Postmodern Deconstruction Research Articles

La sociohermenéutica como programa de investigación en sociología

In this article we have tried to argue that socio-hermeneutics has been a tradition in itself in sociological knowledge since the inception of classical interpretative sociology. Its tradition is totally different from current postmodernist deconstruction and its ideas about the total power of text. Bourdieu’s theories about linguistic practices such as social power practices are subsequently critically reviewed. Finally, the logic of the sociological discourse analysis (comprehensive and interpretative) is defined as a specific type of work which is separate from both quantitative analysis of content and structural text analysis of linguistic origins.

Polityka i czas, czyli zderzenie epok: tradycyjności, moderności i postmoderności

A number of authors have described the clash of civilizations as the main form of conflict in today’s world. The author argues that a far more fundamental clash is taking place: the clash of epochs. It constitutes a hitherto little-noticed ground in which various forms of conflict can take place. It contributes to the weakening of Western civilization. The clash of epochs, as manifested in the conflict between tradition, modernity and postmodernity, has impelled the West to a point where it is torn apart internally and increasingly incapable of withstanding emerging challenges. To resist its postmodern deconstruction, the West must rediscover itself as a cultural entity. It must return to the classical tradition that for hundreds of years contributed to its strength. It must review it anew in today’s complex context of postmodernity and globalism.

<i>Gravity’s Rainbow</i>: A Portrait of the Artist as Engineer

The generic debate surrounding <em>Gravity’s Rainbow </em>can be divided into two groups. On the one hand, there are critics such as Palmeri, Weisenburger (<em>Fables</em>), Seidel, Morgan, and Kharpertian, who have argued that Pynchon’s novel fits in with the tradition of the Menippean satire. Drawing attention to the subtle and intricate ways in which Pynchon’s third novel parodies and aggrandizes the discourse of the power elites, these critics see <em>Gravity’s Rainbow </em>as the latest exponent of a long and particularly illuminating tradition of the literary gadfly, which runs from Petronius, over François Rabelais and Jonathan Swift, to Pynchon. The defining characteristic of <em>Gravity’s Rainbow </em>for these critics, is, as Kharpertian puts it, “the critical exposure of official cultural institutions and demystification of power [as well as] the focus on the ugly, the painful and the ridiculous” (108-9). A second group of scholars, while hardly oblivious to <em>Gravity’s Rainbow’s </em>satirical dimension, defines Pynchon’s generic affiliation instead in terms of the encyclopedic narrative. In the wake of Edward Mendelson’s influential essay “Gravity’s Encyclopedia,” these critics, including LeClair and Hite, have pointed out that what is central to Pynchon’s novel is the broadly conceived vision of the world that it offers. Like the original eighteenth-century <em>Encyclopédie </em>of Diderot and D’Alembert, Pynchon’s novel bespeaks a summative gesture that tries to envelop all the variety and richness of the world between the covers of one book, complete with mathematical formulas, foreign alphabets, and explanatory illustrations. As Mendelson himself put it, “[e]ncyclopedic narratives attempt to render the full range of knowledge and beliefs of a national culture, while identifying the ideological perspectives from which that culture shapes and interprets its knowledge” (30). Whether or not this encyclopedic vision mirrors the summations fostered by the works of Dante and Shakespeare, as Mendelson originally argued, or whether <em>Gravity’s Rainbow </em>should instead be read as a postmodern deconstruction of the very idea of summation and order, remains a topic of critical debate. Yet, what is clear to both groups, as well as to those who locate <em>Gravity’s Rainbow </em>in the satirical tradition of Gargantua and Pantagruel, is that, when trying to define Pynchon’s novel generically, size matters.

Toward a reconstruction of pedagogical reason

The legitimacy of pedagogy, as scientific and philosophical discipline about education, has been questioned after the arrival of post-modernity. Postmodernity has suspected about traditional rationality and values of educational activity. but, at which point are going the pedagogues to defend the rationality of their proposals? Is still education the sphere of reason’s development in the students? Decisive questions like these are demanding the reconstruction of pedagogical reason, reconstruction which has to use the rubbles of postmodern deconstruction, but otherwise cannot reject democratic modernity and a great amount of its axiological legacy.

The Narratology of Lay Ethics

The five narratives identified by the DEEPEN-project are interpreted in terms of the ancient story of desire, evil, and the sacred, and the modern narratives of alienation and exploitation. The first three narratives of lay ethics do not take stock of what has radically changed in the modern world under the triple and joint evolution of science, religion, and philosophy. The modern narratives, in turn, are in serious need of a post-modern deconstruction. Both critiques express the limits of humanism. They do not imply, however, that these narratives should not be taken seriously. In particular, the enduring presence of three ancient narratives in laypeople’s symbolic thought is highly significant in terms of the role that the logic of the sacred keeps playing in the workings of modern societies. Lay people’s implicit understanding of how modern technology tends towards catastrophe and apocalypse provides the strongest argument for taking these narratives seriously.

Social Constructionism as a Semiotical Paradigm: An Analytical Approach of Social Creativity

Today's global society, from the year 2000, is a paradigmatic shift period, dominated by a theoretical cleavage from theory of the postmodern paradigm, methodological individualism and programmatic deconstruction by a transmodern paradigm, centered on integration and border spiritualization both political and cultural, scientific, etc., with the dominant model based on constucţionist overall interpretation. Complementary to postmodern deconstruction, construcţionism kept its antirealist nature, centering on the multiplicity of experiences and interpretations in a plural world or even a plurality of worlds, and also the correlation with the meaning of words and interpretive will. It emerges through social or cultural mediation of interpretation. There is no single sense that corresponds to a single truth but a multiplicity of senses, reflection of the entire in various levels of fractal existence. Constructionist epistemology takes into account the development of scientific, social and cultural paradigms, as a negotiation of interpretations offered by data provided from empirical reality or in other areas such as theoretical knowledge, models, etc.

Biography and Social History under the Challenge of Commissional Research. The Case of Carl Diem

Commissional research implies chances, temptations and problems. This becomes obvious in the case of Carl Diem who was a central figure of sport organization and ideology from the Wilhelminian era up to the Federal Republic. After having been recognized as an authority of sport through long time, his name became controversial during the 1990s because of his involvement in Nazi policy of sport and war. The German Sport Federation launched a research project, resulting among others in a collected volume. It presents eye-opening detail studies on the history of body culture and of sportive mass rituals, but the bridging between social history and biography, which is discussed in a spirit of “postmodern deconstruction”, fails. The approach lacks a critical theory of fascist sport as unified singular, which was the project of both the Nazi state and Carl Diem − and continued in post-1945 Olympism.

Destruction of the Image and the Worship of Transiency

Taking as its starting point Jung’s statement, “Everything of which we are conscious is an image, and that image is psyche... [which] is a world in which the ego is contained,” the fundamentalist’s collective consciousness of the One Truth is compared with the postmodern imagination of a multitude of perspectives (CW 13, ¶75). The identity of the fundamentalist is shaped by archetypal identification, whereby the shadow is projected onto the Evil Other, against whom acts of evil may then be “justifiably” perpetrated. Postmodern deconstruction of identity, on the other hand, tends toward a condition of transiency and “as-if.” Images and ideas become detached from “ground and reality.” The image becomes its own simulacrum, detached from the images of interiority. Finally, features of transiency and the transient personality are compared to and contrasted with the survivor syndrome.

Closure through Mock-Disclosure in Bret Easton Ellis’s &lt;em&gt;Lunar Park&lt;/em&gt;

Closure through Mock-Disclosure in Bret Easton Ellis’s &lt;em&gt;Lunar Park&lt;/em&gt;

Innovation and Multimedia in the Poetry of cummings and Mayakovsky

In her article Innovation and Multimedia in the Poetry of cummings and Svetlana Nikitina discusses how e.e. cummings and Vladimir Mayakovsky foreshadowed the digital revolution of today in their multimedia experiments in poetry. Although they spoke different languages and lived in different societies, the two modernist poets display similarities in their modernist aesthetics. Both are artists as well as poets who blur the line between the two forms of art. Their synesthesia inoculates them against postmodern disintegration of meaning or form. Although cummings is a staunch individualist, and Mayakovsky the tribune of the collective, they both rebel against traditional poetic forms and invent a new language of multisensory and multimedia processing. Both make orthography and page design sculpt the spontaneous experience they want to convey. By showing Mayakovsky and cummings as consummate makers of words, images, experiences, and new social orders who treated their verbal material as a physical medium, Nikitina supports the claim that the poets' visual sensibility and multimedia orientation prevented them from sliding into postmodern deconstruction and created the center that could hold. Svetlana Nikitina, Innovation and Multimedia in the Poetry of cummings and page 2 of 10 CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 11.4 (2009):

Integrating Psychology within the Globalizing World: A Requiem to the Post-Modernist Experiment with Wissenschaft

Since the new beginning in 2007 of Integrative Psychological & Behavioral Science we have brought out to the open both the reasons why the ever-widening research enterprise in psychology has largely failed to produce general knowledge, and to point to promising new directions in the field. The post-modernist turn in psychology is now over, and it is an interesting task to return to creating a universal science of psychology that is context-sensitive, and culture-inclusive. The latter goal entails a renewed focus upon qualitative analyses of time-based processes, close attention to the phenomena under study, and systematic (single-system-based-usually labeled idiographic) focus in empirical investigations. Through these three pathways centrality of human experiencing of culturally constructed worlds is restored as the core of psychological science. Universal principles are evident in each and every single case. Transcending post-modernist deconstruction of science happens through active international participation and a renewed focus on creating general theories. Contemporary psychology is global in ways that no longer can any country's socio-political world view dominate the field. Such international equality of contributions grants innovation of the core of the discipline, and safeguards it against assuming any single cultural myth-story as the axiomatic basis for the discipline.

Antropologie van de moderne geschiedwetenschap?

J. Tollebeek, Fredericq en zonen. Een antropologie van de moderne geschiedwetenschap The Anthropology of Modern Historiography?Jo Tollebeek’s book about the Belgian historian Paul Fredericq is meant to be an example of ‘the anthropology of modern professional history’. The author believes that this anthropology goes beyond older genres. The traditional historiography focused too heavily on the intellectual content of history writing, whereas the sociology of knowledge only looked at the infrastructure of history as a profession. The post-modern deconstruction of the political role of history writing has become rather reductionistic. The anthropological gaze has to combine all of these points of view and then try to embed them in background information. Does Tollebeek succeed in doing this? We certainly get a rich picture of content, social context and professional practice. The thrills of archival research, the routine of day-to-day academic life, and the (management of) emotional ties within the community of scholars in particular, all come alive. It comes at a price, though. The precision and specificity of micro-history make comparisons within larger frameworks and developments difficult. This macro level makes more selection and simplification inevitable.

Editor’s Note

Editor’s Note Jeffrey R. Di Leo Over the course of the past twenty-five years, digital gaming has become a dominant and ubiquitous form of recreation. Most children are drawn to video games at about the age of seven—and many might prefer a new Nintendo DS or Sony PS3 to a new bike or a dog. Instead of embarking on cycling adventures around their neighborhoods, they would rather go on adventures with Indiana Jones on their DS. Even “real” dogs aren’t necessary when you have stuffed animals that “come alive online in Webkinz World.” But digital gaming is not “just for kids.” A recent survey by the Pew Research Center (12/7/08) reports that four out of five young adults play games, and that over one-half of all American adults play video games. In this issue, my co-editor, David Savat from The University of Western Australia, and I sought contributions that engage the various intersections of the idea and practice of digital gaming and critical theory. We thought that this topic would yield a rich set of theoretical interventions, and aimed to include work that engaged the politics and philosophy of gaming. We were not seeking the critical theory of any particular school or thinker, and the critical theories of Theodor W. Adorno, Marshall McLuhan, and Michel Foucault, and others can be found in the contributions. However, what stands out is the predominance of reference to the thought of Gilles Deleuze and Fèlix Guattari in these essays. Over half of the contributors engage significantly Deleuze and Guattari’s work in their gaming investigations (which might not be surprising to longtime readers of this journal who will recall that some time ago (1998) we ran an entire issue (6.1–2) dedicated to the work of Deleuze and Guattari). We’ll leave it up to you though to decide whether Deleuze and Guattari provide a particularly significant point of entry into theoretical considerations of gaming. [End Page 5] Following this issue on Gaming and Theory, two issues are in preparation. The first is entitled Emotions (Vol. 18, Nos. 1–2 (2010)). Welcome are contributions that engage the role of the emotions in contemporary critical theory and practice. Are there particular emotions critics or theorists feel? Are criticism and sympathy mutually exclusive? What is the place of emotions in posthumanism? Are we returning to an aesthetics of feelings? Is this a new aesthetics? To what extent are feelings and sentiments back in the focus of critical theory? What does the exploration of emotional representation look like after the global turn in theory? What does it mean to feel for the other in the age of transnationalism? What is the place of emotion after the postmodern deconstruction of the sentimental subject? Submission deadline: closed. The second issue is entitled Hunger (Vol. 19, No. 1 (2011)). Welcome are contributions that theoretically engage the referential and figural use of hunger. What is hunger? Is it a sign of our humanity or animality? Who is the paradigmatic subject of hunger? Is its meaning transhistorical and transcultural? Or is it imbued in ideology and thus irremediably discursive and historically contingent? Whose hunger is acknowledged and whose is ignored? Is hunger an ontological or ontic concern? Is it a metaphysical desire (the hunger for recognition) or a biological need (the hunger for food)? Is hunger a global problem to be eradicated, or a perpetual reminder of our embodiment and exposure to others? Can an inquiry into hunger ever be disentangled from biopolitics? Can we speak of both an aesthetics of hunger and a hunger for aesthetics? Is intellectual hunger a desire for disciplinarity, a taste for theory? Submission deadline: 31 December 2010. I would like to thank the contributors to this issue for sharing their reflections on digital gaming and critical theory with us, and David Savat for his editorial work on this issue. Special thanks also to David Felts for his extraordinary assistance in the production of this issue; to Katie Moody for production support; to Brenna Killebrew for keeping the books straight; to Sandra Wood for administrative assistance; and to UHV, for providing financial support for our editorial office...

Complex systems in Renaissance and Postmodern texts: Aesthetic and epistemological consequences

The question of complex systems is relatively new for critics today. Analyzing complex systems in Renaissance texts shows that the Christian kabbalistical concept of harmonia mundi led to an aesthetical development, reflecting the worldview of harmonious parallel worlds. Failure to perceive the esoteric text uniting apparently contradicting themes has often led Renaissance scholars to elaborate a theory of the instability of atmospheres characterizing the English Baroque. This article gives an example of a complex system in Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra revealing that the Christian kabbalistical Hercules unifies contradicting metaphors and intertexts of the play, and reintegrates this work in a form of semantic stability more in harmony with the aesthetics of its time. In the case of postmodern literature, contradictory intertexts appear as a device to deconstruct all values and logic previously established. With the study of a text structured by the optical questions around the refraction of light, this paper shows that in the case of Nabokov, the unifying system of apparently contradicting semantic systems is the underlying logic of scientific theory. In Nabokov's text, failing to perceive the fundamental intertext of scientific debate leads one to assimilate Nabokov's writing to a form of postmodern deconstruction. Both cases studied tend to show a continuity of a form of aesthetics through different epistemological eras.

Lectures (post-)modernes de la littérature régionale en Flandre

The present article analyses the vicissitudes of the genre of the regional or rural novel in Flanders during the past century. Notwithstanding the enormous success of the genre during the first decennia of the 20th century (with Stijn Streuvels, Felix Timmermans and Ernest Claes as its major representatives), the regional novel lost its literary prestige after the Second World War in favour of innovative modernist prose. From 1970 onwards, however, regional fiction has revived within a postmodern perspective, in the form of so-called ‘genealogical novels’. This complex poetical history is subsequently highlighted by the analysis of two novels by Hugo Claus : on the one hand the modernist, critical rewriting of regional fiction in De Metsiers (1950 ; The Duck Hunt, 1955), on the other hand the postmodern deconstruction of the genre in the recent novel De geruchten (1996 ; The Rumours)

Differing Perspectives on Mau Mau

DIFFERING PERSPECTIVES ON MAU MAU Caroline Elkins. Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya. New York: Henry Holt, 2005. xvi + 475 pp. Maps. Photographs. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $27.50. Cloth. David Anderson. Histories of the Hanged: The Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire. New York: W.W. Norton, 2005. ix + 406 pp. Maps. Tables. Photographs. Notes. Glossary. Chronology. Index. $29.95. Cloth. David Lovatt Smith. Kenya, the Kikuyu and Mau Mau. Eastbourne: Anthony Rowe Ltd., 2005. 358 pp. Map. Photographs. Notes. Appendixes. Index. £18.00. Paper. Historians have long viewed Mau Mau as both a nationalist movement and a civil war between those who joined its ranks and the Kikuyu who refused to join for a variety of reasons. These included adherence to Christianity, employment in the colonial administration, revulsion with the content of oathing ceremonies, and rejection of insensate killing and violence. The preponderance of evidence suggests that some one hundred whites, eighteen hundred Africans, and twelve thousand Mau Man adherents died during the slightly more than seven years of the Emergency, which lasted from October 21, 1952, until January 12, 1960. Some eighty thousand people (mostly Kikuyu), or 1 percent of Kenya's then eight million population, were held in detention for varying periods of time, and 1,090 men were hanged for various crimes related to Mau Man activities. The importance of Man Mau to the decolonization process in Kenya and its unique and complex characteristics ensure that it will continue to be examined by historians, political scientists, and sociologists. Each generation brings to endeavors of this kind the intellectual influences that have shaped its critical thinking and attitudes toward the certitude of received knowledge. It is thus not only history that can be reexplored in the future, but also how scholars of past generations have interpreted the forces that shaped it. Under the influence of the New Left, some historians of the 1970s made efforts to bring into their historical narratives those who had previously been excluded, including women and minorities. As Robert J. Norrell has observed, Influenced by the counterculuiral influences of the '60s, those practicing this 'new history' often dismissed old history as biased in favor of white, male in the west, and tended to celebrate those forgotten people without subjecting them to the same tough-minded criticism that they were applying to the old elites (Chronicle of Higher Education, March 11, 2005). In the 1980s, New Left countercultural scholars found a compatible intellectual harbor in postmodern thought, and especially in Jacques Derrida's grand theory of deconstruction. The net effect of this was replacement of carefully reasoned objectivity with strident explicitness and a tendency toward intellectual exhibitionism. Taken to its extreme, deconstruction is forged in a hermeneutics of suspicion and antifoundationalism and denies the objectivity of any reality. Instead, relativism replaces objectivity and is driven by perspectives heavily textured by gender, class, ethnicity, or race. In the view of some postmodern thinkers, the elusive nature of objective truth gives license to a deconstruction of received knowledge, varying interpretations of historical evidence, and the need to create revisionist narratives framed by antifoundationalism. The influence of these powerful intellectual forces is evident in two of the books under review here: Caroline Elkins's Imperial Reckoning and David Anderson's Histories of the Hanged. For the benefit of American audiences, the former has been purged of its hyperbolic British title: Britain's Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya. One does not have to read many pages of this volume to detect that there is an stronger influence at work here than that of postmodern deconstruction, although in order to understand it fully one must examine ex parte evidence nowhere divulged by the author in her book. …

Is there a European Identity?

The concept of identity – beyond its primary meaning of individual identity which is psychologically so important even in times of post-modern deconstruction of the individual – signals a sense of belonging. The question is: to whom or to what do we feel to belong, want to belong? To social, cultural, economical, political groups or communities? To our families, friends, kindred spirits? To a certain gender? To a belief, ideology? To specific memories and experiences? To certain topics and activities? To a borough, a city, a region, a nation, to Europe ? To…?

Human Nature and Modernist Ethics

I argue that the modernist synthesis of the higher self and dehumanized art prepares the way for the Age of Biotech. The high modernists went "out of nature" to recreate man and morality. The critical heirs of modernism, including postmodernists, inherit this ambitious effort — the modernist moral project. The roads of modernism run from the City of Art in Yeats's Byzantium poems, through the dehumanized aesthetic of Woolf and others, to the postmodernist deconstruction of character, as well as to the democratic vistas of John Dewey and Freeman Dyson.

From Cultural Scripting to Autonomy: Influences on Lesbian Identity

This article links postmodern deconstruction of gender categories to the cultural and intrapsychic processes involved in gender script development. Hargaden and Sills's (2001) theory of the development of self is used to discuss the intrapsychic process of lesbian identity development. Poststructuralist theorist Theresa de Lauretis (1994) is discussed in relation to the claiming of body-ego that the lesbian may be expressing. Identity issues experienced by lesbians are discussed along with possible transference issues that may arise when the therapist is perceived as lesbian. Finally, therapists are invited to review their approach to gender and sexual identity development and presentation.

The mismeasure of islands: implications for biogeographical theory and the conservation of nature

AbstractThe focus on place rather than space provides geography with a powerful raison d’être. As in human geography, the functional role of place is integral to the understanding of evolution, persistence and extinction of biotic taxa. This paper re‐examines concepts and biogeographical evidence from a geographical rather than ecological or evolutionary perspective. Functional areography provides convincing arguments for a postmodern deconstruction of major principles of the dynamic Equilibrium Theory of Island Biogeography (ETIB). Endemic oceanic island taxa are functionally insular as a result of long‐term island stability, confinement, isolation, and protection from continental invasion and disturbance. Most continental taxa persist in different, more complex and open spatial systems; their geographical place is therefore fundamentally distinct from the functional insularity of oceanic island taxa. This creates an insular‐continental polarity in biogeography that is currently not reflected in conservation theory. The focus on the biogeographical place leads to the development of the eigenplace concept defined as the functional spatial complex of existence. The application of still popular ETIB concepts in conservation biology is discouraged. The author calls for the integration of functional areography into modern conservation science.