Disney Hall in LA
I have written two theses on the topic. Published an article that directly deals with the issue. I have also published material that indirectly deals with it. I have read through Kirsteva, Foucault, Haraway, Turkle, Derrida, Baudrillard, Lyotard, Schrag, Jameson, Kellner, Harvey, van Huyssteen, Marion, Taylor, and on and on. I never once synthesized any clear idea of what it means to be "postmodern" or to form a "postmodern" community.
Perhaps it is because I think that Habermas is correct: postmodernism is a stage in late-modernity that sees many of the critical aspects of modernity taken to their logical end. His perspective, as with Schrag and perhaps even Rorty, is to find a different way of being and acting that does not disolve into postmodern aporias or incommensurability. For Schrag it is through something he called a transversal praxis and for Habermas it is through communicative discourse. Neither of these are postmodern at all, but thoroughly mdoern becuase they are thoroughly critical and still hold to the idea that there is a reality to know apart from and prior to a human engagement with it. In other words, they are pragmatic when answering the problems modernism creates for itself.
My reading of postmodernism is that it is a fun discourse for people who have the resources and time to engage it, but it suffers from a critical anemia when it comes to action. Postmodernism is, as I have read it, primarily a method for deconstructing current forms of knowing. Yet it fails on the ground that it offers no counter method for re-building. Now Mark C. Taylor in Erring tries to offer a synthesis of sorts at the end, yet I still ask myself what that actually looks like. This is not material for the resource poor who are seeking compensation in otherworldly rewards that are non-contingent on the reality in which they live.
My continued problem with various forms of the "emergent" conversation is the focus on "being" postmodern as if we can clearly identify some kind of postmodern identity that is not bound to confusion, fracture, and utter lack of synthesis. This might be nice for narrative deconstruction, but it does not fit well with people who are just trying to get clean water, dealing with the death of a loved one, or who feel alone in the world.
So if anyone can tell me what a postmodern community or a postmodern person looks like, I am all ears. But I think that what you will find is a modern person being modern in the very essense that they are being critical of current structural assumptions of identity and community. For to be critical is to be modern.
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