Principled positions : postmodernism and the rediscovery of value

Abstract

Principled Positions highlights the controversies which have come out of postmodern dialogues and takes the debate a stage further. Stuart Hall takes on Christopher Norris in this collection which attempts to put the value judgements back into postmodernism. Postmodernism has often been celebrated as liberating, even democratizing in its refusal to acknowledge the dictates of hierarchy and certainty. In cultural terms this has allowed outmoded canons of taste and conservative categories of high and low culture to be challenged and abolished; but it has also banished the vocabulary of evaluation, distinction and merit. In the postmodern cultural continuum, there is no such thing as good (or bad) art. The deconstruction of all principled positions creates a value vacuum which, in turn, leads to a state of ethical and political paralysis. The contributors to Principled Positions ponder these dilemmas and try to build bridges between the modernist absolutes of truth, value and justice and the anti-totalizing spirit of postmodernism. Behind this project lies a real concern to recover modernism's sense of value without lapsing back into the authoritarian practices which postmodernism has undermined.

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