From UKEssays
And lest we forget, there is, in my view, the significant -- gigantic? -- gap between "totalizing society" in one or another theoretical construct and being able to demonstrate out in a particular community of actual flesh and blood human beings how that society can reflect/encompass the least dysfunctional interactions. Your "rules of behavior" or mine?Any theory that aims at totalising society should only be seen as one constructed from a particular perspective (e.g. one that still remains in the logic of modernity), rather than a totalising theory as such.
Cue, among others, Wittgenstein? And forget about "re-theorizing society", how about the act of actually choosing behaviors itself without a "meta-narrative". Without God or ideology or deontology or Satyrean assumptions about nature.Whilst postmodernism can be viewed as liberating and opening up seemingly limitless opportunities for re-theorizing society, it does at the same time impose new problems. Firstly, there seems to be an inconsistency in the postmodernist stance, as it could be argued that the theory of the dissolution of meta-narratives is a type of meta-narrative itself.
But, sure, there's always the argument that post-modernism itself is just another meta-narrative. Which is why I always insist that discussions of it be taken down out of the theoretical clouds and introduced to, say, the real world? The one where we interact in social, political and economic contexts that precipitate conflicting assessments of right and wrong, good and evil, true and false.
And then the part where in "opening up" your options you become "fractured and fragmented" as I am.
Which is why a distinction must be made between one's identity in the either/or world and one's identity in the is/ought world. Given a specific set of circumstances. I believe "here and now" that in the absence of one or another "transcending font" the "self" will become unstable. You are who you think you are now. Then in a world inundated with contingency, chance and change, new experiences cause you to question that.This criticism can also be applied to the postmodernist take on identity, for in arguing that identity is ultimately unstable and fluid postmodernists inadvertently provide a certain rigid structure in which identity operates (i.e. that all identity must be unstable).
https://ilovephilosophy.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=176529