Strengths And Weaknesses Of Postmodernism - 713 Words

A worldwide movement encompassing all disciplines, postmodernism arose in response to the dominant idea of modernism, which is described as the social condition of living in an urban, fast-changing progressivist world governed by instrumental reason. Postmodernism or postculturalism, a term often also used, offer a very different and much more radical version of constructivism. They are strongly opposed to the universalist premises of realism, liberalism, Marxism and post-Marxism, and are highly critical of the general phenomenon of the aforementioned modernity (Lawson, p. 145). For clarity, we can look at postmodernism as a theory of society, culture and history and postculturalism as a theory of knowledge and language (Agger, 1991, p.†¦show more content†¦Ã¢â‚¬Å"People go to war because of how they see, perceive, picture, imagine and speak of others: that is, how they construct the difference of others as well as the sameness of themselves through representations,† they argue. Millions of people globally supported the ‘war on terror’ at one time, largely because the discourse around it was successful in divisively framing the identities involved and attributing a ‘truthful’ nature to that framing. Governments, with the Bush administration seemingly as the lead, created ‘the other’ to be ‘the terrorist’, and those ‘terrorists’ were probably Muslim or Arab. The fear was then created by the comparison of this ‘other’ to the self; or ‘them vs. us’. Poststructuralist Michel Foucault argued that each society possesses a ‘regime of truth’, or a set of discourses, that are imposed upon and generally accepted by society at large. This notion again can be related back to the war on terror, and more recently can be observed in instances such as North Korea’s rhetoric around its ‘Dear Leader’ or communist China’s approach to and treatment of social media, in that is can be dangerous in influencing people’s opinions and behaviours. A weakness of postmodernism, its central one according to critics, lies in its refusal to point out an alternative path for social life. Postmodernists assert that all aspects of social life are subject to the same dynamics so as such, there isShow MoreRelatedPostmodernism And Modernism Of The 19th Century1581 Words   |  7 PagesThroughout history the actual difference between postmodernism and modernism has been a huge debate. Modernism started at the end of the 19th Century and was partial by the new technologies and ideologies that flooded the period, everything ranging from cars, planes, phones, radio, and theory of relativity. The result of such inspirations was that artists sensed they no longer had to obey to strict contracts of what needed to go into generating a picture (painting), figure, construction, musicRead MoreRawls And Habermas Approaches On The Idea Of Reason And Rationality2128 Words   |  9 Pagessome systems of faith or belief (Cahoone 6). 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