Chapter 14 Flashcards
Define Postmodernism (post structuralism):
describes a broad movement that developed in the mid to late 20th century across philosophy, the arts, architecture, and criticism which marked a departure from modernism. While encompassing a broad range of ideas, postmodernism is typically defined by an attitude of skepticism, irony or distrust toward grand narratives, moral universalism, absolute truth, and objective reality. Instead, claims to knowledge and truth are products of social, historical or political discourses or interpretations and are therefore socially constructed.
Define Project of Modernity (Habermas):
Consists of the effort to develop objective science, universal morality and law, and autonomous art according to their inner logic. The enlightenment philosophers wanted to utilize this accumulation of specialized culture for the enrichment of everyday life–that is to say for the rational organization of everyday social life. Embraced the following aspects of knowledge:
- Generalization: The natural and social human worlds operate according to a set of underlying universal principles or laws. Seeks to discover laws through application and reason.
- Science: scientific knowledge is indispensable for understanding the world and is superior to all other forms of understanding because it is based on observation and reason.
- Objectivity: an objective reality exists independent of any observer, and all scientists are capable of producing comparable knowledge of that reality, regardless of their individual characteristics or position in society.
- Progress: the application of scientific knowledge to human problems will result in human progress, a betterment of the human condition.
Define Delicense
Science delicenses the claims to knowledge of all other groups, notably women, minorities, colonized people, and others lacking access to power. The signature philosophical stance of postmodernism is thus a profound distrust about the claims of science to produce reliable knowledge and to bring about a betterment of the human condition.
Define Metanarrative
In critical theory and in postmodernism is a narrative about narratives of historical meaning, experience, or knowledge, which offers a society legitimation through the anticipated completion of a master idea. An overarching account or interpretation of events and circumstances that provides a pattern or structure for people’s beliefs and gives meaning to their experiences.
Describe Time/Space Compression
The perception that the pace of social change is steadily increasing while geographical distances are shrinking.
Describe Fordism
This mode of regulation limited class conflict and helped overcome the periodic crises of underconsumption in capitalism. Fordist mass consumption involved steadily rising wages, allowing workers to purchase goods that could previously only be owned by the wealthy.
Describe Infotainment
Broadcast material that is intended both to entertain and to inform.
Who is Jurgen Habermas?
A philosopher that contends that a unified set of underlying assumptions about knowledge characterized western thought from about 1600. This set of assumptions is what he calls “The project of Modernity”. This project was developed during the enlightenment period with the birth of the sciences at the beginning of the 17th century, and informed virtually all scientific and philosophical inquiry from then until the mid 1970’s.
Who is David Harvey?
A geographer and anthropologist that attempts to chart the differences between the “Enlightenment–modernist” project and postmodernity. He does so through a materialist lens, examining how global economic changes since the 1970’s have revolutionized our view of the world and rendered many Enlightenment assumptions seemingly obsolete. For Harvey, the abandonment of Pruitt-Igoe and other modernist policy schemes based on scientific principles symbolized the hubris and ultimate failure of the Project of Modernity. Argues that postmodernism is a broad cultural shift in assumptions by which we seek to understand the world.
Who is James Scott?
A social scientist that notes that modernist planning schemes have almost always been justified to an often skeptical public by invoking Enlightenment notions of progress. Such schemes are usually motivated by the state’s attempt to extend its power over its citizens by deepening their dependence. He also addressed the question of peasant rebellion. Simply put, they know that is at stake when they overtly challenge authority, and they prefer to remain alive. However, they will carry out harder to detect tactics such as sabotage, arson, dissembling etc= weapons of the weak of everyday peasant resistance.
Modernist perspective on what constitutes “knowledge.”
Embraced the following aspects of knowledge:
Generalization: The natural and social human worlds operate according to a set of underlying universal principles or laws. Seeks to discover laws through application and reason.
Science: scientific knowledge is indispensable for understanding the world and is superior to all other forms of understanding because it is based on observation and reason.
Objectivity: an objective reality exists independent of any observer, and all scientists are capable of producing comparable knowledge of that reality, regardless of their individual characteristics or position in society.
Progress: the application of scientific knowledge to human problems will result in human progress, a betterment of the human condition.
-Complete move towards hermeneutics
“Weapons of the weak” (Scott) – what are they and how are they deployed?
Harder to detect tactics such as sabotage, theft, foot-dragging, dissembling, arson, “feigned ignorance,” and other actions that employers and the state find infuriatingly difficult to eradicate.
What trends in late-twentieth century capitalism lead to postmodern sensibilities? (301-303).
- The perception that the pace of social change is steadily increasing while geographical distances are shrinking, a condition that Harvey refers to as “time-space” compression.
- A perception that national boundaries are increasingly fluid and even meaningless
- Increased ethnic diversity of most states. Postmodernists emphasize the increased awareness of the “other,” meaning anyone different from us in culture, language, appearance, and experience.
- Various economic trends associated with postmodernism such as growing stratification and disappearing middle class.
“Flexible accumulation” – what it is and what the consequences of it are.
During the mid 1970’s U.S. firms found it necessary to reduce inventories, reduce workforces through automation and sub-contracting, and employ resources and labor more flexibly. Fordism was one of the first victims of this restructuring. Therefore, “Flexible accumulation” sought to bolster capitalist profits by lowering the production costs associated with manufacturing and by expanding market goods.
How it became possible to get goods from the cheapest location of manufacture to global markets.
Shipping containers and jets.
