Recently, the term “postmodernism” has been used to designate the specificity of the worldview attitudes of the newest, “postmodern” culture as a whole, associated primarily with the polyvariant perception of the world, as well as with the accentuated problem of self-identification of culture. Widely used as an interdisciplinary term, it still does not have an unambiguous definition, and functions simultaneously as an external research definition and as an internal constitutive principle, realizing itself in various spheres of human activity – art, politics, economics, philosophy, literature, psychology, science, and so on. More broadly, in the words of U. Eco, postmodern culture offers a special language capable of describing its own achievements.
In connection with the implementation of this task, the theorists of philosophical postmodernism are considered to be neo- (or post-) structuralist philosophers: M. Foucault (late period), J. Derrida, R. Barthes (late period), J. Lacan (late period), F. Guattari, J. Deleuze and others – those who proposed a new, in contrast to structuralism, non-binary strategy for studying the text. Postmodernism is often understood as the movement of deconstructivism, in the narrow sense of this term – the practice of analyzing postmodernist artistic texts (developed primarily in the USA by the Yale School), more broadly – the practice of analyzing any phenomena as texts, using a methodology based on the method of deconstruction proposed by Derrida as a method of restoring the meaning of a text by discovering other meanings, other texts associated with it. From the point of view of postmodernism, only such an approach clearly demonstrates – in deconstructivist practice – the infinite nature of thinking, its processual, dynamic character: philosophy finds an adequate tool for studying philosophical thinking itself.
“Postmodernism” etymologically consolidates not only the posteriori attitude of the newest culture and philosophy to the culture and philosophy of modernism, but also reflection, mostly critical, in relation to the previous mode of existence in culture and philosophy. Postmodernism assumes a fundamentally new view of the world that does not accept statics and unambiguous definitions. This idea is transformed into a general philosophical position on the basis of the theory of the newest, primarily neo-avant-garde art and culture. It is believed that the first to use the term “postmodernism” was – as a derogatory characteristic of a person of decadence
R. Panwitz in his work “The Crisis of European Culture” (1917). In its modern meaning as a designation of the specificity of the culture of the period after the Second World War – it appears in the work of C. Jencks “The Language of Postmodern Architecture” (1975) to define the omnivorousness of the architectural style that appeared in the late 60s – early 70s. Then the term is extended to fine art as a legitimation of the experiment with color, form and even genre, to literature as a statement of the emergence of the “new novel” and its influence on the style of artistic text. But the main thing turns out to be a fundamentally new approach to the subject of culture – there is no pre-given, “ready” viewer or reader, just as there is no unchanging, “cult” author. The main categories of cultural theory are blurred, the very concept of culture turns out to be extremely general, not considering it necessary to highlight either a conceptual or axiological core. Society, culture, in the words of J. Derrida, are “decentered”. What was at the center of Art Nouveau — the subjective — is also understood as changeable and relative. The subject “names” itself in the process of communication, perception, and expression. Self-identification of the subject — what was a condition for the existence and understanding of culture in traditional concepts — turns out to be the original motive in the postmodernist perspective. And just as there has been no single language since the time of Babylon (one of the favorite images of the postmodern philosopher J. Derrida), there is no single way of self-expression: as R. Barthes wrote, “the number of languages is equal to the number of desires.” Therefore, there is not and should not be one method, style.
Just as there cannot be a single correct version of interpretation, there should not be a single method of this interpretation on which uniform, and therefore hierarchical, social relations would be built. Postmodernism tries to avoid the main danger of totalitarian thinking – political totalitarianism. It is no coincidence that the spread of the term “postmodernism” to philosophy is associated with the appearance of J. F. Lyotard’s work “The Postmodern Situation” (1979) and his definition of the main problem of modern philosophy as the problem of “philosophizing after Auschwitz”. Lyotard polemicizes with J. Habermas, who considered the crimes of the 20th century to be a consequence of the incorrect implementation of the Enlightenment project of building a single world and saw the task of culture in restoring the values of modernism. In the interpretation of J. F. Lyotard, Auschwitz is the result of the implementation of the modernist project, and the solution is a fundamental change in the perception of the world: the transition from the hierarchy established by the metadiscourse of “grand narrations” (here a literary term is used denoting the narrative level, i.e. a certain – in this case hierarchical – organization of the text and the speech activity fixed in it), to the acceptance of a plurality of independent and equal elements existing in the form of polymorphic and diversified language games.
The status of philosophy also changes: the postmodernist “paradigm” of philosophy paradoxically turns out to be the beginning of the destruction of the paradigmatic way of thinking. The central problem becomes the problem of understanding the text. Postmodernism studies the text, as is already customary in the philosophy of the 20th century, but not in the alternative aspect of the opposition of the objective to the subjective, the intention of the creator of the text to the position of the perceiver, but from the point of view of the natural unity of both.
The ideas of postmodern philosophy appear on the basis of self-reflection of structuralism and phenomenology: the central issue becomes the polysemy of those definitions that appear in constituted co-consciousness. One of those who most accurately in this sense summed up the philosophical searches of the first half of the twentieth century was the French existentialist phenomenologist
Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961). In his main works – “The Structure of Behavior” (1942), “Phenomenology of Perception” (1945), “Sense and Nonsense” (1948), “Adventures of Dialectics” (1955), “Signs” (1960), “The Visible and the Invisible” (1961) and others, based on phenomenological methodology, while criticizing the definition of pure consciousness, sympathizing with the Marxist analysis of historical reality, without accepting the economic explanation of history, M. Merleau-Ponty created his own version of the “philosophy of existence”, in the 1950s contrasting it with existentialism, which, according to Merleau-Ponty, retained a metaphysical, i.e. antithetical way of posing philosophical questions: either in the “idealistic” tradition, which considers any object as an object of consciousness; or in the “realistic” one, understanding consciousness as a product of reality. Merleau-Ponty tries to overcome the opposition of freedom and necessity, objective and subjective. It is no coincidence that Merleau-Ponty appeals to the works of M. Mauss and other ethnographers who discovered the relativity of those concepts and values of culture that we traditionally consider universal and absolute. The central problem becomes the perception and description of lived experience: Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy evolves from the analysis of perception to the analysis of vision and the idea of “flesh”, which removes the contradiction between subject and object, and restores, according to Merleau-Ponty, the ontological status of the perceived world. The intentional world is presented as already pre-reflexively present, and not constituted in the process of reflection. The subject, defined as “transcendence to the world”, is inscribed in a specific historical, cultural, and finally biological context, the meaning of which he can realize even for himself only through the clash of his experience with the experience of others. The world is understood as a “symbol” of interpenetration, an “interworld” that connects the Self and other people, human consciousness and nature. Merleau-Ponty’s social philosophy turns out to be, first of all, a philosophy of human intersubjective experience.
Particular importance is attached to the “living language existing in a linguistic community.” Like the body, it combines the objective and the subjective, being not only a fixed system of forms of expression, but also an “act of signification,” which Merleau-Ponty connects with a living creative speech act – a “floating signifier” discovered in primitive cultures by M. Mauss. The study of linguistic connections between people should clarify, according to Merleau-Ponty, the general law of symbolic relations within a single history. Merleau-Ponty proposes a new mood: “understanding without acceptance, freedom of conscience without defamation” in politics and “multiplicity of perspectives” in philosophy – which researchers have defined as “philosophy of ambiguity” or “philosophy of the reversibility of concepts.”
A unique and vivid realization of this covenant was the creative work of Georges Bataille (1897-1962), who in his works of art (a number of works of rather bold content were published under pseudonyms, for example, “The Blue of the Sky”, “The History of the Eye”, etc.), in literary criticism (the famous “Literature and Evil” was published in 1957), in socio-political studies (for example, “The Psychological Structure of Fascism”, 1933), in speeches on contemporary surrealist art (Bataille was one of the authors of the “Second Manifesto of Surrealism”) and philosophical works (primarily “Inner Experience”, 1940) turned to the problem of the boundaries of the permissible and the transition, going beyond these boundaries. Each time, a heated discussion unfolded around Bataille’s works, where M. Blanchot, M. Leiris, and once M. Heidegger were on his side, and J.-P. Sartre is on the contrary. Challenge, impulse – as opposed to regularity and certainty – this has traditionally been considered evil, however, from the point of view of J. Bataille, it is precisely the limits that are not strictly defined by either human culture or human psychology. Based on the ideas of Bergson, J. Bataille formulated the conclusion that the problem of transgression (the term was borrowed from Hegel – Bataille was one of the listeners of the interpretation of the “Phenomenology of Spirit” by A. Kozhev) is connected with the internal uncertainty, ambiguity and contradictory nature of boundaries. Culture defines boundaries, including in this definition the very possibility of violating these boundaries.
One of the first French philosophers to make the journey from structuralism to poststructuralism and, in fact, to spread the new mentality beyond France was Michel Foucault. His life became an example of crossing all the boundaries that characterize the too rapid liberation from prohibitions – he died of AIDS, which he contracted during sadomasochistic experiments in San Francisco (USA). From his very first works in the 1950s, M. Foucault explores various ways of human psychological self-expression – primarily the imaginary, dreams, etc. – as forms of experience always associated with “pronouncing” and “designating”. However, Foucault himself considered his first mature work to be “The History of Madness in Modern Times” (1961), in which he identifies a specific area of interest characteristic of almost all of his research – the history of the “mutation” of ideas. The meaning of each idea existing in the culture of a certain historical period turns out to be necessarily conditioned by the entire context of meanings functioning at the given moment, and its certainty is formed in the form of an opposition significant for this cultural period: from Foucault’s point of view, the opposition “madness – rationality” that formed by the 17th century is characteristic of the New Age.
The next work, “The Emergence of the Clinic: An Archaeology of the Medical Gaze” (1963), formulates the key concept of the first stage of Foucault’s philosophical evolution: “archaeology,” which involves studying an object from the point of view of its linguistic confirmation, its utterance, as an already existing and functioning cultural phenomenon. Foucault called his method “critical history,” since the focus is on the historical—mental and cultural—prerequisites, the conditions for the emergence of a particular idea. Foucault uses the word “discourse” (literally, reasoning) to denote the combination of these various ideas in a new semantic meaning, fixed in language. At first, Foucault uses this term to describe the method of consistently presenting the course of thought, characteristic of classical philosophy. Later, “discourse” will essentially cover all variants of linguistic practice, all types of human activity, expressed in language in one way or another. In his most famous work, Words and Things (1966), subtitled The Archaeology of Human Knowledge, Foucault examines historical changes in the episteme—the semantic core around which various spheres of knowledge are organized in a given period—subjecting the modern scientistic episteme to sharp criticism. The objects of various sciences are formed according to rules determined by a specific historical situation, and not directly by “things” or “words,” i.e., objects or the logic of knowledge. Discourse—a historically conditioned impersonal linguistic practice that forms concepts according to certain rules of combining discursive elements—combination, derivation, substitution, etc.—proves decisive. Foucault’s concepts of the main components of the episteme from the beginning of the 19th century—life, labor, and language—have a common archaeological basis. In the philosophy of language, according to Foucault, the central point, both in the concepts of Freud and the phenomenologists, and in the concepts of B. Russell and the structuralists, is the “consideration of the limit”, in one case the limit of interpretation, in the other the limit of the formalization of language.
“The Archaeology of Knowledge” (1969) is a study of “the main methods, boundaries, themes of the history of ideas.” According to Foucault, this is the first part of a large work, which was later summarized by him, in tune with the Nietzschean idea, as a “genealogical analysis” examining the historical forms of constituting truth, power, morality. The technique of reproducing power is the focus of attention in the work “Discipline and Punish” (1975). Relations of domination – submission are reproduced at the semantic level of binary semantic oppositions even on the periphery of power. Any communicative act is permeated with power relations, since communication, even in its most simplified form, as an act of direct transmission of information, presupposing at least two participants, is asymmetrical. Using the Hegelian dialectic of slave and master, Foucault shows the indestructibility of this asymmetry and the genetic connection of asymmetrical power relations with asymmetry in relation to information, in a broader sense, to knowledge. Foucault’s grandiose unfinished project, “The History of Sexuality” (six volumes were announced, four were prepared, three of which were published): “The Will to Knowledge” (1976), “The Use of Pleasure” and “The Sorrow of the Self” (1984), “Testimonies of the Flesh,” assumed a step-by-step examination of the formation of the Western European “desirous man.”
A distinctive postmodern manifesto, “What is Philosophy” (1991) by Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995) and Felix Guattari, is marked by a significant attention to the combination of philosophy and psychoanalysis.(1930-1992). It was the result of a joint analysis of modern society as “schizophrenic” – i.e. indefinite and multifactorial: “Capitalism and Schizophrenia” was published in two volumes: “Anti-Oedipus” (1972) and “A Thousand Surfaces” (1980). Human desire is presented as basic, productive. As an active force, desire unfolds as the will to power, being realized in the order establishing relations in society. Desire itself is contradictory and can appear as a reactive force, as a desire for oppression – false consciousness, consciousness of guilt. The key to understanding the modern state of capitalism is the idea of the bourgeois, who is a “slave to himself”, presented by A. Kozhev in “Introduction to Reading Hegel”. The problem of escaping from the clutches of social schedules and returning to the original “desirous” subjective reality is raised in the works of F. Guattari “Schizoanalysis and Transversality” (1972), “Molecular Revolution” (1977), “The Machinic Unconscious” (1978), “Schizoanalytic Cartographies” (1989). Then passivity can be overcome only through a kind of – internal – activation – of schizophrenia: “Schizophrenia as a process is the production of desire, but it appears as such in the end as the limit of social production, the conditions of which are determined by capitalism. It is our own illness. The end of history has no other meaning.” Repetition is at the center of Deleuze’s philosophical ideas. From his very first work, “Nietzsche and Philosophy” (1962), he emphasizes, referring to F. Nietzsche, that true philosophy is called upon to “introduce into philosophy the concepts of meaning and value” and for this it is necessary to discover the meaning behind ideas. Rationalistic philosophy is not capable of doing this, since it cannot find the difference between re-representations – repeating ideas, reducing everything to the difference between two abilities to represent – reason and feelings. J. Deleuze believes that he gives a truly critical and “naturalistic”, meaning the concepts of B. Spinoza and F. Nietzsche, the development of Kantianism. This is the subject of the central works of J. Deleuze – “Difference and Repetition” (1969), “The Logic of Sense” (1969) and – “Cinema 1, 2” (1983, 1985), “Criticism and Clinic” (1993). This unique philosophy of the will of the nomadic subject arises as a way of grasping the “dispersion in space of unambiguous and indivisible being.” Nomad – means changing, not tied to anything specific, having no basis, base, literally – nomadic. Repetition is productive in two senses – it gives existence and puts on display, presents what is. According to J. Deleuze, I. Kant in transcendental aesthetics pointed to sensuality as a diversity of the various a priori, directed at any possible experience – therefore, one should pay attention to all this “newly discovered in experience”. Thus, in the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari, the idea of a concept arises, which is dissonant with traditional conceptualization, and is associated contextually with percept and affect.They possess density as a certain internal consistency, meaningfulness, they are in constant reconstruction in connection with the emergence of other dimensions and other concepts. However, this is not a chaotic emergence – disappearance, but a permanent process of becoming. Referring to Bergson, he notes that difference is not different, different is given, but difference is that through which given is given. The essence of the development of Nietzschean idea of eternal return: this is not a cyclical affirmation of the same or different, but repetition and difference. From the point of view of J. Deleuze, Nietzsche wrote about the return of only the strong, affirming their difference, but at the same time, with their return, they deny differences, since they return different. Meaning is then constituted as surfaces (plans) intersecting with others, multiplying their dimensions. This interference is fundamentally non-localizable. This is the most important – additional, fourth – function of language. Meaning is grasped as a changeable, non-dichotomous (i.e., without internal opposition, so-called binary oppositions) tension, singularity. Each time we try to “deterritorialize,” and we will succeed only when we distinguish not individual details—concepts or images—but penetrate into a landscape that, as in Cezanne, presupposes the absence of the artist: “Philosophy needs a non-philosophy that understands it, it needs a non-philosophical understanding, just as art needs non-art, and science needs non-science… In the depths of all three “non-” lies a non-thinking thought, similar to Klee’s non-conceptual concept or Kandinsky’s inner silence” (9, 279).and to science – non-science… In the depths of all three “non-” lies a non-thinking thought, similar to Klee’s non-conceptual concept or Kandinsky’s inner silence” (9, 279).and to science – non-science… In the depths of all three “non-” lies a non-thinking thought, similar to Klee’s non-conceptual concept or Kandinsky’s inner silence” (9, 279).
Postmodernism thus turns the meaning of all traditional concepts upside down, first of all, the sign and the text. The sign itself is problematized as the distinction between the signifier and the signified. This is stated most methodologically in the philosophy of Jacques Derrida (1930-2004). Philosophy is understood primarily as a critical reading of texts; from this point of view, Derrida turns to the philosophy of Hegel, to phenomenology, to ancient philosophy, as well as to the modern philosophical and literary texts of Levinas, Artaud, Bataille, and others. Based on the “ambiguity” of de Saussure’s semiology, associated, in the words of R. Jakobson, with the “duplicity of the linguistic sign” — on the one hand, signans (the Saussurean signifier), on the other hand, signatum (the signified) — Derrida strives to show that the “semiological project” is simultaneously capable of confirming or shaking the traditional principles of philosophical thinking. Traditional metaphysics made the subject of philosophizing the present being, and the corresponding means of thinking was logos – a voiced, spoken thought, which by the very act of “speaking” recorded the present being. The traditional concept of the sign assumed a “transcendental signifier”, which at a certain moment does not function as a signifier, i.e., it turns out to be a concept independent of language. The result of such thinking was an antithetical philosophy, forced to base itself on the presumption of opposites in order to demonstrate the priority of one of the members of a binary opposition: presence or non-presence, thing or image, past or future, external or internal, etc. The previous metaphysics, as Derrida writes, “fused with Stoic and medieval theologies”, turned out to be “onto-theo-teleo-phallo-phono-logocentric” in content. Around the concept of the sign, in which, from Derrida’s point of view, for metaphysical reasons Saussure considered its connection with sound to be essential, a whole set of concepts arises that determine the specificity of classical philosophy. Among others, Derrida singles out the concept of communication, which essentially presupposes a transfer designed to convey from one subject to another the identity of a certain designated object, a certain meaning or a certain concept, formally allowing one to separate oneself from the process of this transfer and from the operation of signification. That is, subjects and objects or meanings that are not subject to transformation are assumed as the initial ones in metaphysics, and the operation of signification is thought of as a means of such a transparent transmission. In this system, the topic of translation, for example, turns out to be unambiguous and clear and does not present a problem. That is, meaning is not formed in the process of communication, but only reproduced. As a consequence of such an interpretation of the sign, according to Derrida, and contrary to the original position of linguistics, language turns out to be a code, and translation is a pure “transfer” of the signifieds by the “instrument” of the signifier. From the point of view of J. Derrida, the metaphysical, or “idealistic”,the idea of language and text is based on the pre-givenness and immutability of the meanings being transmitted, firstly, and of the abstract subjects of language, secondly, i.e. a certain “transcendental signifier” is assumed, a certain concept independent of language, which at some point does not function as a signifier. And the “speaking subjects,” thus, and what speakers in the past or future refer to, are formally separated from the process of meaning-presentation itself—the text.
In fact, no text is self-sufficient, but turns out to be “a text produced only in the order of transformation of some other text”, the signified functions as a signifier, and communication is a process of formation of meanings, polyvariant in its nature. Derrida approaches the problem of spoken/sounding language and written language in a new way: speech, as opposed to writing, records the meaning expressed here and now, while understanding the meaning lies in the search for many variants of meaning. What R. Barthes, for example, will be opposed as denotative meanings and connotative ones. But in this way the illusion of an instantaneous reference to the present, the present, the real, the designated – the signified is created. Derrida tries to rethink the concept of the sign primarily from the point of view of the inseparability of the signified from the signifier, their mutual reversibility, the processuality of the act of signification itself, expanding the understanding of the means of expressing meanings. This attempt is connected with a critical rethinking of the entire history of philosophy and overcoming the “natural” stereotypes of philosophical thinking: “it is necessary to transform these concepts within semiology, to unsettle them, to turn them against their own premises, to re-include them in other chains, to little by little modify the area of elaboration and thus to create new configurations” (6, 42). In fact, according to Derrida, the present is incomplete and always presupposes the absent. To clarify his position, he offers two key concepts, declared in the title of his 1967 work “Writing and Distinction”. The only thing that can be said about the present is the distinction in it between an “echo” of the past and a “sketch” of the future, the distinction between the possibility of presence and the irreparability of its loss. This theme is also developed by other works of J. Derrida of this period – “Of Grammatology” (1967), “Voice and Phenomenon” (1967). The new concept of writing, or “gram”, or “dispersion” (“distinction”), is called upon to discern the emergence of meanings in the rupture of metaphysical representations. Only “arch-writing” can think the absent, since it pays attention to the traces of speech and thought, to the meaning that emerges and functions in the rupture of metaphysical concepts and representations. As J. Derrida writes, it is a matter of “practical deconstruction of the philosophical opposition between philosophy and myth, between logos and myth”, and “it is impossible to realize this otherwise than through the paths of some other writing”.
The proposed method of textual analysis — deconstruction — sets as its task the reproduction of “traces” of other texts. Deconstruction presupposes the initial non-identity of the text to itself, its echoes with other texts, and therefore the task of the philosopher becomes the search for “traces of traces”, those supporting concepts that point to this non-identity. In this sense, any text turns out to be a potential quotation, that is, it is inscribed in a wider text — the context of meanings. The conclusion that Derrida comes to is that there is not and cannot be a unity of the language of concepts, there cannot be a single correct assessment or core of interpretation: the situation in language repeats the situation in society and culture — this can be designated as a process of decentration and dispersion. The goal of grammatology is to identify “grams”, metaphors original to a given text, which, incidentally, in turn can reveal “earlier” copies. Grammatology is called upon to discover writing that embodies the principle of distinction. This theme is developed and concretized by “Dispersion” (1972), “Spurs. The Styles of Nietzsche” (1978), “Psyche. The Invention of the Other” (1987), “Signed: Ponge” (1988), “On the Right to Philosophy” (1990), “Specters of Marx” (1993) and others. Based on the principle of textual analysis of J. Derrida, a number of literary, sociological, and political studies appear, which received the general name of deconstructivism. Deconstructivism is rather conditionally typologized: geographically, a distinction is made between American (see below), English (for example, E. Easthope), German (for example, W. Welsh) and French (first of all, these are the French poststructuralists J. Derrida, M. Foucault, J. Lacan and R. Barthes of the late period of their work, J. Kristeva and others) deconstructivism; thematically, mainly within the framework of American deconstructionism, they distinguish literary criticism (primarily the Yale school with P. de Maine, M. Bloom / D. Hartman, etc.), sociological, sometimes called “left” (T. Ilton, D. Brankman, etc.), hermeneutic (primarily W. Spainos), feminist (the limitations of such a division are obvious: in France its representatives are the “classics” of poststructuralism – J. Kristeva, L. Irigaray, E. Cixous, etc.; in the USA – J. Rose, A. Snitow, S. Bordo, J. Butler, etc.); and also in relation to Marxism: they distinguish non-Marxist (for example, D. H. Miller, D. Brankman, etc.) and neo-Marxist, or more precisely “realistically” (F. Jameson, M. Ryan, etc.), oriented currents.
Deconstructivism is based on the Derridaian understanding of multi-layeredness; the ambiguity of the text and the need for a special textual analysis – deconstruction, which reveals such supporting concepts and metaphors that indicate the non-self-identity of the text, its echo with other texts. Deconstruction, according to J. Derrida, should make obvious the internal contradictions of consciousness and lead to a new writing that embodies “distinction”. However, this principle, proposed by J. Lacan in 1964, as it is believed, under the influence of M. Heidegger, and developed into the method of J. Derrida in 1967, was concretized differently in various concepts, which provoked an incorrect understanding of deconstruction as destruction.
Lacan’s followers emphasized the act of meaning-making, then tried, relying on the ideas of other poststructuralists, primarily M. Foucault and R. Barthes about the area of the unconscious, bodily expression as the only way to resist the hierarchy-reproducing structures of language, to find linguistic practices that differ from the dominant ones – this is how, for example, philosophical postmodernist feminism was formed. In J. Kristeva (b. 1942), the semiotic, pre-Oedipal procedure of knowledge formation, not controlled by consciousness, in contrast to the symbolic one, is capable of expressing desire and forming subjective identity in the most adequate, pluralistic way; in Cixous, this utopian expressive language is called “women’s writing”, as opposed to the binary, articulated “male” one; in L. Irigaray, phallic symbolism should be replaced by vaginal symbolism. Despite the diversity of the proposed terminology, feminist criticism demonstrates a close connection between the idea of deconstruction and the idea of decentering. We are talking about a new understanding of language, in which there are no central concepts, categories, meanings – in a broader sense of the word, this is overcoming the “logo-fallo-onto-theo-phonocentrism” that J. Derrida wrote about, this is a transition to a new model of culture that does not reproduce the hierarchical situation of “coloniality”. Deconstructivism is critical (the concept of “deconstructive criticism” is synonymous) and is focused on the task of removing hierarchical oppositions, primarily in language. This is why deconstructivism is simultaneously a practice of deconstruction – a specific experience of analyzing a particular text, identifying marginal meanings and series of metaphors. The emergence of deconstructivism is historically associated with the first demonstrations of deconstructivist textual analysis in the works of R. Barthes “C\3” (1970) and J. Kristeva “Semiotics: Studies in Semantics” (1969).
The followers of M. Foucault, among whom we can include, for example, representatives of the so-called hermeneutic and sociological deconstructionism, pay more attention to the problem of the interdependence of discourses. Specific “forms of knowledge” of various scientific disciplines form a single set of prescriptions perceived by the individual at the unconscious level. “Left-wing deconstructionism”, primarily neo-Marxist or “realistic” deconstructionism, emphasizes the criticism of the corresponding institutional practices of a particular historical period, proposing to consider the entire diversity of human activity, understood in the structuralist tradition as discursive, i.e. speech, practices, as a kind of “social text”. According to this point of view, general cultural discourse is ideologically “edited” and serves the dominance of a certain part of society over another. The task of the philosopher is to demystify ideological myths by deconstructing various types of discursive practices as “rhetorical constructs”.
The literary criticism of the Yale School is based on the interpretation of the concept of deconstruction given by P. de Maine, which, in turn, goes back to Nietzschean perspectivism: reading the text gives it meaning, which, in turn, turns out to be ambiguous. Literature and criticism, therefore, coincide in their tasks. There is not and cannot be a final interpretation, and the task of the researcher-critic-reader is to identify in the text those “gaps in meaning” in which we can find this ambiguity of interpretation of the text as a whole. The criticality of the Derridean principle sometimes becomes apophatic: even “misunderstanding” becomes problematic. The main ideas of the Yale School, set out in the so-called “Yale Manifesto” – a collection of 1979 “Deconstruction and Criticism”, are considered fundamental for modern American literary criticism.
Researchers also note a number of “national” features of deconstructivism: for example, French deconstructivism is generally characterized by the focus of deconstruction on the “entire cultural intertext,” while American deconstructivism is characterized by an interest in the deconstruction of specific works of art. In addition, Richard Rorty , for example, is considered an American postmodernist, albeit with reservations. Rorty (see the next chapter) goes a long way in his creative evolution from the analytical philosophy he outlined in his work “Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature” (1979) to the position of so-called neopragmatism (“Truth and Progress, 3,” 1998). He agrees that language is not capable of conveying reliable truth, but human culture is essentially dialogic communication, in the process of which we distinguish degrees of reliability, developing the mechanisms necessary for this communication, such as, for example, tolerance and democracy. The value of philosophy is pedagogical, so it should rather preserve and use the ideas developed than radically change them.
Particularly noteworthy is the philosophy of Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929), who did not make an academic career, but in many ways defined the themes and mood of postmodernism. He himself considered it his task to build a critical social theory, to show that the era of signs, beginning with the Renaissance, gradually comes to the formation of three modern types of discourses that mask and simulate the ambivalence of life and death – economic, psychoanalytic and linguistic. From this angle, J. Baudrillard in his works The System of Things (1968), The Mirror of Production (1973) and Symbolic Exchange and Death (1976) examines modern theories of personality, primarily psychoanalytic ones, the theory of political economy of K. Marx, and the way society functions. Symbolic reflection mixes the real and the imaginary, the symbolic system becomes decisive and dictates its own laws. In modern explanatory schemes, the sign eventually loses all connection with reality, it is based on itself, i.e. it becomes self-referential and creates hyperreality with its hyperspace, hypercausality, etc. The peculiarity of modern simulation, according to the works “Temptation” (1979), “Simulacra and Simulation” (1981) and other articles and interviews by Baudrillard, is that the constructed real is not subject to unambiguous definition, it is a fascinating emptiness. These ideas of Baudrillard have largely shaped the latest postmodern literature, including Russian.
Literature
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