Dr.M.Susithra
The Dept. of Philosophy &Centre for Philosophical Research
The Madura College (Autonomous),Madurai-11,T.N.,India.
Introduction to Postmodern Thoughts:
A serious intellectual disorder that is widespread today amongst literary persons and even philosophers is Pomophobia (Postmodernism phobia). This is because postmodernism is always related with the notorious slogan ‘break the rules’. When it comes to ethics, postmodernism which is condemned as an intellectual terror is concluded to have nothing to say or do productively.
This is a bad reading of postmodernism. In this juncture this paper intends to surf the venture of postmodernism, so that a clear association between ethics and postmodernism could be brought to the floor.
It is quite known that ethics is a branch of knowledge concerned with moral principles. It deals with the judgments of what is right and wrong, good and evil and many do’s and don’ts. Various schools of thought according to their philosophical position prescribe ethical norms and there would be a linear cum structuralized construction in such moral codes. This is the status in both traditional and modernist thoughts. The point to be emphasized here is that, despite of its name modernity retains much of the traditional bearings. On one hand, it has strengthened some hazardous norms of tradition. On the other hand in spite of the progress in science, reason, technology, liberation, and freedom modernity has incepted many serious problems. What if modernity strengthens tradition is a major question and what has modernity to do with problems would be another question. Wars, terrorism, war on terror, genocide, holocaust, death camps and death squads are some of the burning political issues that the world is witnessing right from industrial revolution in the name of progression. Racism, casteism, and religious fundamentalism are worsening in these times with technocratic face which are no doubt the offspring of tradition. Apart from these issues in the present day there are unthinkable dilemmas around the problems of gender injustice, transgender inequality, and homosexual relationships in social and cultural sphere. In economic sphere the chaos and confusions over liberalization, privatization and globalization is a mammoth problem that has got questions around poverty, unemployment, under-employment, food crisis, junk technology etc. In the ecological sphere the globe confronts the threat of ecological disasters, like extinction of species, globalwarming, nuclear pollution, cyber pollution, gene manipulation, genetic engineering, human experimentation, euthanasia, human cloning etc.,
The link between all these mind-boggling and burning social, cultural, economic, political and ecological issues is all are ethical problems which have been hardly addressed by tradition and modern ethical doctrines. Even if there are explications made by ethical theories they are constructed as grandnarratives which do not pay heed to micro level issues whereas postmodernism endlessly operates with the logic of undecidability. It makes ruptures into well defined norms and in fact ruptures its own path. Postmodernism has got no fixed principle that is why the most controversial postmodern thought, deconstruction is infamously called a philosophy that says nothing.
Postmodernism never encourages lofty principles and is vigilant and critical of the act both universalizing and particularizing. The righteousness in postmodernity is not a transcendental signified that bestows some lofty values. Postmodernism is rebellious to accept a sacred text as ethical encyclopedia. Rather it engages in dialogue with various political, social, cultural, economical, and psychological issues; it endorses the significance of context to decide the meaning. Also in ethical grounds there are varied postmodern thoughts and each postmodernist has got her/his own way of doing philosophy. In fact postmodernism is highly debated even between postmodernists themselves. Nick Lacey describes the mindset of the postmodernists that, the postmodernists resound that post-capitalist society has reduced everything to surface including human beings.1
The postmodernists tend to ‘de-naturalize’2 various beliefs and practices that are part and parcel of our lives. Their writings shatter the dogma of culture, tradition, religion and exhibit that they are made by us and not given to us. But the social and political upliftment of the ‘others’ like the feminist, gay, lesbian, Marxist, ethnic, black is passionately supported by them. The postmodernists stand for the ‘other’ in the face of the power. In such sense the postmodernists have got position. But this position is not a theoretical armchair philosophizing position. Postmodernists have no readymade ethical rules to be applied.
At this outset let us probe into the thoughts of few postmodern map-makers and take a quick look at their ethical discourse. For the ease of our understanding postmodernists are divided into two main camps. According to Shanon Weiss and Karla Wesley they are diametrically opposed as Skeptical Postmodernists and Affirmative Postmodernists. The former are those who disrupt the existing tendencies and the fixities in all systems. They are extremely critical of the modern project and demonstrate their resistance to all structures. To them “theory conceals, distorts, and obfuscates, it is alienated, disparated, dissonant, it means to exclude, order, and control rival powers”3. The latter begin with rupture into the existing structure and then go in search for the alternatives. These postmodernists also reject theory but for them theory need not be abolished but transformed. They in fact support movements organised around peace, environment, and feminism4. According to Linda Hutcheon the postmodern war lies between Radically Antagonistic and the Provisionally Supportive.
Hal Foster expression of these two camps is as a postmodernism of resistance, and the other, of reaction, one poststructuralist and the other neoconservative.
Jean Baudrillard is identified as skeptical postmodernist by Rousenau for the statements like, “everything has already happened….nothing new can occur,” or “there is no real world”5 Ihab Hassan seems to be a neoconservative postmodernist who deliberately comments that postmodernism has become ‘a shibboleth for tendencies in film, theater, dance, music, art, and architecture, in literature and criticism; in philosophy, theology, psychoanalysis, and historiography; in new sciences, cybernetic technologies, and various cultural life styles.6
Postmodernists like Lyotard provoke revolt against modernity by pledging “Let us wage war on totality, let us be witnesses to the unrepresentable; let us activate the differences and save the honour of the name”.7
Roland Barthes, one among the masterminds of postmodernism who is widely known for his statement, ‘author is dead’ reflects his view about the ethical issue whether religion and God are necessary for humans to be humanistic,
“It is important to emphasize at this point that there is no hidden power called Being which designed or operated the escalator. Nobody whispered in the ears of the early Greeks, the poets of the West. There is just us, in the grip of no power save those of the words we happen to speak”8
“We shall not need a picture of ‘the human self’ in order to have morality”9 He said that life in the gulags “Gradually . . . disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either — but right through every human heart — and through all human hearts”10
So, Roland Barthes provoking and proclaiming the death of author is not an inhuman stand but vitally a humanistic position to democratize the centre.
Polish postmodern thinker and sociologist Zygmunt Bauman famous for his work Postmodern Ethics delineates Postmodern ethics with the phrase, ‘morality without ethical code’11.
Bauman’s response to the ambiguity of human reality is based in his position that it is our moral capacity that essentially defines us as human beings:
It is society, its continuing existence and its well-being, that is made possible by the moral competence of its members – not the other way round …. Rather than reiterating that there would be no moral individuals if not for the training/drilling job performed by society, we move toward the understanding that it must be the moral capacity of human beings that makes them so conspicuously capable to form societies and against all odds to secure their – happy or less happy – survival …. [I]t is the personal morality that makes ethical negotiation and consensus possible, not the other way round.12
Whatsoever the disagreement may exist between each Postmodernist, postmodernism creates the awareness of the politics of the dominant and the universal privilege granted to White-Male-European-Bourgeois. In supplement it exposes those scheduled for oppression by the dominant culture- the woman, black, gays, lesbian, native people, proletariat, bisexual, ethnics, aborginals.
Deconstruction as Ethics:
This part of the paper elaborates some of the contemporary ethical debates on the socio-political problems carried out by most celebrated cum controversial postmodern intellectual Jacques Derrida.
Derrida’s philosophical inquiry and concern towards the problems of the other (The idea of ‘other’ is drawn by Derrida form Levinas) is evident from an interview in 1981 in which Derrida describes: “deconstruction is always deeply concerned with the “other” of language….The critique of logocentrism is above all else the search for the “other” and the “other
