Postmodernism: Materialist?

[L Spencer]

I think it genuinely silly and myopic to think of Postmodernism as an 
ideology or school or simply an idea within philosophy. The term 
broke into our Anglo-American philosophical vocabulary through the 
work of Lyotard but has such a very wide application... 

In particular one needs to grasp it within the linguistic domain in 
which Modernism was a useful term. We think of Modernist literature 
(Joyce, Eliot, Pound), art (Picasso, Mondrian), and architecture 
(the Bauhaus school,  Wright).

We do not generally think of philosophers as Modernist except where 
this indicates their support or otherwise of modernist movements in 
art and design. Wittgenstein acted as architect in the design of a 
very beautiful house for his sister. An argument could be made for 
both his philosophical systems (Tractatus and Investigations) being 
works that are themselves modernist (in their preoccupation with form 
and presentation as well as concerning themselves with issues of 
representation).

At its simplest Modernism is the radical spirit of 
"back-to-the-drawingboard" which affected almost every aspect of 
artistic and intellectual life. At its most extreme it can be grasped 
in the buildings and redevelopments undertaken by Corbusier and his 
disciples where it sometimes seems as if to achieve the best effect 
for a radically designed building we should tear up all of the 
setting. The sense that we could begin re-inventing society by 
thinking everything through from first principles is the core of 
Modernism. 

Post-modernism can be seen as an extension of modernism which has 
given up the aim of inventing the new and feels content with 
re-inventing the old... Lyotard was simply creaming off the one big 
philosophical implication from all of this: an implied suspicion of 
grand meta-narratives of re-inventing the human race.


lloyd