The Concept of the Postmodern in the “Present”
http://www.pcusa.org/pastorselders/dailyquote#apr8
April 8  “It is safest to grasp the concept of the postmodern as an attempt to think the present historically in an age that has forgotten how to think historically in the first place.�  Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.
I’ve been reading this above quote a number of times and I think I’m beginning to understand better…. Looking this up further with a Google search or two to see what I can find to shed further light, here’s one interesting excerpt….
http://www.christianhubert.com/hypertext/postmodernism.html
Is there a postmodern period? (1973 - ?) For Frederic Jameson, postmodernism is “a periodizing hypothesis” at “a moment in which the very conception of historical periodization has come to seem most problematical indeed.” (p.3) “Analyzing postmodernism amounts to writing the history of no history. In an important sense, to write the history of postmodernism is to indulge in an anachronism.” (Hayles, Chaos Bound, p.281)”It is safest to grasp the concept of the postmodern as an attempt to think the present historically in an age that has forgotten how to think historically in the first place.” (Jameson, Postmodernism, introduction) Jameson limits the brief “American Century” to 1945-1973. According to him, the crises of 1973 (the oil crisis, the end of the international gold standard, for all intents and purposes the end of the great wave of “ wars of national liberation” and the beginning of the end of traditional communism) disclosed the existence, already in place, of a strange new landscape….
In Postmodernism, modernism assumes the role previously assigned to tradition, and postmodernism is associated with the present (previously called modernity). Because of the conflation of modernity and tradition, postmodernity can claim either to reject tradition or to renew it, without contradiction. Hardt and Negri question whether postmodern theorists are so intent on combating the remnants of a past form of domination that they fail to recognize the new form that is looming over them in the present. “What if the dominating powers that are the intended object of critique have mutated in such a way as to depotentialize any postmodern challenge?” “In this case, … the postmodernist and postcolonialist strategies that appear to be liberatory would not challenge but in fact coincide with and even unwittingly reinforce the new stategies of rule!” (Empire, p. 138)
Brian Goodwin describes postmodern science where one can excercize one’s judgement in choosing a set of scientific ideas as opposed to another. For him, to argue that a new paradigm will out-compete a previous one, is to engage in “the authoritarian mode of science that characterized modernity.” (How The Leopard Changed Its Spots, p. 34)
From the conceptualized flatness of high modernism to the literal superficiality of postmodernism.
(cf. surface / depth )
text and simulacrum
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