The French philosophers , for
example, work with concepts developed during the structuralist revolution in
Paris in the 1950s and early 1960s, including structuralist readings of Marx
and Freud. For this reason they are often called “poststructuralists.” They
also cite the events of May 1968 as a watershed moment for modern thought and
its institutions, especially the universities. The Italians, by contrast, draw
upon a tradition of aesthetics and rhetoric including figures such as
Giambattista Vico and Benedetto Croce. Their emphasis is strongly historical,
and they exhibit no fascination with a revolutionary moment. Instead, they
emphasize continuity, narrative, and difference within continuity, rather than
counter-strategies and discursive gaps. Neither side, however, suggests that
postmodernism is an attack upon modernity or a complete departure from it.
Rather, its differences lie within modernity itself, and postmodernism is a
continuation of modern thinking in another mode.
Habermas argues that
postmodernism contradicts itself through self-reference, and notes that
postmodernists presuppose concepts they otherwise seek to undermine, e.g.,
freedom, subjectivity, or creativity. He sees in this a rhetorical application
of strategies employed by the artistic avant-garde of the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries, an avant-garde that is possible only because modernity
separates artistic values from science and politics in the first place. On his
view, postmodernism is an illicit aestheticization of knowledge and public
discourse. Against this, Habermas seeks to rehabilitate modern reason as a
system of procedural rules for achieving consensus and agreement among
communicating subjects. Insofar as postmodernism introduces aesthetic
playfulness and subversion into science and politics, he resists it in the name
of a modernity moving toward completion rather than self-transformation
No comments:
Post a Comment