A Primer on Postmodernism

Stanley J. Grenz

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 1996
• ISBN:
  9781467420853
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Ministerio cristiano

From the academy to pop culture, our society is in the throes of change rivaling the birth of modernity out of the decay of the Middle Ages. We are now moving from the modern to the postmodern era. But what is postmodernism? How did it arise? What characterizes the postmodern ethos? What is the postmodern mind and how does it differ from the modern mind? Who are its leading advocates? Most important of all, what challenges does this cultural shift present to the church, which must proclaim the gospel to the emerging postmodern generation? Stanley Grenz here charts the postmodern landscape. He shows the threads that link art and architecture, philosophy and fiction, literary theory and television. He shows how the postmodern phenomenon has actually been in the making for a century and then introduces readers to the gurus of the postmodern mind-set. What he offers here is truly an indispensable guide for understanding today's culture.

CHAPTER 1

Star Trek and the Postmodern Generation

The camera focuses on a futuristic spacecraft against the background of distant galaxies. The narrator’s voice proudly recites the guiding dictum: “Space—the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its continuing mission—to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no one has gone before.”

With these words began each episode of the popular television series Star Trek: The Next Generation, which completed its final season in May 1994.

In many ways The Next Generation was simply an updated version of the earlier Star Trek series, placed in a future era, after the resolution of some of the galactic political difficulties that plagued the universe of the previous space voyagers. Yet, sometime after Jean-Luc Picard’s new breed of explorers took over the command of the redesigned Enterprise from Captain Kirk’s crew, the creators of the series discovered that the world of their audience was in the midst of a subtle paradigm shift: modernity was giving birth to postmodernity. As a result, The Next Generation became a reflection—perhaps even a molder—of the worldview of the emerging generation.

The shifts evident in the transition from Star Trek to Star Trek: The Next Generation reflect a deeper transition occurring in Western society.

The Movement from Modernity to Postmodernity

Many social observers agree that the Western world is in the midst of change. In fact, we are apparently experiencing a cultural shift that rivals the innovations that marked the birth of modernity out of the decay of the Middle Ages: we are in the midst of a transition from the modern to the postmodern era.¹ Of course, transitional periods are exceedingly difficult to describe and assess. Nor is it fully evident what will characterize the emerging epoch.² Nevertheless, we see signs that monumental changes are engulfing all aspects of contemporary culture.

The term postmodern may first have been coined in the 1930s to refer to a major historical transition already under way³ and as the designation for certain developments in the arts.⁴ But postmodernism did not gain widespread attention until the 1970s. First it denoted a new style of architecture. Then it invaded academic circles, originally as a label for theories expounded in university English and philosophy departments. Eventually it surfaced as the description for a broader cultural phenomenon.

Whatever else it might be, as the name suggests, postmodernism signifies the quest to move beyond modernism. Specifically, it involves a rejection of the modern mind-set, but launched under the conditions of modernity. Therefore, to understand postmodern thinking, we must view it in the context of the modern world that gave it birth and against which it is reacting.

The Modern Mind

Many historians place the birth of the modern era at the dawn of the Enlightenment, which followed the Thirty Years’ War. The stage, however, was set earlier—in the Renaissance, which elevated humankind to the center of reality. Characteristic of the new outlook was Francis Bacon’s vision of humans exercising power over nature by means of the discovery of nature’s secrets.

Building on the Renaissance, the Enlightenment elevated the individual self to the center of the world.⁵ René Descartes laid the philosophical foundation for the modern edifice with his focus on doubt, which led him to conclude that the existence of the thinking self is the first truth that doubt cannot deny—a principle formulated in his re-appropriation of Augustine’s dictum Cogito ergo sum. Descartes thus defined human nature as a thinking substance and the human person as an autonomous rational subject. Isaac Newton later provided the scientific framework for modernity, picturing the physical world as a machine the laws and regularity of which could be discerned by the human mind. The modern human can appropriately be characterized as Descartes’s autonomous, rational substance encountering Newton’s mechanistic world.

The Enlightenment Project. The postulates of the thinking self and the mechanistic universe opened the way for the explosion of knowledge under the banner of what Jürgen Habermas called the “Enlightenment project.” It became the goal of the human intellectual quest to unlock the secrets of the universe in order to master nature for human benefit and create a better world. This quest led to the modernity characteristic of the twentieth century, which has sought to bring rational management to life in order to improve human existence through technology.⁶

The project of modernity, formulated in the eighteenth century by the Enlightenment philosophes, consists of a relentless development of the objectivating sciences, the universalistic bases of morality and law, and autonomous art in accordance with their internal logic but at the same time a release of the cognitive potentials thus accumulated from their esoteric high forms and their utilisation in praxis; that is, in the rational organisation of living conditions and social relations. Proponents of the Enlightenment … still held the extravagant expectation that the arts and sciences would further not only the control of the forces of nature but also the understanding of self and world, moral progress, justice in social institutions, and even human happiness.

Jürgen Habermas, “Modernity: An Unfinished Project,” in The Post-Modern Reader, ed. Charles Jencks (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992), pp. 162–63.

At the intellectual foundation of the Enlightenment project are certain epistemological assumptions. Specifically, the modern mind assumes that knowledge is certain, objective, and good.⁷ Moreover, moderns assume that, in principle, knowledge is accessible to the human mind.

The demand for certain knowledge sets the modern inquirer in search of a method of demonstrating the essential correctness of philosophic, scientific, religious, moral, and political doctrines.⁸ The Enlightenment method places the many aspects of reality under the scrutiny of reason and assesses it on the basis of that criterion.⁹ That is to say that this method exercises an absolute faith in human rational capabilities.

The Enlightenment perspective assumes that knowledge is not only certain (and hence rational) but also objective. The assumption of objectivity leads the modernist to claim access to dispassionate knowledge. Modern knowers profess to be more than merely conditioned participants in the world they observe: they claim to be able to view the world as unconditioned observers—that is, to survey the world from a vantage point outside the flux of history.¹⁰

The pursuit of dispassionate knowledge divides the scientific project into separate disciplines¹¹ and gives special status to the specialist, the neutral observer who has gained expertise in a limited field of endeavor.

In addition to assuming that knowledge is certain and objective, Enlightenment thinkers also assume that it is inherently good. The modern scientist, for example, considers it axiomatic that the discovery of knowledge is always good. This assumption of the inherent goodness of knowledge renders the Enlightenment outlook optimistic. It leads to the belief that progress is inevitable, that science, coupled with the power of education, will eventually free us from our vulnerability to nature, as well as from all social bondage.

Enlightenment optimism, together with the focus on reason, elevates on human freedom. Suspect are all beliefs that seem to curtail autonomy or to be based on some external authority rather than reason (and experience). The Enlightenment project understands freedom largely in individual terms. In fact, the modern ideal champions the autonomous self, the self-determining subject who exists outside any tradition or community.¹²

Modernity and Star Trek. Like modern fiction in general, the original Star Trek series reflected many aspects of the Enlightenment project and of late modernity. The crew of the Enterprise included persons of various nationalities working together for the common benefit of humankind. They were the epitome of the modern universalist anthropology. The message was obvious: we are all human, and we must overcome our differences and join forces in order to complete our mandate, the quest for certain, objective knowledge of the entire universe of which space looms as “the final frontier.”

One hero of the old Star Trek was Spock. Although he was the only crew member who came from another planet (he was part human, part Vulcan), in his nonhumanness he actually served as a transcendent human ideal. Spock was the ideal Enlightenment man, completely rational and without emotion (or at least able to hold his emotions in check). His dispassionate rationality repeatedly provided the key to solving problems encountered by the crew of the Enterprise. In such cases, the writers appear to have been arguing that in the end our problems can be solved by the application of rational expertise.

Postmodernism represents a rejection of the Enlightenment project and the foundational assumptions upon which it was built.

The Postmodern Mind

Modernity has been under attack at least since Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) lobbed the first volley against it late in the nineteenth century, but the full-scale frontal assault did not begin until the 1970s. The immediate intellectual impulse for the dismantling of the Enlightenment project came from the rise of deconstruction as a literary theory, which influenced a new movement in philosophy.

Philosophical Postmodernism. Deconstruction arose as an extension of a theory in literature called “structuralism.”

Structuralists argue that language is a social construct and that people develop literary documents—texts—in an attempt to provide structures of meaning that will help them make sense out of the meaninglessness of their experience. Structuralists maintain that literature provides categories that help us to organize and understand our experience of reality. They also contend that all societies and cultures possess a common, invariant structure.¹³

The deconstructionists (or poststructuralists) reject this last tenet of structuralism. Meaning is not inherent in a text itself, they argue, but emerges only as the interpreter enters into dialogue with the text.¹⁴ And because the meaning of a text is dependent on the perspective of the one who enters into dialogue with it, it has as many meanings as it has readers (or readings).

Postmodern philosophers applied the theories of the literary deconstructionists to the world as a whole. Just as a text will be read differently by each reader, they said, so reality will be “read” differently by each knowing self that encounters it. This means that there is no one meaning of the world, no transcendent center to reality as a whole.

On the basis of ideas such as these, the French philosopher Jacques Derrida calls for abandonment of both “onto-theology” (the attempt to set forth ontological descriptions of reality) and the “metaphysics of presence” (the idea that something transcendent is present in reality).¹⁵ Because nothing transcendent inheres in reality, he argues, all that emerges in the knowing process is the perspective of the self who interprets reality.

Michel Foucault adds a moral twist to Derrida’s call. Foucault asserts that every interpretation of reality is an assertion of power. Because “knowledge” is always the result of the use of power,¹⁶ to name something is to exercise power and hence to do violence to what is named. Social institutions inevitably engage in violence when they impose their own understanding on the centerless flux of experience, he says. Thus, in contrast to Bacon, who sought knowledge in order to gain power over nature, Foucault claims that every assertion of knowledge is an act of power.

Richard Rorty, in turn, jettisons the classic conception of truth as either the mind or language mirroring nature. Truth is established neither by the correspondence of an assertion with objective reality nor by the internal coherence of the assertions themselves, says Rorty. He argues that we should simply give up the search for truth and be content with interpretation. He proposes replacing classic “systematic philosophy” with “edifying philosophy,” which “aims at continuing a conversation rather than at discovering truth.”¹⁷

The work of Derrida, Foucault, and Rorty reflects what seems to have become the central dictum of postmodern philosophy: “All is difference.” This view sweeps away the “uni” of the “universe” sought by the Enlightenment project. It abandons the quest for a unified grasp of objective reality. It asserts that the world has no center, only differing viewpoints and perspectives. In fact, even the concept of “world” presupposes an objective unity or a coherent whole that does not exist “out there.” In the end, the postmodern world is merely an arena of “duelling texts.”

The Postmodern Mood. Although philosophers such as Derrida, Foucault, and Rorty are influential on university campuses, they form only a part of a larger shift in thinking reflected in Western culture. What unifies the otherwise diverse strands of postmodernism is the questioning of the central assumptions of the Enlightenment epistemology.

In the postmodern world, people are no longer convinced that knowledge is inherently good. In es...