Monday, 10 April 2017

The Post-Modern Reader

"Post-modernism means the end of a single world view and, by extension, 'a war on totality', a resistance to single explanations, a respect for difference and a celebration of the regional, local and particular."

"A major goal of post-modernists... is to cut across this spectrum of tastes by using tactics of eclecticism."

"...the attack on artistic experimentation is specifically reactionary: aesthetic judgement would only be required to decide whether such work is in conformity with the established rules of the beautiful. The use of categories in aesthetic judgement would thus be of the same nature as in cognitive judgement. Both would be determining judgements."

"...the subversive force of an aesthetic consciousness that rebels against the normalising achievements of tradition."

"...the analysis of the judgement of taste, whose object is something subjective, the free play of the imagination..."

Pluralism in Postmodern Perspective
Ihab Hassan

"...ambiguities, ruptures, and displacements affecting knowledge and society. Indeterminacies pervade our actions, ideas, interpretations..."

""The postmodern only disconnects... a preference for montage, collage. The age demands differences, shifting signifiers, and even atoms dissolve into elusive sub-particals."

"...all conventions of authority, a massive 'delegitimisation' of the master codes in society.. decarbonise culture, demystify knowledge, deconstruct the languages of power, desire, deceit."

"...entertains its exhaustion', subverts itself in forms of articulate 'silence'. It becomes luminary, contesting the modes of its own representation... thrives on the formlessness, the emptiness."

"This irony assumes indeterminacy, multivalence; it aspires to clarity, the clarity of demystification, the pure light of absence... These express the ineluctable recreations of mind in search of a truth that continually eludes it, leaving it with only an ironic access or excess of self-consciousness."

"Hybridisation, or the mutant replication of genres, includes parody, travesty, pastiche. This makes for a different concept of tradition, one in which continuity and discontinuity, high and low culture, mingle not to imitate but to expand the past and present.

"Performance, participation... Indeterminacy elicits participation; gaps must be filled. The postmodern text, verbal or non-verbal, invites performance: it wants to be written, revised, answered, acted out."

"Immanence. This refers to the growing capacity of mind to generalise itself through symbols. Everywhere now we witness problematic diffusions, dispersals, dissemination; we experience the extension of our senses through new media and technologies. Languages reconstitute it into signs of their own making... culture into an immanent semiotic system. A patina of thought, of signifiers, of 'connections', now lies on everything the mind touches."

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