Moderno e Postmoderno: stili e strategie

Abstract

Postmodernism is a general term which is applied to literature, art, philosophy, architecture, fiction, and cultural and literary criticism. His first result was an ironic collage approach to construction that combines several traditional styles into one structure. As collage, meaning is found in combinations of already created patterns. But Postmodernism is also a reaction to the assumed certainty of scientific, or objective, efforts to explain reality. It can be described as a set of critical, strategic and rhetorical practices employing concepts such as difference, repetition, the trace, the simulacrum, and hyperreality to destabilize other concepts such as presence, identity, historical progress, epistemic certainty, and the univocity of meaning. The paradox of the postmodern position is here that, in placing all principles under the scrutiny of its skepticism, it must realize that even its own principles are not beyond questioning. If it is never possible to evaluate a discourse according to whether it leads to objective truth, how did the established discourses become part of the prevailing worldview of the modern era? Habermas’ critique of postmodernism argues that postmodernism contradicts itself through self-reference, and notes that postmodernists presuppose concepts they otherwise seek to undermine, e.g. freedom, subjectivity, or creativity. Postmodernism is perhaps a rhetorical application of strategies employed by the artistic avant-garde of the Nineteenth and Twentieth centuries. On his view, postmodernism is an illicit aestheticization of knowledge and public discourse. Against this, it is perhaps possible to rehabilitate modern reason as a “style”, a system of procedural rules for achieving consensus and agreement among communicating subjects.

Keywords

• postmodenism
• modernism
• style
• architecture