Category — Post-modernity

Modernity is an assumption that men can understand, comprehend in toto, control and manipulate all of human experience. “Science” and its related projects are the means by which this task of “salvation” is to be accomplished.

Post-modernity recognizes the multiplicity and diversity of human experience and concludes that there is no central or higher meaning. The assumption that follows is that any attempt at a singular or certain meaning is futile.

Modernity recognizes “law” within a modal sphere, and absolutizes a single aspectual law as dominating all others. Post-modernity recognizes the diversity of aspects, but assumes a religious dialectic between all aspects, and thus the impossibility of any one “Master-Determiner”. All aspects cancel the others out. Badiou describes the post-modern world as “atonal”. Zizek, following Badiou, characterizes the postmodern mind as “a world of multiplicities lacking a determinate tonality” (In Defense of Lost Causes, 31).

What modernity seems to offer is a singular, certain “answer”, based in the analytical aspect of temporal experience. Modernity, as a project, assumes that empirical evidence provides objective truth. Truth is “out there”, it is possible.

What post-modernity seems to offer is the recognition that experience cannot be reduced to a single, dominating aspect. Post-modernity is a reaction against “the hegemony of scientific discourse” (Defense, 33). Post-modernity appears religiously committed to the sensate or psychical aspect of temporal experience. Foucault’s lifestyle and death are often used as an example of the post-modern life in demonstration. He is the philosopher of bio-politics.

Both assume the autonomy of the mind. Both assume that meaning is dictated by things. Both assume that Being precedes Meaning. The two exist in a religious dialectic, although the two aspects to which they cling are, in reality, relative.