Week 10 Postmodern Flashcards
What are some of the characteristics of postmodernity?
- Global civilization - pluralistic
- Change in how we believe
- Same world can contain multiple worldviews
- World of multiple realities
- Many truths
- Human ‘truth’ is not an objective representation of reality
- Age of exposure to otherness
- Focus on language as deeply involved in social construction of reality and ideas can not be understood apart from the language systems that produced them.
- Preference for local and culturally-specific
- Self-awareness and language-awareness, seeing how we have constructed our reality and truths
What is postmodernity?
Follows the enlightenment and the twentieth century focus that followed it - emphasis on meta-narrative.
Postmodernity is a time of fragments of stories, diverse and contradictory - not able to believe in metanarrative.
What is a meta-narrative?
A metanarrative is a story of mythic proportions, a story big enough and meaningful enough to pull together philosophy and research and politics and art, relate them to one another, and - above all - give them a unifying sense of direction.
What are 3 types of societies that Anderson references?
Premodern, modern and postmodern.
What was a premodern society?
-Small, homogenous societies, familiarity and security, social control
-Most people lived within the context of a single coherent cultural package.
-Premodern societies weren’t necessarily simple or primitive, but people in them were relatively free from culture shock.
-Had an experience of universality but no concept of it.
Didn’t have to worry a lot about how to deal with pluralism (they could go through their lives without encountering other people with entirely different worldviews).
What is the difference between postmodernity and postmodernism?
Postmodernity - the postmodern condition or time
Postmodernism - various schools and movements the time has produced
What was a modern society?
Larger, heterogeneous (diverse), mainstream vs marginal groups
Who is Kenneth Gergen?
Psychologist who focusses on postmodern experience
What are the four corners of the postmodern world?
- Self concept: made identity is constructed
- Moral and ethical discourse: move from “found” morality of a single cultural/religious heritage to “made” morality forged out of dialogue and choice
- Art and culture: no style dominates, parody and playfulness
- Globalisation: rapid information exchange, unstable boundaries,
How is self-concept viewed in postmodernity?
- Self is dead
- We have multiple selves
- Instead of forming our ideas of who we are on the basis of the “found” identity fixed by social role or tradition, we begin to understand ourselves in terms of the “made” identity that is constructed (and frequently reconstructed) out of many cultural sources.
What does Kenneth Gergen say is the major psychological problem of our time?
‘Multiphrenia’ - the postmodern individual is a member of many communities and networks, a participant in many discourses, an audience to messages from everybody and everywhere - messages that present conflicting ideals and norms and images of the world. G
What is psychology today characterised by according to Gergen?
Psychology today is a by-product of cultural modernism. Psychology is historically frozen.
What three ingredients of the modernist worldview are pivotal to practices of psychology today?
- Individual knowledge
- The objective world (rather than socially constructed)
- Language as a carrier of truth (instead of result of cultural practices)
What does Gergen say about the objective world and how it relates to psychology today?
- Assumes mental processes are available for objective study
- Mental processes are related in a causal manner to environmental inputs on the one hand and behavioural consequences on the other
- Experimental method is superior to all others in capturing these causal relationships
What does Gergen say about language as a carrier of truth and how it relates to psychology today?
Scientists treat language (including numerical language) as the chief means by which we inform our colleagues and our culture of the results of our observations and truths. The postemodernist says that language is not the child of the mind but of cultural process.
