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Articles

Postmodernism, Post Structuralism and ‘Enlightenment’

by Geoff Wade

“Nothing comes from nothing – speak again” (King Lear)

The starting point for this article is a piece of writing by Jane Flax. Although she engages primarily with issues of feminist philosophy and postmodernism, she deals too with problems which give rise to wider implications, particularly in her ‘deconstructivist’ claims that all knowledge is perspectival; that there is not one authentic reality, but diverse and culturally determined ‘ways of seeing’; and that ‘meaning’ is always unstable, i.e. it is always ‘on the move’, as there obtains, ineluctably, a slippage between ‘signifier’, ‘signified’ and ‘referent’ (crudely: word, idea and object or action referred to). After considering Flax’s theses, I shall concentrate briefly on the aesthetics of postmodernism, looking critically at Linda Hutcheon’s book A Poetics of Postmodernism (1988).

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