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APPENDIX I: Modernism and Postmodernism
- Indiana University Press
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[ ≤∫∑ ] A P P E N D I X I Modernism and Postmodernism This book deals somewhat with ‘‘modernism’’ and ‘‘postmodernism.’’ To the modern mind, today’s world is disorienting because the familiar world, the Modern World, is ending. This book is partly an elegy for a world gone with the wind. The modern mind understood the world through the eyes of its intellectual parents, people in whose image the modern viewpoint was made: Plato, Aristotle, Moses, Jesus, Mohammed, Thomas Je√erson, Abraham Lincoln . The Judeo-Christian, Muslim deity held it all together, albeit in a discordia concors, a harmony of discordant elements. But postmodernism thinks of reality not as an underlying harmony but as the clamoring discordant elements themselves—only. The kaleidoscope consists of bits and pieces and a tube: there is no underlying portrait or map. This applies not only to the ‘‘external world,’’ but, more decisively, to the Self, which was the central concern and feature of modernism. In postmodernism, both the subjective Self and the objective outer world are replaced by language . The object is gone, and the subject is gone. Only the social and linguistic kaleidoscope remains. (While in this text, November, there could be a modern Self wandering through the time and space of November, history, and Gettysburg relating everything within himself, in another sense—postmodern —there is no Self here, only a series of chapters somewhat interlinked linguistically.) To modern minds, which have grown up on beliefs in purpose, meaning, and perhaps even in an overall Designer, the kaleidoscope idea is extremely disturbing; and the loss of Self is completely disorienting. While postmodernism is just what its name implies, a temporary phase between eras with no proper existence of its own, it has become necessary to deal with it somehow because we are temporary, too, and might not outlive it. We are both modern and postmodern. We project ourselves into cyberspace; we respond to blitzing collages of video images; we have become the variety we believe in. Day to day, we are disorder itself. Our lives happen with the apparent randomness of today’s bombing in Jerusalem following yesterday’s Super Bowl, preceding tomorrow’s flood in the Philippines—and history as we live it seems to be exactly what somebody once said it is: ‘‘just one damn thing after another.’’ But we also still believe that thirty days make a month. * * * a p p e n d i x i [ ≤∫∏ ] Postmodernism is useful in providing a critique of modernism, a structure which has failed us. Postmodernism can give us a few of the reasons why. One of the chief concerns of modernism—not surprisingly—is itself. The Modern World, or movement, or mentality, has ceaselessly investigated its own nature and its origins. The era that brought us humanism, with its interest in the human being to the exclusion, in e√ect, of a Creator, has focused on itself to the extent, perhaps, that its focus and its subject have dissolved. ‘‘When you see through everything, everything is invisible.’’ What is modernism? Because this age has worked hard to define the term, one must not expect the result to be unanimous, or simple—or perhaps one should not expect a result at all. In The Culture of Interpretation, Wlad Godwicz says, ‘‘Modern thought is characterized by the fact that humankind no longer thinks of itself as the emanation or creature of a superior being or as part of an external nature, but rather as becoming.’’ This is not to say that we are seen as becoming something planned, unless planned by ourselves. Here is a product of a leading element in modernism: humanism. Humanism attempts to free human beings from their former masters: ignorance, political tyranny, religious authoritarianism, cultural desolation, economic poverty. On the other hand, it subjects everything to the human intellect. This leads to the ‘‘objectifying’’ of everything, and everyone, that Heidegger saw as characteristic of modernity. Everything is made an object of knowledge in the Modern World, and the idea is to intellectually ‘‘grasp,’’ or control, whatever comes into view. This gives us ‘‘knowledge’’ in the modern sense. If we are becoming, then progress must be the dynamic of history. Indeed , there is a dynamic; things do not stand still in relation to humanity. History is a drama, or a narrative, telling the story of humankind’s progress. Modernism’s progress is intellectual, economic, political, social, even—believe it or not—spiritual. (For modernists, the drama and narrative refer to...