The Post-Postmodern Turn: Challenging the Application of Kuhn's Model

Jesús Bolaño Quintero

doi:10.17561/grove.28.5588

Abstract

The point of departure for this article is the much-debated death of postmodernism, heralded by influential experts on the subject such as Linda Hutcheon or Ihab Hassan at the beginning of the new millennium. Although the academic community as a whole has not agreed with this fact, there was an intense debate during the first years of the twenty-first century that was evidence of a change of attitude towards this cultural phase. With this in mind, the aim of this study is to provide a theoretical framework for the change in order to understand its nature. Analysing the theories developed by Thomas S. Kuhn on paradigm shifts in the field of science and applying them to the context of critical theory at the beginning of the millennium serves to challenge the very idea of postmodernism as a paradigm in the terms developed in Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

Highlights

In 1989, Francis Fukuyama declared the end of history
Even though at the turn of the millennium the death of postmodernism was not generally agreed upon, the twenty-first century brought about an intense debate on the subject that evidenced that something was happening
In “Postmodern Afterthoughts” (2002), Linda Hutcheon declared: “[f]or decades diagnosticians have been pronouncing on its health, if not its demise, with some of the major players in the debate weighing in on the negative side: for people like Terry Eagleton and Christopher Norris, postmodernism is certainly finished, even passé; for them it’s a failure, an illusion

Summary

28 Jesús Bolaño Quintero

Kuhn sobre cambios de paradigma en el campo de la ciencia y su aplicación al contexto de la teoría crítica desarrollada al respecto al comienzo del milenio se pondrá en tela de juicio la misma idea del postmodernismo como paradigma en los términos desarrollados por Kuhn en La estructura de las revoluciones científicas. Cambio de paradigma, postmodernismo, Jürgen Habermas, proyecto inacabado de la modernidad, post-postmodernism

Introduction

Kuhn’s Model

The Unfinished Project of Modernity

Conclusion