Postmodern Aesthetics (Part 1)
DECONSTRUCTING BELIEF
“God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we, the murderers of all murderers, comfort ourselves?”
—Nietzsche, The Madman
Perhaps the most overused and least understood word in the history of pseudo-philosophical chitchat is “postmodern.” It just has such an irresistibly progressive ring to it! But what does it mean? Well, that’s actually a pretty hard question to answer, due in large part to the fact that postmodernism is based on a core, possibly self-defeating, distrust of objective ideology.
Postmodernism is a metanarrative, meaning that it has an overall effect on the way its subscribers understand and interpret the world. Ironically though, it is a metanarrative against metanarratives. It states as absolute truth that there is no absolute truth. It holds that any quest for “capital-T Truth,” like that of Christianity or Modernity, is destined to fail. There are only individual truths, and those morph in different contexts. Discourse is no longer seen as the means of finding truth but as the end in itself, full of possible truths.
Many have ascribed postmodernism’s origin to Nietzsche’s chilling words above. With the abandonment of universal values that he inspired, and the lack of a central source of meaning, there is no remaining basis for believing in ultimate truth or the ideal of beauty.
During the modern era, people counted on human reason to save them from investigative impotence, but as the work of philosophers like Descartes and Hume make clear, not even sound logic can provide entirely certain answers. Accepting that fact is the essence of postmodernism.
How does this relate to art? Tune in for Part 2 on page 359.... —CKG
QUESTIONS TO PONDER
• What contemporary art have you seen that embodies the postmodern worldview?
• Do you agree that we can never find absolute Truth?