POSTMODERNISM - Excerpts from the Lecture..:

Excerpts from the Lecture on Postmodernism, by Dr.ASD Pillai on 04 September 2010.

Most of the societies in the United States have entered the Post industrial stage. First, there was the Pre-industrial, then the Industrial stage, and then the Post-industrial times.

In the Industrial age, we depended on the machines. Now highly developed societies have entered the post industrial age. The chief occupation of man is to process information and knowledge. Now you find less and less industries, and more and more people working on computers. Machine technology has now been replaced by Industrial technology. During Industrial times, industrialised nations were characterised by availability of raw materials and cheap labour. Today in the Post-industrial age our raw material is information and knowledge, and this has transformed the nature of knowledge.

What is produced, sold and bought is not goods but knowledge. [Like you buy soap and powder]. That is why the Postmodern society is also called knowledge society or information society. Today knowledge has become a commodity, which you can buy or sell, and that has greatly affected education today.

Formerly, nations were fighting for territory. Now they fight for data banks. Hereafter databanks must not be stolen. So, there is a need to protect and govern knowledge. So, knowledge and governance go together.

There are two kinds of knowledge:

1. Traditional knowledge from our own folk tales, epics, puranas, which are otherwise called as narrated knowledge.

2. Scientific knowledge - which always insists on proving whether your knowledge is correct or not. In the former, nobody wants to prove it, but in scientific knowledge, you've got to prove your point. Scientific knowledge is characterised by verification. "The savage mind is equal to the civilised mind", says Claude Levi-Strauss.

So scientific knowledge considered itself superior to narrative knowledge and the Westerners brought scientific knowledge. So the West considered themselves superior to the Non-West. That is how their domination over the East was born.

Postmodernism signifies the fall of science and the fall of Western society and its cultural institutions. Whether there is a fall or not, there is a rethinking.

Science itself has changed somewhere in the 1960s. Virginia Woolf said that human nature changed in 1910. But human nature changed originally in the 1960s. because it was at this time that all these great things were happening in science. Somewhere in the 1960s, science underwent a great crisis because of certain books - by J.F.Lyotard, T.Kuhn and Feyerabend.

You can look at the Postmodern condition from various dimensions. My friend said that MCC has got four gates. Well, Postmodernism has got 14 gates..!!! Architecture being one of the firsts among them. Malcolm Bradbury introduced me to the agony and the ecstasy of Postmodernism.

T.Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), Paul Feyerabend's Against Method (1975), these two books, they did science in. We all think that scientific knowledge is accurate. For the first time they proved that it is not possible to prove anything accurately in this world. How did they do it? through the field of Microphysics. "Can you completely describe the cowness of a cow?"

The very presence of man disturbed the structure. Can you give a 100% accurate census of Madras city? Absolutely not. This whole scenario was brought out beautifully by

Heisenberg's indeterminacy principle - Structuralism took over from this point. The perceiver alters the perceived object at least in a minimal way. If this is true of science, what about social science? - where there's less accuracy. Light - we are not sure whether it is a particle. Normally, as accuracy increases, uncertainty, indeterminacy decreases. But, John Bered argued that when accuracy increases, uncertainty also increases. So, there's no such thing as determinacy in science. Contrary to what we think, scientists are also exchanging ideas about nature, like philosophers and social thinkers do.

Thomas Kuhn talks about "Paradigm Shift". The phrase that's commonly used whenever you study Postmodernism. The phrase "Paradigm Shift" is taken from science. Scientific discovery, scientific growth is continuous. It is not addictive. It is discontinuous, catastrophic, paradoxical.

What is a Paradigm Shift? At one point of time, one scientific theory rules the whole world. Many experiments will be conducted in the light of this theory. But still, certain questions remain unanswered. Then a new theory comes. Before Copernican theory came, there was a Ptolemic theory.

"This world is beyond all your philosophies put together" - Hamlet.

Newton's theory was replaced by Einstein's. Hence, all scientific theories are additive. "Science is producing not the known, but the unknown. It goes on creating new mysteries", says T.Kuhn in Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

This is the first, of a five-part series on Postmodernism, delivered by Dr.ASD Pillai at MCC. The rest will follow soon...!