An article and a blog rant caught my eye this morning. The article is a bit tongue in cheek but is a fascinanting look at postmodernism. (see link here) Postmodernism is described in the article (Postmodernism is dead).
In the beginning artists, philosophers, linguists, writers and musicians were bound up in a movement of great force that sought to break with the past, and which did so with great energy. A new and radical permissiveness was the result. Postmodernism was a high-energy revolt, an attack, a strategy for destruction. It was a set of critical and rhetorical practices that sought to destabilise the modernist touchstones of identity, historical progress and epistemic certainty.
Above all, it was a way of thinking and making that sought to strip privilege from any one ethos and to deny the consensus of taste. Like all the big ideas, it was an artistic tendency that grew to take on social and political significance. As Ihab Hassan, the Egyptian-American philosopher, has said, there moved through this (our) period “a vast will to un-making, affecting the body politic, the body cognitive, the erotic body, the individual psyche, the entire realm of discourse in the west.”
In such a world, truth is no longer absolute but relative. The blog writer calls modern day politics "fact-free" and asserts that
In a postmodern world in which all all discourses are equally valid regardless of their truth-value, the claims of the ruling class are not exposed for the lies and imbecilities they are. Postmodernism as it actually exists - that is, with a supine media - thus helps to serve a reactionary function. (see link here)
Believe what you will and who you will. And don't worry overmuch about truth or validity. Which leaves us economists back at the impossibility theorem. If we can't have a democratic social welfare function, and truth does not exist, then how does a nation choose its position on a production possibility frontier?
In my interpretation postmodernism means interpreting something old and giving it a new modern spin that can be contextualized in current society. This 'spin' could even lend to making the new idea somewhat contradictory to how the original idea was once perceived. Generally for this to be done that thing, be it art or economic policy, things need to be simplified. It is hard to narrow down how exactly our nation must choose to proceed, however looking at the possibilities that are most efficient and well as what has worked in the past may lead to a new postmodern solution.
ReplyDeleteIn a positive sense, the answer to this question is very simple- we fail, since tastes are badly transmitted through the democratic process, and many in the body politic exhibit the principal agent problem, politicians will do roughly whatever they want, they pick our location on the PPF, but not necessarily with our preferences involved.
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