Deleuze and Fragmentation 4
Perspectivism and the 20th Century: Postmodernism
Postmodernism is first and foremost a rejection of the universal and the structural. It is a rejection of the homogeneous in favor of heterogeneity.
Postmodernism is a move away from elitist visions of the inner workings of the mind, towards a fractured exteriority.
Postmoderns reject any notion of objective truth, including the grand narratives of human progress and man over nature.
Meaning and Originality
Postmodernism starts out as ambivalence to anything aspiring to objective meaning, including western values and any alienation in relation thereto. Anything held up as original or uniquely creative is held in contempt.
This early skepticism embraced the void, embraced consumerism as having no less status than high art. Postmoderns seemed to be suggesting that in the west there is now nothing more than consumerism and commercialism.
Originality was replaced with irony, parody, pastiche and satire.
Anyone attempting to assert anything more profound or remarkable would fall on their sword.
Power Relations
The postmodern ethos is self-conscious, self-referential, pluralist and irreverential. Rejecting totality and structure, postmoderns sought to deconstruct experience.
Postmoderns focused on a critical theory that sought to expose the impact of language, ideology and history on culture and freedom.
Intrinsic identity and value were viewed with suspicion, viewed instead as contingent on history, politics, economics; on power relations in society.
Power relations themselves were viewed as contingent, in flux.
Change, the power to effect change, became the postmodern focus of concern.
Derrida and Foucault
Jacques Derrida, via his method of “deconstruction,” examined the text and meaning of language, and concluded that truth, if it exists, is complex, unstable and contingent; as such, truths could evolve.
Michael Foucault examined power in society through an historical lens, and concluded that social power was again complex, unstable and contingent; as such, relations of social power could be altered.
If thought, language and history convey social power, combine to form oppressive social structures seemingly invincible, but ultimately are found to be contingent, then thought, language and history can be influenced and changed through the exercise of a countering social power.
And postmodernism opens up onto a new radical form of freedom.
Relative relations in society can exert their social power to influence how language is used and how history is made.
Skepticism gives way to a new but bracketed optimism:
No longer human progress and man above nature, but instead a flux of social interest relations, but with man at all times immanent and in nature.
I hope you enjoyed this article. Thanks for reading!
Tomas
Please join my email list here or email me at tomas@tomasbyrne.com.
Excerpt from my forthcoming book, Becoming: A Life of Pure Difference (Gilles Deleuze and the Philosophy of the New) Copyright © 2021 by Tomas Byrne. Learn more here.
