Postmodern Paradigm 1 next page Santa Fe Institute (A postmodern-scientific transdisciplinary research center focussing on "Complexity")
Systemic Functional Theory (of language and other modes of meaning) belongs to the Postmodern Paradigm.
- ...Yet despite the extent and depth of the variety of shifts from the modern to the postmodern, and the different ways that postmodern discourse is used to organize a wide range of new assumptions, terms, and methods, there are some core family resemblances of ideas and shared positions. Hence, although there is a bewildering variety of concepts identified as "postmodrn" in varous fields of knowledge and the arts, we can identify four main thematic similarities that break with distinct modern concepts and themes.
1. Postmodernists reject unifying, totalizing, and universal schemes in favor of new emphases on difference, plurality, fragmentation, and complexity. ....
2. Postmodernists renounce closed structure, fixed meaning, and rigid order in favor of play, indeterminacy, incompleteness, uncertainty, ambiguity, contingency, and chaos. ...
3. Postmodernists abandon naive realism and representational epistemology, as well as unmediated objectivity and truth, in favor of perspectivism, anti-foundationalism, hermeneutics, intertexturality, simulation, and relativism. ...
4. A new emphasis is evident on deconstructing boundaries within and among different disciplines in postmodern turn. ...
(Steven Best and Douglas Kellner. The Postmodern Turn. 1997. The Guilford Press. pp.255-258)
- Postmodern science rejects the deterministic world view of modern science for a version of reality that is indeterministic, probabilistic, relative, chaotic, complex, and in a constant struggle between entropy and emerging order.
(Ken Baake. Metaphor and Knowledge: the challenges of writing science. 2003. SUNY Press. pp.19-20)- ...the tension between science in the positivist tradition, which posits the existence of a neutral reality, and postmodern philosophy, which holds that reality is largely constructed subjectively out of words.
(Ken Baake. Metaphor and Knowledge: the challenges of writing science. 2003. SUNY Press. p.26)
- ...a paradigm shift that he (William Barrett.1958. Irrational Man) sees as unfolding in philosophy, art, literature, and science, all of which evince a sense of crisis, breakdown, loss of absolutes and foundations, and dissatisfaction with rationalism. Relativity theory, quantum mechanics, complementarity in physics, the incompleteness principle in mathematics, and new forms of indeterminacy in the sciences undermined belief in absolute foundations of knowledge and a well-ordered universe. ...
(Steven Best and Douglas Kellner. The Postmodern Turn. 1997. The Guilford Press. p.7)- Notions of a postmodern break with the modern era and modern culture and society appeared regularly from the 1940s to the present in the fields of history and social science; in the arts, a current of postmodernism emerged that rejected modernism, and postmodernism's practices and forms eventually erupted in every artistic field during 1960s. Modern paradigms in philosophy, literature, science, and the arts were decisively formed in the social context of modernity, which involves a shattering of tradition, the replacement of a religious worldview by a secular worldview, and the instantiation of a social-institutional logic based on incessant change and progress. Science, capitalism, and technology were the driving forces behind rapid social development, while theorists and artists affirmed change and novelty and produced new theories and visions. Despite the specialization of disciplines, an overarching modern paradigm emerged in society, beginning perhaps in the 15th century and continuing strongly through the end of 19th century, organized around mechanical metaphors, deterministic logic, critical reason, individualism and humanist ideals, a search for universal truths and values, attempts to construct unifying and comprehensive schemes of knowledge, and optimistic beliefs in progress and the movement of history toward a state of human emancipation. Through a series of revolutions---geographic (colonialism), intellectual (the Renaissance, modern science, and the Enlightment), economic (capitalism), political (bourgeois democracy), technological (the Industrial Revolution), and artistic (modernism)---the world of Newton, Kant, and Marx became fundamentally different from the premodern world of Dante, Aquinas, and Augustine.
Of course, the modern paradigm is highly complex, diverse, and contested. The Enlightment, for example, although comprising a general belief in reason and critical thought as the key to human emancipation, was divided within itself on major issues such as religion, politics, and human nature. Dissent from the modern paradigm began at the moment of its formation in science, the emerging capitalist economy, the bourgeois political revolutions, and the first flowerings of the Enlightment. Throughout its entire development, from Burke to Blake to Bakunin and Baudrillard, the values of modernity were hotly contested, as modern paradigms in theory, the arts, and science began to take shape, were criticized, and developed further. In the realm of theory, sustained and powerful critiques of totalizing modes of rationality, a major complaint within dissenting traditions, was begun in the mid-19th century by European existentialists, was continued through the early 20th century by U.S. pragmatists, and culminated in the second half of the 20th century with poststructuralism and New French Theory, all helping to generate a postmodern turn.
By the 1960s, with their complex lineage of anticipations, postmodern paradigms in various fields began to take shape in reaction to the orthodoxies and problems in modern paradigms. But the sea change that has taken place in virtually every discipline since the 1960s has also been influenced by economic and technological changes occuring during the whole post-World War II period and was decisively influenced by the political turmoil of the 1960s. The modern paradigm, which began to emerge at various levels in the 15th and 16th centuries and was clearly dominant by the time of the American and French Revolutions, is now in great crisis at all levels---from the values of humanism to the deterministic and mechanistic logic of the sciences to the ideology of growth and progress. Consequently, there is today an emerging postmodern paradigm organized around a family of concepts, shared methodological assumptions, and a general sensibility that attack modern methods and concepts as overtly totalizing and reductionistic; that decry utopian and humanistic values as dystopian and dehumanizing; that abandon mechanical deterministic schemes in favor of new principles of chaos, contingency, spontaneity, and organism; that challenge all beliefs in foundatiuons, absolutes, truth, and objectivity, often to embrace a radical skepticism, relativism, and hihilism; and that subvert boundaries of all kinds.
The postmodern paradigm that we see emerging in society and culture as a cumulative result of paradigm shifts in specific disciplines must not be understood in terms a closed, unanimous, or finalized framework that rigidly and inexorably informs all thoughts today, nor should it be seen as the new "cultural dominant" as Jameson, for example, argues. In the current conditons of crisis and ferment, the postmodern paradigm is only emergent and is strongly resisted by modernist orthodoxy, as well as being conflicted among competing tendencies. ...Modern neo-positivist approaches still prevail in the social sciences, behaviorism dominates psychology, and the Anglo-American analytic tradition still governs philosophy.
Yet in the past decade, postmodern interventions have taken place in a wide range of academic disciplines, challenging basic assumptions, practices, and the very division of intellectual inquiry and education into separate fields. Postmodern theory has penetrated almost all academic fields, producing critiques of modern theory and of alternative theoretical philosophy, politics, economics, anthropology, geography, environmental theory, education, and just about every domain from the humanities to the sciences. Consequently, nearly every academic discipline and profession have been challenged and confronted with alternative approaches that often fly the banner of the postmodern, and every domain of society is undergoing transformations to which the term "postmodern" is applied.
In different fields, the postmodern turn takes distinct forms, ... What is at stake is not only standard methods and ideas within each academic field but the concept of disciplinality itself. ...the postmodern turn comprises border crossings that traverse standard academic domain and boundaries. Postmodern theory---along with the critical theory of the Frankfurt School, feminism, British cultural studies, and other contemporary approaches to society and culture---is transdisciplinary, exploding artificial academic divisions of labor and creatin new forms of discourse, critique, and practice.
(Steven Best and Douglas Kellner. The Postmodern Turn. 1997. The Guilford Press. pp.17-20)- One should be clear that the concept of the postmodern is a cultural and theoretical construct, not a thing or state of affairs. That is, there are no phenomena that are intrinsically "postmodern." The concepts are generated as theoretical constructs used to interpret a family of phenomena, artifacts, or practices. Thus, the discourses of the postmodern produce thier objects, whether a historical epoch of postmodernity, postmodernism in the arts, or a new type of postmodern theory. This is not, however, to affirm the "theoreticism" of Hindess and Hirst (1975), who claim that there is no "history" or "reality" independent of theory. Obviously, there are social and historical phenomena from which theorists derive concepts like postmodernity, just as there are practices, artifacts, and authors in the field of culture from which theorists derive the therm "postmodernism." Yet which phenomena, practices, artifacts, and so on are seen as "postmodern" is itself a function of the theoretical assumptions that denominate some things as "postmodern" and others not.
Consequently, postmodern concepts are primarily conceptual constructs meant to perform certain interpretive or explanatory tasks and are not neutral descriptive terms that define preestablished state of affairs. This is an obvious point, but an important one; it explains why there are so many conflicting postmodern tneories circulating. Each discourse constructs its own objects, calling various phenomena "postmodern," having different genealogies, and contesting other theories. Thus, one should be clear that when we are dealing with postmodern discourse, we are operating on the level of theory and need to make appropriate clarifications and distinctions.
(Steven Best and Douglas Kellner. The Postmodern Turn. 1997. The Guilford Press. p.24)- Although it is prudent to be skeptical of extreme postmodern claims that would render obsolete the assumptions, values, categories, culture, and politics of the modern era, it must be admitted that significant changes are taking place and that many of the old modern theories and categories can no longer adequetely describe our contemporary culture, politics, and society. Whereas the modern era swept in unprecedented forces of secularization, rationalization, commodification, individualization, urbanization, nationalism, bureaucratization, and massification, since the 1960s we have seen the decline of the nation-state, a tumultuous process of decolonialization, explosions of ethnicity and fundamentalism, cultural fragmentation, and the erosion of belief in progress and Enlightment values. in addition, revolutionalizing new phenomena have appeared, such as automation, robbotics, and computers and huge data banks; media culture has risen to unparalleled power; and new forms of virtual reality and hyperreality have spread, challenging our definitions of subjectivity and objectivity.
(Steven Best and Douglas Kellner. The Postmodern Turn. 1997. The Guilford Press. p.30)