Modernism/Constructivism and Space for Emergence

                               <<< Appreciation/Exploration/Application of Emergence ?  >>>
                                                                                                                   
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Modernist Reproduction  >    <          "Present Ground " *         >     <   Textual & Constructivist  Iteration
         (Reductionism)                                                                         (Complexity/Mystification)
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                                                    Negatively Framed Ground
                                                           (The Commons)





The  theoretical response to modernist reproduction, (i.e. post structural theory) offers the possibility of positing an assumed  ground / commons of 'inclusive value' and emergent co-creation (Massumi & Manning 2010), however the post - modernist forces of (re)production,  both material: mechanical/electronic and academic:constructivist/textual ( Weatherall et al, 2001, referring to Witgensteins Language games. state discourse is concerned with 'building worlds') may be  motivated (by job security, position, niche etc) by the economic  metric (Marx)  to impose an assumed 'comparative value'  that privileges the various varieties of construction.


Is potential space for / discourse on emergent form/agreement from a common source (e.g. Appreciative Judgement (Vickers) in the academy/public sphere  obscured by constructionist values driven  comparative expert  judgement and language games? (perhaps this is considered, spiritual space?)


Are the commons and public space for potential inclusive emergence:  framed negatively ie  perceived as a threat from each 'opposing'  constructed metric? (Massumi)


eg the  theory of 'emergence' (Hyeck /Delanda) - appropriated by the closed/exclusive designed economic metric system and dismissed as such by the forces of textual reproduction based on closed discourse? when emergence is  a property of natural open systems(Wynne B( 2005)


The  increasing complexity of such constructed expert language games and the stereotyped reductionism of Modernism provide a fertile ground for endless argumentation, (reducing sensitivity?) also  can the expressive dominance of performative iteration (Austin/ Kristeva)  obscure/block  collective sensitivity to  a common creative emergence ?
Can this  also block progressive (non competitive) innovation and automation in both the theoretical and innovative-productive realm ? (eg Logical Typing/ General System Theory/Complexity theory > Deleuze)


Should those concerned with space for communicative discourse (Habermas) (e.g. the university)  take account of this (symbolicly distorted communication) by actively exploring  if  the (excluded) 'random flows' and  and 'layerd textured surfaces of natural environments'  perhaps could facilitate emergent agreement   ?


Do/Should Discourse Analysis based  Methodologies (e.g. Mouff / Fairclough) take account of this 


Is this an exclusive  dialectical framing of theoretical perspective... excluding sensitivity to  middle ground?




* "Present Ground" -  the term acknowledges the difference in type, of the 'present moment' from the 'past' and 'future' ,which are actually both consturcted and experienced in the present, it could be perceived as  a ground that we do not 'escape from' although we may convince ourselves we do with our language, that ground is our inclusive source. not an enclosed segmented 'objective' conceptual aspect, or idea, nor something that can be enclosed or segmented,  but a living inclusive shared presence and source of all we are...the dynamic self-organising nature of natural systems...


http://browse.reticular.info/text/collected/massumi.pdf


 Massumi & Manning A Continuum of Modes of Perception - Neurodiversity


 re : Human language (with its inherent conceptual boundaries & dualism?) <> Textured Perceptual Relating  (Co-creation & Emergence)


1 Massumi, B , The-political-ontology-of-threat The affect theory reader


 2. Massumi & Manning "Coming alive in a world of Texture (Video)"
: the blurring of  "Autist/Artist" is not a mistake...the authentic artist really does have to step back from Neurotypical position if they are to leap... there are material/reified methods and more authentic methods of achieving this as usual and the market chooses its own favorites... 'objectivisation' or 'mutual dance of attention'...efficiency...or ?


3. Weatherall,Taylor, Yates. 2001 "Discourse Theory and Practice": Introduction


"People are using their language to construct versions of the social world": (1)built from existing resources (components) , (2)there is an active selection of these components, (3)people experience events in terms of their linguistic constructions
see The Thomas Theorem and The Matthew Effect. Robert K. Merton. Social Forces, December 1995, 74(2):379-424.
c.f Sapir Whorf

4. Vickers, Sir Geoffrey (1995) The Art of Judgment – A Study of Policy Making. Sage 

Publications. Centenary Ed. 


+ Massumi: Artspace into the Diagram 
Creative Involution Deleuze & Guttari


* its the nature of academia to focus on distinction, more subtle distinctions and changes in relevant distinctions, indeed that is the theoretical foundation of research. However, the balance between valid distinction and distinction for mystification is a delicate one.

Performatism and the Ethics of Perpetration

The ethics of postmodernism is characterized by such features as face-to-face engagement 

with a Other irreducible to totalizing concepts (Levinas), by the focus on weak, peripheral 

victims of institutional force (Foucault), or by the endless uncovering of aporetic relations in 

discourse (Derrida); ethical relations appear as shifting and contingent rather than as 

universally applicable principles (Rorty). In the last few years, however, postmodernism has 

been eclipsed by an epoch that I call performatism, which forces upon readers unity, closure, 

and the experience of transcendence with aesthetic or patently artificial means. The purpose 

of this paper is to explore how performatism works in ethical terms. In particular, I wish to 

examine the specific ethical strategies developing in performatism that are associated with 

centered, active subjects, with unified, closed states, and with ethical and/or aesthetic acts 

offering ways of transcending those states. As examples I provisionally have in mind films 

and novels which turn presumed victims into perpetrators or allow characters to in some way 

“play God”: Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, Lars von Trier’s Dogville, Michael 

Haneke’s The White Band, Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader, or Ian McEwan’s Saturday. I also 

wish to explore how these and similarly structured works relate to transcending or 

ameliorating the various traumata of the 20th and 21st centuries.      

Name: Raoul Eshelman              

     

Bio:  

Raoul Eshelman teaches Slavics and Comparative Literature at the Ludwig-Maximilians- 

Universität in Munich. He received his Ph.D. in Slavic literature from Konstanz (1988) and 

wrote his Habilitation in Hamburg (1995) on Early Soviet Postmodernism (Frankfurt 1997). 

His most recent work is Performatism, or the End of Postmodernism (Aurora, 2008), which 

represents a systematic attempt to define the epoch after postmodernism. 

Personal Construct Psychology, Constructivism, and Postmodern Thought Luis Botella Department of Psychology Ramon Llull University (Barcelona, Spain)

Personal Construct Psychology, Constructivism, and Postmodern Thought

Luis Botella

Department of Psychology

Ramon Llull University (Barcelona, Spain)


http://www.massey.ac.nz/~alock/virtual/Construc.htm

Realer than Real The Simulacrum According to Deleuze and Guattari

REALER THAN REAL 

The Simulacrum According to Deleuze and Guattari 

Brian Massumi.  

From Copyright no.1, 1987, pp. 90-97. 

There is a seductive image of contemporary culture circulating today. Our 

world, Jean Baudrillard tells us, has been launched into hyperspace in a kind of 

postmodern apocalypse. The airless atmosphere has asphyxiated the referent, 

leaving us satellites in aimless orbit around an empty center. We breathe an 

ether of floating images that no longer bear a relation to any reality 

whatsoever.1 That, according to Baudrillard, is simulation: the substitution of 

signs of the real for the real.2 In hyperreality, signs no longer represent or refer 

to an external model. They stand for nothing but themselves, and refer only to 

other signs. They are to some extent distinguishable, in the way the phonemes 

of language are, by a combinatory of minute binary distinctions.3 But 

postmodernism stutters. In the absence of any gravitational pull to ground 

them, images accelerate and tend to run together. They become 

interchangeable. Any term can be substituted for any other: utter 

indetermination.4 Faced with this homogeneous surface of syntagmatic 

slippage, we are left speechless. We can only gape in fascination.5 For the 

secret of the process is beyond our grasp. Meaning has imploded. There is no 

longer any external model, but there is an immanent one. To the syntagmatic 

surface of slippage there corresponds an invisible paradigmatic dimension that 

creates those minimally differentiated signs only in order for them to blur 

together in a pleasureless orgy of exchange and circulation. Hidden in the 

images is a kind of genetic code responsible for their generation.6 Meaning is 

out of reach and out of sight, but not because it has receded into the distance. 

It is because the code has been miniaturized. Objects are images, images are 

signs, signs are information, and information fits on a chip. Everything reduces 

to a molecular binarism. The generalized digitality of the computerized 

society.7

Advanced capitalism, Deleuze and Guattari argue, is reaching a 

new transnational level that necessitates a dissolution of old identities and 

territorialities and the unleashing of objects, images and information having far 

more mobility and combinatory potential than ever before.26 As always, this 

deterritorialization is effected only in order to make possible a 

reterritorialization on an even grander and more glorious land of worldwide 

capital reborn. But in the meantime, a breach has opened. The challenge is to 

assume this new world of simulation and take it one step farther, to the point 

of no return, to raise it to a positive simulation of the highest degree by 

marshaling all our powers of the false toward shattering the grid of 

representation once and for all.  

This cannot be done by whining. The work of Baudrillard is one long lament. 

Both linear and dialectical causality no longer function, therefore everything is 

indetermination. The center of meaning is empty, therefore we are satellites in 

lost orbit. We can no longer act like legislator-subjects or be passive like 

slaves, therefore we are sponges. Images are no longer anchored by 

representation, therefore they float weightless in hyperspace. Words are no 

longer univocal, therefore signifiers slip chaotically over each other. A circuit 

has been created between the real and the imaginary, therefore reality has 

imploded into the undecidable proximity of hyperreality. All of these 

statements make sense only if it is assumed that the only conceivable 

alternative to representative order is absolute indetermination, whereas 

indetermination as he speaks of it is in fact only the flipside of order, as 

necessary to it as the fake copy is to the model, and every bit as much a part 

of its system. Baudrillard's framework can only be the result of a nostalgia for 

the old reality so intense that it has difformed his vision of everything outside 

of it. He cannot clearly see that all the things he says have crumbled were 

simulacra all along: simulacra produced by analyzable procedures of simulation 

that were as real as real, or actually realer than real, because they carried the 

real back to its principle of production and in so doing prepared their own 

rebirth in a new regime of simulation. He cannot see becoming, of either 

variety. He cannot see that the simulacrum envelops a proliferating play of 

differences and galactic distances. What Deleuze and Guattari offer, 

particularly in A Thousand Plateaus, is a logic capable of grasping Baudrillard's 

failing world of representation as an effective illusion the demise of which 

opens a glimmer of possibility. Against cynicism, a thin but fabulous hope--of 

ourselves becoming realer than real in a monstrous contagion of our own 

making.  

Postmodernism

It sees no difference such as ‘high' culture and ‘low' culture. As it protests against totalitarianism of rationality, instead it suggests narrations and irrational behavior. But this does not mean postmodernism simply supports all sorts of narrations and myths. It vehemently condemns grand narratives and replaces them with local cum micro narratives. Particularly when it comes to metaphysical aspects, it demolishes foundationalism, essentialism, and absolutism. It denies absolute objectivity of truth, reality and knowledge and supports plurality of truths, multiplicity of meaning and celebration of difference.(Undecidable) When it comes to epistemology, postmodernism deliberately refuses reason as an ultimate instrument of knowledge. In social and political sphere it closely observes the disparity, coercion and domination implanted by the utopian concepts of universalism, transcendentalism. In turn postmodernism develops "incredulity toward metanarratives"26 andrejects any foundational or universalistic account of existence. It invokes de-naturalization of hierarchy and topsy-turvy of centrality. In ethical grounds though postmodernists are groundless, they value plurality of cultural, ethnic and religious "small narratives". They aim to (re)conceptualize a pluralistic justice which takes into account the concern for the "other", the "excluded", "unrepresented", "unknown" or "marginalized": the postmodern ethico-political project constitutes a response to "difference, exclusion and marginalisation"27 produced by modernity. Except for the distrust in systematic moral codes and integrated forms of life, postmodernism shows respect to moral relativism and promote diversity of all kinds.

It opens up various other possibilities that rejoice fluidity, variations, multiplicity, diversity, plurality, difference, etc., without prescribing any final solution.

Read more: http://www.articlesbase.com/college-and-university-articles/ethical-dilemmas-in-postmodernism-2259341.html#ixzz10AZWIEmz Under Creative Commons License: Attribution

Dr.M.Susithra

The Dept. of Philosophy &Centre for Philosophical Research

Its full of undecidables - sloppy logic? purpose?

Also denies meta langage which addresses undecidables

I am suspicious that it clears the way for division and dominace by capital via the language games of instrumental reason

Radical Postmodernism & Assumed Bounded Identity

Arguments against Universal values eg Lyotard assume a horizon limiting us to ad hoc local  criticisms (Sarup pp144)
however he bases this on assumptions about the subject identity  as atomised and bounded...?

(need to read more eg) postmodern explained pp4


ie he denies a universal aspect to  identity /collective identity conciousness...?

Postmodernism - Skepticism

Postmodernism? (denial of Grand Narrative? seems to encourage Skepticism (Russel pp251)
(Go along with current norms, don, no strong beliefs?) c.f Hume?


Seems to me its all great fun  if you are successful in the capitalist game (fits American Dream?)
(Wealth, Power Lyotard in Sarup pp134) (often gained by imposing world views on others)
only measure legitimised is monetary? efficiency of system as it is?
If not any criticism of the system (Grand Narrative) is denied so you have to blame yourself > hopelessness and suicide?


What about Meta language - language games


c.f Freedom of identification UN, Human rights, slavery

Post Modernism values

PostModernism- Humour and Pastiche, "it's all surface/copying so let's have fun" - fit's well with capitalism?

Different views of what PM is

The term postmodernism is used in a confusing variety of ways. For some it means anti–modern, while for others it means the revision of modernist premises. (Get/Make chart/list of authors) The seemingly anti–modern stance involves a basic rejection of the tenets of modernism, such as belief in the supremacy of reason, the notion of truth, and the idea that it is possible through the application of reason and truth to create a better society

As an anti–modernist movement, therefore, postmodernism is seen as rejecting those elements that comprise the modernist worldview, including the ideas of truth, self, meaning, and purpose. In this respect, deconstructive postmodernism is seen by some as nihilistic.

Questions are then raised about who constructed these intellectual ideals and what were their motives. Who does modernism serve? When considered in a global context, it should be clear from the history outlined is this essay that modernism serves Western social and political aspirations.

In contrast to the anti–modern position, an alternative understanding seeks to revise Modernism’s premises and traditional concepts, which have become institutionalized, corrupt, and entrenched.

In support of the core values of modernism — liberty, equality, rights, the pursuit of happiness — the aim is to challenge the logic of the oppressive modernist state and undermine the legitimacy of prevailing conservative forces. Sometimes termed constructive postmodernism, it seeks to provide a new unity of scientific, ethical, aesthetic, and religious intuitions.

It rejects not science and religion as such, but only those scientific approaches and religious practices in which only prescribed data and beliefs are permitted to contribute to the construction of our worldview.

Constructive postmodernism seeks to recover truths and values from various forms of pre–modern thought and practice. This is necessary because the pursuit of modernism, especially in its unfettered capitalistic and consumerist manifestations, is not sustainable and threatens the very survival of human life on the planet.


The postmodern is deliberately elusive as a concept, due in part to its willingness to accept, in contrast to modernism, uncertainty and ambiguity. (**** Levels of type (cant you be clear at a meta linguistic level (if not can be exploited by the elite? (mystification of Modern Art) (and reification used as a door to it) (as here)???l!!!)  (explore metalanguage its place in postmodern) (knowledge-intuition) Whereas Modernism was concerned with reasoned progress and logical conclusions, postmodernism respects ‘process’ and ‘becoming,’ preferring openness, transparency, and the unbounded.

Whitcombe C

http://witcombe.sbc.edu/modernism/modpostmod.html

The ways that modern societies go about creating categories labeled as "order" or "disorder" have to do with the effort to achieve stability. Francois Lyotard (the theorist whose works Sarup describes in his article on postmodernism) equates that stability with the idea of "totality," or a totalized system (think here of Derrida's idea of "totality" as the wholeness or completeness of a system). Totality, and stability, and order, Lyotard argues, are maintained in modern societies through the means of "grand narratives" or "master narratives," which are stories a culture tells itself about its practices and beliefs. A "grand narrative" in American culture might be the story that democracy is the most enlightened (rational) form of government, and that democracy can and will lead to universal human happiness. Every belief system or ideology has its grand narratives, according to Lyotard; for Marxism, for instance, the "grand narrative" is the idea that capitalism will collapse in on itself and a utopian socialist world will evolve. You might think of grand narratives as a kind of meta-theory, or meta-ideology????, that is, an ideology that explains an ideology (as with Marxism); a story that is told to explain the belief systems that exist.


??? Grand Narrative = Meta Theory?? is this true? doesnt this create confusion? cant this be used by those divisive elements (duakistic constructs) that are exposed by meta theories,  what about their liberating value?
(Meta language is essential for wisdom -?) clarity about levels of  typing (dialectic) - eg (safety openness, union-freedom)
add too with references

Another way of saying this, according to Jean Baudrillard, is that in postmodern society there are no originals, only copies--or what he calls "simulacra." You might think, for example, about painting or sculpture, where there is an original work (by Van Gogh, for instance), and there might also be thousands of copies, but the original is the one with the highest value (particularly monetary value). Contrast that with cds or music recordings, where there is no "original," as in painting--no recording that is hung on a wall, or kept in a vault; rather, there are only copies, by the millions, that are all the same, and all sold for (approximately) the same amount of money. Another version of Baudrillard's "simulacrum" would be the concept of virtual reality, a reality created by simulation, for which there is no original. This is particularly evident in computer games/simulations--think of Sim City, Sim Ant, etc


Lyotard says (and this is what Sarup spends a lot of time explaining) that the important question for postmodern societies is who decides what knowledge is (and what "noise" is), and who knows what needs to be decided. Such decisions about knowledge don't involve the old modern/humanist qualifications: for example, to assess knowledge as truth (its technical quality), or as goodness or justice (its ethical quality) or as beauty (its aesthetic quality). Rather, Lyotard argues, knowledge follows the paradigm of a language game, as laid out by Wittgenstein. I won't go into the details of Wittgenstein's ideas of language games; Sarup gives a pretty good explanation of this concept in his article, for those who are interested.

There are lots of questions to be asked about postmodernism, and one of the most important is about the politics involved--or, more simply, is this movement toward fragmentation, provisionality, performance, and instability something good or something bad? There are various answers to that; in our contemporary society, however, the desire to return to the pre-postmodern era (modern/humanist/Enlightenment thinking) tends to get associated with conservative political, religious, and philosophical groups. In fact, one of the consequences of postmodernism seems to be the rise of religious fundamentalism, as a form of resistance to the questioning of the "grand narratives" of religious truth. 

This association between the rejection of postmodernism and conservatism or fundamentalism may explain in part why the postmodern avowal of fragmentation and multiplicity tends to attract liberals and radicals. This is why, in part, feminist theorists have found postmodernism so attractive, as Sarup, Flax, and Butler all point out.

On another level, however, postmodernism seems to offer some alternatives to joining the global culture of consumption, where commodities and forms of knowledge are offered by forces far beyond any individual's control. These alternatives focus on thinking of any and all action (or social struggle) as necessarily local, limited, and partial--but nonetheless effective. By discarding "grand narratives" (like the liberation of the entire working class) and focusing on specific local goals (such as improved day care centers for working mothers in your own community), postmodernist politics offers a way to theorize local situations as fluid and unpredictable, though influenced by global trends. Hence the motto for postmodern politics might well be "think globally, act locally"--and don't worry about any grand scheme or master plan.

 Dr. Mary Klages, Associate Professor, English Department, University of Colorado, Boulder.


http://www.colorado.edu/English/courses/ENGL2012Klages/pomo.html

Humanism & Post-Modernism

"this subject is more appropriately conceptualised as an 'individual' or 'person' and is seen to posess the capacity for constructing the social world in a way that is meaningful to her/him. It is precisely this notion of the individual as the centre of the socialuniverse that is the object of such vehement criticism by structuralism and its post-structualist and psotmodern offshoots. This thetrefore represents a radical distinction between  the humanist and postmodern forms of thinking. Dispite this crucial divergence, there are other pioints at which there is some overlap between  humanist schools of thought and postmodernism.In particular there is  emphasis on the ocaland fragmentary nature of meaning, an anti-theoretical strain and a distruct of the search for objective truth which is the hallmark of conventional scientific enquiry.

p73 Layder D Understanding SocialTheory

Meta Language : Lyotard : Sarup

"Lyotard argues that art, morality and science () have become seperated and autonomous,. A characteristic of our times is fragmented language games. (academic culture?) There is no meta-language"


Sarup  p145 


Lyotard adopts a small/grand narrative criterion, small narratives are associated with localised creativity, grand narratives with a political program

Why are the post structuralists so frightened of the universal?

p146

The Idea of the Postmodern University

• Fragmentation of disciplines – modularity
• Fragmentation of sector – multiversity
• Mass education
• Inter-disciplinarity – research
• Politicalisation of knowledge
• Distance learning
• Technological
• Deconstruction of absolute truth
• No idea of the university

The 1960 and 70s was an important time for the development of the idea of the university in Britain. The most significant move was from an elite to an expanded system of entry, signalled by the Robbins Committee report. While there is a tendency to think of traditional universities as being based on the medieval model of the university, it is a fact that the present system of universities was created in the 1950 and 1960s with two thirds of British Universities created in this period (Delanty 44).

This expansion was based on satisfying student demand, linked to the imperatives of the post war society which included the need for a more skilled workforce, based around the ‘contemporary enthusiasm for science and technology’ (Scott 1984). Although Robbins suggested a very pragmatic programme for expansion his report was not without its idealism:

‘Not only is it a probable condition for the maintenance of our material position in the world, but, much more, it is an essential condition for the realisation in the modern age of the ideals of a free and democratic society’ (Scott 122).

The outcome of this expansion of HE in this period saw the creation of a number of new universities, East Anglia, Lancaster, York, Warwick, Kent, Stirling and Coleraine, as well as the upgrading of former colleges of advanced technology: Bath, Bradford, Brunel, City, Loughborough, Salford, Surrey, Heriot Watt, Strathclyde and Chelsea to full university status (Scott 1984).

This was the period when the Polytechnics were established as ‘the people’s universities’ replacing the ‘concept of the boarding school university by that of the urban community university’ (Ainley 1994 9). The Open University was created in 1969 as an institution not directly associated with a specific location, notwithstanding its HQ in the new city of Milton Keynes, where learning would take place at a distance for cohorts of part-time students, mainly through correspondence and by utilising the new power of television and radio. The importance of television and radio for the effective delivery of course materials meant that the Open University was originally to be known as the ‘University of the Air’.

Kerr’s describes this expansion of the university in terms of the idea of the university: there was not now one type of university but a multitude of universities: a ‘multiversity’ and with it the end of the idea of the university (Delanty 45):

The ‘Idea of a University’ was a village with its priests. The ‘Idea of a Modern University’ was a town – a one-industry town – with its own intellectual oligarchy. The ‘Idea of a Multiversity’ is a city of infinite variety. Some get lost in the city; some rise to the top within it; most fashion their lives within one of its many subcultures. There is less sense of community than in the village but also less sense of confinement. There is less sense of purpose than within the town but there are more ways to excel’ (Smith and Webster 1997 33-34).

If universities were now appearing in dramatic new forms, there was another challenge to the notion of the idea of the university emerging from within the university itself. This challenge was not simply accommodating the increasing numbers of students or adapting to new types of academic institutions, but involved the status of knowledge and science in society. Delanty (2001 60) refers to this process as ‘the politicalisation of knowledge and its public role in society’. This challenge questioned not only the nature and knowledge in society, but with it the existence and role and nature of the university itself.

This politicalisation of knowledge became manifest by the ways in which universities became the sites of social and political unrest. From 1968 onwards in Paris and around the world, students – often in collaboration with trade unions, feminists, peace campaigners and other civil rights activists – led wave after wave of protest. In some countries these protests brought governments and political structures to the point of collapse (Ali and Watkins 1998)

Delanty ( 2001) relates this activity in terms of the idea of the university. He argues that the university has now become a site of contested knowledge, and with it the landscape of the university had been transformed into a space through which a more democratic form of citizenship might emerge (Delanty 2001 43). Universities were now playing a key role in providing the intellectual space for these new democratic and progressive movements to flourish (Delanty 2001 64), and in doing so providing a new basis for the idea of the university.

What is significant about this new ideal is that it calls into question not just the nature and role of the university but the nature of knowledge itself. In 1979 Jean-Francois Lyotard wrote a report for the Canadian government on the status and condition of knowledge and science. For Lyotard knowledge and the activities that produced it had been overwhelmed by industrial society, but it was a society whose rigorous examination of its own content had undermined the very foundations on which knowledge was constructed. Lyotard referred to this as the postmodern condition.

Lyotard famously describes postmodernism and its relationship to the university:

‘I define postmodernism as incredulity towards meta-narratives. This incredulity is undoubtedly a product of progress in sciences; but that progress in turn presupposes it. To the obsolescence of the metanarrative apparatus of legitimation corresponds, most notably the crisis of the metaphysical philosophy and of the university institution which in the past relied on it’ (Lyotard introduction xxxiv 1979).

Lyotard described this process as signalling the end of the university.

This new ideal of the university that emerged in the 1960s has been described as the postmodern university (Smith and Webster 1997 ). The key to the idea of the postmodern university is the way in which teaching and research have come to be redefined. Kant’s coherent subject based faculties were now being disrupted by the craze for inter-disciplinarity in research and modularity in teaching – all of which expressed the increasing fragmentation of knowledge (Delanty 2001 136). This was making it ‘increasingly hard to state the goals which were held in common by all areas of the academic community (Smith and Webster 1997 3). It appeared as if the idea of the university has been completely undermined.

This is reflected in campus design. Temple tells us:

‘This mixing and community-building was, in fact, one of the objectives in the planning of several of the UK’s 1960s universities. Ideas about teaching and learning were, contrary to Edwards’s view, central to this planning. The master-plans of both the Universities of York and Kent, for example, were based on assumptions (not obviously supported by any evidence, incidentally) about teaching and learning being enhanced by staff and students living together, and to an extent working together, in colleges. At York, a distinctive view of higher education guided its early planning: “Care will be taken to avoid the association of a particular college with a particular subject. This might…work against the mixing of different interests and skills which is one of the chief purposes of university education” (University of York, 1962: 10). A similar view was expressed by the founding Vice-Chancellor of the University of Kent, that each of its colleges should be “a microcosm of the whole University” (Martin, 1990: 130). Other 1960s universities took different planning approaches, but each had what would now be called a model of teaching and learning at the centre of its planning, which influenced campus design and space use. Warwick, for example, like Sussex, planned for interdisciplinary schools of studies created around core subjects, rather than the then-usual single-subject honours degree courses (Burgess, 1991: 96). (Temple 15 and 16).

All of this expressed in the emergence of the idea of the campus – Malcolm Bradbury, in the campus novel, reminds us that a university campus is ‘one of those dominant modern environments of multi-functionality that modern man creates, close it down as a university…and you could open it again as a factory, a prison, a shopping precinct (Bradbury History Man in Showalter 2005 58)

The result is that the idea of the university appears to be completely lost.

Further Reading (not complete)

Ainley, P. (1994) ‘Degrees of Difference, Higher Education in the 1990s’, Lawrence and Wishart

Ali, T and Watkins, S. (1998) 1968

Bradbury, M. (1975) The History Man

Delanty, G. (2001) Challenging Knowledge: The University in the Knowledge Society, The Society for Research into Higher Education and Open University Press, Buckingham and Philadelphia

Lyotard, F. (1979) The Postmodern Condition, Manchester University Press

Smith, A. and Webster, F. (eds) (1997) The Postmodern University: Contested Visions of Higher Education in Society, Society for Research in Higher Education and the Open University Press, Buckingham

Scott, P. (1984) The Crisis of the University, Croom Helm, London

Showalter, E. (2005) Faculty Towers, University of Pennsylvania Press, Pennsylvania

http://learninglandscapes.blogs.lincoln.ac.uk/the-idea-of-the-university-reimagining-higher-education/post-modern-university-radical-democratised/

Raoul Eshelman (performatism)

These examples suggest that the switch to a radical monist, postmillennial or performatist kind of consciousness is not exactly going to cause writers or other artists to burst out in hosannas to global capitalism. What it does mean, though, is that the thing that Eric Gans calls victimary politics (of which Hotel World is a prime example) is going to grow increasingly outmoded as an aesthetic device. In part, this is due to the ubiquity of victimary argumentation itself. The ironic act of displaying your political impotence on the one hand and flaunting your epistemological superiority on the other has by now become an entirely predictable exercise even for those who agree with its political aims. However, the rise of radical monism also appears to meet a real cultural need to create spatially discrete identities or performances within global capitalism that would enable forms of totalized or holistic resistance to it.

Using the examples I have discussed here as a rough guide, you could speak of a "right," a "left" and a sublime or "terrorist" path to this goal. The "right" method is not uncritical of capitalism. However, it tries to work within it by creating inspirational projections in its inner space (by aspirating what Sloterdijk calls spheres or foams--whole pockets of belief, faith, truth etc.). The "left" strategy corresponds roughly to the attempt to amalgamate variegated otherness into an appealing, tasteful object of cultural identity (a nice hot chutney, so to speak). This strategy seems particularly appropriate to postcolonial writers, as it would allow them to reify attributes from their own cultures that are at the same time universally binding or "necessary" for others to enjoy in the Kantian sense. Finally, the "terrorist" alternative suggests the possibility of a total critique of capitalism that takes place in the mode of "as if." The terrorist aesthete will play va banque with the sublime possibility of a radical monist alternative to capitalism, postmodern society or Western culture per se(16) (although this doesn’t mean that we must now be on the lookout for a novel by Osama bin Laden).

Summing up, the performatist works by Tokarczuk, Roy and Urban can all be subsumed under the broader umbrella of what might be called "anthropological Kantianism." In the new literature, Kantian notions of subjectivity and aesthetic judgment are being applied--sometimes quite consciously--to topical problems relating to the role of individuals and cultures in the era of global capitalism. In the process, these Kantian notions have been modified and adapted to a new, specifically monist mindset that runs counter to Kant’s original (and possibly also misinterpreted) dualism of mind and matter.(17) The innovative crux of this adaptation lies in what I call the performance.(18) The author knows there is a split between mind and matter (or some other basic duality), but nonetheless forces us to identify with the possibility of transcending it per formam--by passing with our mind’s eye and with our bodily emotions through form. The "reward" for engaging in this formally mediated identification or projection is an aesthetic, performatist pleasure which transcends the dualism of cognitive vs. physical; the "punishment" for dismantling that projection is to live in the epistemologically correct but joyless state of knowing that is postmodernism. In performatism, aesthetics trumps epistemology. Art is a privileged place where secular individuals will once again be able to experience transcendence, albeit only under limited, artificial conditions.

There is little doubt that the most appropriate philosophical, psychological, and sociological sources for dealing with this "closed" situation with its specific, positive projections can be found in the Kantian tradition. Reclaiming this long line of Western thought for performatism/postmillennialism is a project that must, however, remain reserved for further studies.

http://www.anthropoetics.ucla.edu/ap1002/transhotel.htm

Lecture: Postmodernism

Session 9

Characteristics of Postmodernism

Uses tools of post-structuralism? Critiques pre existing cultural norms.. Symbolic Capital*

1. Deletion of the boundary between art and everyday life

2. Collapse of hierarchical distinctions between “high” and “popular” culture

3. Stylistic eclecticism and the mixing of codes

4. Celebration of parody, pastiche, irony and playfulness

5. Espousal of surface over depth

6. Shift in emphasis from content to form

7. Decline of the concepts of originality and artistic genius, and assumption that art is only repetitious

Session 9

Characteristics of Postmodernity according to Fredric Jameson

commodification of aesthetics

depthlessness

historicity

emotional intensities

technology

Session 9

hegemonic : order-maintaining

counter-hegemonic: resistant or order-transforming

Session 9

Post-Marxism

1) Post-Marxists acknowledge that there is no necessary correspondence between economics and culture, and that the cultural realm has a presence and power of its own separate from the economic base.

2) They recognize that there has been a transition from a society of commodity production to a society of consumption and the re-production of images and information.

3) Post-Marxists follow Foucault in observing that power is not a force located within a single group, class or action, but it permeates all our lives "from the bottom up".

4) They hold a fragmented view of class, arguing that gender, ethnic, religious or sexual identities cut across and fracture the Marxist notion of social class.

5) They recognize that the expression or representation of these "sub-cultural" identities constitutes new sites of oppression and struggle that serve to replace traditional class politics.

Session 9

Summary of Postmodernism

1. Postmodernism is an imprecise, elusive and sometimes contradictory term with a range of applications and potential understandings.

2. There are at least three distinct ways the term postmodernism has been used: as an epoch, as astyle and as a method.

3. Each of these perspectives conceives of postmodernism in relational terms and claims that society, culture and forms of analysis have changed significantly in recent decades.

4. Postmodern theorists are concerned with describing the nature of these changes and suggesting reasons for why they have come about.

5. They propose new approaches and new vocabularies for understanding and discussing contemporary social and cultural phenomena.

6. Many postmodern critics agree that as a style or a form of analysis, postmodernism aims to be a critique, transgression or subversion of pre-existing norms.

7. Postmodernism is conceived by many as a "crisis of representation", or loss of faith in our ability to represent reality.