You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
There are a number of unchanging ideas—none of them particularly stylish—worth fighting for; that honor is immitigable; that so, too, is dignity, despite the almost inherent ridiculousness of human beings; that one's life is a work of art, however badly botched, which can be restored and touched up here and there but not fundamentally changed; that, in connection with this, integrity includes coherence of personality; that elegance, where possible, is very nice, but there are many things more important than style, loyalty and decency among them; that a cello is a finer instrument than an electric guitar; and that a man ought to start the day with a clean handkerchief.
Natoli and Hutcheon (1993) point out that “very few critical terms in recent memory have been as used and abused as ‘postmodernism’” (p. 1). The modernist project, as Habermas calls it, assumes that it is possible to objectively determine a foundation for a progressive grasp of “truth,” so that knowledge accrued may be at least to some extent culture-neutral and value free. Hopefully even history itself and any shifts in our ways of seeing ourselves within it can be understood in terms of objective studies. Postmodernism may be thought of as negating this basic foundationalist proposition and can be criticized, as Norris (1990) does, for effacing “all sense of the difference between truth and falsehood, reality and illusion, serious and nonserious discourse” (p. 2).
Postmodern paradox, ambiguity, irony, indeterminacy, and contingency are claimed to replace the closure, unity, order, and the rational of modernism. Modernism saw uncertainty as temporary but postmodernism sees no way out of uncertainty because the growth of knowledge inevitably expands the field of ignorance. This is the Hegelian concept that thought expands until