Mandy Martin, Puritjarra 2, 2005. For further information on MANDY MARTIN, refer here: http://www.mandy-martin.com/
If there are diverse kinds of knowledge and ways of knowing place, then we need to learn to value the different ways each of us sees a single place that is significant, but differently so, for each perspective.
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looking for something firm in a world of chaotic flux
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postmodern revisited sensibly
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June 10, 2006
Margaret Sankey, who works in the Department of French Studies at the University of Sydney, gives a more reasonable account of postmodernism than that of the cultural conservatives at The Australian caught up in hysterics.
Sankey says:
Postmodernism is first of all a category to describe critiques and reactions, cultural, political and social, against the central tenets of monolithic modernism.....The shaking of the modernist foundations of our culture and society paved the way for postmodern criticism in the arts and literature and brought into question the dichotomies of high and low culture, high and popular literature, classical and pop art. Overall, "postmodern" is a term to describe the crisis in representation which has characterised the modern world with increasing urgency since the World War II.
That is pretty right. Along with Lyotard's rejection of grand narratives the crisis of representation, which is associated with the picturing (correspondence) of the propositional view of language is a key to understanding postmodernism. That crisis of representation would also include the expressionist theory of language.
Sankey adds:
Likewise deconstruction, associated with the names of Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man, acutely focusses on the crisis in representation, the loss of confidence in the triumphal Enlightment discourse. Language, rather than being referential, can be seen as an infinite regression of the sign, creating a deferral and fragmentation of meaning. Representation becomes, then, a space where other voices can be heard, the black as well as the white, the colonised as well as the coloniser, women as well as men. All languages become legitimate in this pluralised and politicised space of representation.Whatever we think of it, the fragmented, fractured world of postmodernism with its post-colonialism and poststructuralism, the polyphony of its voices, is the one in which we live.
Rafe Champion interprets this 'as anything goes' by relying on the judgement of Friedman and Miller:
Language, rather than being referential, can be seen as an infinite regression of the sign, creating a deferral and fragmentation of meaning. Representation becomes, then, a space where other voices can be heard, the black as well as the white, the colonised as well as the coloniser, women as well as men. All languages become legitimate in this pluralised and politicised space of representation.
That plurality does not prevent some interpretations of some texts and images (whether high or low culture) as being better than others.
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Gary, This book and its introduction addresses ALL the presumptions of every culture that has ever existed. Especially of the world dominant patriarchal western "narrative" with its drive to total power & control which has essentially brought the entire world to the brink of both cultural & ecological meltdown. The war of all against all. A narrative which is implacably opposed and at war with any and everything to do with what the author calls the Pattern That IS Woman or Shakti. It is about the reintegration of these two primal realities into the consciousness of western "man" (in particular) both male & female.
The theme of the war of all against all is particularly addressed at the end of part One in a section which could be called the "democratic Neighbour-Wars. Essentially the patriarchal "world"-view championed (great pun) by Rafe and his fellow travelers over at the CIS and all the other right wing think tanks.And ALL inherently puritan fundamentalists.
It also contains and addresses in a unique and extraordinary way ALL the themes and meanings that ALL the great foundational literay classics have attempted to do. For instance the epics of Gilgamesh,Osiris,the Rig Veda,Ramayana, Bhagavad Gita, Tao te Ching, Iliad,Hesiod & Sapho, Samson & Deliah, Dante. Essentially the relation between consciousness (masculine) and Shakti or the Goddess or energy in its beginningless and endless play of miriad forms.And especially the way in which these primal energies are understood in relation to the human body-mind complex, whatever it is altogether.
It also addresses the inherent limitations of ALL
languages.
1. http://global.adidam.org/books/mummery.html
2. www.mummerybook.org
Also Meaning at: 3. www.dabase.net/meaning.htm