Page 181 - Cultural Studies Dictionary

DICTIONARY OF CULTURAL STUDIES

Most thinkers who have been characterized as postmodern argue that knowledge
is not metaphysical, transcendental or universal but rather is specific to particular
times, spaces and language-games. Thus, knowledge is perspectival in character and
158 there can be no one totalizing knowledge that is able to grasp the ‘objective’
character of the world. Instead, we both have and require multiple viewpoints or
truths by which to interpret a complex heterogeneous human existence. In
addition, knowledge is not regarded as a pure or neutral way of understanding but
rather as being implicated in regimes of power.
Postmodernism rejects the Enlightenment philosophy of universal reason and
progress and understands truth as a construction of language valid only within the
language-game of its formation. Knowledge is not a question of ‘discovering’ that
which already exists, rather it involves the construction of interpretations about the
world that are taken to be true. In so far as the idea of truth has a historical
purchase, it is the consequence of power, that is, of whose interpretations count as
truth. Since postmodern philosophy argues that knowledge is specific to language-
games, it embraces local, plural and heterogeneous knowledges. Consequently the
postmodern condition is said to involve a loss of faith in the foundational schemes
or grand narratives that have justified the rational, scientific, technological and
political projects of the modern world.
Thus, while Enlightenment philosophy and the theoretical discourses of
modernity championed ‘reason’ as the source of certain and universal truths that
would lead to social progress, writers associated with postmodernism, such as
Foucault, Lyotard and Rorty have criticized the impulses of modernity for heralding
not universal progress but oppression in its search for an impossible set of
metaphysical truths.
For some commentators, the assertion by postmodernism that no universalizing
epistemology is possible is a form of relativism. That is, truth-claims are said to be
of equal epistemological status so that we are unable to make judgements between
forms of knowledge. However, Rorty has argued that what is being asserted is not
relativism but the culturally specific character of truth. Indeed, there is no
standpoint from which one can see across different forms of knowledge and regard
them as of equal value. Rather, we are always positioned within acculturated
knowledge so that judgements can only be made by reference to ‘our’ values and
not to a transcendental truth.

Links Enlightenment, epistemology, Grand narrative, irony, modernism, positionality, truth

Postmodernity The concept of postmodernism refers to aesthetic, cultural and
philosophical questions. However, the notion of postmodernity is more obviously
a periodizing concept founded on broadly defined institutional parameters of social
formations. As such, the term postmodernity is an abstraction that refers to a
historical period after modernity.
Modernity is marked by the post-medieval rise of industrialization, capitalism,
surveillance and the nation-state system. Consequently, postmodernity ought
logically to be a post-industrial, post-capitalist and stateless society. However, no