After Postmodernism | 3. Spirit and the Specter of Identity

[Music] [Music] in my last video I looked at how three influential thinkers Jean Francois leotard David Harvey and Frederick Jamison defined and assessed post-modernism from there I turned to some milestone responses to post-modernism particularly from the pivotal writer David Foster Wallace we saw that academics such as Linda Hutcheon were already pronouncing the death of post-modernism in the early 2000s and looking forward to a new generation of thinkers to provide a label and analysis of what was only then emerging I'd like soon to get into the models that have arisen in response to this call the air is apparent to the dead King post-modernism if post-modernism is over what do we call the cultural period were in now remod anism performant isms and meta modernism have all been suggested and we'll consider each in turn however as we saw with Wallace some core elements of these paradigms can already be seen prefigured in the works of certain late postmodern thinkers and as a final prologue before diving into these proposed cultural paradigms I'd like to focus on one more of those thinkers yob Hasan Hasaan will serve as our bridge taking us from post-modernism into our current cultural moment in his 2003 essay beyond post-modernism toward an aesthetic of trust the great postmodern literary critic Ihab Hassan reflects on the legacy of post-modernism in part something he helped to establish and how it relates a rather fails to relate to the urgent demands of a world increasingly given over to fragmentation factionalism and group conflict 15 years on from Hassan's essay such conflict is still with us and arguably more corrosive than ever clearly leotards fragmentation into countless micro narratives mentioned earlier plays a big role here shorn of any unifying grand narrative post-modernism invites even demand such fissuring of humanity into distinct identities each with their own incommensurable language games this generates a very real problem however how does one establish and maintain these identities on what grounds and at whose expense the answer is from recent history Hasan regretfully observed from the standpoint of the early 21st century have been largely steeped in blood quote the horrendous facts of post modernity invade our lives continually diasporas migrations refugees The Killing Fields a crisis of personal and cultural values seemingly without parallel in history therefore we may be forgiven to conclude a Spectre is haunting Europe in the world the specter of identity unfortunately though perhaps expectedly the philosophical context for this crisis has provided no means for its resolution cynicism a sceptical interrogation of the others attempts at domination or apathy these are essentially the postmoderns toolkit for approaching other identities within a matrix of power a different more productive answer to this antagonistic impasse Hasan concludes will need to lie and quote words that we have forgotten in academia words that need more than refurbishing reinvention I mean words like truth trust spirit all uncapitalized the all uncapitalized here seems crucial I believe since the reason such words were banished from intellectual conversation to begin with was their supposedly inextricable link to oppressive religious traditions and naive philosophical absolutes as well as the historical imperialism that such metaphysical ideals help to rationalize in every sense of the word but Hassan isn't arguing here for metaphysics or some good old religion his truth is rather a common human truth of quote soft universals not platonic but empirical appreciating the common humanity behind your desire for place and purpose and my desire for place and purpose can only be mutually beneficial and a hedge against dehumanizing violence if the threat postmoderns were countering was that of an all subsuming iron cage of Western rationalism they largely succeeded today however the threat is different it's the threat of tribalism hyper-partisanship intergroup conflict even civil war more of the same differentiating medicine will only make the patient sicker truth trust spirit but Hasan immediately asks what would spirit mean in our intellectual culture of disbelief he immediately offers some limiting parameters quote certainly it would not mean atavism fundamentalism or occultism it may not mean adherence to Orthodox religions Christianity Judaism Hinduism Islam though it would not exclude them as it turns out Hassan never really does offer much of a positive insight into what it could be though this isn't an accident in his essay the postmodern literary critic is considering spirit more mystically spirit in the way of negation practiced by some mystics is kanata core self emptying a sense of radical simplification and continuous reduction toward nothing this way of approaching spirit by connecting it with emptiness with nothingness is actually quite productive for Hassan opening a bridge he sees from a corrosive postmodern nihilism to a new kind of inter subjective trust and spiritual transcendence he writes Trust I have claimed is a spiritual value in word with self dispossession and in it's postmodern form familiar with the void for only through nihilism is nihilism overcome in some sense if truth trust and spirit all uncapitalized we might say and even put in the postmodern scare quotes have their basis not in the old metaphysical systems of ideals and absolutes but actually in nothing one might find a way while still retaining the genuine insights of postmodern critique to move beyond its inevitable disintegration towards a new integration rooted and reinvented notions of spiritual connection Hasan's adamant assertion that whatever the spirituality beyond post-modernism might be it will not be quote atavism fundamentalism and so on would seem to underscore an important point for his son namely that this return to spirit must not be reactionary a conservative reflex to the status quo indeed Hasan frames his concept of spirit is being arrived at through nihilism not by means of any retreat away from it his aim is beyond post-modernism not just instead of it this is an important point to be considered more deeply what follows [Music] [Music] already with David Foster Wallace and now with Hasan we see emerging from late postmodernists a number of sentiments and concerns that will come to flourish in post-postmodern trends as we shall soon see ideas like truth trust spirit in the specter and demand for identity will recur like light motifs in the consideration of remodel ISM performant ISM and meta modernism before I turn our attention to these however I'd like to explain first why I believe this is the case it is why this particular configuration of ideas should really significant after a period of their being shall we say out of vogue to do this let's pick up an earlier issue I'd left unresolved until this point in our discussion the fundamental agreement about the postmodern condition by leotard Harvey and Jameson a fundamental agreement albeit expressed differently by each that gets at the root of what post-modernism was and thus a clue to what its successor could be [Music] as you'll recall from episode 2 we saw that the formulations of postmodernism put forward by Jean Francois Lyotard David Harvey and Frederick Jamison we're all framed in important ways as narratives of subtraction or loss for leotard this was the loss of the grand narrative for Harvey the eternal and unchanging for Jamison the deeper meaning could it be I then wondered that all these were in fact but facets of the same thing elements of a greater whole of which each thinker was only grasping a part I'm now ready to answer this question for it but remains to ask what principle once widely held but recently lost had served for a grand overarching world orienting narrative a thing that was likewise understood as eternal and unchanging while also providing the depth of foundational meaning the basis and foundation for all hermeneutic gestures of interpreting reality in relation to something beyond mere appearance what is this if not transcendence itself the whole notion of a higher plane dimension beyond mundane existence in philosophical terms meta physics and religious ones the divine the numinous the sacred in common colloquial usage the supernatural the heavenly God the eternal and unchanging focus of grand narratives of meaning if the loss of this thing is what ultimately defines post-modernism perhaps the postmodern period is best understood as actually the culmination of the modern projects of disenchantment and secularization it was after all the high-water mark of anti supernatural materialism in it all notions of a higher order all spiritual notions such as truth purpose soul self were abrogated by jettisoning metaphysics entirely and turning completely to the material world of appearance without ideals this would help to explain I think the postmodern preoccupation with surfaces since the whole dialectic of transcendence imminent was resolved into a one-dimensional monism total imminence or what Charles Taylor is called imminent frame with the collapse of all ontological dimensionality into a single plain depth is indeed lost holiday misen in similar fashion the old platonic dialectic of being becoming is resolved in favor of a totalized becoming with the resultant loss of beings quote eater and immutable possibilities ala Harvey with the collapse of transcendent imminent dimensionality all relationships one to the other are lost as a result any notions of imminent existence finding its meaning relative to transcendent goals are also lost the whole notion of a meaning to life thus becomes lost since life set in the imminent frame has nothing for which it can be a means there is no narrative that can take life itself into account for there is no position outside of it from which to tell such a story as a consequence all grand narratives of meaning becomes senseless a la leotard interestingly we see hints of this idea and Jameson's conclusion to his work post-modernism reflecting on a diagnosis for confronting the Mirage metaphysical notions for him this looks like quote the effort to imagine a way of living that could radically eschew these illusions a life and time capable of doing without belonging to become me in itself for itself what the religion is called God and this down to the very micro structure of our most minut gestures and feelings this epic alai deal of anti transcendent human existence is surely one of the most glorious of all post Nietzschean enlightenment visions which tracks religion metaphysics and transcendence into the most seemingly secular spaces and events of an only apparently enlightened modern world yet what is worth asking today about this seemingly utopian and unrealizable vision of an authentic or text realized existence in full post-modernism is whether it may not very precisely be one of the transformations of everyday life and of the psychic subject designated by the term postmodern [Music] so much for the synthesis of these three seminal formulations of the postmodern the elephant in the room was no less than quote what the religions call God at least in the extent that God is the traditional epitome of transcendence what post-modernism signaled and one could say was the loss or removal of spirituality itself from cultural production in philosophy the arts etc Nietzsche's prophetic utterance issued almost a century earlier had been fulfilled God was indeed and at last dead the importance of this becomes crucial when considering what's happening now for post-modernism has seen a wide scale rejection in the past decade as we have been discussing specifically its totalizing eminences what has come under scrutiny people are not so keen it turns out on living in a world without meaning and depth place and purpose indeed from this perceived lack has sprung the whole postmodern crisis of identity this dissatisfaction and disillusionment with postmodern imminence is less occasion to the return of what I am calling dimensionality an non monastic multiplanar mapping of reality that allows for some relationship between different modes of existence and thus depth meaning even teleology generally speaking this return is taking two forms the first is simple reaction a conservative backlash against the whole postmodern paradigm and an eager repository and dentals but the traditional imminent transcendent paradigm was only one form of dimensionality the one lost in post-modernism with the collapse of multidimensionality into the singular plane of totalized imminence with the end of post-modernism you're seeing not only the return of this old model of dimensionality from conservative voices but also other new models in these returns of dimensionality the postmodern imminent frame is not actually rejected at all but rather sublet it or complexified it's not just a tease from it some analogy of transcendence and an imminent transcendence here a new horizon opens up a kind of sub dimensionality where the relationship is not the old below of natural supernatural this world other world etc but rather more based in intra imminent language such as outer inner constituent or emergent self for universe even unhelpful constructs and helpful constructs imminence itself is reconsidered you might say is the new locus of transcendence one can already see this sensibility in Hassan's essay it is why the author is so keen to qualify his truth trust and spirit is being poked all uncapitalized this is why his recourse to universals must be positioned as empirical and not platonic the desires for transcendence but of a kind shorn from metaphysics further this revived sense of dimensionality seems to explain the seeming return of modern and pre-modern ideas methods and forms in actuality they're not necessarily the same old ideas and methods at all their similarity to earlier forms to both sharing a commitment to dimensionality but the spirit of asanas miles away from say Hegel's spirit and obviously much further still from the holy spirit of traditional Christianity its spirit reinvented [Music] you [Music] [Applause]

Channel: Brendan Graham Dempsey

Views: 11,248

Keywords: after postmodernism, post-postmodernism, what's after postmodernism, metamodernism, performatism, god is dead, death of god in postmodernism

Id: DGAcI2aD35Q

Length: 19min 38sec (1178 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 18 2019