Red Sky at Morning
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I was thinking about the difference between truth and the stories we tell about the things we believe to be true. Postmodernism has a lot to answer for in taking away the distances and directions in our thought process, so that Pilate’s first century question, “What is Truth?” could very easily have been framed in this generation.
I don’t endorse the view quoted below but it does represent the nature of much contemporary thinking...
GRAND NARRATIVE
Written by David Gress 1998
”Grand narrative is a term introduced by Jean-François Lyotard in his classic 1979 work: “The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge,” in which Lyotard summed up a range of views which were being developed at the time, as a critique of the institutional and ideological forms of knowledge. Encyclopedia of Marxism
Narrative knowledge is knowledge in the form of storytelling. In the tribal times, myths and legends formed knowledge of this type; that such-and-such a mountain was just where it was because some mythic animal put it there, and so on.The narrative not only explained, but legitimated knowledge, and when applied to the social relations of their own society, the myths functioned as a legitimation of the existing power relations, customs and so on.
The great religions of the feudal world – Christianity, Islam and Buddhism – institutionalised this narrative knowledge, and monotheism invested the narrative with a unitary extramundane subject as the central agent. It was Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-1872) who exposed how the Christian narrative was not an explanation but a legitimation of the norms of Christian society.
With the arrival of the modern era, natural science introduced a different kind of explanation of things in terms of material processes and causes. However, the narrative form continued – as it must! – in social theory and histriography. The telling of history is, after all, a narrative.
Looked at from the postmodern perspective, all knowledge becomes narrative however. For example, rather than saying that “the existence of oxygen has been proved,” there is a ‘little’ narrative about the experiment Antoine Lavoisier (1743- 1794) carried out.
The concept of grand narrative, and in particular what Lyotard called the “emancipation narrative,” concerns the kind of narrative which talks, not just about “one thing after another”, but sees some kind of interconnection between events, an inner connection between events related to one another, a succession of social systems, the gradual development of social conditions, and so on – in other words, is able in some way to make sense of history. More particularly, when pronounced as it is, the “grand narrative”, the “narrative of emancipation” is all those conceptions which try to make sense of history, rather than just isolated events in history, concepts like “class struggle”, socialism and capitalism, productive forces and so on.
According to Lyotard, in the postmodern period, people no longer believe in grand narratives, and consequently, to the armies of postmodern pen-pushers, ipso facto, “grand narratives” are old fashioned and oppressive – oppressive because one grand narrative excludes another and doesn’t my narrative have just as much right to truth as yours?
And what is this theory about “grand narrative” really about? It is another version of the end of history, another way of saying that perceived materialistic values or conventional attitudes in society are as good as it gets.
Nevertheless, the concept does tell us something about postmodern capitalism. Postmodern society has made the conception of real progress difficult to sustain, meaning is contested and fragmented, and it is difficult to see a way out of the morass....”
So, are we relegated to sit in the dark with a broken compass, or are some things that matter demonstrably, eternally true? If so, how would we know?
I don’t endorse the view quoted below but it does represent the nature of much contemporary thinking...
GRAND NARRATIVE
Written by David Gress 1998
”Grand narrative is a term introduced by Jean-François Lyotard in his classic 1979 work: “The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge,” in which Lyotard summed up a range of views which were being developed at the time, as a critique of the institutional and ideological forms of knowledge. Encyclopedia of Marxism
Narrative knowledge is knowledge in the form of storytelling. In the tribal times, myths and legends formed knowledge of this type; that such-and-such a mountain was just where it was because some mythic animal put it there, and so on.The narrative not only explained, but legitimated knowledge, and when applied to the social relations of their own society, the myths functioned as a legitimation of the existing power relations, customs and so on.
The great religions of the feudal world – Christianity, Islam and Buddhism – institutionalised this narrative knowledge, and monotheism invested the narrative with a unitary extramundane subject as the central agent. It was Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-1872) who exposed how the Christian narrative was not an explanation but a legitimation of the norms of Christian society.
With the arrival of the modern era, natural science introduced a different kind of explanation of things in terms of material processes and causes. However, the narrative form continued – as it must! – in social theory and histriography. The telling of history is, after all, a narrative.
Looked at from the postmodern perspective, all knowledge becomes narrative however. For example, rather than saying that “the existence of oxygen has been proved,” there is a ‘little’ narrative about the experiment Antoine Lavoisier (1743- 1794) carried out.
The concept of grand narrative, and in particular what Lyotard called the “emancipation narrative,” concerns the kind of narrative which talks, not just about “one thing after another”, but sees some kind of interconnection between events, an inner connection between events related to one another, a succession of social systems, the gradual development of social conditions, and so on – in other words, is able in some way to make sense of history. More particularly, when pronounced as it is, the “grand narrative”, the “narrative of emancipation” is all those conceptions which try to make sense of history, rather than just isolated events in history, concepts like “class struggle”, socialism and capitalism, productive forces and so on.
According to Lyotard, in the postmodern period, people no longer believe in grand narratives, and consequently, to the armies of postmodern pen-pushers, ipso facto, “grand narratives” are old fashioned and oppressive – oppressive because one grand narrative excludes another and doesn’t my narrative have just as much right to truth as yours?
And what is this theory about “grand narrative” really about? It is another version of the end of history, another way of saying that perceived materialistic values or conventional attitudes in society are as good as it gets.
Nevertheless, the concept does tell us something about postmodern capitalism. Postmodern society has made the conception of real progress difficult to sustain, meaning is contested and fragmented, and it is difficult to see a way out of the morass....”
So, are we relegated to sit in the dark with a broken compass, or are some things that matter demonstrably, eternally true? If so, how would we know?
