Postmodernism: Language, Power, Knowledge, and the Self in Society

Learn to answer fundamental questions about life with our philosophy short courses online & in Sydney.

Postmodernism is a term as much maligned as it is misunderstood. Caricatured as a literary movement led by trendy French intellectuals responsible for the downfall of Western Civilisation, this course will instead offer an introduction to postmodernism as a philosophy of difference, play, creative rebellion, and pluralistic experiments in the art of living. Discussion will focus on the interrelation of Language, Power, and Knowledge in the Human Sciences, and examine the ways in which our sense of self has become fragmented with the rise of post-industrial information societies. We will spotlight the hidden sources of oppression and the techniques of domination in postmodern societies, as well as the possibilities of emancipation that grow alongside them. By the end of the course, students will gain a nuanced understanding of postmodernism as neither a nihilistic rejection of truth nor a relativistic free-for-all, but as an exciting attempt to critically expose the institutional forces that shape the social fabric of everyday experience.

Through close engagement with figures such as Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze, Lyotard, Baudrillard, Haraway, Butler, Lacan, and Žižek, students will investigate how language, power, science and technology are intertwined in the construction of personal identity and social reality. Topics will include nihilism and the collapse of tradition, the meaning and making of Being, difference and deconstruction, the institutional production of norms and the micro-physics of power, the crisis of metanarratives, hyperreality and simulation, anti-humanism and cyborg theory, gender performativity, and the political-economic structures of late capitalism that underlie our shifting experiences of selfhood, otherness, and world.

Learning outcomes

By the end of the course, students should be able to:

• Students will gain an understanding of notoriously difficult concepts and be able to define key terms
• Identify the similarities and differences between major theories of postmodernity
• Critically analyse cultural discourses and representations that ideologically encode hegemonic systems of oppression
• Creatively synthesise and rationally reconstruct arguments, and bring them to bear on contemporary issues, e.g., the problem of expertise, post-truth, artificial intelligence, data collection and mass surveillance
• Make an educated assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of postmodernism by engaging its main instigators and sharpest critics

Course content

What is covered in this philosophy course?

Week 1: Nihilism, Technology, and the Meaning of Being: Nietzsche and Heidegge

• The Death of God and the dislocation of Humanity from the centre of Creation
• • “There are no facts, only interpretations” Perspectivism and the value of truth
• • World-Disclosure, Anti-Humanism, and the Essence of Technology
• • The End of Metaphysics and the Open Horizon of Being

Week 2: Knowledge-Power and the Production of The Human-Being: Michel Foucault

• Confinement, Classification, and Exclusion, The History of Madness in the Age of Reason
• • What is Power and how is it exercised? Governmentality and Biopolitics
• • “The soul is the prison of the body” Disciplinary Society, Surveillance, and the Panopticon

Week 3: Deconstruction and the Riotous Bloom of Meaning in the Margin: Jacques Derrid

• Decentering the Self and Shaking the foundations of the Metaphysics of Presence
• “Being is always already divided” Différance and the irreducible complexity of Origins
• Is there nothing outside the text? Language, Writing, and the Textile Metaphor
• Hauntology and the Trace

Week 4: Desiring-Machines and the Nonlinear Metaphysics of Difference: Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari

• Real without being actual, ideal without being abstract” Multiplicities and their Becomings
• Capitalism and The Factory of the Unconscious: Anti-Psychiatry and the Liberation of Desire
• Rhizomes, Swarms, Nomads Everything is a machine plugged into other machines

Week 5: The Disintegration of Reality in Post-Industrial Information Societies: Jean Baudrillard and Jean-François Lyotard

• Consumerism, Advertising, and Spectacle
• When the Copy of the Copy replaces the Real Simulation and Hyperreality
• Who defines the limits of “legitimate” knowledge? The Crisis of Metanarratives
• Being a node in the Network and the proliferation of local Language Games

Week 6: Gender-Bending Cyborgs and Cross-Species Contaminations: The Postmodern Feminism(s) of Judith Butler and Donna Haraway

• Gender Performativity, The Social Construction of Desire and Heteronormativity
• The Ethics of Vulnerability, Care, and Interdependence
• Post-human Hybrid Species and the Cyborg Manifesto
• Anti-essentialism and Alliances based on Affinity

Week 7: Opponents of Postmodernism: Noam Chomsky, Frederick Jameson, Alasdair MacIntyre

• Language, Human Nature, and the need for free creative activity
• Historical Amnesia, style over substance, and the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
• The unified narrative of the Good Life
• Justice and the Universal Goal of Human Flourishing

Week 8: Ideology and the Cracked Mirror of Self-Reflection: Lacan and Slavoj Žižek

• The Unconscious Object of Desire, Jouissance, and the failure of 1960’s counter-culture
• The Real, the Symbolic, and the Imaginary
• Ideological Fantasy and the Big Other
• Parallax, the Split Subject, and Ontological Incompleteness

Intended audience

Who is this philosophy course for?

• This course is for artists, activists, poets, filmmakers, culture critics, digital curators/memelords, social-media influencers, historians and time-travellers, sci-fi futurists and prophets of the
• apocalypse, political storm-trackers and zeitgeist meteorologists… or generally anybody who’s curious about postmodernism but can’t quite make sense of it. No necessary background required: forbidding terminology aside, this course is beginner-friendly as far as possible, clear explanations of key concepts and theories will be provided each week, along with helpful learning resources like short readings, podcasts, videos and artworks.

Course Venue

Online via Zoom

• Zoom details will be emailed to you with your enrolment confirmation
• Requirement: A device and stable internet connection

Course Materials

What to bring to class

• Notebook and pen
• A willingness to engage and learn!