Postmodern as a “Non-object”. On Criticism of Ontology and Language of Postmodern Self-identification

Abstract

The article considers the internal contradictions of the popular attitude, accord­ing to which postmodernism as such, in principle, “is not an object” (current, style, school, etc.). At best, it is assigned a set of intentions and conditions that characterize the “situation of postmodernism”. However, in postmodernism it­self, which rejects binary oppositions, the concept of an object is generally elimi­nated. In traditional logic, on the contrary, there is nothing that could not be an object in its proper and strict sense. These inconsistencies are generated by the forced mixing of languages – the inevitable inclusion of postmodern dis­course in traditional contexts. The semantic distinctions of the concepts of post­modernity, postmodern, postmodernism are introduced. The invariance of post­modernism as an object is revealed only at the level of form, including the basic characteristics of the language – its syntax, semantics and pragmatics. Language collisions continue in the relationship of the paradigms themselves. Modernity turns out to be a project, not only unfinished (Habermas), but also unfinishable, and postmodernity is a purely secondary phenomenon in its initial reactivity. This sets the limits of what is possible in the new search for a way out of post­modernism into post-postmodernism, neoclassicism, after-postmodernism, etc.