THE SECOND FLOATING "FINAL" FORMULATION OF THE ARGUMENT

1. The overriding need of human beings is to end their suffering and secure their comfort while alive.

2. Before this period, in Western culture a variety of "metanarratives" met that need for some people.

3. (Some) people heard these "metanarratives" in the form of philosophical, religious, scientific, and political expressions.

4. (Some) people believed these expressions and obtained thereby a kind of assurance that their lives were under a universal, benign control.

5. In their relative freedom from suffering and in their comfort, (some) people in the West created an industrial technology. It was based on the scientific metanarrative and originally was expected to be congruent with the philosophical, religious, scientific, and political narratives.

6. (Some) people believed that the outcome of the industrial technology would be to bring still greater relief from suffering and still greater comfort to them while on earth.

7. (Some) people believed that their metanarratives would be fulfilled more completely if they took the outcomes of their industrial technology to others who did not know or share their beliefs.

8. (Some) people to whom they took the outcomes of industrial technology did not value them the way (some) people did in the West.

9. (Some) people in the West itself did not value them the way others in the West did.

10. Through industrial technology and the belief system that linked it to a universal, benign control, governments under the control of (some) people in the West mobilized themselves for two wars of unprecedented destruction and in other ways brought pain and suffering to many millions unimagined before.

11. (Many) people in the West consequently lost belief in the universal, benign control which had appeared to provide release from suffering and greater comfort.

12. The need for release from suffering and for greater comfort led postmodernists to acknowledge the loss and to find some narratives that would help people.

13. The narratives are still emerging.

14. The emerging narratives have some points in common. They constitute a working definition of postmodernism:

• Belief in metanarratives will not release people from suffering or increase comfort.

• To release (more) people from suffering and to provide more comfort requires that (some) people be deprived of their controlling metanarratives.

• In place of controlling metanarratives, (more) people have to be shown how they can have a say in determining the (non-meta-)narratives that will diminish suffering and increase comfort.

• People can create a new kind of identity in terms of the words they speak with other people in "real" time, not in terms of metanarratives that favor (some) people over others and that have a history of frightening destructiveness.

• People on these terms will be inherently social and will not possess an isolated identity derived from obsolete metanarratives.

• A society of such people will operate with reference to itself and not to a metanarrative of which it is representative.

• This necessitates a never-ending process of social interaction which involves the distribution and redistribution of power.

• Through such a process, (more) people will contribute to the (non-meta-)narrative to which they look for release from suffering and greater comfort.

• This (non-meta-)narrative is still being worked out and, in the eyes of some, it fails to help diminish suffering and increase comofort. Indeed, (some) people think that its shortcomings are so great that it needs to be overcome with either old metanarratives or new narratives with greater efficacy. Postmodernists continue the debate with postmodernists as well as with those who came before with their metanarratives.

• Art and literature now do not reflect a metanarrative but rather take part in the never-ending process that constitutes the real life without metanarratives.

• Technology did not cease to evolve with the end of the matanarratives that spawned it. It is evolving in ways that paradoxically reinforce the (non-meta-)narratives sought after in the postmodern period.

• Human bodies still are born, exist for a finite time, and die. The (non-meta-)narrative may take that into account or not, but it is central to the continuous need of human beings for the release from suffering and an increase in comfort.

The "Genesis" Document, Part One.

The "Genesis" Document, Part Two, on critical theory.

Return to THE PROGRAMME contents page.

3 December 1995