Postmodernism and the Deconstruction of Modernism

Abstract

Postmodernism has an ancient history. This fact is not postmodernism's only paradox, although it is the best known and certainly the richest in philosophical consequences. Since JeanFrancois Lyotard's 1979 pamphlet, La Condition Postmoderne, which initiated the philosophical and European debate on postmodernism, philosophical postmodernism has been characterized (at least by its promoters) as the consequence of a dissolution of modernist projects, rather than as a new age's allergic, polemic reaction to modernism. If prephilosophical postmodernism, in architecture or literature, is passably ancient this was the name given in the 1930s to the Spanish literary period from 1905 to 1914 philosophical postmodernism undoubtedly originated much earlier, from the modernity of the Enlightenment and idealism, with their desire to break with the past and go beyond their inner contradictions. In short, the birth of modernism sanctioned the birth of postmodernism, just as Plato's dialectic marked the beginning of sophistry or its differentiation from and ostracism by philosophy. Postmodernism, however, as an explicitly debated and thematized philosophical problem is not old. It originated between 1979, the year of Lyotard's pamphlet, and 1980, the year of Jurgen Habermas's conference on modernism. Before these dates, postmodernism was not a philosophical topos but belonged to the tradition of disciplines, such as literature or architecture. By entering the realm of philosophy, the modernism/postmodernism alternative abandoned its localized character and acquired universal significance (although in certain cases, postmodernism calls into question philosophy's claim to universality another paradox that will be discussed). As a philosophical theme, postmodernism or better, the modernism/postmodernism alternative brings together many earlier philosophical themes, such as the Enlightenment, idealism, the technology-metaphysics relationship and the concepts of progress and secularization. This history of themes explains how such a recent philosophical theme could appear so ancient, even at the moment it asserted itself.