Recent developments in

western thought

(phl2c07)

STUDY MATERIAL

Ii SEMESTER

CORE COURSE

MA philosophy

UNIVERSITY OF CALICUT

SCHOOL OF DISTANCE EDUCATION

Calicut University- P.O, Malappuram- 673635,Kerala.

190407

(2020 Admission ONWARDS)

UNIVERSITY OF CALICUT

SCHOOL OF DISTANCE EDUCATION

CORE COURSE :

PHL2C07 : RECENT DEVELOPMENTS IN WESTERN THOUGHT

Prepared by:

Dr. Krishnan T.V,

Assistant Professor Of Philosophy (On Contract),

School of Distance Education, University of Calicut.

Scrutinized By:

Dr. Sheeja.O.K,

Assistant Professor Of Philosophy,

Sree Kerala Varma College, Thrissur.

STUDY MATERIAL

SECOND EMESTER

MA PHILOSOPHY (2020 ADMISSION)

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PHL2 C07 RECENT DEVELOPMENTS IN WESTERN THOUGHT

(Core)

Unit 1. Structuralism and Semiotics

Concept of Sign – Generation of Meaning – Deep Structure

And Surface Structure – Media and Message – Truth and Meaning

Unit II. Ideology and Criticism; Hrs

Ideology as material force – Interpretation – Two features –

Super structure and Ideology

Unit III. Post Structuralism Hrs

Structure, Sign, play- The indeterminacy of meaning – Text and Difference –

Philosophy of writing, reading and deconstruction

Unit IV Post Modernism

1. Modernism and the project of modernity – features of modern philosophy – Renaissance

and enlightenment –Descartes, Kant and Marx.

2. Post modernism; Incredulity narrative towards meta narrative, - paradoxical ways

post modernism and globalization – post modernism and the concept of progress –

commodification -Real and representation, revivalism.

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Unit I

Structuralism and Semiotics

Introduction

Structuralism is the term given to a variety of analytic methods and practices that, in the

first half of the twentieth century, dominated studies in linguistics, anthropology, literary theory,

and semiology. According to structuralist theory, human knowledge and practice are instituted

by structural relations between terms in a system ruled by codes that assign meaning to each

term.

Ample criticism since the 1950s can be observed as a contained impugnment of

extensively institutionalized New Critical practices. A continuous challenge came from

structuralism and some of its descendants such as deconstruction. Structuralism is the name

given to a variety of analytic methods and practices that, in the first half of the twentieth century,

dominated studies in linguistics, anthropology, literary theory, and semiology. According to

structuralist theory, human knowledge and practice are instituted by structural relations between

terms in a system governed by codes that allocate meaning to each term. The foundations of

structuralism were laid in the work of the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, whose insights

were developed by the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, Roland Barthes, and others.

Structuralism has been predominantly influential in literary theory through the writings of

Roland Barthes, Umberto Eco, and Jean Baudrillard. It has, however, been subjected to sharp

criticism, most notably by Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva, Paul Ricoeur, and

Pierre Bourdieu

Semiotics or semiology is quite simply the study of signs or systems of signs and

represents the largest possible extension of Structuralist concepts into the investigation of human

culture. The term “semiology” is connected primarily with the work of the Swiss linguist

Ferdinand de Saussure, while the term “semiotics” is often linked to the American philosopher

and mathematician, Charles Sanders Peirce, this science of systems of signs, in general, is often

called “semiotics,” an elaborate semiotic theory to facilitate the analysis and classification of

signs. Peirce’s division of signs into icons, indexes, and symbols is his best-known semiotic

Semiotics or Semiology, terms deriving, from the Greek word for 'sign': semeion. In both cases,

the thrust of the semiological study is to explore how signs, understood as social constructs are

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shaped by and through language. The study of signs has been taken up by academic disciplines

such as linguistics, information theory, formal logic, and structural anthropology, through

semiotic analysis is a common strategy across the spectrum of poststructuralist theories

Saussure proposes that a great number of signs are necessary to establish a language, that

language constitutes a complex system, and that a system of linguistic signs must have a strong

sense of stability to gain the status of a social institution. Structuralist linguistics encouraged a

new wave of investigations into the nature and function of the sign as a social phenomenon, for

it paved the way for new research queries and new fields of practice. Saussure suggests that

semiology be “recognized as an independent science with its object like all the other sciences.”

Language needs to be studied “in itself,” rather than, as in the past, in its connection with other

things. The task of linguistics is to determine what makes language a “special system,” but to

do this, the linguist must learn what language has in common with other semiological systems.

“It is, therefore, possible to conceive of a science which studies the role of signs as part

of social life … We shall call it semiology (from the Greek semeîon, ‘sign’). It would investigate

the nature of signs and the laws governing them … Linguistics is only one branch of this general

science” (Jon Simons, From Kant to Levi-Strauss, page 233)

Ferdinand de Saussure.

Ferdinand de Saussure is generally regarded as the father of modern linguistics and

contemporary semiotics. He projected that language could be studied scientifically and that

language changes are frequently discontinuous but subject to general laws. This approach has

come to be called “structural linguistics.” For Saussure, linguistics was a distinct case, although

the most significant one, within the broader semiological structure. He apprehended the new

science of semiology as associated with social psychology and keen on the analysis of the

general principles of signs. A unified discipline of broad theoretical possibility and predicated

upon the concept of the sign. In addition to language, he acknowledged writing, sign language,

Braille, symbolic rites, honorific speech, and military signals as other sign systems subject to

semiological analysis. Saussure defined linguistics as the scientific study of human language in

all its varied manifestations.

Saussure’s structural linguistics must be understood as emerging from his critique of the

conventional belief that language is a nomenclature which describes as language consists of a

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collection of words which are simply labels of independently identifiable things, usually an

object, an action, or a state of being. The linguists of his day looked at language referentially

and historically and were concerned primarily with the relations between words and things and

with the history of linguistic development. Saussure’s radical contribution to the study of

language lies in his refusal of that ‘substantive’ view of the subject in favour of a ‘relational’

one. Saussure argues that language has a special character — it has a contemporary social

existence and it is the product of a historical trajectory. For every society, language is always an

inheritance from the past. This historical viewpoint yielded what Saussure called a diachronic

analysis of language. As divergent to a diachronic approach that studies changes in language

over some time, Saussure assumed a synchronic method that saw language as a structure that

could be studied in its whole at a given point in time. rather than concentrating on how modern

language (English) evolved historically, the synchronic analysis would look at how it works as

a language system apart from its history of usage. Saussure initiated several further significant

and radical insights.

Saussure considered the phenomenon of language in terms of two fundamental

dimensions that of langue and that of parole. Saussure observes language in terms of a hierarchy

of binary oppositions. These encompassed internal and external elements of language, langue,

and parole, synchronic and diachronic aspects. For Saussure, language is a rule‐based system of

elements and their relationships whose functioning is similar to chess, where the relational value

but not the material substance of chess pieces matters. Saussure distinguished between

language(langue) as a system of rules and norms and speech (parole) as all instances of its use

in practice

External linguistics entails all those relations that stand outside the language system. It

addresses the connections between language and political history as in colonialism when a

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dominant group enforces its language upon a subordinate one. Internal linguistics denotes to the

language system complete with its own rules and principles of grammar. “everything that

changes the system in any way is internal”

Langue refers to linguistic structure. It is language minus speech and consists of a set of

linguistic habits that allow a speaker to communicate. It is the domain of articulation which

accounts for the division of speech into syllables, or the division of signs into meaningful units.

Parole denotes speech understood as the social understanding of language by a member of the

linguistic community. It is an individual act and thus subject to considerable variability in

expression. Saussure adopts this distinction to identify the social from the individual and the

essential from the accidental. However, Saussure also noted that langue and parole exist in such

a close relationship that it is difficult to separate them.

Concept of Sign

Initially, he denied that there is somehow a natural connection between words and things,

urging that this connection is conventional. This assessment of language also challenges the

view of reality as someway independent and existing outside of language, reducing language to

merely a “name-giving system.” Saussure’s work challenged certain vital assumptions regarding

language and its relationship to the world. Furthermore, Saussure said that language is a system

of signs in relation: no sign has meaning in isolation; rather, its signification depends on its

difference from other signs and generally on its situation within the entire network of signs.

Finally, Saussure made a distinction between two dimensions of language: langue, which refers

to language as a structured system, grounded on certain rules; and parole, the specific acts of

speech or utterance which are based on those rules. In short, he proposed that a language should

be studied as a Gestalteinheit, a unified ‘field’, a self-sufficient system.

Saussure further defines langue as a system of signs, in which the sign itself is

decomposable into two halves, the signifier and the signified. For him, the linguistic system is

made up of a multitude of signs. Every sign consists of two elements that are one inseparable

unity: on the one hand, the sound-image “signifier”, on the other, the mental concept that is

connected with this sound-image “signified”. The structural relationship between the notion of

a tree (i.e. the signified) and the sound-image made by the word ‘tree’ (i.e. the signifier) thus

constitutes a linguistic sign, and a language is made up of these: it is a system of signs that

express ideas. It is arbitrary, there exists no necessary ‘fitness in the association between the

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sound-image, or signifier ‘tree’, the concept, or signified that it involves, and the actual physical

tree growing in the earth. Saussure states, the linguistic sign in its totality is “a two-sided

psychological entity,” entailing of both signifier and signified. The sign as a whole denotes the

real object in the world, as shown in the following illustration:

Signifier (the word or sound-image “table”)

Sign > Actual object: table

Signified (the concept of “table”)

The prevailing attitude toward language was referential. That is, it was implied that

words denoted things and that the referential connection gives words their meaning. Saussure

contended instead that words operate by relating a sound image or signifier with a mental image

or signified. That association of sound to the concept is what permits words to have meaning,

not the reference of the word to thing. He used the word “sign” instead of “word” to name his

more scientific description of what words are and how they function. Saussure established a

methodology aimed at attaining this, demanding that the signifier-to-signified relationship was

built around the idea of contraries. Besides, he noted that all words in a language depend on their

identity in other words. Difference makes identity possible. Without differences, there can be

no identities – at least in language. The relationship between signifier and signified is an

arbitrary and accidental one, which means that their articulation is purely a matter of agreement

within a particular linguistic community (for example, ‘horse’ in English, cheval in French).

This conveys us to an important feature of langue, which is that it is a system of signs constructed

on the principle of difference, the difference between different signifiers on the one hand, and

the difference between different signified on the other.

Everything we have said so far comes down to this. In langue, there are only differences

… and no positive terms. Whether we take the signified or the signifier, langue includes neither

ideas nor sounds existing prior to the linguistic system, but only conceptual and phonetic

differences arising out of that system

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Consequently, there is no essential link between language and reality. the meanings of

those signs being derived from those relations, not from references to things outside the system.

For example, the notion of power is constructed around the notion that in its absence there is

weakness; so, power does not happen in a vacuum but is dependent on its relationship with the

opposing concept of weakness.

“in language, there are only differences without positive terms. Whether we take the

signified or the signifier, language has neither ideas nor sounds that existed before the linguistic

system” (Saussure 1966[1916]:120).

If all aspects of the language are thus ‘based on relations’ two dimensions of these

relationships must assume particular importance. Saussure presents these as the linguistic sign’s

syntagmatic (or horizontal’) relations and its simultaneous associative (or ‘vertical’) relations.

Subsequently, language is primarily an auditory system, the association between

signifier and signified discloses during a passage of time the mode of the relationship between

signifier and signified can be said to be essential, albeit minimally, sequential in nature. The

sign has two primordial characteristics: firstly, the bond between the signifier and signified is

arbitrary: by this, Saussure means that the concept (e.g., “sister”) is not associated by any inner

connection to the succession of sounds which assists as its signifier (in French, s-o-r). the bond

is not natural but unmotivated, founded on collective behavior or convention, fixed by rules.

Signifiers and gestures don’t have any intrinsic value. Saussure is careful to suggest that

“arbitrary “does not suggest that the choice of the signifier is left completely to the speaker: the

individual has no power to change a sign in any way once it has become established in the

linguistic community. The second characteristic of the signifier is its linear nature. Being

Signified

Signifier

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auditory, it is unfolded in time and thus characterizes a span that is measurable in a single

dimension. On the other hand, visual signifiers can propose groupings in several dimensions.

Auditory signifiers, having only the dimension of time.

Generation of Meaning

Structuralism, as primarily theorized by Saussure in its linguistic form was created on

the idea that language is composed of an internal structure of signs this view, the meaning is

derived from the development of signification between signifier and signified. In other words,

language is a social construction and not intrinsically related to the reality of the external world,

different aspects of which it seeks to grasp through description and analysis. He attacks the

conventional correspondence theory of meaning whereby language is viewed as a naming

process, each word corresponding to the thing it names.

Lévi-Strauss developed the field of structural anthropology. The method contains the

application to non-linguistic material of the principles termed the ‘phonological revolution’

which was brought about by the linguist’s idea of the phoneme. That is, he attempts to observe

the constituents of cultural behavior, ceremonies, rites, kinship relations, marriage laws,

methods of cooking, totemic systems, not as intrinsic or discrete entities, but in terms of the

contrastive relationships, they have with each other that make their structures analogous to the

phonemic structure of a language.

Levi-Strauss was influenced by linguistics which, in his view had made the most

prominent progress in the study of the unconscious infrastructure of linguistic phenomena,

concentration on the relations between terms, the exhibition of the structures of phonemic

systems (systems of vocal sounds), and the discovery of general laws which would articulate

basic essential relationships. Alike Saussure and other structural linguists, Lévi-Strauss was

concerned that the “objective basis of language (sound)” would be separated from the

“signifying function(meaning)” His prime innovation about semiotics was to point out the

similarity between kinship and phonemic systems, for, as in language, the “observable

phenomena” of kinship systems outcome from the action of laws which are general but implicit

he concludes that kinship terms not only have a sociological existence; they are also essentials

of speech.

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Lévi-Strauss notion of kinship systems as arbitrary systems of representation, as systems

of symbols. In the Introduction to Mauss Lévi-Strauss extends this definition to the whole of

social existence. He proposed six classifications of systems into two groups. The first three terms

(language, kinship rules, economic relations) could be seen as the ‘infrastructure’ of social

organization, representing the most immediate forms of social interaction and exchange, while

the final three terms (art, science, religion) would designate the relatively autonomous instances

of creation, intellection and collective representation, the ‘superstructure’, as it were, of social

existence.

‘kinship’ systems are, sets of ‘rules’ concerning who may – and more often who may not

marry whom and advising the nature of familial relationships at large. Levi-Strauss proposes

that such systems, or ‘structures’, perhaps homologous with the construction of the language of

the society involved in them because ‘diverse types of communication systems in the same

societies – that is, kinship and language’ may in effect be shaped by ‘identical unconscious

structures.it globally contains the relation on a power structure. This structure containing four

types of relationships that are organically linked, namely: brother/sister, husband/wife,

father/son, and mother's brother/sister’s son. In it one pair of relations, it is always possible to

infer the other.

potentials of translation between these symbolic systems are limited and never integral;

the different systems are essentially irreducible. Moreover, in the case of ‘superstructural’

systems such as art, science, and religion, their expression of aspects of the physical and social

world is never a comprehensive one: there is always an element of ‘play’ between the signifier

and the signified. The notion of a mental unconscious common to all subjects, irrespective of

the contingencies of cultural difference. it is analogous to the deep-level structures of language

as revealed by structural linguistics. It is the transcendental ground that assurances the eventual

intelligibility of systems of representation radically different from our own. While traditional

interpretations of these systems saw them as being entirely affective in motivation, expressing

the mystical ‘participation’ of the individual with nature. Lévi-Strauss instead describes such

representations as a ‘logic of the concrete’ or bricolage, constructing higher-order systems of

signification in the same way that a language constructs meaning from different sound

utterances.

Lévi-Strauss arrived at some important perceptions into the nature of myth. He observed

that, despite their contingent character, myths throughout the world exhibited an astonishing

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resemblance. Drawing on Saussure’s ideas, he proposed that myth was a specific form and use

of language. The structural study of Myth’ (1955) represents the first substantial application of

the linguistic model to mythical discourse. Lévi-Strauss argues that not only is a myth in

principle subject to the same kind of analysis as language, it is also objectively a part of the

language, which is its primary means of expression. He, therefore, distinguishes between three

levels in language: the two, distinct levels of langue and parole, as defined by Saussure, and a

higher level of complexity, at which the myth operates, which is both dependent on the first two

levels and detached from them, it uses a third referent which combines the properties of the first

two. On the one hand, a myth refers to events having taken place long ago; but what gives the

myth an enduring value is that the specific pattern described is timeless: it explains the present

and past as well as the future. Myth is, therefore, a qualitatively different form of language, but

it can be analyzed in the same way as language

He describes that:

Like any language, myth is made up of elements or constituent units, but of a higher

order of complexity than the constituent units of language. One can, therefore, trace an

ascending order of inclusion and complexity from phoneme (minimal unit of sound) to

morpheme (minimal unit of meaning) to sememe (sequence of morphemes) to the ‘gross

constituent units’ of myth, what Lévi-Strauss calls the mytheme.

• The meaning of myth is not to be found in its isolated constituent elements, but in the

way in which these elements are combined. (Christopher Johnson, Johnson, Claude Lévi-Strauss

The Formative Years, page89, Cambridge University Press.)

To discrete the ‘gross constituent unit’ or mytheme, Lévi-Straus breaks up the narrative

sequence of each myth into the shortest possible sentences, each of which signifies the linking

of a subject and a predicate. The real constitutive elements of myth are therefore not isolated

relations, but ‘bundles’ of relations of the same type. The ‘meaning’ of the myth originates from

the combinations, or more precisely, the binary oppositions, between these bundles of relations.

The overall function of myth is therefore to overcome or mediate the essential contradictions of

social life, without necessarily providing a direct resolution of them.

Lévi-Strauss describes s that society is itself systematized according to one form or

another of significant communication and exchange – whether this is of information, knowledge,

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or myths, or even of its members themselves. The organization of social phenomena could thus

be clarified through a comprehensive explanation of their subtending structures, which,

collectively, testify to a deeper and all-inclusive, social rationality. As with the analysis of

language, these social structures would be revealed, not by direct observation, but by inference

and deduction from the observed empirical data. Structuralism does not consider the terms of

such structures as independent items that can and should be studied in their own right, but rather

as correlations that are defined by their function within the system governing them. And

structuralism aims to study the general rules which control such systems.

Deep Structure and Surface Structure

Chomsky's involvement in linguistics has been generally threefold. In the first place, he

moved the emphasis of linguistics from the strictly descriptive and inductive level to the ideal

level of competence and 'deep structure', the level which opens up a creative characteristic in

the language which describes that language was more than its material execution.

Subsequentially, he brought about a reassessment of language learning by arguing that language

competence is not attained inductively through a behaviourist stimulus-response conditioning,

but is the significance of an innate cognitive capacity possessed by humans. It means linguistic

freedom and creativity is not developed, but always already exists as a governing a priori.

Thirdly he settles, the difference between 'competence' and 'performance' even when it was

poorly understood - has served as a metaphor for structural studies in other disciplines such as

philosophy and sociology.

surface structures are apparent in our syntax; or that to use language successfully

demonstrates a command of these, the Surface structure is present in the sensory or observational

characterization of an utterance and is closely connected with the phonetic structure of the

spoken language. This structure, according to Chomsky, cannot disclose the ambiguity of a

sentence. In some cases, two sentences may mean the same but differ in their surface structures;

in

Chomsky proposing the 'deep structures' which are not ambiguous, they are open to only

one semantic interpretation, and they are turned into surface structures by the rules of what

Chomsky calls a 'transformational' or 'generative' grammar. Deep structure is essentially the

abstract features of grammatical structure. It has some affinity with the logical structure of

sentences and is closely related to meaning. For Chomsky, deep and surface structure do not

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distinguish between profound and superficial linguistic features, but between what is abstract

and what is concrete in language. These transformations are, in his phrase, 'structure-dependent

. . . in the sense that they apply to a string of words under the organization of these words into

phrases. “That is to say that the transformation depends on the syntactical organization.

“The syntactic component of a grammar must specify, for each sentence, a deep

structure that determines its semantic interpretation and a surface structure that determines its

phonetic interpretation. The first of these is interpreted by the semantic component; the second

by the phonological component.” (Noam Chomsky, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, Page 15,

MIT Press)

Generative grammar is a kind of elementary system of rules that recursively defines and

gives rise to sentence transformations. It is linked to the basic 'competence' of an ideal speaker

hearer, a competence which enables the production of a potentially infinite number of well-

formed sentences. He says

[A] (generative) grammar may be said to generate a set of structural descriptions each

of which, ideally, incorporates a deep structure, a surface structure, a semantic interpretation

(of the deep structure), and a phonetic interpretation (of the surface structure) .'(John Lechte,

Fifty Key Contemporary Thinkers From Structuralism to Post-Humanism, Taylor & Francis

page 75.)

Chomsky was able to illustrate that both phrase structure grammar and transformational

grammar are more influential than finite-state grammar and that transformational grammar is a

more powerful grammar than phrase structure grammar. Transformational grammar is

Chomsky’s contribution to a general theory of grammar. Only a transformational grammar can

derive the basic rules constitutive of the ideal speaker-hearer.

In the conspectus of Structuralist ideas, in linguistics is the close connection between

Chomsky's projected model of language acquisition and Saussure's distinction between the

language system and everyday language events. however, there is a significant difference

between Saussure's langue and Chomsky's 'competence', in that where the langue is specified as

something belonging to society or the language-community, 'competence' remains the

possession of the individual. Saussure more or less ignores the question of how the individual

acquires mastery of the essentially collective system, meantime Chomsky explains the fact of

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the individual's linguistic creativity he suggests a 'tacit knowledge' of the language system as a

whole, an 'internalized' grammar which permits each of us to create a potentially infinite number

of new sentences.

Media and Message

Barthes’s published a series of essays as Mythologies in 1957: these were semiotic

evaluates of diverse cultural forms and everyday artifacts, and popular entertainment. These

aspects of everyday life were called “myths” in that they were “falsely obvious”: bourgeois

ideology passing itself off as simple and natural. Barthes endeavoured to explain each of these

myths, refuting its “naturalness” with an analysis of its artificial construction. Barth says that

“language is never innocent” there is nothing neutral or natural about realism, which Barthes

comprehends to be a highly contrived mode of writing grounded in “bourgeois consciousness”

and characterized by “the most spectacular signs of fabrication”.

Barthes’ most important suggestion is that myth is not an object, a concept, or an idea

but a language, a kind of speech. It is a mode of signification and is defined by how it expresses

its message. He cautions that there are no eternal myths; it is human history that “converts reality

into speech” (Myth., 110).In the essay “Myth Today,” Barthes defined “myth” not in traditional

literary terms, but instead as a second-level semiological structure, or meta-language, extending

the linguistics of Saussure, and facilitating the examination of tensions between the uncoded (or

denotative) and the coded (or connotative) levels of signification (→ semiotics). Rather than

identifying mythic structures, however, Barthes described collapses of systematic

communication in what he called “emptiness of language which constitutes a writing.

He describes myth as a “second-order semiological system” The first-order system is the

agreement of signifier and signified forming the sign in language. This first-order sign, the

“language-object” becomes the signifier of the second-order sign. The myth then is a language

on top of a language: myth makes use of the language-object as its signifier, to which a

mythological signified is devoted, creating a mythological sign or signification. While the first-

order sign is unmotivated and arbitrary, the second-order sign is motivated and “never arbitrary”

The alteration into a mythological sign is a “deformation” of the language-object in question:

the meaning of the language-object is partially emptied, then filled/distorted with a mythological

notion. Barthes’s evaluates of cultural phenomena underscores the extent to which myths are

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deformations motivated towards naturalizing, universalizing, and eternalizing bourgeois

ideology.

He claimed that a myth is a second-order message that appropriates a primary message,

visual or textual. The relationship between the two messages conforms to the linguistic

difference between “denotation,” the literal meaning explicitly conveyed by a message, and

“connotation,” the triggering by the message of additional implicit meanings. The primary

message is or maybe a neutral representation: Barthes’s example is a photograph of a black

soldier in French uniform saluting. But, appearing in the popular magazine Paris-Match, it

acquires a further meaning: it is a sign of the inclusiveness of the French Empire since the

African is saluting just as a Frenchman would. For the typical reader of Paris-Match, the image

completely refutes the idea that the people of French colonial Africa is at all discontented with

French rule. The image thus has what Barthes sees as the typical effect of myth: to naturalize

history and so make it invisible. It joins any number of images and discourses that indirectly

suggest that it is natural for Europeans to rule Africans. The history of colonialism, which would

reveal the social and economic interests in play, is thus masked.

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For Barthes, the first order of language as such is understood as a system of signs that is

primarily denotative. Two kinds of second-order sign systems – connotation and metalanguage

incorporate this first-order level of denotation as a constitutive element. Connotation takes the

first-order sign as its second-order signifier, whereas metalanguage takes the first-order sign as

its second-order signified. Metalanguages form “the majority of scientific languages” including

semiology itself, and are “operations … whose role is to provide a real system, grasped as

signified, out of an ensemble of original signifiers, of a descriptive nature. As opposed to

metalanguages, connotations pervade languages which are primarily social, in which a first,

literal message serves as a support for a second meaning, of a generally affective or ideological

order”

Barthes explored the tension between the indexical nature of Photography and the

arbitrary character of its cultural interpretation. He upheld, on the one hand, that a photograph

does have a value as a record of an actual moment. On the other hand, a photograph has meaning

through its special quality to affect us as viewers. A photograph is always an image of something

past, continually remembering death. Furthermore, there is an element in any photograph that

seems tangential to the main representational subject but is central to our reaction as viewers.

Barthes called this element the “punctum.”

Myth today, Barthes says, is a message - not a concept, idea, or object. More specifically,

myth is defined' by the way it utters its message'; it is thus a product of 'speech' (parole), rather

than of language' (langue). With ideology, what is said is crucial, and it hides. Myth 'is neither

a lie nor a confession: it is an in inflection'.' Subsequently, in the example of the Negro soldier

saluting the French flag, taken by Barthes from the front cover of Paris-Match, the Negro

becomes, for the myth reader, 'the very presence of French imperiality'.

Barthes’s work in the 1970s and the last decade completes the “poststructuralist turn” he

had begun when he started to contemplate structure and semiology in terms of practices of

reading and writing in prevailing order the author “guarantee the meaning” of the work; that is,

it relied on finding out the author’s intention by recourse to biographical and historical context.

However, Barthes wants to free the text from authorial intention, “erasing the author’s

signature”, and permit the interpretation of the text to be dependent upon its reading in the

present, rather than upon a construction of the past. Once the text is freed from the guarantee,

provided by the author, of a single meaning, it is open to multiple interpretations. Barthes’s

poststructuralism put forward the vision of a text as a “multi-dimensional space” composed of

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numerous writings “none of them original” whose cultural sources are “innumerable concludes:

“The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author”.

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Unit II.

Ideology and Criticism

Ideology

The term ideology states to a system of interrelated beliefs, values, and opinions held

by an individual or a group; they are typical of a political nature. Generally, an ideology holds

assumptions about how the social and political world is and how it ought to be. The term

idéologie (ideology) seemed at the time of the French Revolution. The Enlightenment

philosopher Antoine Destutt de Tracy (1754–1836) devised the term as the name for his new

“science of ideas.” In the nineteenth century, the word started to be used in its modern sense

to name a methodical body of ideas or doctrines. Ideology in the sense of concrete political

ideologies denotes the ideological traditions that arose beginning in the mid-eighteenth

century. These contain liberalism, conservatism, nationalism, socialism, communism,

fascism, and others. In literary and cultural studies, the word is used primarily in its Marxist

sense to name a way of thinking that supports the rule of one economic or social class over

another. This use derives from Marx’s employment of the term to signify a false

consciousness shared by the members of a particular social class. (CDP416). According to

Marx, members of the capitalist class share the ideology that the laws of the competitive

market are natural and impersonal, that workers in a competitive market are paid all that they

can be paid, and that the institutions of private property in the means of production are natural

and justified. This use of the word derives from Karl Marx’s famous characterization of

ideology as “ruling ideas” in The German Ideology:

The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which

is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The

class that has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time

over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those

who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more

than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material

relationships grasped as ideas; hence of the relationships which make the one class the ruling

one, therefore, the ideas of its dominance. (Marx & Engels 1970[1845]: 64)

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Ideology” has one additional meaning in literary and cultural theory. Those who are

in a subordinate economic position and who have to work for others to survive must believe

that the economic system is fair and just. For their psychological survival and well-being, they

must see themselves as striving individuals rather than as exploited dupes. For Marxism, the

study of ideology denotes the study of how the mode of production gives rise to p.eople’s

false beliefs about society

The common-sense nature of ideology implies that the relevant patterns of meaning

or frames of interpretation are (supposed to be) intersubjectively shared, as a kind of common

ground, within a given community. Thus, they tend to be taken for granted or, formulated

more negatively, not to be questioned. In Eagleton’s (2007) words, this means that ideology

is always most effective when invisible. The wider the realm for such unquestioned

acceptance of ways of thinking, the more hegemonic the corresponding ideology will be, that

is, the more effectively they will block alternative ideas and rival views

Society and Structure

Marx perceived the structure of all society as established by 'levels' or 'instances'

According to this division, each society and economic structure has a base, which would

contain both the means of production and the social relations knotted to production. For

instance, the “base” for capitalism would include industries that deliver raw materials,

factories that turn those raw ingredients into consumer products, the investors who invest in

the factories, the workers who labour in the factories, the contractual relations between

laborers, their bosses, and the investors, the distributors and shops that sell the products to

consumers, and so on. Besides, every “base” is accompanied by a “superstructure,” which

would include cultural, moral, and religious traditions that reflect the base. These separation

articulated by a precise purpose: the infrastructure, or economic base (the 'unity' of the

productive forces and the relations of production) He considered the mode of production to

be the “base,” or ultimate determinant, of social life; it is the primary locus of production and

of ruling- class abstraction from direct producers. For him, the “material factor” to be chiefly

a socio-cultural construct, which contains biophysical sides. Overall, Marx’s materialism

focuses more on social relationships oriented to material factors than on material conditions

Marx held that social formations also are composed of the superstructure, which

entails modes of intercourse and ideology, which do not contribute directly to the creation of

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the necessary product or surplus product but reproduce the circumstances required to

perpetuate the mode of production. and the superstructure, which itself comprehends two

'levels' or 'instances': the politico-legal (law and the State) and ideology (the different

ideologies, religious, ethical, legal, political, etc.). However, he also argued that other types

of organization and association (e.g., families, voluntary groups) control, socialize,

indoctrinate, or otherwise fashion people to fit the existing mode of production.

Marx recognized that concepts or other characteristics of the superstructure can at

times be of independent importance in shaping the nature of human societies. Marx meant

that the dominant ideology in a society is molded and upheld by this powerful group because

it serves their interests. “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas: i.e.,

the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual

force. “In the meantime, the superstructure is not fully determined, but only influenced or

designed by the substructure or general mode of production. Marx recognized that in

numerous places the political system or cultural traditions could at times shape or influence

the means and relations of production in the long run, however, the inspiration of the

substructure over the superstructure was perceived as prime in Marx’s philosophy

State and State Apparatus

Louis Althusser contrasted ideology with science, of which he saw Marx’s theory of

history as a leading instance, but at the same time, he took ideology to be a pervasive and

ineliminable part of human experience, regardless of a given historical society’s class

configurations. Ideology can be understood, in a comprehensive sense, as “a way of seeing

things.” Ideologies inform and shape people’s everyday practices and the writing of policies,

and they guide thinking in ways that can be conscious or unconscious (Althusser, 1970).

In Marxist philosophy, the State has no meaning except as a function of State power.

The entire political class fight circles around the State is intended to capture and conserve

State power by a certain class or by an alliance between classes or class fractions. For Marx

state’s coercive powers and other control mechanisms as the most vital means of perpetuating

creative forces and stuff relations. He considered the legal, administrative, military, and

ideological arms of complex states to be overpowering sources of class power. But he also

argued that other organizations and associations help to control, socialize, indoctrinate, or

otherwise fashion people to fit into or comply with the existing system of production. The

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State is considered as a repressive apparatus. The State is a 'machine' of repression, which

empowers the ruling classes to guarantee their domination over the working class, thus

permitting the former to subject the latter to the process of surplus-value extortion

The State is thus first of all what the Marxist classics have called the State apparatus.

This term means: not only the specialized apparatus whose existence and necessity. The State

apparatus, which outlines the State as a force of repressive execution and intervention 'in the

benefits of the dominant classes' in the class struggle conducted by the bourgeoisie and its

allies against the proletariat, is quite certainly the State, and quite certainly defines its basic

'function’. The description of the State as a class State, standing in the repressive State

apparatus, casts an intense light on all the facts observable in the various orders of repression

whatever their domains.

The Marxist describes that the State as the repressive apparatus, State power, and

State apparatus must be illustrious, the objective of the class struggle apprehensions State

power, and significance the use of the State apparatus by the classes holding State power as a

function of their class objectives, and the proletariat must seize State power to destroy the

existing bourgeois state apparatus. Althusser considered the classic Marxist State Apparatus

such as the Government, the Administration, the Army, the Police, the Courts, the Prisons, as

Repressive State Apparatus. To articulate a theory of the State Althusser illustrates not only

the distinction between State power and State apparatus but also another certainty which is

clearly on the side of the repressive State apparatus, called ideological State apparatuses. For

him, State Apparatus holds two frames: the body of institutions that signify the Repressive

State Apparatus on the one hand, and the body of institutions that represent the body of

Ideological State Apparatuses on the other.

Ideological State apparatuses (ISA) are diverse from repressive State apparatus

(RSA) the Government, the Administration, the Army, the Police, the Courts, the Prisons,

etc., which constitute the Repressive State Apparatus. Repressive suggests that the State

Apparatus in question 'functions by violence' -- at least eventually. Ideological State

Apparatuses a positive number of certainties that present themselves to the immediate

spectator in the form of distinct and specialized institutions. He delivers a list of these which

will have to be examined in detail, tested, corrected, and re-organized. With all the

reservations implied by this requirement, he categorized the following institutions as

Ideological State Apparatuses

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➢ the religious ISA (the system of the different Churches),

➢ the educational ISA (the system of the different public and private 'Schools'),

generating a breed of disciplined people accord the state. “It takes children

from every class at infant-school age, and then for years, the years in which

the child is most 'vulnerable', squeezed between the family State apparatus and

the educational State apparatus, it drums into them, whether it uses new or old

methods, a certain amount of 'know-how' wrapped in the ruling ideology”.

➢ the family ISA - play the role in instigating the social moral odder of the state

into generation

➢ the legal ISA

➢ the political ISA (the political system, including the different Parties),

➢ the trade-union ISA, infiltrates the dominate ideology in labors and cover the

exploiting norms of workplace and

➢ the communications ISA (press, radio, and television, etc.), broadcasting

dominant class ideals to sustain the prevailing order. The communications

apparatus by cramming every 'citizen' with daily doses of nationalism,

chauvinism, liberalism, moralism, etc, through the press, the radio, and

television.

➢ the cultural ISA (Literature, the Arts, sports, etc.)

In all these ISA the Church plays a key role in society, which concentrated within it

not only religious functions, but also educational ones, and a large proportion of the functions

of communications and 'culture'.

The State Apparatus belongs entirely to the public domain, much the larger part of the

Ideological State Apparatuses is part, on the contrary, of the private domain This is a fact that

the RSA functions massively and predominantly by repression including physical repression

while functioning ISA by ideology. There is a plurality of Ideological State Apparatuses. Even

assuming that it exists, the harmony that creates this plurality of ISA as a body is not directly

evident. The larger part of the Ideological State Apparatuses is part, on the contrary, of the

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private domain. Churches, Parties, Trade Unions, families, some schools, most newspapers,

cultural ventures, etc,. are private. ISAs 'function' immensely and predominantly by ideology,

what unites their diversity is precisely this functioning, insofar as the ideology by which they

function is always in fact unified, despite its diversity and its paradoxes, beneath the ruling

ideology, which is the ideology of 'the ruling class'.

Ideological State Apparatuses, institutions which for the most part do not possess

public status, but are quite simply private institutions. In its actual life order, it is unimportant

whether the institutions in which they are realized are 'public' or 'private'. What matters is how

they function. Private institutions like churches, schools can perfectly well 'function' as

Ideological State Apparatuses. Through this institution the state able to propagate or teach

their norms to its people and create a social sphere to continue its regime no class can hold

State power over a long period without at the same time exercising its hegemony over and in

the State Ideological Apparatuses

On the discourse about the history and existence of ideology Althusser illustrating

ideology in two different approaches in the first hypothesis, with the support of German

ideology and Marx’s philosophy he articulates that ideology has no history and the Ideology

represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence.

usually, we call religious ideology, ethical ideology, legal ideology, political ideology, etc.,

they do not resemble reality, i.e. that they constitute an illusion, we acknowledge that they do

allude to reality and that they need only be 'interpreted' to learn the reality of the world behind

their imaginary representation of that world an ideology always exists in an apparatus, and its

practice, or practices.

Ideology As A Material Force

This existence of ideology is material, the material existence of the ideology in an

apparatus and its practices do not have the same modality as the material existence of a

paving-stone or a rifle. utilizing the ideological 'conceptual' device thus set up the attitude of

the subject concerned naturally follows.

While discussing the ideological State apparatuses and their practices, each of them

was the realization of an ideology. The individual in question behaves in such and such a way,

adopts such and such a practical attitude, and, what is more, participates in certain regular

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practices which are those of the ideological apparatus on which 'depend' the ideas which he

has in all consciousness freely chosen as a subject. The ideological representation of ideology

is itself forced to recognize that every 'subject' endowed with a 'consciousness' and believing

in the 'ideas' that his 'consciousness' inspires in him.

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Unit III.

Post Structuralism

Post-structuralism is a philosophical approach of thought which believes that in the

world there is no reality, only “manufactured reality” created by words. On the other hand, Post-

structuralism which diverges from Structuralism became a reaction to it. While structuralists

followed a structure of the text, the Post-structuralist as Derrida denies the possibility of such a

structure, Derrida’s deconstruction gives new ways of thinking. Derrida has made great efforts

in undermining the traditional understanding of truth. The Post-structuralists are appealing that

the real truth is impossible to know. Post-structuralism is to say that there is no one

interpretation, every person would think differently post-structuralism questions methodical

thought. The French post-structuralist and phenomenologist deconstructionist philosopher,

Derrida discards the metaphysics of presence that characterizes Western philosophy since Plato.

He applies his method of deconstruction to philosophical and other texts to disclose the

indeterminacy and instability of meaning. his studies of language, metaphysics, and aesthetics

have been influential in cultural and literary criticism.

Structure, Sign, and Play

Derrida’s early works are a meditation on the implications for the philosophy of

Ferdinand de Saussure’s idea that all identity is instituted through difference. He claimed that

the fundamental terms of Western philosophy are not, in fact, fundamental at all. The concept

of structure and even the word "structure" itself are as old as the episteme-that is to say, Western

philosophy-and that their roots thrust deep into the soil of ordinary language, a process of giving

it a center or of referring it to a point of presence, a fixed origin. The function of this center was

not only to orient, balance, and organize the structure-one cannot conceive of an unorganized

structure but above all to make sure that the organizing principle of the structure would limit

what we might call the play of the structure. the center of a structure permits the play of its

elements inside the total form as the center, it is the point at which the substitution of contents,

elements, or terms is no longer possible. At the center, the permutation or the transformation of

elements is forbidden. Thus, it has always been thought that the center, which is by definition

unique, constituted that very thing within a structure which while governing the structure,

escapes structurality. This is why classical thought concerning structure could say that the center

is, paradoxically, within the structure, and outside it. The center is at the center of the totality,

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and yet, since the center does not belong to the totality the totality has its center elsewhere. The

center is not the center. The concept of cantered structure is the concept of a play based on a

fundamental ground, a play constituted based on fundamental immobility and a reassuring

certitude, which itself is beyond the reach of play. In all the classic dualities of Western thought,

one term is privileged or "central" over the other. The privileged, central term is the one most

associated with the phallus and the logos. Examples include speech over writing, Meaning over

meaninglessness, etc. the center could not be thought of in the form of a present-being, that the

center had no natural site, that it was not a fixed locus but a function, a sort of no locus in which

an infinite number of sign-substitutions came into play.

The Indeterminacy of Meaning

In place of constant meaning appears what Derrida calls "Freeplay,” a tremendously

inventive and exhilarating possibility. The parallel seems close between the conception of

Freeplay and the dehellenization of theology, which transforms the static idea of God's

omnipotence into a sense of the radical openness of history. Whereas, then, Saussure recognizes

that meaning derives from the difference between one element and others in the system, Derrida

grasps that differance works within as well as between elements.

... Freeplay is the disruption of presence. The presence of an element is always a

signifying and substitutive reference inscribed in a system of differences and the movement of a

chain. Freeplay is always an interplay of absence and presence, but if it is to be radically

conceived, freeplay must be conceived of before the alternative of presence and absence; being

must be conceived of as presence or absence beginning with the possibility of freeplay and not

the other way around.

He also vetoed the structuralist belief that texts have identifiable “centers” of meaning–

a belief structuralists shared with formalists. The argument turns on Saussure’s attitude to the

relative priority of spoken as opposed to written language, a dualism Derrida locates at the heart

of the Western philosophic tradition. He cites several passages from Saussure in which writing

is treated as a merely derivative or secondary form of linguistic notation, always dependent on

the primary reality of speech and the sense of a speaker’s ‘presence’ behind his words. Derrida

sees a whole metaphysics at work behind the privilege granted to speech in Saussure’s

methodology. The voice becomes a metaphor of truth and authenticity, a source of self-present

‘living’ speech as opposed to the secondary lifeless emanations of writing.

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Against this tradition, Derrida argues that writing is the precondition of language and

must be conceived prior to the speech. This involves showing, to begin with, that the concept of

writing cannot be reduced to its normal (i.e. Graphic or inscriptional) sense. As Derrida positions

it, the term is closely associated with that element of signifying difference which Saussure

thought important to the workings of language. Writing, for Derrida, is the ‘free play’ or element

of undecidability within every system of communication.

Freeplay is defined as "the disruption of presence"; it also defined as the interaction

between presence and absence; and finally, it is defined as something which "must be conceived

of before the alternative of presence and absence." freeplay for Derrida is at once all of these

descriptions and yet none of them. Because freeplay is unnameable. Derrida seems to be defining

freeplay in terms of absence, that he has replaced the concept of the center as a pure presence

with freeplay as an absence

Derrida discards that freeplay is either absence or presence, suggesting that it is anterior

to such notions, but at the same time, he proposes implicitly that freeplay is absence, that it is

somehow absence and yet not absence. He rests exactly on this point: there is no perception or

consciousness, and without perception and consciousness, the only language remains. Derrida

wants to deconstruct presence, so he falls back upon the concept of absence; and to deconstruct

perception and consciousness, two concepts related to presence, so he falls back upon language,

written language.

Now I don't know what perception is and I don't believe that anything like perception

exists. Perception is precisely a concept, a concept of an intuition or of a given originating from

the thing itself, present itself in its meaning, independently from language, from the system of

reference. And I believe that perception is interdependent with the concept of origin and of

center and consequently whatever strikes at the metaphysics of which I have spoken strikes also

at the very concept of perception. (272)

Derrida disagrees with the possibility of perception because it depends on a belief in

things that exist "independently from language, from the system of reference." For Derrida,

nothing can exist independently from language, which means that all things are merely concepts,

including "perception," "experience," and "consciousness."

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Freeplay is certainly the central and important aspect of Derrida's work, Freeplay in its

relation to the exclusion of a center, to the critique of presence as self-presence, to the falling

back upon a non-origin which creates the alterity of discourse, emphases upon the most

important things Derrida has brought to light: the need to think a non-centered world and the

need to think the discontinuities of this non-centered world. If there is a central structure,

freeplay is hardly freeplay anymore, for the structure itself refutes this freedom; and if we accept

the notion of freeplay, we must have done with a center, for it is precisely the static concept

which covers up the freeplay of freeplay. If there is a cantered structure, freeplay is hardly

freeplay anymore, for the structure itself denies this freedom; and if we accept the notion of

freeplay, we must have done with a center, for it is precisely the static concept which covers up

the freeplay of freeplay.

They are made possible by a process of differentiation. Derrida institute that regardless

of how central the process of signification conceived as a structure of repetition, substitution,

and differentiation seemed to be to its founding principles and concepts, Western philosophy

generally relegates signification to a secondary status regarding the standard of truthfulness

defined as a living presence in the mind or logos. Such logocentric philosophy makes presence

primary as a criterion of truthfulness and ignores how it is constituted by differentiation of a

kind generally related in the tradition with signification. Through evaluates of specific texts, he

identifies a “metaphysics of presence, “which, he argues, persists throughout the history of

Western philosophy. Such philosophy regularly erases and suppresses the power of language

and signification by declaring the best kind of language, the most “true,” to be mental speech

that is close to the conscious mind and is directly expressive of its meaning. It also posits the

idea of a “transcendental signified, “a point where the mechanics of signification ends, and

something like a semantic or ideational presence exempt from signification can be grasped by

the conscious mind.

Difference

For Derrida language is inherently variable. So, language functions are based on

differentiation. What empowers words to denote to whatsoever they denote to their difference

from other words, not a direct link to their so-called reference Though, those words work within

a linguistic system that never touches the real world. Reality determines the form of our

language, so we have to work with meanings that are shaped with the help of “difference” and

do not directly derive from the world they refer to. In language, we find only differences without

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positive terms. Words are never steady and fixed in time. First of all, because the meaning we

see in words is the product of difference, that meaning is always contaminated. Moreover, since

words are not determined by their relationship with what they refer to, they are always subject

to change. Meaning is the product of difference and it is also always subject to a process of

deferral

Derrida inherits from Heidegger the idea that truth in philosophy is defined in terms of

presence, the presence of an idea, or a thing to the conscious mind. Language can be said to be

truthful to the degree that it refers to ideas that are presences that our mind can grasp and know.

Differance is Derrida’s name for the processes that give rise to presence, but it can never itself

be “present” and can never, therefore, be grasped “as such” by the conscious mind. A term

introduced by Derrida from the French verb “différer,” meaning both “to differ” (to be other,

not to be identical) and “to defer” (to temporize, to take recourse in the temporal mediation of a

detour that suspends the fulfillment of desire). Differing, conforming to the Greek diapherein,

is correlated to spatiality and is the root of all theoretical oppositions. Deferring, on the other

hand, is associated with temporality and encompasses the perceptual change in the relationship

of determining to mean between the linguistic chain and the extralinguistic world. With this

neologism, Derrida attempts to advise that while traditional metaphysics is concentrated on

“presence,” the meaning of language is always deferred because linguistic meaning is associated

with the use of language and cannot be present in language as structure. In a productive

movement, difference is an oscillation between differing and deferring.

Derrida asserts that differance "has neither existence nor essence. It belongs to no

category of being, present, or absent. And yet what is thus denoted as difference is not

theological, not even in the most negative order of negative theology... Not only is differance

irreducible to every ontological or theological—onto-theological—reappropriation, but it opens

up the very space in which onto-theology—philosophy—produces its system and its history."

Deconstruction

Deconstruction is a poststructuralist theory, created primarily on the writings of Derrida.

It is in the first instance a philosophical theory and a theory focused on the rereading of

philosophical writings. Through deconstruction, Derrida intentions to remove the

boundary between binary oppositions and to do so in such a way that the hierarchy implied by

the oppositions is thrown into question. He believes that preceding Western metaphysical

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structures were established based on fundamental conceptual oppositions, such as

speech/writing, soul/body, transcendent/empirical, nature/culture, and good/evil. For each

conceptual pair, one term was supposedly superior to the other. Deconstruction is a

philosophical practice that intentions to disregard our thinking from the dominion of these

contraries by asking how they are possible. It is an analysis or critique of the meaning of

linguistic expressions by attending to their use or to the role that they play in human activities.

Derrida begins by demonstrating that the supposedly inferior concept within each pair has the

same defining features as the allegedly superior one and that there is no ground for giving

significance to one over the other. he did not define “deconstruction,” formally, though, he

presented three precise definitions. Derrida’s earliest deconstruction argues against the

possibility of an interior “language” of thought and intention such that the senses and referents

of terms are determined by their very nature. Such terms are “meanings” or logoi. Derrida calls

accounts that presuppose such magical thought-terms “logocentric.” At this stage of his career,

Derrida speaks of “metaphysics” as if the Western philosophical tradition was monolithic and

homogeneous. At times he also speaks of “Platonism,” Western metaphysics neglects the

complexity of reason in the life-world and restricts it to its cognitive instrumental dimension.

The dominant concern of traditional metaphysics with the articulation of the source of order and

structure of things is based on its cosmological and ontological assumption that the world has

an ordered ground. Logocentrism is the target of Derrida’s deconstruction. In his view,

philosophy should be concerned with the condition of the possibility of logos, rather than

viewing logos as the condition of the possibility of truth. For Derrida, logocentrism presents

itself chiefly in history as phonologism or the emphasis of speech over writing. “Phonologism”

is always used by Derrida as a synonym for “logocentrism.”

“Logocentrism would thus support the determination of the being of the entity as

presence. To the extent that such a logocentrism is not totally absent from Heidegger’s thought,

perhaps it still holds that thought within the epoch of onto-theology, within the philosophy of

presence, that is to say, within philosophy itself.”

Modern European philosophy Derrida’s term for a science of writing. Because the

Western metaphysical tradition has ranked speech or voice over writing, it is charged by Derrida

with phonologism. Derrida argues that we should reverse the priority between speech and

writing and establish a science of writing, that is, grammatology. His wide definition of writing

includes, in general, all that gives rise to an inscription, such as cinematography and

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choreography, as well as pictorial, musical, sculptural “writing. “According to Derrida, Hegel’s

system is the end of the tradition of phonologism, but it is also the beginning of the era of

grammatology.

Jacques Derrida's deconstruction became one of the most powerful expressions of the

poststructuralist ethos. Deconstruction was focused against the system-building side of

structuralism and took issue with the idea that all phenomena were reducible to the operations

of systems, with its inference that we could come to have total control over our environment.

Derrida was concerned to demonstrate was the instability of language, and indeed systems in

general. Signs were not such predictable entities in Derrida's view, and indeed there was never

any perfect conjunction of signifier and signified to guarantee unproblematical communication.

To Derrida, what has revealed at this point that Linguistic meaning was an unstable

phenomenon: at all times, and all places, differance applied.

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Unit IV

Post Modernism

Features of Modern Philosophy

Modernism was a movement in Catholic religious thought, predominantly in biblical

criticism, that established in the late nineteenth century and expended itself, as a distinctive

movement, it intended to bringing Catholic traditions into closer accord with modern views in

philosophy and with current social and political views. Modernism ran parallel to liberal

Protestantism; both ended to reject authority and rigid forms of religious dominance. Modernism

is distinguished from modern philosophy in that, it is associated with certain movements in art

and literature that began sometime around the end of the nineteenth century. Modernism in art

and literature involved a shift away from the dichotomies of romanticism and realism to the

stream of consciousness lived and internal time-consciousness, transcendental subjectivity

narrated remembrance and awareness portrayed speed, mechanisms, objects, and abstractions.

Western philosophy in the Middle Ages was primarily a Christian philosophy,

complementing the divine revelation and giving itself into the institutional tasks of the Roman

Catholic Church. Modern philosophy is construed as beginning in the Renaissance. A

philosophy that follows new basics for knowledge was offered as an alternative to that provided

by the ancient philosophers. The “disagreement between the ancients and the moderns” resulted

from this basic difference as to the basis of philosophical knowledge. Modern philosophy turned

away from the past and toward the future, toward the progress of knowledge, toward human

understanding, and progress through method or experience. With the break between the

Continental rationalists (Descartes, Nicolas Malebranche, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, and

Benedict de Spinoza) and the British empiricists (Hobbes, John Locke, and David Hume) at the

end of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, a new formulation in modern philosophy was

called for. Immanuel Kant carried together in his “critical” philosophy the commitments to the

analytic exercise of the mind, on the one hand, and the empirical reception through the senses

on the other. With Kant, modern philosophy shared the “transcendental unity of apperception”

with the “manifold of experience.” Modern philosophy was no longer based on a theory of

representation—representation to the mind through reason or representation to the mind through

experience—but on the linking of transcendental subjectivity and empirical objectivity.

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Modern philosophy is regarded as an emerging of the philosophical spirit, like a

quickening of criticism, as a rebellion against authority and custom, as a protest against

totalitarianism and collectivism, as a demand for freedom in thought and act. Modern philosophy

is independent in its search for truth. The essence of modern philosophy is individualistic, while

those of both ancient and medieval philosophy was, persuaded to be institutional. A modern

intellectual an individualist in the sense that he makes experiments for himself, verifies

hypotheses with his own, and tests the logic of arguments with his thinking Modernist was a

shift from faith to reason. Enlightenment is held to be the source of vital notions, such as the

significance of freedom, democracy, and reason as being the prime values of a society.

Renaissance

At the beginning of the 12th century, the social sphere of Europe, especially the Italian

socio-political culture, and structures felt a change in its foundations. This movement of the

renaissance shifted people to a mode of life generated according to humanistic thoughts of

ancient Greek philosophy. The social culture of Italy and the new technology of printing spread

the thoughts in Europe. Russell describes that

“It broke down the rigid scholastic system, which had become an intellectual straitjacket.

It revived the study of Plato and thereby demanded at least so much independent thought as was

required for choosing between him and Aristotle. In regard to both, it promoted a genuine and

first-hand knowledge, free from the glosses of Neoplatonists and Arabic commentators.”.

(Russell Bertrand. 2004.History of Western Philosophy. Routledge Classics, u.k.p.461)

The achievements like Gutenberg’s method of printing and other developments enabled

the multiplication of books and put them within the reach of scholars with modest means. Italy

possessed a unique culture which turned to be the ground for the renaissance. Unlike others,

Italians enjoyed a liberal education and were able to understand things as real. They succeeded

in forming a critical sense based on reason. The decline of the Roman Empire in the 14th and15th

century transformed European society into a mercantile social order. The new society provided

space for interaction with other populations and generated multicultural aspects in social life.

The influence of traditional aspects of literature and culture and the fall of the Roman Catholic

Church energized the movements and succeeded in reaching the masses.

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In the beginning, the Italian renaissance, based on the doctrine of humanism, was

concerned with human beings and the ideas of freedom, liberty, and equality. It was meant to

reform the social order according to the inalienable human. Humanists reprinted the works of

ancient authors and translated a large number of books from Greek and Latin. They created

commentaries on them. They acquired knowledge in all kinds of schools of thought like

stoicism, skepticism, and Platonism. This contained features that stood apart from theological

philosophy that considered humans sinners and circumscribed social acts according to the

church’s interests.

“Humanism had several significant features. First, it took human nature in all of its

various manifestations and achievements as its subject. Second, it stressed the unity and

compatibility of the truth found in all philosophical and theological schools and systems, a

doctrine known as syncretism. Third, it emphasized the dignity of human beings. Finally,

humanism looked forward to a rebirth of a lost human spirit and wisdom.” (Duignan Brian.

2010.Modern Philosophy: From 1500 CE to the Present. New York. Britannica Educational

Publishing.p.23)

The humanists were filled with a thirst for love for the wisdom of the past. They were

engrossed towards the divine rendered visible in humans; they believed that self-control, rather

than s e l f -sacrifice, is the way of life. Renaissance humanists opposed metaphysical

aspects like a god and other superstitious powers. “The great humanists of the Renaissance

- including Dante, Petrarch, Erasmus, and More- were theists and usually devout Christians.

But they took the classics to heart and incorporated human-centered or secular ideas into their

views.”

Renaissance humanism began with, 14th-century Italian writer and scholar, Petrarch,

who was interested in rhetorical and stylistic qualities of a range of neglected classical Roman

writers, Particularly Cicero, Livy, and Virgil. For him, the existing education system lost the

spirits of rational thoughts. He instigates the Greeks genre of thought and inspired men to go to

nature in free inquiry for data of one's premises; to a t tempt and to appraise things of life

through critical faculty that had been ignored the time being. He considered humanism as:

“The unification of the philosophical quest for individual truth, and the practical ability to

function effectively in society through the use of rhetoric and persuasion.” He opposed

scholastic philosophy, its attitudes, and emphasis on classical ideals of humanity.

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The traditional Greek philosophers like Epicureans and Sophists are the first among

humanist philosophers. They also influenced Aristotle and Socrates. The Italian intellectual

Leonardo Bruni translated many Greek books into Italian. The Greek philosophical norms

discharged diverging thoughts of humanity into Italian culture that was structured by Christian

intellectuals for centuries. “He is chiefly famous in the revival of letters as a translator from

the Greek. He possessed a critical mind, and he gave a great impulse to textual criticism and

philosophy.”

The renaissance depicted the rise of humans, which recaptured human reason, passion,

and values. It broke the authority of the church. The thinkers claimed their freedom of thought

and expression. The social sphere formulated an era of the all-round development of man, where

sovereign human-occupied the place of God almighty. It generated intellectual revolutions in

European culture. “Humanism is taken to include the conscious revival as well as the

reinterpretation of classical Graeco-Roman history, literature and values and, in so far as

political thinking is concerned, their effective application to the political problems of the

contemporary world.”

Humanism founded humanity that signified mankind’s basic attributes such as

understanding, benevolence, mercy, judgment, love, and honor, etc. “Humanist ideas not only

pertain to interesting issues in Western thought; they relate to fundamental issues of human life.

They are ideas that deal with the big questions of existence, the kinds of questions that are the

focus of the discipline of philosophy.” Humanism encompassed the acts of society and turned

ideal for the people to recapture their immobilized self-consciousness. “Humanism called for

the comprehensive reform of culture, the transfiguration of what humanists termed the passive

and ignorant society of the dark ages into a new order that would reflect and encourage the

grandest human potentialities.”

The renaissance contained characters that stayed apart from the ongoing thoughts in

European philosophy. Humanism focused on classical works and thoughts of Cicero and Livy.

The humanists replaced traditional assumptions with realism from the academic dogma. They

engaged in social self-inquiry and succeeded in revealing the illogicality of dominant

philosophy. “The realism of the humanists was finally brought to break on the Roman Catholic

Church, which they called into question not as a theological structure but as a political

institution”. Humanists conducted critical scrutiny of precise details in their judgments. They

ruled out traditional concepts of individual categorization of the freedom of the individual to

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choose the place in the social sphere. The Italian Renaissance philosopher Pico Della Mirandola

emphasized that “humanity had been assigned no fixed character or limit by God but instead

was free to seek its level and create its future.”13

Like humans, humanism also contained a variety of characteristics. Different

intellectuals constituted a variety of interpretations. Some considered it a way of life. For the

American Humanist Association:

“Humanism is a way of living, thinking, and acting that allows every individual to

actualize his or her highest aspirations and successfully achieves a happy and fulfilling life.

Humanists take responsibility for their morals and their own lives, and for the lives of their

communities and the world in which we live. Humanists emphasize reason and scientific inquiry,

individual freedom and responsibility, human values and compassion, and the need for tolerance

and cooperation. Humanists reject supernatural, authoritarian, and anti-democratic beliefs and

doctrines.” (Vaughn Lewis, Dacey Austin, Fales Evan.2003. The Case for Humanism: An

Introduction. Maryland. Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group.p.7)

The Italian humanism relented classical modes of thought to recapture the observations

and acquire the perfect knowledge of nature and man. It granted opportunities for individuals

to think and act with his/her accord. Italian humanists enjoyed the freedom of thought and relied

on new ideals of virtue. They succeeded in generating a moral and religious influence.

Humanism crossed borders and spread all over Western Europe. It added a variety of assets

according to the socio-culture of the nation. The classes of humanisms arise in the outskirts of

Italian spheres, known as northern humanism which included the humanist’s acts of English,

French, German, and Spanish humanism which kept traditional and conventional ideas as key

features; “It was rooted in r e l i g i on . It labored first of all to eradicate the prevalent

ecclesiastical abuses; and then, later on, it turned its attention to the dogmas of the Church

and sought to reconstruct what it deemed to be a degenerate Christianity. It, therefore, led

to heresy, to ecclesiastical r e v o l u t i o n .” The renaissance and its ideals formulated a

helpful atmosphere of freedom in all spheres of life. It chained out human self-

consciousness from religious dogmas and generated a rationalist knowledge in social

spheres.

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Enlightenment

The Enlightenment was a time when thinkers expressed their thoughts in writing. They

created a social sphere to read out the thoughts of others. It generated principles of the genuine

human spirit, which focused on his inherent rights or human rights. The notion of human rights

influenced people and intellectuals in a large sense and rejuvenated the original spirit in the

social order. Human rights were considered the essence of mankind inherent in human beings

regardless of factors such as ethnicity, nationality, and sex which ensured worthy life to every

individual. It is a derivative philosophical idea of natural rights. Some philosophers recognized

no difference between the two and regarded both as labels for the same thing, while others

choose to keep the terms separate and eliminated associations with some features traditionally

associated with natural rights. James Nickel defines human rights as “Basic moral guarantees

that people in all countries and cultures allegedly contain. Calling these guarantees ‘rights’

suggests that they attach to particular individuals who can invoke them, that they are of high

priority, and that compliance with them is mandatory rather than discretionary.” Human rights

shaped communal virtuous means and delivered a collective structure to geopolitical order. It

delivered an appropriate condition for all individuals to lead a minimally good life. The moral

justification of human rights is thought to precede considerations of strict national sovereignty.

The Enlightenment philosophers like Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), John Locke (1632-1704),

Montesquieu (1689-1755), Voltaire (1694-1766), and Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-88)

advocated humanist philosophy and thoughts.

The most famous proponent of dualism in modern philosophy is René Descartes the

doctrine for which Descartes is most famous is ‘Cartesian dualism’. He advocates a view of the

mind whereby the mind is a different substance from the body, under having different essential

or defining properties, and the mind can exist in its own right, independently of the body, and

have an identity that decides it from other minds. Descartes made an important role differently;

he redrew the boundary between mind or soul and body and between the corporeal and the

incorporeal. In brief, before Descartes, the incorporeal mind was usually recognized with the

intellect. But Descartes articulated our modern conception of the mind as including far more:

sense, perception, imagination, feeling, emotion. The first answer to the mind-body problem

proposed in the modern period was that of Descartes, who apprehended that minds are distinct

from bodies and physical objects of any kind. According to Cartesian dualism, minds are purely

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spiritual and radically non-spatial, having neither size nor location. In this opinion, a normal

living human being or person is a duality, a mind, and a body paired. The mind is a non-spatial

entity that exists independently of the body, Despite the radical distinctness of minds from

bodies, they interact causally: bodily happenings cause sensations and experiences and thoughts

in one’s mind; conversely, mental activity leads to action and speech, causing the physical

motion of limbs or lips. Cartesian dualism has a strong intuitive appeal and the philosophy of

mind has been dominated by Descartes’s ‘first-person’ or from the-inside perspective.

René Descartes

The method of philosophy reformed radically as an effect of Descartes’ arguments. He

deferred to no intellectual authority other than the ‘natural light’ of reason. This set him apart

from both from the scholastic traditions to which we have referred and also from the worldly

preoccupations of the Renaissance humanists. For Descartes, the results of all previous

assumptions had to be set aside or suspended, until clear and certain principles could be

established against which to measure them. Descartes could not find these basic principles in

the works that he had read. He, therefore, embarked on a program of radical intellectual reform,

which resulted in a change of philosophical perspective. In his Principles, Descartes defined

philosophy as “the study of wisdom” or “the perfect knowledge of all one can know.” Thus his

metaphysics, in essence, consisted of three principles: skepticism, mathematicism, and

subjectivism.

Immanuel Kant

Kant constituted a philosophy of idealism that freed human beings from theological

absolutism. His philosophy contained notions of rights and freedom that stood apart from

traditional thoughts. For him, these were inherent ones. He said that every human being must

form his principles through inherent self-reason. For Kant, the concept of freedom is purely

rational. He categorized it into positive and negative according to moral accountability. In that

sense, freedom of the individual is structured according to the moral constituted through the act

of reason or rationality, “on this concept of freedom, which is positive, are based unconditional

practical laws, which are called moral.” His idea of natural rights contained the characteristics

of the human relation to one other. His concept of right is stated as “Right is, therefore, the sum

of the conditions under which the choice of one can be united with the choice of another under

a universal law of freedom.” The rights contained a constituent of valid, a priori, which is

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Understandable through reason, who cannot understand the suitability are coerced to obedient

to the law. for him, an action will be right only when it satisfying norms such as lawfulness,

universality, formality, and necessity “any action is right if it can coexist with everyone’s

freedom per a universal law, or if on its maxim the freedom of choice of each can coexist with

everyone’s freedom following universal law.”

Kant provided means for justifying human rights as the basis for self-determination,

grounded within the authority of human reason. Kant’s moral philosophy begins with an attempt

to correctly identify those principles of reasoning that can be applied equally to all rational

people, irrespective of their specific desires or partial interests. In this way, Kant attaches a

condition of universality to the correct identification of moral principles. For Kant, doing the

right thing is thus not determined by acting in pursuit of one’s interests or desires, but acting

following a maxim which all rational individuals are bound to accept. Kant terms this the

categorical imperative, which contains the quality of universality. So all moral statements

contain a generality in its nature, the moral codes also advocate people to consider others not as

a means but as an end. His notion of end in itself strengthens ideals of equality. He advocates

people to act freely or autonomously with morality “act only on that maxim through which you

can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.” The categorical imperative is

self-imposed by morally autonomous and formally equal rational persons, which provides the

basis for determining the scope and form of those laws which are morally autonomous and

equally rational to the society.

Through categorical imperative, Kant restricts individual freedom into a common

structure and sustained adequate freedom to the individual. He advocates individual rights for

the property. He considered the right to possess private property as apriori one and dealt it as

the necessary right of the individual: “all humans are originally in a possession of the land that

conforms with the right, that is, they have a right to be wherever nature or chance has placed

them.” He emphasized the importance of reason and restricted the pure implementation of

juridical regulation in the social sphere. He contended that full-pledged juridical will harms the

human rights of property and practice of reason.

Kant also emphasizes the unique idea of the social transformation of mankind into civil

society. He describes it as an act of transformation from the nature of the state to the civil state.

It is an act juridically necessary, which will occur in society through practical reason, where the

individual relinquishes the wild freedom to lawful social order through the original contract. He

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describes it as: “In accordance with the original contract, everyone within a people gives up his

external freedom to take it up again immediately as a member of a commonwealth that is, of a

people considered as a state.” He considered it a practical necessity of reason which will be

implemented in the social sphere without discrimination where freedom and equality endure in

an intact single form. The Kantian thoughts strengthened social movements and people to

accomplish social acts of freedom and dignity in daily life.

Karl Marx

Marx’s philosophical views can be understood in terms of a series of central concepts:

freedom, alienation, and critique; historical materialism as a dialectical theory; the creation of

value and the problem of exploitation; and communism and the nature of a free society a fully

free individual was autonomous, and this essential rational understanding of and control over

one’s actions. Marx hired Hegel’s method of dialectic to create an internal critique of the theory

and practice of capitalism, screening that, under assumptions found in such earlier theorists as

Adam Smith, this system must undergo increasingly severe crises, resulting in the eventual

seizure of control of the increasingly centralized means of production from the comparatively

small class of capitalist proprietors by the previously impoverished non-owners /the proletariat

in the attention of a thenceforth classless society. Historical materialism is the theory Marx

produced to explain the nature and sources of human alienation, oppression, and suffering and

the possibility of attaining emancipation.

Marx’s early writings, most never published during his lifetime, emphasize social ethics

and ontology. In them, he characterizes his place as a “humanism “and a “naturalism.” In the

Theses on Feuerbach, he illustrates a middle path between Hegel’s idealist account of the nature

of history as the self-unfolding of spirit which Marx regards as the ahistorical, mechanistic, and

passive materialist philosophy of Feuerbach; Marx suggests a conception of history as forged

by human activity, or praxis, within determinate material circumstances that differ by time and

place. In later Marxism, this general position is often labeled dialectical materialism

The initial point of historical materialism is the claim that the central project of human

history is the production and reproduction of material life. Humans exist within nature as beings

of wants that can only be satisfied through interaction with nature, that is, through labor. The

human productive action contains three essentials: raw materials from nature, technology, and

human labor. Marx mentioned the first two factors, the natural resources, and technology, as the

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means of production. Collective, the three elements deliver the creative power or, as it is more

often called, the forces of production. In society two groups of people can be designated: those

who dominate the relations of production and have power over the conditions of labor and the

product and those who lack control. This division is the basis of Marx’s theory of class and the

integrally antagonistic class relations of the dominant ruling class and the subordinate worker's

class. The relations of production in terms of which they are organized form an economic

structure that Marx calls a mode of production.

According to historical materialism, the economic or class relations of a society for the

basic institution of that society. The other principal institutions, including the political, legal,

religious, and cultural, constitute what Marx calls the superstructure of society and justify and

reinforce economic relations. The superstructural institutions that incline to exist at any given

point are those that help to stabilize the base, the level of development of the forces of production

determines and explains the nature of the existing relations of production, so the existing

relations of production determine and explain the nature of the superstructural institutions.

For him, the ruling ideas of an age are the ideas of the ruling class, and they assist the

interests of that class. Morality and religion are part of the ideological superstructure, according

to Marx. ideology generates a false consciousness. Insofar as the members of the subordinate

class admit the ideology of their society, they are misled about the nature of their actions, their

society, and the role they play in creating it. In this way, ideological mystification is a key aspect

in the creation of the experience of alienation and the successive loss of freedom. Alienated

conditions of existence, conditions that involve the domination of people by the reality they have

produced but do not understand, are built into the nature of class society. In all class societies,

the ruling class dominates and exploits the labor of the subordinate class. Such exploitation is

fairly evident in slave societies and feudalism. Capitalism, however, presents a far more complex

case.

Marx’s theory of capitalist exploitation is founded on the key division between labor and

labor power. He prolonged the theory by giving labor power as a commodity that received a

price, in this case, called the wage, in the same way as other commodities. It is significant to

note here that human beings can produce under most circumstances more than they need to

survive; they can produce a surplus. According to Marx’s analysis, the wage is determined by

the value of what is necessary to keep the worker alive and able to work from day to day. The

wage does not reflect the value of what the worker can produce, which includes both what is

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necessary and the surplus. He keeps the surplus, and it is this surplus that forms the basis of

profit. the worker in the form of a wage, however, only the necessary value. His macroeconomic

theory tried to show how capitalism would, with increasing frequency, fall into various crises as

the capitalists competing within the essentially anarchistic market struggled to maintain their

profit.

Part of the superstructure of a society consists of what Marx terms the realm of

consciousness; that is, the principal ideas and values in a society. As with other features of the

superstructure, these ideas and values are explained in terms of their role in stabilizing class

relations and the base. When such views and values are produced and propagated by

professionals like academics, religious authorities, cultural critics, Marx mentions to them as the

ideology of society. As Marx famously states: the ruling ideas of an age are the ideas of the

ruling class, and they serve the interests of that class. Morality and religion are part of the

ideological superstructure.

Ideological principles are not necessarily false, while typically they are. But even when

not false, they serve to limit or mislead understanding—for instance, by signifying that a certain

condition is natural and not socially created. Thus, ideology creates false consciousness. Insofar

as the members of the subordinate class admit the ideology of their society, they are misled

about the nature of their actions, their society, and the role they play in creating it. In this way,

ideological mystification is a major factor in the creation of the experience of alienation and the

subsequent loss of freedom. Alienated conditions of existence, conditions that involve the

domination of people by the reality they have produced but do not understand, are built into the

nature of class society. most sustained work was to unmask this ideological appearance and

expose how and why the proletarian was exploited in a way at least as bad, and perhaps worse,

than was the slave or villain.

It asserts, quite firmly, that literature and other forms of ideology are not autonomous

or self-contained - they can be understood as part of the total process of man’s social being. - is

that the relation of literature to the economic structure is one of passive dependence, or that

ideology is simply a 'reflection' of the economic foundations. On the contrary, the essential

feature of society is that conflict is central to it, and literature, art, religion, etc. are among the

weapons that men fabricate to 'fight it out'.

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As the proletariat struggled against worsening misery, their political consciousness

would be awakened by the ideologues of their class perspective, The two-fold movements, of

the capitalists struggling to keep the system going and the workers struggling with increased

understanding to overcome it, would eventually culminate in a revolution, ending capitalism and

instituting a socialist society.

II Postmodernism

We can describe postmodernism as a philosophical movement would be as a form of

scepticism - scepticism about authority, conventional wisdom, cultural and political norms, etc.

and that puts it into a long-running tradition in Western thought that stretches back to classical

Greek philosophy. postmodernism, a term that Daniel Bell used in connection with

postindustrial society in the 1950s, that architects attracted to in the 1960s, and that art and

literary historians invoked in the 1970s. had still not been invoked in connection with

philosophy. The word appeared during the late 1960sto refer to the novels of John Barth and the

dance of Mcree Cunningham. Its first widespread currency came from Charles Jencks in his

book. The Language of Post-Modem Architecture (1975). Jencks gives a very specific and yet

suggestive application to the notion of postmodernism. Postmodernism for Jencks arises when

modernism is joined to new technologies, producing a pluralistic admixture of styles and with it

a different sense of space:

Post-Modern space is historically specific, rooted in conventions., unlimited or

ambiguous in zoning, and 'irrational' or transforrnattonalm its relation of parts to whole. The

boundaries are often left unclear, the space extended infinitely without apparent edge...

Postmodern thought means the demand for differences—differences in theories,

differences in formulations, differences in identities. Postmodern thought rejects hierarchies and

genealogies, continuities and progress, resolutions, and overcoming. Philosophers like Lyotard

and Foucault see the modern as the period from the Enlightenment and Romanticism to the

present, characterized primarily by belief in “grand narratives” of historical advancement,

whether capitalist, Marxist, or positivist, with “man” as the glorious hero of the story.

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Incredulity Narrative Towards Meta-Narrative

The writings of Lyotard were largely concerned with the role of narrative in human

culture, and particularly how that role has changed as we have left modernity and entered a

"postindustrial" or postmodern condition.in The Postmodern Condition, A Report on Knowledge

Lyotard famously defines the postmodern as 'incredulity towards metanarratives, The two

metanarratives that Lyotard sees as having been most important in the past are (1) History as

progressing towards social enlightenment and emancipation, and (2) knowledge as progressing

towards totalisation.

Modernity is defined as the age of metanarratives legitimation, and postmodernity as

the age in which metanarratives have become bankrupt. Through his theory of the end of

metanarratives, Lyotard develops his version of what tends to be a consensus among theorists

of the postmodern - postmodernity as an age of fragmentation and pluralism. Lyotard's appeal

that we should reject the 'grand narratives' (that is, universal theories) of Western culture because

they have now lost all their reliability appears to sum up the ethos of postmodernism, with its

disdain for authority in all its many guises. There is no longer any point engaging in debate with,

for example, Marxism, the argument goes; rather we should ignore it as insignificance to our

lives.

In the postmodern condition, 'the grand narrative has lost its credibility ... regardless of

whether it is a speculative narrative or a narrative of emancipation'. Instead of totalizing and

unifying narratives at the centre of culture - making a centre for culture- any former 'hierarchy

of learning' has now given way' to an immanent and, as it were, "flat" network of areas of inquiry

...'. Lyotard claims that scientific knowledge never legitimated itself because it always relied on

what he terms 'narrative knowledge' to support it. Narrative knowledge is customary, embedded

in culture, enacted in forms of social competence as 'lived experience' which typically is

represented as narration He calls into question the powers of reason, asserts the importance of

no rational forces such as sensations and emotions, and rejects humanism and the traditional

philosophical notion of the human being as the central subject of knowledge.

The Postmodern Condition is a study of the status of knowledge in computerized

societies. It is Lyotard's view that certain technical and technological advancements have taken

place in the modern world have a radical effect on the status of knowledge in the world's most

advanced countries. Lyotard identifies the problem with which he is dealing the variable in the

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status of knowledge as one of legitimation. For Lyotard, this is a question of both knowledge

and power. For Lyotard, in the computer age, the question of knowledge is now more than ever

a question of government. With vast amounts of knowledge stored digitally in databases, who

decides what knowledge is worth storing and who has access to these databases. Lyotard points

a suspicious finger at multinational corporations.

The method Lyotard chooses to use in his investigations is that of language games,

Lyotard's choice of language games are primarily political in motivation, and relates to the close

links between knowledge and power Lyotard argues that even as the status of knowledge has

changed in postmodernity, so has the nature of the social bond, particularly as it is evident in

society's institutions of knowledge. Lyotard presents a postmodern methodological

representation of society as composed of multifarious and fragmented language games; Lyotard

firstly distinguishes between two types of knowledge - "narrative" knowledge and “scientific”

knowledge. Narrative knowledge is the kind of knowledge prevalent in "primitive" or

“traditional' societies and is based on storytelling, sometimes in the form of ritual, music, and

dance. Narrative knowledge has no recourse to legitimation - its legitimation is immediate within

the narrative itself, in scientific knowledge, however, the question of legitimation always arises.

Lyotard says that one of the most striking features of scientific knowledge is that it includes only

denotative statements.

In postmodernity, knowledge has become primarily a saleable commodity.

Knowledge is produced to be sold and is consumed to fuel a new production. According to

Lyotard knowledge in postmodernity has largely lost its truth-value, or rather, the production of

knowledge is no longer an aspiration to produce truth.

Lyotard’s philosophy frequently calls into question the powers of reason, rejecting many

of the claims that have been made about it in the history of philosophy. Lyotard develops

critiques of the subject and humanism. For Lyotard the subject as traditionally understood in

philosophy acts as a central point for the organization of knowledge, eliminating differences and

disorderly elements. Lyotard seeks to dethrone the subject from this organizational role, which

in effect means decentering it as a philosophical category. He sees the subject not as primary,

foundational, and central, but as one element among others which should be examined by

thought. Lyotard considers that little narratives are the most inventive way of disseminating, and

creating, knowledge and that they help to break down the monopoly traditionally exercised by

grand narratives. Lyotard's objective is to thrash the authority wielded by grand narrative, which

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he takes to be repressive of individual creativity. 'We no longer have recourse to the grand

narratives,' he declares; that is, we can no longer rely on them to guide our action, either at the

public or private level.

Globalization

A wide range of social theorists is arguing that today's world is organized by

globalization and its ideology, which is strengthening the dominance of the world capitalist

economic system, supplanting the primacy of the nation-state by transnational corporations and

organizations, and eroding local cultures and traditions through a global culture.

Globalization is a multi-dimensional process of economic, political, cultural, and

ideological change. The term has come into common usage since the 1980s, technological

advances that have made it easier and quicker to complete international transactions both trade

and financial flows. Like postmodernism, one cannot define globalization as such. Many see it

as a primarily economic phenomenon, involving the increasing interaction, or integration, of

national economic systems through the growth in international trade, investment, and capital

flows.

Economic "globalization" is a historical process; it’s the result of human innovation and

technological progress. It refers to the increasing integration of economies around the world,

particularly through trade and financial flows. The term sometimes also refers to the movement

of labor and knowledge across international borders. Markets promote efficiency through

competition and the division of labor—the specialization that allows people and economies to

focus on what they do best. It means that people can access more capital flows, technology,

cheaper imports, and larger export markets.

Adam Smith, saw globalization positively, whereas Karl Marx and Friedrich Engel’s had

more critical perceptions. Smith thus envisaged the emergence of a world market system as one

of the most important features of modernity that would eventually benefit the entire world. In

"The Communist Manifesto," Marx and Engel’s followed Smith in seeing the importance of the

globalization of the capitalist market but differed in their evaluation of it. Globalization also

involves the dissemination of new technologies that have a tremendous impact on the economy,

polity, society, culture, and everyday life.

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Commodification

For Fredric Jameson postmodernism is submissively complicit with the consumerism it

depicts. The result, in the postmodern condition, is a loss of a sense of reality and so the

emergence of ‘a new kind of smoothness, of deathlessness, a new kind of superficiality in the

most literal sense'. This effacement of the real through the 'commodification of objects', aesthetic

and otherwise, has ramifications across the entire culture: not only in painting, 'architecture, and

the perceived association of space but also in the film, novels, poetry, and indeed in theory itself.

Loss of historical reality in what has now become 'a field of stylistic and broad heterogeneity

without a norm' leads to the replacement of parody by imitation. Whereas formerly parody

imitated another style with the firm intention of mocking, satirizing, or at least making a

judgment on it, today imitation reproduces formal features for the pleasure of naming them, in

a practice of 'blank irony’. Loss of the real, in Jameson's view, leads to a reduction of the

traditional autonomy of the self, since with postmodernism the individual subject is no longer

able to define itself reciprocally against a reliable, exterior object.

The totalization of consumerism and commodification corresponding to multinational

diversification, eroding any awareness of reality in favour of pastiche and copies of copies,

produced 'the disappearance of the individual subject'. What now seems to be lost is any critical

distance between culture and the social establishment which would allow collective action for

change; the fear is that 'we are submerged' as it becomes ever more difficult to represent our

present to ourselves.

Real and Representation

Jean Baudrillard's work is yet another significant expression of postmodern philosophy.

He too came to be very critical of Marxism and structuralism, ultimately discarding the notion

that there were hidden structures behind all phenomena which it was the analyst's task to identify

and explain. For Baudrillard, the postmodern world was a world of simulacra, where we could

no longer differentiate between reality and simulation. Simulacra represented nothing but

themselves: there was no other reality to which they referred. Baudrillard defines Hyperreality

as the stimulation of something which never really existed. Baudrillard against Foucault,

Kantian rationalism, and liberal humanism sought to understand the world neither in terms of

the subject's desire to coherently know the world, nor in terms of the interpolation of power

within subjectivity, but in terms of the object, and its power to seduce.

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Baudrillard developed theories on the notions of seduction, simulation, and Hyperreality.

These notions share the common principle that signification, and therefore meaning, is self-

referential. Hyperreality is closely related to the concept of the simulacrum: a copy or image

without reference to an original. In postmodernism, Hyperreality is the result of the

technological mediation of experience, where what passes for reality is a network of images and

signs without an external referent, such that what is represented is representation itself.

Baudrillard presents Hyperreality as the terminal stage of simulation, where a sign or image has

no relation to any reality whatsoever but is “its own pure simulacrum”. The real, he says, has

become an operational effect of symbolic processes, just as images are technologically generated

and coded before we perceive them.

Baudrillard conceives postmodernism as a boundless circulation of signs from which

any sense of reality has fallen away, a world in which there are simulations and only simulation

signs. Could be replaced for reality in the sense that they were representations of it. in

postmodern order, signs have no connection to the real, signs certainly are more real than reality

in what Baudrillard termed the 'hyperreal'. For Baudrillard, the postmodern world was a world

of simulacra, where we could no longer differentiate between reality and simulation. Simulacra

represented nothing but themselves: there was no other reality to which they referred. In

consequence, Baudrillard could claim that Disneyland and television now constituted America’s

reality.

In postmodern philosophy the term Hyperreality characterizes the inability of

consciousness to distinguish reality from fantasy, Hyperreality is a means of characterizing the

way consciousness defines what is actually "real" in a world where a multitude of media can

radically shape and filter the original event being depicted. Some famous theorists of

Hyperreality include Jean Baudrillard, Albert Borgmann, Daniel Boorstin, and Umberto Eco.

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Reference;

Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, Tran. Alan Bass

Jameson; Post-modernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Duke University Press

Lenin and Philosophy, Monthly Review, New York

Lyotard; The Post-Modern Condition, Manchester

Terence Hawkers; Semiotics and Structuralism, Methuen.

Terence Hawkers; Cultural Materialism; Theory and Practice; Blackwell Publication