysterious attraction between particles was little better than the scholastics’ “tendency to fall” (319).
• Paradigm arguments are partially circular. They satisfy the criteria they themselves set and fall short of the ones set by other paradigms. But none ever solves all the problems. And two paradigms don’t leave the same problems unsolved. So then the value judgment comes up: which problems are more important to be solved? This is a recourse to something external to science. It is value based and revolutionary (323).

Rober Venturi, from Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, in From Modernism to Postmodernism, edited by Lawrence E. Cahoone (Hoboken, New Jersey: Wiley-Blackwell, 1996): 325-335.

• Mies van der Rohe creates great buildings because he picks particular problems of the building and solves them to the exclusion of the other messy problems. Modernism is a totalizing and simplifying force that by definition has to exclude swaths of reality and insoluble problems because of its commitment to rationality and universality. Postmodern architecture that would result from Venturi embraces contradiction, irony, and intractability (327).
• Clarity of modernism is sacrificed for richness of meaning with postmodernism (329).
• “When circumstances defy order, order should bend or break: anomalies and uncertainties give validity to architecture” (331).
• For incremental traditional development: “The complex program which is a process, continually changing and growing in time yet at each stage at some level related to a whole, should be recognized as essential at the scale of city planning” (334).

Jacques Derrida, “The End of the Book and the Beginning of Writing,” in From Modernism to Postmodernism, edited by Lawrence E. Cahoone (Hoboken, New Jersey: Wiley-Blackwell, 1996): 336-359.

• The occurrence of a “signified” by its nature denotes a slippage if meaning (338).
• Either writing is not just a supplement to speech or we need to change our definition of supplement (338).
• In the west writing has been the nonpresent interpreter or translator of an original fundamental presence (338).
• Writing is used by Derrida for all sign making, all semiotics (339).
• The great Adventure of western metaphysics has been to convince us that the written word is the imperfect vehicle of the original spoken word, that it is primary. This adventure was conveyed through writing, however. This shows the paradox of this situation: the denigration of writing is conveyed by writing. The “corruption” of speech by writing is the very medium that tries to tell us about this corruption (341).
• Rationality ultimately does not govern writing (341).
• Going back to Aristotle, voice is immediately proximate to thought, while writing is a step removed from them. According to him the words and representations change but the mental processes are the same for all (342).
• Hegel also intimated that the ear perceived not as in some relation to the ideal behind the sound but as if it were perceiving this ideal directly (342).
• This phonocentrism dovetails with the historical understating of being as presence, nowness (343).
• The opposition of signified and signifier in the Greek and Christian tradition is premised on the actuality and reality of the ideal signified and the falling short of the signifier. This is an unacknowledged privileging of the one over the other. This implies the distinction between the sensible and the intelligible (343).
• The signified thus is the “pure” element which relates to the eternal logos before “falling” to the sensible world in the signifier. Not to say we could dispense with these concepts but Derrida means to outline their historical situation (344).
• Deconstructing presence, the signs, and metaphysics requires using their own tools. These tools are the only thing that can point to the unnameable beyond. But using them also entails falling back into their traps (345).
• Writing confines itself to secondariness according to western metaphysics. It related to a signifier mediately which related to an “eternal verity” immediately. It is metaphoricity itself (345).
• Absolute presence determined the superior reality of the spoken word pre-modernity. After Rousseau, absolute divine presence is replaced with self-presence springing from the senses. This is the Enlightenment enthronement of the subject, of the sensible cogito. This is the new divine law. So don’t look to the Bible but to the human heart, which rightly comprehends nature, the living book (347).
• Rousseau: “natural” writing of nature is more like voice than writing. It’s interior, present, immediate. As opposed to the artful technique of exterior writing (348).
• The “book” is an attempt to encapsulate this totality in the preexisting and eternal idea. As such it is opposed to the disrupting and unfenced or unfleeced quality of writing (349).
• Nietzsche was one of the first to explore a framework outside metaphysics (349).
• Nietzsche however is not simply intending to substitute an inverted metaphysics for the traditional metaphysics. Such a one would be merely part of the tradition of metaphysics and would be a naive sort of rebellion. Instead he had “written what he has written”: he has asserted that his writing is not originally subordinate to a logos at all. Sort of to say that it floats, that this idea that his imperfect writing is merely the reflection of some perfect logos is not even the case. Heidegger on the other hand read Nietzsche as merely reversing the roles of the sign and signifier, and he ultimately upheld logos as originary, though he eschewed settling on its form as this or that version of logos (349).
• Conscience usually stands in for this pure ideality. It’s voice is heard within the self, making it feel as if it is original, unmediated. It is unworldly, so it is said. “Within this closure” the word is lived as transcendental and transparent. Heidegger gives credence to this concept with his idea of a concept of Being above and beyond all words. Heidegger doesn’t want it to be tied to a certain concept, but it is at least tied to the concept of “the possibility of the word in general. And to the possibility of its irreducible simplicity.” Derrida asks, “Is not all that is profoundly meditated as the thought or the question of being enclosed within an old linguistics of the word which one practices here unknowingly?” (351) [It seems Derrida is saying multiplicity, chaos, unintelligibility is primary in reality.]
• Modern linguistics is deconstructing language, and in that process it inadvertently deconstructs the ontology which it relies on as part of classical conceptuality and metaphysics. This is similar to what Heidegger talked about when he said that the question of being comes from science but then goes outside of it to something it cannot comprehend. His meditation on being dislocates the sense of the word like modern linguistics (352). It is at once within the metaphysical closure. and outside it. Being is obfuscated and occluded by the signs under which it is understood, but Heidegger ends by basically saying that the classical assumption of a gap between being and its representatives in the world is essentially nothing. That Being is all these things and that there is not a hidden essence beneath the surface. Seems obvious enough, but his way of getting there is unique and makes the conclusion seem profound. But he invites us to meditate on how the third person singular (it is) and the infinitive (to be) have dominated and channeled our thought about being (rather than things like I am or you are) (353).
• Western metaphysics has limited the sense of being within the field of presence as a result of this linguistic bias. To question this, it doesn’t mean you’re positing a hypostatized “transcendental signified”; it means you’re questioning what invented transcendentality itself. He simultaneously limits and unleashes the logocentric metaphysics when in Zur Seinsfrage he only allows the word being to be printed if it’s crossed out. It is effaced but also still legible (353).
• Ultimately the Heideggerian path allows us to think being not as a transcendental signified, but as itself a determined signifying trace. That the trace or sign and the signified derive from one other rather than only in a one-way sense of signified to signifier. This gets back to Derrida concept of differance: differing and deferring all at once, in a continuous circle. So in a sense difference itself is the originary, rather than transcendental being, and yet to call it the originary or ground is itself to fall into logocentrism’s trap, which seeks the effacement of difference ultimately. So the irony is that one must begin with the ontic-ontological difference and then erase that determination. It’s a trick of writing that is “irreducible.” So metaphysics’ and logic’s tribute must be paid even to go outside of them, once again (354).
• Deconstructing the western tradition then can only happen from inside it (355).
• Hegel represents the apotheosis of the western tradition: history is the eschatology of parousia, of “the self-proximity of infinite subjectivity”. He criticizes Leibniz (possibly) because Leibniz theorized the absolute as “being-outside-of-itself” or “the intellectual abstraction” which was akin to writing, which is a going outside of the self to both remember through recording and forget through moving on to something else in the presence of thought (355).
• However Hegel likes alphabetic writing because these symbols refer back to speech directly; they merely assemble speech. Hieroglyphic writing, which is what even alphabetic writing becomes when it is read rapidly and on sight (which would mean even alphabetic writing falls into the evils that Hegel decries here), represents the menace that writing poses to speech. It is the interpretation of speech: it cuts off the living breath for a stuffy and stiff exegesis, cut off as it is from the source. He contrasts it in cultural terms as the difference between Europe and China (356).
• “The horizon of absolute knowledge is the effacement of writing in the logos, the retrieval of the trace in parousia, the reappropriation of difference, the accomplishment of what I have elsewhere called the metaphysics of the proper.” (357).
• Yet for all that, Derrida is also to show that Hegel was the “last philosopher of the book and the first thinker of writing” because he conceived of irreducible difference between signified and sign, something Derrida would fully develop, along with the necessity of the written trace in philosophy (357).

Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” from “Truth and Power,” in From Modernism to Postmodernism, edited by Lawrence E. Cahoone (Hoboken, New Jersey: Wiley-Blackwell, 1996): 360-381.

• Foucault picks up the Nietzschean program of tracing the genealogy of morals and ideas. With Nietzsche, he challenged the idea, though, that a pure origin can be found at the beginning of a so-called genealogy. That would presume the existence of “immobile forms that precede the external world of accident and succession,” of a “primordial truth.” Instead things “have no essence or their essence was fabricated in a piecemeal fashion from alien forms” (362).
• Genealogy also leads to laughter at origins, which are not the lofty theogonies our metaphysics prejudice us to think they are (363).
• Only a metaphysician would seek history’s soul “in the distant ideality of the origin” (364).
• Analyzing descent lets the genealogist explode myths of unity: in nations in ideas and even in the self (364).
• Do not look at things as if their present purpose was the goal that some obscure telos within the process of development had been secretly tending towards the whole time. Genealogy doesn’t seek “the anticipatory power of meaning, but the hazardous play of dominations” (366).
• Because of the incommensurability of contending ideas and parties, the emergence of a “synthesis” occurs in the interstices and is not attributable to one camp’s “logic” (367).
• Rules, conscience, taboos are not the cessation of violence after a conflict has ended but its inscription on our very bodies and a continuation of violence (368).
• Rules are empty of themselves: they are tools to be used by wills. Legalism is a naive fraud (368).
• “Interpretation is the violent or surreptitious appropriation of a system of rules, which in itself has no essential meaning” and “the development of humanity is a series of interpretations (369).
• Genealogy shatters traditional history, which shatters “the unity of man’s being through which it was thought he could extend his sovereignty to the events of the past” (369).
• “‘Effective’ history deprived the self of the reassuring stability of life and nature, and it will not permit itself to be transported by a voiceless obstinacy toward a millennial ending” (370).
• “An entire historical tradition (theological or rationalistic) aims at dissolving the singular event into an ideal continuity—as a teleological movement or a natural process.” Effective history attempts no such thing (370).
• The world is “a profusion of entangled events” (370). There is no “landmark or point of reference.” It also acknowledges its bias and revels in it unlike the official historians in denial about their preferences (372).
• Even the historian has a history, which he may be embarrassed to learn (372).
• Historian: “Having curved the demands of his individual will in his knowledge, he will disclose the form of an eternal will in his object of study” (373).
• Nietzsche: objectivity is dressing up “in the part of wisdom.” The straitjacket of objectivity can lead to an impoverishment of the creative spirit (373).
• But since there is no providential telos, like all things, history can be turned against itself in genealogy (374).
• Athenian demagogy birthed metaphysics, “the vulgar spite of Socrates” (374).
• Genealogical history’s described in pp 374 to 377.
• The drive for knowledge is “a position that sides against those who are happy in their ignorance, against the effective illusions by which humanity protects itself, a position that encourages the dangers of research and delights in disturbing discoveries” (376).
• The desire for knowledge has taken on a life of its own and will probably be the thing humanity sacrifices itself to. Only its “enormous prerogatives could direct and sustain such a sacrifice” nowadays (377).
• Definition of how societies produce truth: also describes the “cathedral’s” role in truth production exactly on p. 379.
• “‘Truth’ is linked in a circular relation with systems of power which produce and sustain it, and to effects of power which it induces and which extend it. A regime of truth” (380).

Ihab Hassan, “POSTmodernISM: A Paracritical Bibliography,” in From Modernism to Postmodernism, edited by Lawrence E. Cahoone (Hoboken, New Jersey: Wiley-Blackwell, 1996): 382-400.

• History reinvents the past, like a black Muslim taking a new name and ignoring that Muslims were notorious slave traders too (383).
• Could the end of modernism mean end of periodicization and bringing of simultaneity? (384)
• Since standards are inevitable, they should be used to create new occasions, new forms (385).
• Dismissal of new developments by calling it a fad, saying it’s been done before, saying the old version was better, or saying it’s just contrived academic newspeak are all ways of reacting negatively to the new that reason does without realizing the underlying assumptions to this bias (385).
• Yet rage for change can be a form of self hatred (386).
• The canons of modernism and postmodernism laid out on p. 386.
• “The culture of logos” of modernism inhibits and restrains the new behind cover disguised as definitely as the Supreme Court did the opposite in the 50s (388).
• Language of silence idea captures postmodern mood (388).
• Modernism and postmodernism coexist. And they increasingly throw light on one another (390).
• One element of modernism running through it all is the sundering of societal bonds. Some instead focus on the modern drive to identify and cut off irrationality (391).
• Urbanism in modernism: “nature put in doubt”. City not as a place but as a presence (391).
• Struggle with technology a theme of modernism (392).
• Dehumanization also: not Vitruvian man but Picasso’s splintered man (392).
• Constructivism reveals that lines and forms have their own power independent of anything bearing them in the real world. Modernist tendency to abstraction (392).
• Primitivism can be found in modernist quest to uncover structures undergirding culture (393).
• Antinomianism tendency leads to ruptured iconoclasm, individualism (394).
• Experimentalism, fetishization of the new and change (394).
• The preceding elements carry us toward postmodernism (395).
• Postmodern art is art that while still art “pretends to abolish itself.” This is related to Derrida’s intractable problem (395).
• Predicts “ecological activism, the green revolution, urban renewal, health foods, etc.”
• Postmodern response to modernist dehumanization is participation, anarchy, acceptance, slapstick, camp, negation, abstraction being changed to a new concreteness (397).
• Modernism responds to dehumanization by revising the idea of the self through surrealism, impersonality in art, “modes of hyperpersonality,” while postmodernism responds to it through “authorial self-reflexiveness, by the fusion of fact and fiction,” phenomenology, among other things (397).
• Primitivism brings out in postmodernism things like celebrations of “the Dionysian ego (Brown)” and irrationalism, dovetailing with the hippie movement (398).
• Eroticism leads to new levels of perversity, homosexualism, and comedic versions (398). Many such cases.
• Antinomianism leads to mystical metaphysics and transcendentalism, witchcraft (398).
• “Yet it is already possible to note that whereas Modernism—excepting Dada and Surrealism—created its own forms of artistic Authority precisely because the center no longer held, Postmodernism has tended toward artistic Anarchy in deeper complicity with things falling apart—or has tended toward Pop” (400).

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, from Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, in From Modernism to Postmodernism, edited by Lawrence E. Cahoone (Hoboken, New Jersey: Wiley-Blackwell, 1996): 401-422.

• There is in reality no strict separation between production and consumption. In fact production consumes (raw materials for instance) and consumption produces (effects that follow the consuming). Schizophrenics actually live this out in their inability to strictly separate self from world (403).
• Schizophrenia then is the “essential reality of man and nature” because it is a process, rather than a settled end state (404).
• Everything desires another thing and interrupts its flow through coupling with it and drawing off some of its energy : but then it itself is desired and subjected to the same (405).
• The human sciences work the same way through Claude Levi Strauss’s idea of bricolage. Rearranging fragments one off the other. “Continually producing production” (406).
• Rigid stasis is a part of the production process. It is both dynamic and divided and also immobile and one. Non-productiveness is inserted at a certain point in the production process. So there are no dialectical opposites (407).
• Schizophrenia has been forced into the Oedipal Freudian box, but it resists this. It is beyond questions of the ego because it doesn’t believe in it (409).
• Freud got right that the unconscious produced desires. But he stifled this discovery through imposing the Oedipal roles upon the unconscious. This obscured the productive nature of the unconscious in line with what Deleuze and Guattari are saying (409).
• Instead of imposing ideal forms of causation on schizophrenia, the authors link it to desire production, a chain of desiring and the ruptures and intrusions it causes (410).
• Platonic and classical reasoning posited desire as a lack of something. As a problem of acquisition rather than production. Kant did not fundamentally alter this even though he acknowledged that desire can produce fantasies. It presupposes an ideal world in which the desire’s missing object was present (411).
• These two say desire is a “set of passive syntheses” that produce the flows between objects and bodies. The subject is missing in desire because desire facilitates the creation of a new subject. Repressing desire is what creates the fixed subject who no longer couples. In this system desire is not a byproduct of need but vice versa. The poor are missing desire and are saddled with needs then, because desire is the state of power that produces in the world (412).
• Desire is true power and productive passion. Needs don’t come from it. Lack is created socially: it is introduced into the existing system of production by a dominant class. They do this to create supply and demand which depends on anxiety about not receiving what one NEEDS. This puts fulfillment outside in some exterior controllable function of capital. It is correlated to exterior rationality bearing down on the subject (413).
• Production in the real world is simply desire-production as limited by finite conditions. There’s no mediation of Freudian structures between them (414).
• Psychologists have always attempted to divide desire and the real object as produced and this comes from dualism and idealism. Desire for them is just a subjective mental state. Desiring-production shows the oneness of the two (415).
• Desiring production fixes no strict demarcation between the product and the production, like technical production does. It is self-feeding in a way, breaking down in the process but reconstituting itself as well. Some surrealist artists place interruptions and decomposition in their works of art to bring in something like the decomposition of desiring machines into their technical machine products (416).
• Technical machines are products of some social order while desiring machines are both technical and social. All that is real is the body without organs or the unorganized person of conflicting desires and the Socius or social real world. Which comes first? Both because they are symbiotic (417).
• Capitalism produces schizophrenia in its attempt to deterritorialize the socius and encode everything with only money. Whereas old despotism fueled manic depression and paranoia and the old territorial regime fueled hysteria (417).
• Capitalism tries to recode all that it has decoded but can only do so in an artificial way. It decodes to quantify and extract profit but recodes to produce more flows which can be decoded, yet these are always lacking. It’s not that nothing is no longer real, but that everything is (419).
• Reducing the territorialities of our society or its map of pathways and goods and values and taboos, to the Oedipal complex is a symptom of modernistic totalizing idealism. A materialist psychology would instead locate the basic motor of society as production, whether desire production or social production, and say that reality is produced through their process of interaction (420).
• This is all an application of the inside-out principle of Derrida, the turning on its head of things. Also showing idealistic preconceptions in the modernist Freudian paradigm.

Daniel Bell, from The Coming of Post-Industrial Society, in From Modernism to Postmodernism, edited by Lawrence E. Cahoone (Hoboken, New Jersey: Wiley-Blackwell, 1996): 423-436.

• “Each conceptual scheme is a prism which selects some features, rather than others, in order to highlight historical change” (424).
• Bell gives a great deconstruction of the Marxist fixation in mode of production and how reductionist it is. Instead different metrics reveal different convergences and divergences between systems (424).
• “Any society, since it mingles different kinds of economic, technological, political, and cultural systems (some features of which are common to all, some of which are historical and idiosyncratic) has to be analyzed from different vantage points, depending on the question one has in mind” (426).
• Moving to a post-industrial society involves a shift from labor theory of value to knowledge theory of value. But since knowledge by nature is a social good that can’t be used up and is very difficult to restrict usage of, what incentive do people have to produce it? And what social structure will the new incentives and winners and losers produce? (428). [This question is answered by Florida’s creative class theory,]
• Post industrial society doesn’t erase industrial, it removes some features and thickens “the texture of society as a whole.” (429).
• Meritocracy is a feature of this society based on education and skill (431).
• Two facets are “the centrality of theoretical knowledge and the expansion of the service sector as against a manufacturing economy” (432).
• “When capitalism arose as a social-economic system, it had a tenuous unity: an ethos (individualism), a political philosophy (liberalism), a culture (a bourgeois conception of utility and realism), and a character structure (respectability, delayed gratification, and the like). Many of these elements have withered or remain as pale ideologies. What is left is a technological engine, geared to the idea of functional rationality and efficiency, which promises a rising standard of living and promotes a hedonistic way of life.” And science enters in more deeply in post-industrial society to the extent that rather than providing a new ethos to the society, it itself is subverted, leaving the society with no transcendent ethos, no sources of stable meaning (433).
• The utopian idea that power is progressive and to be desired because it will destroy superstition and religion and lead to liberation was proven wrong by the 20th century (434).

Jean Baudrillard, from Symbolic Exchange and Death, in From Modernism to Postmodernism, edited by Lawrence E. Cahoone (Hoboken, New Jersey: Wiley-Blackwell, 1996): 437-460.

• Marx and the classical conception said that a coin or item of exchange is first related to what it is exchangeable for (like the product being bought) and second to all the other elements of the system that define its relative worth. This has been dislocated and now the second element above is dominant, the structural position. Or the system of reference that relates the sign to the product it is to purchase, which in a way weighs it down with attachment to some real thing, is vanquished and now the sign is free to float in value relative to all other signs. It is a decoupling from the real and tangible. “Signs are exchanged against each other rather than against the real.” This is evidently seen in the way money and speculation are no more tied to a gold standard or to actual production. “Determinacy is dead, indeterminacy holds sway” (438).
• Classical law of value: “one signifier and one signified facilitate the regulated exchange of a referential content” (439).
• “Conversely, the structural law of value signifies the indeterminacy of every sphere in relation to every other, and to their proper content” (440).
• It wasn’t a communist revolution which abolished “the determination of the social according to the means of production” but capital itself (440).
• Genesis of simulacra: the commutability of all former opposites. Everything is dislodged and circulated and exchanged. The economic is no longer determinant in this environment. So Marx is out (440).
• History of production: value is deduced from God and nature. Then commodity production: value produced and related to labor, from which surplus is possible. Basis of both capitalism and its critique, Marxism (441).
• But now we may be in a hyper-capitalist mode, in that capital has invaded everything bloodlessly and created the fluid economy of signs which references only itself and absorbs all of life (442).
• The revolution was based on the alienation of labor, but now everything is alienated by the economy of the sign. The sign substitutes itself for the reality and creates a reality of empty allusions (442).
• Production is not important to labor anymore; it’s joined the cavalcade of signs that has only relative social significance. It has a sign function, an affect, a social simulation, but not much else (443). This could be like how where something’s made is more a part of its marketing campaign than anything else. “Made in America” might just be one more sign rather than as much a statement of some hard physical fact of where something was produced.
• Even the reality of exploitation becomes another sign floating in relation to others, dragging behind it the memory of its real existence. It becomes commodified (443).
• Marx reduces all to production as the autonomous mover of society, with socialism squirreled away within it as its logical goal at the end of a process. What has actually transpired is production as code, which means the preeminence of social signifiers and relations (444).
• Simulacra come in three orders roughly corresponding to three ages of man: counterfeit dominates the renaissance to the industrial revolution, proficient dominates the industrial revolution, and simulation the current era. Respectively they are the natural law of value, market law of value, and structural law of value (444).
• The first order of the counterfeit is because there is an original and then many copies. The second order of production through industrial mass technique effaces all notion of an original and leaves only “equivalence and indifference” in identical mass products and mass men. If you think about it, the very idea of production requires no distinction between an original and a copy. We should stop regarding it as the peak of civilizational progress because it’s really quite limited in its progress toward world mastery and less ambitious than the other two eras (445).
• The true revolution of all this was the simulacra, reproduction. This principle introduced in the Industrial Age would carry us into the third age and swallow up production with it (445)
• Now there is reproduction according to a model, and all forms proceed therefrom with modulated differences. [The meme of the Internet age might be an example.] It’s not just reproduction of a physical series but unleashed evolution of a form. “Modulation is ultimately more fundamental than serial reproducibility, distinct oppositions more than quantitative equivalences, and the commutation of terms more than the law of equivalences; the structural, not the market, law of value.” Production is being absorbed by “operational simulation” (446).
• Digitality is this age’s metaphysical principal and “DNA is its prophet” (447).

Luce Irigaray, “The Sex Which is Not One,” in From Modernism to Postmodernism, edited by Lawrence E. Cahoone (Hoboken, New Jersey: Wiley-Blackwell, 1996): 461-468.

• Luce Irigaray says Freud and the modern Western tradition view woman and her pleasure as afterthoughts (462). She is a “facilitator for the working out of man’s fantasies” (463). She would say by custom, woman’s sexual experience leaves her in a state of dependency and treats her as an object (463).
• One, individual, proper, division—these define logocentrism and the male sexual pattern (464).
• Based on the design of the female organ, woman is not one sex but two, or perhaps plural. She is “other in herself”. This is mirrored in her psychology: “temperamental, incomprehensible, perturbed, capricious” unable to be figured out by man (465). “When she says something, it is already no longer identical to what she means” (465-6).
• Woman breaks the linearity of male rationalism and refuses its ruts. She is excess or remainder around this absolute subject (466).
• Maternity serves the male paradigm here because the woman focuses her multiplicity on a singular object, the child (465) (Irigaray says it is a stand in for the desired male member) (464). This entails loss of the female sexuality (467).
• Nor property, but nearness what women desire (467).
• She supports feminist “liberation” but says its “phallocratic” orientation will not truly liberate women unless their true diffuse feminine nature is recognized, cultivated, and placed above the male paradigm (468).

Charles Jencks, “The Death of Modern Architecture,” from What is Post-Modernism? in From Modernism to Postmodernism, edited by Lawrence E. Cahoone (Hoboken, New Jersey: Wiley-Blackwell, 1996): 469-480.

• Jencks: “Rationalism, Behaviorism, and Pragmatism” the inspiration behind modern architecture. It died with the demolition of Pruitt-Igoe a mere twenty years after it was built. The abstracting logic it embodied failed to comprehend humans (470).
• “Faults of an age trying to reinvent itself totally on rational grounds” (471).
• Jencks popularized the term beginning in 1975. Postmodern architecture double codes in modernism and in other languages, usually traditionalism, to try to communicate with everyone, not just other architects. They remain separate from revivalist though through use of things like “irony, parody, displacement, complexity, eclecticism, realism”, etc. It continues modernism but also transcends it (472).
• International style by Walter Gropius, Ludwig Mies van Der Rohe, and Le Corbusier like a straitjacket (473).
• Modernist principles of “truth to materials,” “logical consistency,” “straightforwardness,” “simplicity” all prevent modernist architecture from any kind of allusion or play. (474)
• Postmodernism does please more people. It’s interesting and its pluralism stretches to accommodate more tastes. As Jencks found in Stuttgart (475).
• State capitalism of Russia and China a hybrid born of postmodernism (475).
• Jencks predicted total ascendancy of postmodernism by 2000 (476).
• Says postmodernism is a stage of growth and you have to go through modernism first. (477).
• The reductivism, analysis, and specialization modernism imposes does not lend itself to an understanding that all things are interconnected (477).
• Jencks presages metamodernism: postmodernism won’t lapse into total relativism and skepticism, but will instead “support relative absolutism, or fragmental holism, which insists on the developing and jumping nature of scientific growth, and the fact that all propositions of truth are time- and context-sensitive.” (478). [Postmodernism basically requires metamodernism. It follows inevitably.]
• Like post-Fordism, (478) postmodernism is kind of like a lack, a parasite, and so it cannot exist on its own. It’s not content but critique.

Jean-François Lyotard, from The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, in From Modernism to Postmodernism, edited by Lawrence E. Cahoone (Hoboken, New Jersey: Wiley-Blackwell, 1996): 481-513.

• Lyotard: metanarratives are overarching stories that legitimate value systems (482).
• We live at the intersection of clouds of narratives that are not mutually communicable (482). In the face of this, we are managed according to efficiency, which entails a level of tyranny (482-3). Consensus in such an environment just means violence to certain language games, so Habermas is wrong (483).
• State takes power to spread knowledge and science to “the people.” That is one legitimating narrative (483-4).
• The whole German intellectual project bears witness to this. Two ideas are forced together: the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, or the speculative spirit, and the pursuit of knowledge for the sake of the people, or Bildung. The first is theoretical, the second practical. The idealists do this by means of Spirit or what Fichte calls Life, which is a name for the supposed governing Idea that unites these goals. Philosophy is the means for this. It then “links the sciences together as moments in the becoming of spirit.” A metanarrarive. Hegel’s project, the universal history of knowledge and all its forms in the sciences as “Life” (484-6). Truth and usefulness are not the same thing, not subject to the same criteria, and so their marriage is necessarily arbitrary (486).
• The speculative discourse of Spirit or Life arranges all knowledge as pieces of itself, each finding its place within the overall framework which exists to legitimate itself. It provides a hermeneutic key in this way and guarantees intelligibility and the possibility of ultimate knowledge (486-7).
• But that unity has been shattered in postmodernism, and so the first version (self-emancipating humanity as the subject of knowledge) is now predominant. The legitimating language game here is what Kant called the Imperative, aka the prescriptive (487). Knowledge’s role here is “that it allows morality to become reality” (488).
• Marxism can take both forms. Either both knowledge and practice are elements of the march toward socialism as in Stalinism, or knowledge becomes the means to the end, that being the emancipation of the proletariat (Frankfurt school believed this for a time) (488).
• Advanced liberal capitalism seems to entail delegitimation and the destruction of unified knowledge by valorizing the individual and his enjoyment of goods (489).
• Idealist speculative tradition says scientific knowledge isn’t actually knowledge itself. Knowledge must be self-legitimating, and science is just facts. Idealism presupposes its own legitimacy (490). Nietzsche said nihilism resulted from the truth requirement of science being turned back on itself (490); the drive for legitimation creates delegitimation (491).
• And with the enlightenment: two different language games at work, and so truth and justice not the same nor do they work according to the same rules. Science is then set adrift from morality as just another language game. Enlightenment dream of scientifically true and arrived-at justice in political life is thus a fantasy (491-492).
• The meta language that is used to define whether statements conform to the rules of whatever language game they’re in is logic (493).
• Logic has internal limitations, though, as do all formal systems. It has to use “natural” or “everyday” language, the language that must be used to understand anything, but this language allows paradoxes, which means it is not consistent with logic (494).
• The possibility of paradoxes means that there is an opening for ruptures implicit in the system, such as Thomas Kuhn describes and which actually represent the “progress” of science. The rules that get blown open are therefore not logically airtight but rather “agreements” among interested communities. They are upheld by consensus about what makes up the “rules” (494-5).
• Even “proof” within the empirical system is not ironclad. Scientists describe their methods so others can replicate them, but replicating and observing them—how trustworthy are the sense organs that are used for this? (495)
• Technology is meant to sharpen this observational capacity, but technology requires wealth to develop, build, and sustain. Therefore verifying and creating “truth” becomes a function of funding, and therefore of resource control and power. “No technology without wealth, but no wealth without technology” (495-6).
• But a system based on power cannot bridge the gap between the three different language games that determine “what is strong, what is just, and what is true.” Technology increases efficiency, which increases performativity, which increases the ability to create proof, which increases the ability to be right (497); performance then becomes a kind of legitimation: “normativity of laws is replaced by the performativity of procedures.” The concentration of information possible with technology creates a self-reinforcing and -legitimating loop (498).
• Both modernist narratives: the dialectic of spirit and the emancipation of man are shown as baseless by postmodernism (499).
• Paralogy is a logically unjustified conclusion (481). That is what all legitimation boils down to (499). Paralogy births new paradigms that don’t arise dialectically from the rules of a pre-existing language game (499-500).
• Consensus is artificially created by making individual wills aspire to the system’s decisions, something accomplished through control of information flows (500). The system only meets needs that improve the productivity of the system, or only those needs that not meeting would involve instability to the system. It can fret and wring its hands about things like homelessness but never solve the issue. That would just be another expenditure (501).
• Even science functions according to “terror” and becomes a regular old power center because disruptive theories are not given a fair hearing rather than refuted. The paradigm changes happen as revolutions opening into a decaying or moribund current ideology, they do not emerge from within the accepted framework (501-502) [this is Kuhn and Lehman I believe].
• In principle science could be the opposite of stability if the pure criterion of proof in support of novelty is adhered to. This is an acceptance of a lack of a meta language. But how can such a system relate to the power-sucking mechanism of society? Can science and the state be separate and equal any more than science and money in our system? (502) But at least in theory science could operate by seeking knowledge with “newness” of ideas being the rule scientists play by (503).
• But society is too complex to even pretend to want this goal. Both traditional and modern metanarratives have failed, which is why the system cynically calls up performance as its raison d’etre (503).
• Habermas and the liberals assume an identity between the knowledge or denotative science game and the action or prescriptive emancipation politics game. He’s wrong in part because the knowledge game works by Paralogy, not consensus, and the action game works by performativity, not consensus (503-4).
• Lyotard has a solution. Consensus then is a lie because it is based on the fallacy that the language games are reconcilable under a single discourse. But justice may not be this way. He thinks we can reach justice by relativizing all meta language games, keeping them local and applicable only to the current players, subject to modification or cancellation at any time (504). [In truth he does not solve the problem but only makes it “smaller” or attempts to. Within any “local” Grouping there is always the possibility of disagreement about the assumptions underlying any language game that may be adopted, no matter how temporarily. The end result of seeking justice in this way is complete atomization, to the point where no individual can enter into relation with any other because consensus is not possible, even on Lyotard’s “local” temporary scale. And what’s more, even individuals are not unitary wholes, as Deleuze and Guattari explain. Can there be consensus and justice in the fragmented soul of the average individual, or will one dimension of the personality repress or drown out the others? Postmodern solutions many times look like watered down modernist ones because postmodernism is not a real thing; it’s a critique. It is not solid. His solution merely kicks the can down the road and seeks to lessen the severity of the problem rather than fix it. Related to Derrida’s discussion of violence to fight violence.]
• And Lyotard admits the system likes temporary because it adds to flexibility and therefore dynamism. He points to formerly permanent things becoming temporary things like marriage and family and employment [and I add, where we live]. [Yes, more “just” if justice is unimpeded wills, but more enslaving ultimately. This where postmodernism reveals it’s essentially the same old liberal worship of license and the exaltation of the will] (504).
• He ends by discussing how information technology could increase surveillance and regulation of people’s lives versus how it could provide almost perfect, real-time information to the public as a balance to concentrated power. It seems to have done both since his writing (504-5).

Mark C. Taylor, from Erring: A Postmodern A/theology, in From Modernism to Postmodernism, edited by Lawrence E. Cahoone (Hoboken, New Jersey: Wiley-Blackwell, 1996): 514-533.

• Mark C. Taylor posits Derrida’s deconstruction as the “‘hermeneutic’ of the death of God” (515); with Derrida he maintains that concepts define one another, so none is absolutely primary. Too, no system can encompass all of western theology. However he gives four key concepts: God, self, history, book (515-6).
• Though monotheistic, western theology, like philosophy, is dyadic in opposing concepts to one another, while always privileging one side (516-8). But a modernist rebellion that merely inverts the value hierarchy still remains trapped by that hierarchy. Instead it must be dissolved. It must bring a new meaning to the past (518).
• Derridean deconstruction dislocated the network that embeds dyadic oppositions (519). By definition deconstruction cannot be fixed in meaning. It slides along and within meaning to create permanent transition. It undermines foundations and shows that the entire edifice is in motion (519).
• Taylor uses “erring” as the theme of his theology. To err is to be aimless, errant, off the mark. His a/theology then isn’t atheism or theism; it has no beginning and no end, and is never finished. He links this “nonbinary” to the paradox of the Cross to give it some basis in Christianity (521-2). [He may be getting at something, but not in the way he thinks.]
• He says incarnation is the death of God because God becomes Word, the unchangeable becomes changeable, inscribed, in-scripted into the world (522-23). This becomes a sort of pantheism, or theology of divine process, where God as the distant, impenetrable entity vanishes and God as the fluid, ever shifting and variably interpretable word has infiltrated reality.
• Derrida talks about how all systems that privilege the “signified” over the “sign” (the ideal or reality over the word that is supposed to refer to it) are ultimately theological. Truth is the transcendental referent, not the mere changeable word we use to refer to it. (523).
• Derrida takes that and says the signified is also itself a sign (524). Therefore, there is no “there” there. Consciousness is generating in large part the transcendent that it believes is external to itself (524). Writing therefore is not about something but is that thing. Writing is “about” itself (524). Rather than firm foundation, the whole structure of intelligibility is a makeshift building where every part is holding up every other part. When one piece shifts, the entire edifice moves.
• When the transcendental signified is just another signifier (the death of God), then the word is released from being simply the Father’s “thesis.” The divine takes on both/and, presence/absence, itself and yet other (524-5).
• Derridean insight relies on our trappedness: reading writing is not a straightforward communication of ideas from someone’s head to yours, but a complex interplay of communication and creation. Writing lives in the “joint” between minds, neither here nor there (525).
• The middle, the milieu, the mean, is a permeable membrane where outside becomes in and inside becomes out, all at the same time (526). Like the Zeno’s paradox, where is the boundary? Where does one become the other?
• Interstitiality is actually permanent, not temporary. The word, as eternally creative and destructive, therefore, is God (527). Taylor: “Writing… is the structured and differing origin of differences” (526). “Writing is an unending play of differences that establishes the thoroughgoing relativity of all ‘things’” (529).
• This would seem to break down the law of noncontradiction, the bedrock principle of logic (528). It mirrors what Catholics say about the Trinity, in some sense: it is relationships of opposition that create difference within the perfect unity of God. Likewise for Taylor and Derrida, meaning is not stable, and one thing is not distinct from another. They gain meaning in relation only to the other parts of the whole, and there’s no foundation. Logic is subverted by this: a does not equal b becomes if a then b and if b then a. One cannot always say that a equals a under deconstructivisim. “Nothing is itself by itself” (529).

Alasdair MacIntyre, “The Virtues, the Unity of a Human Life and the Concept,” in From Modernism to Postmodernism, edited by Lawrence E. Cahoone (Hoboken, New Jersey: Wiley-Blackwell, 1996): 534-555.

• Private life definitely divided from public by modernity (532). [We see no front porch ranch homes, for instance.]
• Modernistic existentialism atomizes the individual from the roles he plays (Sartre) or divides those roles in an individual life (Ralf Dahrendorf) (535). Social virtue as Aristotle would conceive of it is inauthentic for Sartre, whose project of remaking the self does not allow for outside pressures to soil the “authenticity.”
• Classical virtue depended on the life conceived as a narrative, not a series of roles (536). The setting is required to understand the intention which is required to understand what the action really is, and who the person is ultimately (537). Behavior doesn’t exist without intentions, beliefs, and settings (538). Gives example of man at bus stop randomly giving Latin name of the wild duck to a stranger. Unintelligible unless we know the narrative: was he a Soviet spy with a code word, a neurotic told to talk to people by his psychotherapist, etc. (540). Human reality is narrative (542). One type of narrative will make a life more intelligible than another (543).
• Opposite of what Sartre says in La Nausée: Antoine Roquentin says to “present human life in the form of a narrative is always to falsify it.” (544). [This is why we reflexively resist seeing patterns and story in life and tell ourselves we’re making things up. That Christ couldn’t be born on Dec 25. We have accepted this modernist premise of unintelligibility, of reality being discreet actions, sound and fury signifying nothing.]
• [My own book illustrates the problem in La Nausee. God guarantees the intelligibility of the story I discerned. Literally madness would result otherwise.] Funny that Sartre writes a narrative to prove that they aren’t real (545).
• Man is essentially a story-telling animal (546).
• Suicide and the crisis of meaninglessness come from man saying my life is unintelligible and there’s no telos (548).
• “Personal identity is just that identity presupposed by the unity of the character which the unity of a narrative requires” (548). Empiricists like Locke and Hume said personal identity stems from psychological states (547). But they’re missing the narrative background structure which is necessary to unify it (548).
• Interlocking, presupposing of one another, and inseparable: personal identity, narrative, intelligibility, and accountability (549).
• What is good for man? Is answered by what all the “what is good for me?”’s have in common. The Good which orders and allows all the particular goods to relate properly. A narrative is a quest in which these goods are sought and sorted. It can fail (549-50). But there are differences in how these goods are valued based on the context into which each individual is thrown. Modernist says no I can be what I choose to be. Not constrained by history (550-51). See the example of “I never owned slaves” among Americans. This is modernism: “to cut myself off from the past, in the individualist mode, is to deform my present relationships. The possession of an historical identity and the possession of a social identity coincide” One has to accept these limitations in some sense. To try to identify totally with the universal imparts a dangerous level of self-righteousness that always ends badly (551).
• Burkean tradition is dead: it opposes tradition to reason, which is false. It supported oligarchic Glorious Revolution of 1688 because of free markets and entrenched elites. So conservatism today is conserving an earlier form of individualism. Tradition embodies “continuities of conflict” (552).
• Traditions need the virtues in order not to decay. They “confront a future whose determinate and determinable character, so far as it possesses any, derives from the past.” (553). The virtue of true tradition is the wisdom of how to adapt a tradition to a time, with all its delimiting tragedies and exigencies (554).

Frederic Jameson, from “The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” in From Modernism to Postmodernism, edited by Lawrence E. Cahoone (Hoboken, New Jersey: Wiley-Blackwell, 1996): 556-572.

• Frederic Jameson says break of postmodernism happened late ‘50s or early ‘60s. The modern movement before was one hundred years old: abstract expressionism, existentialism, Wallace Stevens poetry (556). Postmodernism followed: Andy Warhol, pop art, photorealism, John Cage music and Phil Glass and Terry Riley and punk and new wave rock (with the Beatles and the Stones being the modernist high water mark of new wave rock). Godard, Burroughs, Pynchon, Ishmael Reed in film, textuality (557).
• Architecture was most defined: critique of Wright and the International Style also in urbanism. Modernism is elitist and aloof (557). Postmodernism is populist in how it effaced distinction between high and low culture and celebrated kitsch (558).
• Many, with Daniel Bell, argue as if postmodernism is a superseding of capitalism, with the exception of Ernest Mandel, who argues it’s an even purer form of capitalism. All critiques therefore say something about the writer’s opinion of multinational capitalism as it existed in their time (558-9).
• Postmodernism doesn’t like Jameson’s Marxist tendency to periodize because it is viewed as homogenizing of real differences and incommensurability (559).
• He says there were postmodernists avant la lettre (before the word): Gertrude Stein, Raymond Roussel and Marcel Duchamp. Victorian culture considered all this rude and antisocial, but the canonization of modernism has rendered this now part of acceptable society. Perhaps it was postmodernism in a previous time? (559-60)
• “Aesthetic production today has become integrated into commodity production generally”: aesthetic innovation and experimentation has joined or even replaced commodity production as the driver of economic growth (560).
• Raymond Williams specified emergent and residual forms of cultural production in any age. Emergent are those arising from its logic and residual are those left over from the previous one (561). Resistance to perceiving a dominant cultural trend makes very real heterogeneity into an unintelligible mess; it doesn’t preserve or respect diversity (561).
• Postmodernism: depthlessness of the culture of the image or simulacrum, weakening of public history; return to older theories of the sublime; this and its relationship to new technologies (561-2).
• Strangeness of postmodernism: fetishization of urban squalor, horrible and alienating, because of new hallucinatory exhilaration. Simulacrum is what Sartre would call the “derealization” of reality (562). It’s hitting at what Burke and Kant called the sublime, which is a moment of stupor and incomprehensibility that breaks concepts (563).
• Precapitalist societies: other of civilization is nature. Now: other is this dread unthinking stored up power of our technology that is turning back on us. Highways and condos and sprawl and alienation and pollution (563).
• Ernest Mandel gives three fundamental revolutions in power technology: machines producing steam motors since 1848; producing electric and combustion motors since 1890s; producing electronic and nuclear machines since the 1940s (564).
• Now we are in late or multinational or consumer capitalism, the purest form, which commoditizes areas of life never seen before. “This purer capitalism of our own time thus eliminates the enclaves of precapitalist organization it had hitherto tolerated and exploited in a tributary way” (564). [This is like how women were forced into workplace so childcare could be commoditized. Or like how home is turned into an investment and all stability is ripped away and you don’t know your neighbors. Everything then becomes a business because volunteerism disappears.]
• This is the Third Machine Age of the rise of media and advertising and the Green Revolution (564).
• Previous period offered idols of speed and power that Futurism fetishized as symbolizing the utopian dreams bound up in those “motive energies”: steam engines, turbines, modernist skyscrapers, etc. (565).
• Our computers do not have this dynamism. They are not machines of production but reproduction (565). What postmodernism produces is a “space” in the mental imagination (566) that is reflective, distorting, and somehow tending toward the sublime. But this humble technological aesthetic also mesmerized because it does actually represent the whole overwhelming decentered communicational network enveloping the globe. The sublime is the only somewhat adequate characterization of this massive system (566).
• Jameson is opposed to characterization of postmodernism as just a stylistic aberration. That leads to moralistic handwringing that’s hypocritical anyways since we’re all immersed in it. The simulacrum intensifies capitalism; it isn’t just a flavor of aesthetic choice. It invades even the imaginary and history and all images with replicable consumerism (567). Casting it as an unserious moral lapse is a fall from Marx’s high but difficult dialectical thinking (568).
• Whereas before postmodernism, culture had a certain autonomy from which a “critical distance” could afford a vantage point that allowed critique and the possibility of attack, now in the culture of the image, capital has invaded all cultural forms and made this distance impossible. Seen by the simple fact of Che Guevara shirts being big business and fetishized consumer products now (568-9).
• The sheer international envelopment of all and everything by the postmodern system offers possibility of a new less nationalistic resistance, however. Its very depressing, monolithic comprehensiveness is paradoxically the fact about it which makes it preparatory for a new “liberation” (570-1).
• Proposes an “aesthetic of cognitive mapping” that allows the subject to discern its place in the new disorienting global system (571). Some mode of representation that allows orientation within this menagerie (572).

Richard Rorty, “Solidarity or Objectivity?” in From Modernism to Postmodernism, edited by Lawrence E. Cahoone (Hoboken, New Jersey: Wiley-Blackwell, 1996): 573-588.

• Solidarity is defining oneself as part of a community. Objectivity is defining oneself in relation to a nonhuman concept like truth. Greeks started this trend. Could have been increase of diversity or their knowledge of such diversity that spurred them to find a better justification for belief than what they were given by the tribe (573-4).
• With Enlightenment, Newtonian physical scientists gave access to Nature, and so we needed to remake social, political and economic institutions in accordance with Natural laws. Reform is objective and based on what humans are like, not on what some group of humans are like. Transcending “the distinction between the natural and social” is the goal to reach ahistorical human nature (574-5). Views actual blood and flesh existence as a curse to be overcome and left behind.
• “Realists” are those who try to “ground solidarity in objectivity” by saying truth is the correspondence of objects with reality. Justification springs from knowledge of principles that are not just local idiosyncratic constructs but unchanging rational universals common to all reality (575).
• “Pragmatists” do not require this link between beliefs and objects. Truth is “what is good for us to believe.” They either don’t think it’s possible or just not necessary to construct an epistemology which links beliefs and objects into a one-to-one relation. Human knowing is limited and there is always room for improvement and new evidence to discover. Objectivity is not some Platonic ideal but rather the most “intersubjective agreement” possible: extending the community of “us” as far as possible. Opinion then just becomes what is not agreed upon whereas “knowledge” is what is agreed upon. This is derogatorily called “relativism” by realists (575-6).
• A pragmatist believes that “his views are better than the realists’, but he does not think that his views correspond to the nature of things.” He’s making a negative point that we should refrain from declaring one set of ideas “truth” and the other “opinion.” The pragmatist is making an ethical claim, i.e., that these beliefs result in good outcomes for my group, not an epistemological one (which would be to say these beliefs can be known as binding on all men) or a metaphysical one (to say these beliefs correspond to the structure of reality). He’s not actually a relativist, then, because relativism requires an epistemological or metaphysical assertion, and he’s not making one (576).
• Even asking the question of whether truth should be constructed around human nature or around this particular group of humans already concedes the debate to the realists. That’s precisely the question at issue: pragmatists refuse to engage in that debate. They’re not interested in metaphysics. Studying knowledge for the pragmatist looks then like Foucault’s genealogical method (576-7).
• It gives up the “God’s eye view of things.” We cannot stand on ground illumined “only by the natural light of reason” (577). Pragmatists “distrust … the positivistic idea that rationality is a matter of applying criteria.” (578)
• Alternative cultures are not like alternative geometries. Those are axiomatic and irreconcilable, they have rules which cannot apply in other systems. Cultures are “webs of beliefs” that are woven and rewoven in dialogue with circumstances and other cultures. To argue that truth is “relative” is to act like the claim being made is that cultures are irreconcilable. It’s not like each culture has a “truth” incompatible with all other cultures. Working from within one’s culture and forswearing access to unbiased objectivity.
• Foucault says knowledge is never separable from power: “one is likely to suffer if one does not hold certain beliefs at certain times and places” (579).
• Saying “there is only the dialogue” does not mean truth is relative. It means the dialogue is all we can know. Objectivity wants the conditions for human flourishing to be “transhistorical.” With solidarity as the sole goal instead, the emphasis would move to “making” new ways rather than “finding” that way that has somehow been prepared for us. Objectivity and scientism posit that place toward which we are all converging, but there’s no basis for this. Human activity would rather be seen as proliferating many different ways (580).
• Liberals smell in pragmatism an attack on liberal democracy and say relativism will lead to repression. [They’re right basically with wokeism.] Classical liberal says we need reason: “conceived as a transcultural human ability to correspond to reality, a faculty whose possession and use is demonstrated by obedience to explicit criteria” (580-1).
• Neither realism nor pragmatism is non-circular. Pragmatism says, “Justification is not by reference to a criterion, but by reference to various detailed practical advantages.” And circular insofar as we praise democracy from inside democracy with the language of democracy (581-2). Trying to justify knowledge and our limited perspective using knowledge and our limited perspective is like trying to build a ship out of the ship you’re already on while out at sea, according to Otto Neurath. There’s no way to actually do it (582).
• “This admission that we are just the historical moment that we are, not representatives of something ahistorical” is what irks liberals. By charging this view with “relativism” the realist is “projecting his own habits of thought upon the pragmatist.” “Relativism” in this sense means an assertion that “truth” is relative, that it changes, and the realist then charges that this is an oxymoron. True. But the pragmatist is not making that statement. His argument is, well, more pragmatic than that. He’s saying we have no choice but to judge against our own ethnocentric criteria and to attempt to do otherwise is dishonest (582). The realist “thinks that everyone, deep down inside, must want such detachment” from the limited group perspective. He thinks a denial of this desire is just an ironic, sneering attempt at either faux sophistication or radical egalitarianism. But the fault of the pragmatist could only be that he becomes too ethnocentric, too solely focused on his own group’s perspective. NOT that he is philosophically incoherent regarding the nature of truth (582-3).
• Realism against pragmatism guards two important comforts for the modern liberal: one that our whole moral framework of “rights” based on “human nature” is not just something our people came up with that suits us, but something eternal and universal to humanity. We derive great satisfaction from knowing we discovered the “true” ethics. Two is that even if we are destroyed, the knowledge that our arts and values are intrinsic to the race means that they will reemerge again one day. This means we can be comforted that our civilization is eternal, not time bound and idiosyncratic like those of other more primitive cultures (583).
• The pragmatist can approach Nietzsche’s ideal of the self-aware man who understands his values to be historically baked and contingent, but who nonetheless still glories in them and accepts the risk and unsureness and lack of guarantees for permanence in this world. Maybe a joyful nihilism? Objectivity then could be linked to the fear of death (584).
• Descartes: “project of grounding such inquiry upon ahistorical criteria of rationality” (588).
• Rorty sees Socrates turning from gods, Christianity turning from distant god to god-man, and Bacon turning from science as eternal truth to science as social progress as prepping for Nietzschean turning from realist truth to social faith truth of pragmatism (584-5). Enlightenment transcultural rationality is as bankrupt as old pagan gods. We turn to pragmatism because Realism doesn’t work. It divinizes science (585).
• He says science and democracy are fine, just don’t make them more than they actually are. Don’t put Messianic faith in them (585). [This is a very grounded, conservative view actually. Runs directly counter to current capitalist crusading around the world. But the liberals are right to not to like postmodernism and Rorty because liberalism can’t just be one option among others. It’s too eschatological. That’s why postmodernism opened the way for the strong gods to come back.]

Jürgen Habermas, “An Alternative Way out of the Philosophy of the Subject: Communicative versus Subject-Centered Reason,” in From Modernism to Postmodernism, edited by Lawrence E. Cahoone (Hoboken, New Jersey: Wiley-Blackwell, 1996): 589-616.

• Foucault has shown the entanglement of science with power, but scientism erects itself as a god and loses its objective freedom (590). He points out the contradiction of Foucault basically assuming a new “objective” standpoint from which to judge science. [But Derrida does answer this.] Modernism has an “objectivism of self-mastery” while postmodernism has an “objectivism of self-forgetfulness.” Result is a “contradictory self-thematization” (590).
• He says Schiller, Fichte, and Schelling pointed out the blind spots of the modernist “philosophy of consciousness” before Foucault but just with different solutions (590).
• Hegel and Marx solve dilemma by basing justification on non-coercive consensus making in cooperative communities. For Heidegger and Derrida, it would be justification through consensual wordsmithing that motivate cooperative action. The idea of modernity as “knowledge of objects” therefore was already being replaced by the idea of it as being “mutual understanding between subjects capable of speech and action” (591).
• He says Heidegger and Derrida stopped at a philosophy of origins. Foucault goes there too by abstractly negating the self-referential subject by saying man is “nonexistent.” There’s no stable subject that comes into contact with objective values. Habermas says all this is a result of an exhausted “philosophy of consciousness.” “Power” in Foucault becomes an independent force animating all that occurs because he has no theory of man or man’s consciousness left as something that could drive history. The battle between understanding man as self-reflective knower of the world on the one hand and freely floating genealogical, historically contingent product of evolution have resulted in a dead end, in no solution. Is objectivity possible, is meaning accessible, or is it all an illusion? There has been no answer at the end of this road. Habermas says moving to a “paradigm of mutual understanding” is needed (591).
• Modernism: subject sees itself as another object in the world. Habermas is not saying that. He’s saying a performative model where participants “coordinate their plans for action by coming to an understanding about something in the world” (591-2).
• Subject as an object in the world: the subject sees itself from a third person perspective. He sees himself as objective object in the world, and as transcendental “I” as the only ground and possibility of experience. There is no way to mediate between these two stances; they are irreconcilable. But “linguistically generated intersubjectivity” obliterates this dichotomy. Here, instead of objects in the field of view, the ego and his interlocutor become locked in as necessary participants in a yin-yang dance of relationality. The other person is a mirror of the self and a confirmation of the relation between the ego and his alter. The theoretical is “tested” by the fire of the actual interaction, and knowledge of reality results (592-3).
• Foucault says the conscious is in a back and forth between its thought and its unconscious attempting to wrest more control of the unconscious away from the abyss to achieve greater self-direction. In a “paradigm of mutual understanding” the background of the “lifeworld” or the unexamined cultural and physical and everything else beliefs are not grappled with but lived in and assumed. Speech forms the player that links the selves to each other in mutual embrace. “It is present only prereflectively” (593).
• The lifeworld is always “co-given”: if you try to “constitute” it theoretically with speech, you get the lifeworld as a concept, or lifeworlds in general. The space for the thinking and choosing ego is not accounted for when thinking in this way. Habermas is saying the world is a given. Turning to it and seeking an account of it through his theory of communicative understanding is impossible (except so as to understand it in abstract). You cannot understand this world because you are immersed in this world. Dialogue is the space where the ego experiences the real world as it exists (593-4).
• Understanding the totality of a life can only be done by recurring to the narrative perspective of the participant of that life, through the “journey” of that life. Getting beyond that takes two forms. Rational reconstruction is one. It does not try to create a totality of the person but does seek to “heighten consciousness.” Methodical self-critique is the second and it does refer to the Person as a totality, but it can only do so because it accepts the background of the lifeworld as a given. It looks at the general picture rather than the details [my interpretation]. Communication theory wraps both of these up: rational reconstruction in the fact that communication involves capturing, holding, and “reconstructing” in the mind your interlocutors reply (and by extension your prompt that occasioned it) and also self-critique as the critique reflected back at the ego by the interlocutor (594).
• Habermas’ theory has to deftly steer between absolutism (modernism) and relativism (postmodernism): world is not self-generating spirit or species nor an impenetrable darkness of tangled origins. Has to be two levels to society: communication and life world. Can’t bog down every principle in origin stories like Foucault does. This doesn’t resurrect the “purism of pure reason” but it does take us out of a subject-centered paradigm which is what Habermas says the problems flow from (594-5).
• Kant has been critiqued by those tracing the supposedly sordid history of pure reason. Kant critiqued reason from the perspective of reason: reason’s reasonable self-limitation. But to critique the critique, you need a “reason” that goes beyond reason: a reason that can encompass the reason Kant speaks of. A meta-reason that offers a transcendent foundation. Consistency with the claim that postmodernism is critiquing reason itself would require postmodernism to utilize something other than reason. But without reason, consistency doesn’t matter. Postmodernism with Foucault and others say they’re just using another power technique: swapping exclusion for permeation. Habermas says postmodernism ignores that modernity has grappled with the problems postmodernism raises for 200 years (595-6).
• This counterdiscourse from within modernity started from Kantianism and attempted to enlighten “the Enlightenment about its own narrow-mindedness.” Postmodernism denied continuity with this tradition. Critics of Habermas say he is trying to complete the Enlightenment but they say that this is impossible. But he stands in the tradition of Fichte, Schiller, and Schlegel (596).
• Hegel, Schelling and Hölderlin saw problems with the mainstream Enlightenment drawing arbitrary distinctions between faith and knowledge, infinite and finite, spirit and nature, understanding and sensibility, and duty and inclination. Hegel didn’t see these exclusions as real but instead posited a philosophy that could encompass them: subjective reason and its given other (596-7). But with the postmodernists the Young Hegelians also went against Hegel in saying that “the other of reason, what is always prior to it,” was supposed to be absorbed into reason under Hegels absolute reason idea. The result was “situated reason,” or reason operating within the given-ness [my term] of reality and which seeks to accept those things as the essential background of its existence. It is when reason cannot accept this symbiosis that it becomes repressive (597).
• In Marx, reason is limited but tied essentially to a comprehensive reason (its social theory) that attempts to transcend itself, without however being absolute. But postmodernism says comprehensive reason is not real but rather the necessary “other” of all the background noise (power, history, contingency, etc.) (598). Nietzsche according to Habermas opposed the internally critiquing and dialectical Enlightenment against a “totalizing” critique of reason. This is basically the modernist assertion that saying everything is relative is not a relative statement. Böhme brothers (postmodernists): “That the subject of reason wants to owe no one and nothing outside itself is its ideal and its insanity at once.” Only by setting up this strawman of Enlightenment reason can postmodernism succeed in its critique: reason has to be this fake narcissistic universal power that fanatically seeks to subjugate “everything around it as an object”: that’s when the other of reason can be thought of as the spontaneous, and vital reality unpolluted by this irrational imperialism. “Only reason as reduced to the subjective faculty of understanding and purposive activity corresponds to the image of an exclusive reason that further uproots itself the more it strives triumphally for the heights, until, withered, it falls victim to the power of its concealed heterogeneous origin” (598).
• Hegel and Schiller imagine self-regulation via reason possible in society and in individuals, whereas postmodernism (Böhme bros) sees only “disciplinary power” from the police down to the examination of conscience. Postmodernism sees power differentials explaining everything (616).
• Habermas: diremption (or separation) model: society the “locus of historically situated reason” where different trajectories of reason converge, for postmodernism (the exclusion model he says), reason opens a space that is quickly filled by “bare power” (599).
• The “other” of reason under postmodernism is many things, body, fantasy, desire, feelings, etc. it’s all the things discovered by Romanticism: the “experiences of a decentered subjectivity.” This other, as a sort of potential for excitement, is called many names: “as Being, as heterogenous, as power” (599).
• Postmodernism calls philosophy of reason a move that destroys “the lost childlike relationship to nature” (600).
• Heidegger: other of reason is meditative thought while for Foucault it is genealogy. They want to place these things outside of discursive thought “without being utterly irrational.” But that only shifts the supposed paradox somewhere else (600).
• Postmodernism says reason has to surpass itself and experience the suprarational other and stop trying to control and encompass this other. But to do that, reason would have to get hold of this other somehow. Subjectivity, or the subject’s relation to itself, is a bipolar thing: you think yourself. You split. Postmodernism implies this other would have to take the place of “you” and think about subjectivity. In postmodernism somehow the other of reason is supposed to think about reason rather than the other way around. Heidegger and Foucault approach this and explain this “other than reason” by having reason exile itself. Reason has to leave its own rational realm, in other words. This is supposed to reveal to reason (and by extension subjectivity) its self-idolatry. Reason had smuggled in quasi-metaphysical and -religious ideas to itself before this. The “other” that they are trying to place in this position is a result of a making “finite” of the “absolute” that postmodernism says reason had tried to replace with itself. Postmodernism is saying that reason finitized the other: Heidegger says time was what was finitized and says other of reason “as an anonymous primordial power, set aflow temporally.” Foucault says bodily experience as finitized and other as the power of bodily interactions (600-1).
• Heidegger doesn’t quite say it (that meditative thought should replace philosophy) this directly, but Foucault clearly just replaces degenerate human science with the genealogy of power (601).
• Summary: postmodernism says reason cannot encompass the other and should stop trying. Reason ends up “finitizing” the other in its attempts to control it. Instead, reason should realize reason is limited and is controlled and formed by “the other.” Foucault says other is genealogy of power. Power corals bodily experience-freedom under its disciplinary schemes to subject it to “reason” and classification. This sensorial bodily other is supposed to be outside reason. But Habermas says it’s not actually outside reason. It is not exactly the same as discursive reason but it is not somehow illogical or incomprehensible. If reason exiles itself from this “other” it either a) can’t actually do so and will therefore be prating on about being Supra-rational when it really isn’t; or b) it will be unable to say anything about this other and so will render itself totally closed off from it (600-1). [I think postmodernism is not necessarily saying that the other is something totally other than reason, but rather that it might as well be and that we can’t really know it. It’s pre-modern ancient thinking that dares to posit a real suprarational, as in Plato’s “beyond being” or God being beyond all thought and categories.]
• [Habermas is arguing for me why metamodernism comes about.] Even saying that reason “includes” or “excludes” some “other” leaves reason tied to subjectivity, the whole paradigm that was trying to be escaped. Habermas says there’s no way to leave this paradigm behind and enter the freedom of postmodernity. The “concepts of subject-centered reason” are necessary to even know you’re outside of it! (601)
• Extinction of the subject seems to mean the debasing and removing of rational subjectivity as the measure of reality. The end of the “paradigm of self-consciousness, of the relation-to-self of a subject knowing and acting in isolation” (602). Habermas says you can’t defeat that paradigm with a simple negation. You need a substantive counter proposal. He says postmodernism is not that but his communicative reason paradigm is. From this perspective (“the intersubjective relationship between individuals who are socialized through communication and reciprocally recognize one another”) one can diagnose “logocentrism” as a deficit of reason rather than an excess. This line picks up on the counterdiscourse within modernity and gets away from the fruitless battle that started between Hegel and Nietzsche. Released from that zero-sum game, it can take aim at the “philosophy of consciousness” that reigned from Descartes to Kant (602).
• Habermas correctly describes the situation: post Nietzsche, logos is not master of its own house, but rather is dependent upon something prior—“the dispensation of Being, the accident of structure-formation, or the generative power of some discourse formation. The logos of an omnipotent subject appears as a misadventure of misguided specialization, which is as rich in consequences as it is wrongheaded.” Postmodernism tries to show the inconsistency of logos, and unveil that it’s hollow within and only held together by brute force on the outside. Man must then turn to the indeterminacy of the “other” (602-3).
• Postmodernism characterizes logos as “free of language, as universalist, and as disembodied.” For it, intersubjective understanding is a path “inscribed” into our language acts that actually limit the potential of communication. The rational human under modernism encounters entities, knows and deals with objects, speaks true statements, and carries out plans.” Such a conception is according to Postmodernism a selective and incomplete view of man. Ontologically it reduces to a world of objects, epistemologically to a world of events to be known “in a purposive-rational fashion,” and semantically to a world of truth statements (603).
• Research is showing that what is unique to human speech is the “communicative use of propositionally differentiated language” not just the ability to produce such language itself (603-4). Logocentrism says that we “understand a sentence when we know the conditions under which it is true.” But it’s more “communicative” than that. You can dispute truth (existential presuppositions of the content), rightness (legitimacy regarding context), or intention. Not just statements of fact then but any speech act has to conform to these three dimensions (604-5).
• But if that’s so, then modern philosophy of consciousness, which says that all that is is subjects relating to objects via their representations or propositions, is not enough. (Objective world = “correlative of all true assertoric sentences”). But for Habermas there’s the “normative rightness” of that contextual social situation (“rightness of the speech act”) and the first-person attitude or intention (“agreement of what is meant with what is stated”). These are analogous worlds to that third person, objectifying gaze. Heidegger lifeworld needs to be redefined as including these two dimensions of the presupposed background of knowledge (604-5).
• Communicative reason assesses rationality “to validity claims geared to intersubjective recognition”: “propositional truth, normative rightness, subjective truthfulness, and aesthetic harmony” (606). Not just cognitive-instrumental, but moral-practical and aesthetic expressive (606), so Habermas agrees that subject-centered reason divided reality and usurped the whole. One moment took over the entire show when it didn’t have the actual ability to do so. “Self-reifying subjectivity” (Horkheimer and Adorno). Habermas says first reason’s communicative dimension had to be forgotten before society could be shaped so brutally by the cognitive—instrumental dimension of it (606).
• Max Weber said disenchantment of religious and metaphysical removed “all substantive connotations” from rationality and left the “purposive-rational” as the only “structure-forming influence” (607). Habermas says instead “network of communicative actions” is the medium of producing the forms of life and is “nourished by resources of the lifeworld” (607).
• The entanglements of “impaired communicative life-contexts” then stands in for fate and the “destining of Being,” yet shows how we are all communally responsible for the trajectory of world events (607).
• Marx’s “social practice” and communicative reason are both supposed to accomplish “reason concretized in history, society, body, and language” (607).
• Praxis philosophy or [I guess] just modern philosophy in the form of Marxism replaced self-consciousness with labor. Then phenomenology and anthropology through Edmund Husserl tried to untie the knot of how subjective knowledge is externalized by turning to other “subject-object relationships”: Sartre says history is projected by subjects formed by history; Schütz says society is an object above subjects “with their transcendentally prior mutual understandings”; Kojève says society is generated by subjects projecting their ideas out against each other; Merleau-Ponty says subjects find themselves centered in their bodies; Plessner says the subject regards its body as an object. “Thought that is tied to the philosophy of the subject cannot bridge over these dichotomies but, as Foucault so acutely diagnosed, oscillates helplessly between one and the other pole” (607-8).
• But postmodernism doesn’t solve this he says. Modernism says subject is the master of language, using it to disclose his intentions. Postmodernism says language is shifting meaning behind their backs; it’s a “differential event” (Foucault and Derrida) or creative practice (Castoriadis). So they would only be shepherds who also get shepherded, but subject-object remains (608).
• Castoriadis: action not the expression of subjective reason but rather the creative demiurge that originates the new patterns (the relationship is flipped). So the rational content of modernity is coming from “a Being operating without reason.” Kind of like doom or fate (608-9). Being or the imaginary or what have you dispenses new historical truths that instantiate in men’s lives. Who is the subject of knowledge then if we are being instituted by society rather than the other way around? Habermas says he ends where George Simmel began: Lebensphilosophie (609). That probably means a type of life force that governs all.
• Habermas: Castoriadis, Heidegger, Derrida, Foucault all believe there’s an ontological difference between our understanding of the world and the world itself. Language is the whole constellation of meanings within which we interpret the world. For postmodernism, there’s kind of like a transcendental consciousness (without the supernatural aspects) to language as the world-discloser. It is the background and grounding of our world that stands above us and delimits us. Habermas says postmodernism says that this linguistic superstructure shifts independently of us and what we learn in the world. Some call it Being, some call it différance, some power, some imagination. But they all detach the “horizon-constituting productivity of language” from the language-bound world and its happenings that people inhabit. We cannot rationally engage with it and shape it; it moves according to its own laws (609-10).
• Enlightenment, or “praxis philosophy” was the opposite. The creation of society is self-generative for man, and the conquest, instrumentalization, and transformation of nature is possible with human nature as well. Ideas change as man learns and a feedback loop emerges. “A dialectical relationship between the world-view structures that make intermundane practice possible by means of a prior understanding of meaning, on the one hand, and, on the other, learning processes deposited in the transformation of world-view structures” (610).
• Heidegger and by extension postmodernism conflate “meaning-horizons” with “the truth of meaningful utterances”: praxis philosophy says meaning has to also be “valid” to be true. It has another screening mechanism than postmodernism does. But modernism’s lack of understanding the communicative dimension has caused it to be confined to “truth and efficiency,” which lead to the production-based obsession and one dimensional society. Capitalism (610).
• Castoriadis entrusts socialism to a “demiurge” that does not see a distinction between meaning and validity and so therefore cannot be tested or proven (610-11). [Like how leftism can not work but that doesn’t matter for instance.]
• Communicative action allows questions of rightness and truthfulness to inform our praxis of social creation rather than just questions of truth and efficiency (modernism) (611).
• Objection: world of action driven by mutual understanding gets “cut off from its material life processes.” But there’s no pure reason first off. It’s always incarnated in a time and place. Yes, claims have a universal value as such; they are made as if they state something true about the world that is unconnected to their context many times. But they can only be made in that context and so cannot be artificially separated out from it. The two are entwined (611-12).
• “Factually raised validity claims” are only worked out in relationship. They require the assumption of a purified, ideal discourse that is held equally and in tension with an unpurified, biased reality. Communicative action mediates truth claims and rounds out the actual dimensions of how they are made. This eliminates the objectifying tendency of modernism but preserves the possibility of rational, constructive discourse and applied action to the world and ourselves. (612-3).
• Habermas says: Plato: abstract reason can transcend and understand and emancipate; Democritus: reveals the fiction of rational purity through materialism (613).
• Postmodernism scornfully reduces validity questions to the suprarational demiurge that determines our reality. But Habermas says while using materialism, his theory incorporates the tension between knowledge and ignorance and understanding and misunderstanding as central to its theory of knowledge. It showcases the “binding force of intersubjective understanding and reciprocal recognition.” Rational and irrational form the web of our interconnected nature and reveal the solidarity of the lifeworld. We cannot isolate, and mistakes and crimes represent malformed reason rather than nothingness. (613-4). The structural restrictions of this reality are therefore “at once claimed and denied.” Reason’s potential is interwoven with what is in its lifeworld. Reason gets its resources that lend it rightness and subjective truthfulness from the lifeworld. It’s interwoven with them in that it cannot exist without them; to conceive of reason in a vacuum is an absurdity. These resources are “background assumptions, solidarities, and skills bred through socialization.” They’re not knowledge properly speaking and aren’t questionable because they’re the water reason has to swim in (613-14).
• Philosophy of the subject or pure Enlightenment had said the lifeworld was a “synthetic accomplishment” of consciousness. Habermas replaces transcendental consciousness with the concrete forms of life as what gives consciousness unity. These historical forms have a universal character in common in that they are the result of communicative reason being worked out between interlocutors in time (615).

[Start page 617 in notebook (Harding)]

Sandra Harding, from “From Feminist Empiricism to Feminist Standpoint Epistemologies,” in From Modernism to Postmodernism, edited by Lawrence E. Cahoone (Hoboken, New Jersey: Wiley-Blackwell, 1996): 617-637.

• Sandra Harding says “feminist standpoint epistemologies try to complete the original goals of modern science (the Enlightenment) by viewing things from the female standpoint and therefore overcoming the dichotomizing tendencies of the Enlightenment. These epistemologies are different than feminist postmodernism. She says these epistemologies give five reasons why this female perspective can uncover parts of reality that male-centric epistemologies cannot (617-18).
• [Postmodernism wants to explore distinctively female ways of doing and knowing. Female modernists hate this because modernism is a distinctively male, rationalistic system. It originally rejected women until its own logic required it to include them. So they are walking contradictions: they’re only idolizing this male behavior because postmodernism basically opened that space for them. They want to deny any distinctively female way because it undercuts their position within modernism.]
• She references Hilary Rose who says women scientists are more prone to “craft labor” than industrial labor. Craft labor is the unity of “manual, mental, and emotional (‘hand, brain, and heart’) activity” that women have traditionally been involved in. Male, modern ways have that Cartesian dualism: “intellect vs. body, and both vs. feeling and emotion.” Both Enlightenment and Marxist science does this. Such “caring labor” is considered needed in a world threatened by nuclear annihilation (618).           
• Rose says Sohn-Rethel (not a woman) observed that the capitalist separation of manual and mental labor led to the “mystifying abstractions of bourgeois science.” But Rose says go further: capitalism separated out “caring” work exclusively to women. She says if you don’t agree you tacitly endorse sociobiology, or genetic determinism for women. She says caring labor was foisted on women by men (618-19). Rose says women’s unique experience of craft labor and menstrual “bleeding, pain and tension” along with their self-examination desire fuse objective and subjective knowledge in ways that single-minded, extractive capitalist (male) science cannot (617-18).
• Rose identifies a feminist epistemology as holding that “appeals to the subjective are legitimate, that intellectual and emotional domains must be united, that the domination of reductionism and linearity must be replaced by the harmony of holism and complexity”: what Foucault calls “subjugated knowledges” (620).
• She says feminists are skeptical of male feminists because they usually are trying to just appropriate some androgyny to themselves without liberating women (620). Says women version of evolution (Keeler and McClintock) says organism actively evolves with its environment and isn’t just passive. Says that’s like women wanting that power for themselves in a male-dominated environment (620-21). They can only do this in a “degendered social order” (621).
• Second thing Harding identifies: subjugated senses, concrete rational activity. Nancy Hartsock says women’s labor and activity is sensuous, more connected to concrete reality and messy life. They even “produce” new humans. Their existence prohibits them from devolving into rationalistic male abstractions that split and divide reality. So to go further than Marx, not proletarian experience (which is still male), but female experience can only counter “bourgeois subjugations and mystifications” (622-23).
• Women’s experience is the necessary ingredient to correct masculinist distortions. These are a reversal of the proper order: like privileging abstract over concrete and sensual. Even Simone de Beauvoir parroted this when she agreed that death-risking rather than reproduction of the species is the paradigmatically human act. Women are natural like animals while men are abstract and idealistic like spirits (623).
• Hartsock wants us to take the lens of the subjugated female so that gender can ultimately be transcended. Gendered divisions of labor have produced lopsided knowledge bifurcation which has formed brutal patterns of power and oppression. Transcending these divisions can help us transcend power itself. Male: power over others (dichotomizing); female: power to others and self. Postmodernism would say any epistemology-centered philosophy (even female) requires policing of thought. But Hartsock (or Harding) would say this epistemological policing is transitional to the elimination of domination (624) [like the dictatorship of the proletariat?].
• Jane Flax in “Return of the Repressed” says modernist feminist “successor science” theory and postmodernism are conflicting. She says examine how patriarchy permeates all discourse and ideas, even those “emancipatory” (or feminist) (625). The feminine is like the ultimate repressed, and so its return will open the way to the overcoming of masculine dichotomies (626).
• Flax says when women are the exclusive caregivers of children, male infants have to learn to dominate or repress this female “other” in order to get an individual sense of self. This fractured identity leads to them, as adult male philosophers, projecting these cleavages onto all of philosophy as if it’s fundamental to the human condition. So she’s saying make men equally share childcare so that this first other can be “incorporated into the self” for boys (626-7). But not purely feminine-worshipping, because she also says that it’s a pole that must be transcended to reach “a new stage of human development” (627).
• [This all ignores that masculinity by definition is a process of (disambiguation?); it only exists as defined off the feminine, and so has to prove itself and cut itself away. The wish for men to be watching babies and women running society does result in a de-gendered society: but it’s one that can no longer reproduce itself.]
• Later Flax is more fond of postmodernism, but she’s not consistent. She says untrue masculine dualities replaced women relational understanding that needs to supplant these (more Enlightenment, successor science-sounding), but also that there is no “woman’s” standpoint and that these alter epistemologies and identities are just the flipside of and created by the domination of the male epistemology (628-9).
• Dorothy Smith doesn’t see contradiction between successor science feminism and postmodernism. She focuses on the actual condition of women’s labor as determining gender proclivities and experience. She thinks the fact that women silently create food and shelter—the conditions that allow for men to exist—that therefore men don’t have to think about these things and are therefore free to create abstractive mental worlds that exclude these considerations. When women get educated (starting in the 19^th century), then these male paradigms are just piped back into their brains (629-30). Housework: men think it’s part leisure and part labor because it’s self-directed. Women would describe it as neither (630).
• Smith says the fact of feminist unity between the inquirer and subject of inquiry as the subjugated female experience in feminism produces a less distorted epistemology than does masculine Enlightenment science. It’s still a kind of narrative imperialism, though, and not really postmodernism (831-2).
• Smith concludes by saying certainly the Enlightenment idea of disinterested rational observers formulating ideas out of pure logic that then influence the social world is wrong, but the Marxist idea of philosophy only originating in the economic mode of production is also a bit too Enlightenment. But she ends by describing it: technology, the pill, sexual revolution, off-shoring have created social conditions favoring historical persons who could grasp and conceptualize these trends, and use them as a springboard for new formulations (633-4).

Susan Bordo, “The Cartesian Masculinization of Thought,” in From Modernism to Postmodernism, edited by Lawrence E. Cahoone (Hoboken, New Jersey: Wiley-Blackwell, 1996): 638-664.

• Susan Bordo: Middle Ages: man is part of the world, shares soul with it. Modernity: man born into the “adulthood” of objectivity. Descartes begins it by saying reject childhood, sensuality, prejudice, and isolate and purify reason to clearly distinguish the inner world of subjectivity from the outer world of true objects (638-9).
• Descartes says subjectivity is an epistemological threat: medievals say “the interpenetrations, through meanings, of self and world” (639). Interpenetrations were source of satisfaction but now are distortions. Descartes starts project of founding knowledge on separation of subject and object. Kant crystallizes this: objective world unified by a “discrete consciousness that can represent itself to itself (640).
• Descartes: res cogitans (spiritual, mind) totally divorced from res extensa (materiality). Totally emptying of meaning or purpose from the universe. We project these qualities onto the world (640). Nature is understood by “measurement, not sympathy,” says Bordo, quoting Whitehead. Bacon: “enchanted glass” of the mind turned into the “mirror of nature.” But it’s a defensive suppression, rooted in anxiety and uncertainty about the new world of inventions and discoveries (640-1).
• Bordo says anxiety about the sundering of the self from the cosmos and its environment was then defensively reconstructed as a rebirth of mankind out of darkness, as a necessary stage in human growth and progress. She casts cosmos as feminine. To clearly separate mind from it and propose mechanism and objectivism she says were part of this fantasy reconstruction (641-2).
• Ancient and medieval sources saw the earth in living, sometimes feminine terms: as a mother giving birth after being stirred by the Heavens or by spirit. It was “alive” in some sense and commanded some reverence. Descartes emptied all this and substituted a machine in its place. Even the human body became wrapped up in the concept of dead matter and estranged from the mind (642-3).
• Descartes: clarity, distinctness with the world (objectifying). Pre-modern sympathy, a merging with or marrying needed. Not coercive but allows values to unfold (643-4). Evelyn Fox Keller says re-envision objectivity by care and love—the opposite of the cool, detached rationality of Descartes. Artistically rational (644). Keller: masculine means “autonomy, separation, and distance” (645). Conceived of as a more disciplined, purer mode of thought that could beat nature’s secrets out of her (or it) (645-6). She uses psychoanalysis to explain the possible defensive psychological strategy of Descartes’s project as a reaction to being wrenched out of an organic conception of the universe (647-9). Way to assert control over this alienation rather than be its passive victim (649). “The ‘otherness’ of nature is now what allows it to be know” (649).
• Bardo recounts the reconceptualization of nature in parallel to the witch hunts and anti-midwifery movements. Enlightenment did destroy the sphere of women. They no longer had a legitimate sphere because under reductionistic male “science” they were merely deficient men (649-50). 1550-1650: food shortages, devastating wars, religious confusion—nature seen as alien “other,” as a capricious virago (651-2).
• Recent evaluation of these tendencies by feminism “finds the failure of connection (rather than the blurring of boundaries) as the principal cause of breakdown in understanding” (652). Accepted that girls emerge with greater sense of connectedness with external world than boys. Feminists differ from all before them by saying this is socially constructed. Nancy Chodorow: it’s cause baby girls get more identification with the mother, and don’t have the need like boys do to define their gender identity as separate from the mother. Therefore feminism says gender difference is based on nurturing being restricted to females (653-4). This is how they deny any biological or spiritual basis for observed gender differences: how they preserve their fundamental hatred of women. She even warns against taking this to mean there are spheres that should remain distinct between men and women. Instead, both ways of knowing should mutually enrich each other in the public arena (653-4). But if “women” are obliterated by a change in social structure, what’s left to enrich?
• Since the ‘60s, diversity of voices has exploded—but also exposure of how previous diversity has been suppressed (655-6). Openings to feminine in Cartesian tradition: Leibniz (each monad its own mirror of the universe); Hume saying reason is and should be the slave of the passions; and Kant saying “objectivity itself is the result of human structuring” (656-7) even though there is still a historical law at work (i.e., the categories) (657). Even Marx opened the door to historically conditioned subjects though he still posited a great metanarrative for the world (657).
• Bardo walks a fine line of saying women need to transform masculine social structures with their feminine genius while avoiding saying these differences are anything other than socially conditioned. She’s aware the first point leads in a direction she doesn’t want to go (663). This describes the postmodern deconstruction of everything (657-8).

David Ray Griffin, from The Reenchantment of Science, in From Modernism to Postmodernism, edited by Lawrence E. Cahoone (Hoboken, New Jersey: Wiley-Blackwell, 1996): 665-686.

• Griffin talks about the disenchantment of nature. This was chiefly a removing of any quality that depended on “experience” from nature, including unconscious ones. These would be things like creativity, self-determination, final causation, “ideals, possibilities, norm, or values.” This means no intrinsic value in nature. Only relation left is mechanistic, physical force from one particle to another. Force at a distance was an “occult virtue.” “Things” [mine] are assemblages of parts rather than discreet entities. Human life is completely alien to the world (665-66).
• First, modernism said soul and God are the causal power behind mechanistic universe. Then God said to only be the original cause as in deism (the watchmaker). Then, consciousness was an epiphenomenal effect of brain matter mechanism; then, it was denied as a distinct entity and called an “emergent” property. “Mechanical” unseats “personal” as the cause of absolutely everything (666).
• Science disenchants the world by drawing the logical conclusion that any “caprice,” that is, any spontaneous, autonomous, ordinary/creative cause in the world, is an illusion that has been determined by environmental mechanics. If any such independent source of causation is admitted, we are in the realm of the “miraculous” and science is disproven (667-8). Freedom is an illusion. [This is why I say the soul has to be an originary, miraculous supernatural power—we are walking miracles, clear examples of spiritual power!]
• Example of John Taylor in Superminds studying psychokinesis (bending spoons with the mind), then recanting later because it didn’t fit scientific presuppositions (668) [almost like forced reeducation?]. Time also said to not be real—just our perception (668-9). The postmodern solution to relegate science to one corner of human knowledge (with maybe poetry or theology giving answers in other areas) is not workable because science by definition is imperialistic. It claims to be the only actual knowledge (669-70). Science therefore disenchants (un-animates) not only the cosmos but man himself (671). Typically people try to stop total disenchantment by drawing a line between the human mind and everything else, but this is hard to maintain and seems arbitrary (671).
• Alfred North Whitehead: postmodern organicism. The progression: Aristotelean phase: final purposive cause in all things. 1^st Galilean phase: final cause only in humans, or just in all life (say the vitalists). 2^nd Galilean phase: efficient, material cause explains everything (672).
• Seems previous forms of pan-experientialism or pan-psychism said enduring individuals are final-purposive within themselves but efficient-causative without, toward the world. Creates problem of how these things relate if they’re just running parallel to each other (673). Griffin says the problem is solved if individuals are not enduring but instead “societies” of momentary events. Final causation would then arise out of the association of these momentary events and so … be on the same continuum as efficient causation [?] (673-4).
• Photons, electrons, in quantum physics show “indeterminacy,” which Griffin says is the “germ” of “self-determinacy.” As you increase in complexity, less and less becomes predictable via physics because of self-determination (674-5). He explains how psychokinesis is much less practiced and developed—it exerts effects of final causation without intervening chains of efficient causation—which is why it’s so much less predictable, but still observable sporadically, as in the Hermetic traditions (675-6). [This dovetails with my explanation, sort of, for why spiritual things are not “testable” like science things.]
• [Look into Paul Feyerabend who says science isn’t “true.”]
• He argues that we can expand science in light of this: if final causation and purpose explain things better, then they’re science (676). [He seems to be saying context, wholeness matters, and that it does confer something greater than the sum of the parts.] Science must lose its bias for declaring lab experiments that are infinitely repeatable the gold standard to every issue (678).
• In his attempt to put forth a less suffocating conception of science, he tries to salvage a version of the correspondence theory of truth, which is attacked by postmodernism. He says, true that naively assuming a one-to-one correspondence between ideas/language and objects or ideas in someone else’s head is ridiculous. But there is some overlap and some accurate apprehension that can occur (679-80).

Henry A. Giroux, “Towards a Postmodern Pedagogy,” in From Modernism to Postmodernism, edited by Lawrence E. Cahoone (Hoboken, New Jersey: Wiley-Blackwell, 1996): 687-697.

• Giroux is seeing postmodern decay of indifference and disengagement and saying how do we fire Americans to care about Enlightenment value of democracy the way Eastern Europeans do now, but in a postmodern way? Starts by saying make them critical, not good, citizens. This is how they will get power (686-88). Ethics needed to be more about concrete struggles, not just abstract rights (688).
• Giroux provides blueprint for transforming students to focus on and analyze intersectional differences and the power relationships that flow from them (690-1). He disarms even the idea of a “canon” and says curricula must be an ever-shifting negotiation centered on making society more “democratic” (692).
• [Society doesn’t get more democratic; power just becomes more obscured.]
• Postmodernism: he says reason is not innocent and must be situated historically. Partial epistemologies honest about their roots are preferred. There is nothing beyond criticism or dialogue. Other, non-reason forms of learning also to be explored (693). He wants a sense of the “not yet” of possibility, to get leftist students out of the funk of dystopian despair. Says that’s not utopian (694-5). Teachers should be “transformative intellectuals” that get political and call out oppression; give up the illusion of objectivity (695).
• Self must be politicized. Self and its various identities and relations are embedded in political structures and webs. Victimization narratives must be wedded to theorizing to be valuable and constructive (696).

David Hall, from “Modern China and the Postmodern West,” in From Modernism to Postmodernism, edited by Lawrence E. Cahoone (Hoboken, New Jersey: Wiley-Blackwell, 1996): 698-710.

• Derrida says logocentrism is quest to make being present. This bias made the West want to “present the truth, being, essence, or logical structure” of things and ideas: “the capital ‘T’ truth of things” (698). Postmodernism, on the other hand, is “a philosophy of difference. “First, difference between whatness (essence, qualities, or relation of things) vs. thatness (ontological fact of existence, “isness”): cosmological vs. ontological (698-9). Stems from Western cosmogony: the arising of order out of chaos. What principle or being accounts for why there is something rather than nothing (699). He says talking about capital “T”ruth, “G”oodness, and “B”eauty makes us lose sight of the truths, goodness, and beauty of our local particularities (699). “Dogmatism, totalitarianism, and narrow intolerance,” come from “unjustified” truth claims (699). Says first Christianity, then our techno-rational economic values, made us universalizing imperialists (700).
• Strangely defends Chinese cultural sensitivity to individualism (700). Paradoxically claims it makes them more open to the philosophy of difference (701). Western: being vs. non-being, and being vs. becoming. Tao: becoming is all that truly is. Being and non-being are poles of becoming. So little limited “orders” add up to the great fact of “becoming” chaos. No chain of being (702-3).
• In the West, you can have ontological difference: being vs. non-being. This does not exist in Taoism. Instead being and non-being are not ultimate categories or fundamental ones. They are just two more of the many cosmological differences that exist (i.e., quality, relation, etc.). Becoming is and everything is a variation on that (703). [These types are very good at manhandling foreign philosophies to liberal Western purposes, so exercise caution.]
• Hall thinks getting rid of ontological difference will keep us from obscuring cosmological difference, which he says is the Western problem. We can only see “ultimate” being because we’re concerned with ontological questions and this makes us universalizing, imperialist abstractionists (703). Says yes “reason” presupposes our POV in the West, but reason itself shaped by our limited anthropocentric history, perspective, and priorities. We see what we expect to see, what we’ve programmed ourselves to see. Tao rejects quest for overarching unities (703-4).
• Calls “priority of cosmological difference over ontological presence” in Taoism and Confucianism “priority of an aesthetic over a rational mode of understanding and discourse.
• Two languages in the West: language of absence, or via negativa: advertises absence of the referent; mystical, poetic. Dominant one, though is language of presence: it’s what postmodernism rebels? fights? battles? against. This holds literal language in regard and gives it precedence over figurative. It’s univocal, or one-to-one meaning. (Naïve, but it’s what modernism holds to.) Holds metaphor to be parasitical upon literal meaning. Not “as real.” Holds imagination in check. Clinical (704-5).
• Language of difference requires “allusive metaphors.” Western metaphors extend literal meaning; allusive ones hint, suggest, and defer meaning to other metaphors. Depend on the web of free-floating interdependencies. But this is what postmodernism says all language is!
• Because Western philosophy has capital “T” truth lurking behind all language and metaphor, experiences are ultimately independent of the true, ultimate state of affairs. Being as I experience it is decaying, changing, limited; so dualistically different from capital “B” Being. If this ultimate ontological ground is removed, then experience is fundamentally true in and of itself without reference to a more fundamentalist “ground.” Communal tradition in China provides the commonality of experience that makes language and ideas communally intelligible, them, and not some abstract logic or eternal idea superstructure. So it’s relatively repressive, not ontologically oppressive. It’s got no pretense to universality. Its uniformity is only parasitical (706-7). Bottom line: there is an absent idealized referent or object in postmodernism or China: it’s “mutual resonances among instances of communicative activity.” It’s a play of meanings between past and present. It builds its meaning on the communally accepted meanings from tradition. There’s no “there,” there, but yet every here is just as real as every other here (708).