Postmodernist paradigm and its main historical forms

The concept of postmodern man, which forms the basis of the term postmodernism, was introduced into scientific circulation by the German writer and essayist philosopher Rudolf Panwitz (1881-1969). In his work "The Crisis of European Culture" published in 1917, Panwitz noted that postmodern man is a person who has been strengthened by sports, nationally defined, has undergone military training, has awakened religious feelings, and has emerged from the vortex of the great decadent revolution caused by radical European nihilism [ 22].

Postmodernism was later defined as a reaction to modernism by the Spanish literary critic Federico de Onís (1885–1966) in his Anthology of Spanish and Latin American Poetry (1934). [ 6, pp. 258-259 ] .

But it would be more correct to evaluate postmodernism not as a reaction against modernism, but as a reaction against modernity, that is, against the New Age style of thinking. Because modernism, which emerged at the end of the 19th century and became the leading trend not only in fine arts and literature, but also in philosophy at the beginning of the 20th century, was itself a reaction against modernity, a call to break away from past historical traditions, and was aimed at forming a different way of thinking from modernity. The word “modernismo”, which means “contemporary trend” in Italian, expressed a counter-reaction against the New Age style of thinking. If the leading position of analytical aesthetic thinking was characteristic of the New Age as a whole and therefore the focus was on artistic generalization, then towards the end of the New Age, characterized by the concept of modernity , a deformation of the analytical-aesthetic paradigm occurred, and individualism, not artistic generalization, was brought into the center of attention [ 19].

From this perspective, it would be more logical to view postmodernism as a continuation of modernism, rather than as a denial of it.

Here, of course, other approaches to the relationship between modernism and postmodernism also have the right to exist. It is no coincidence that in the ideas of modern Western aestheticians, a number of contradictory points in the approach to the essence of postmodern aesthetics are manifested. If in aesthetic theories, the postmodern stage is approached, on the one hand, as a

Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of ANAS,senior researcher, PhD continuation of modernism, and on the other hand, as a new content that is different from or opposite to the aesthetics of modernism. This can be directly explained by the eclectic ideas that have taken their place in postmodernist art or aesthetics. Thus, if in postmodernist aesthetics, abstract forms of perception of beauty characteristic of modernism have been continuously developed, on the other hand, in contrast to the aesthetics of modernism, tendencies have begun to be observed to re-apply the limits of beauty accepted in traditional aesthetics to postmodernist art. In the process of comparative analysis, it is also possible to show a number of common features of postmodernist aesthetic thinking with modernist aesthetic thought, as well as to differentiate them. Common features for both of them include a departure from systematicity, syntheticity, a skeptical attitude towards scientific knowledge, and pessimistic theories about the decline of aesthetic values. However, in modern times, a number of researchers often approach the postmodernist explanation of aesthetic thinking as an independent, new way of thinking, and do not consider it appropriate to accept it simply as a continuation of the traditions of modernism [ 18; 19].

The important difference between modernism and postmodernism is that modernism was simply a formative stage, a formative stage, of postmodernism. If we can say so, modernism is an incomplete postmodernism, while postmodernism is a fully formed modernism. Both of them are opposed to modernity, that is, the New Age style of thinking.

Postmodernism was developed by the French philosophers Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, Guattari, Lyotard and Baudrillard, the American architect and philosopher Jenks, the American philosopher Rorty, the Italian writer and philosopher Eco, and others. In general, the research of postmodernists is focused on the study of the level of manifestation of the subconscious in modern aesthetics, art and artistic creativity [18].

2 Postmodernist aesthetics in the context of French philosophy

Claude Levi-Strauss (1908-2009) , a prominent French philosopher, ethnographer, sociologist, the most influential representative of structuralism, and the founder of the theory of structural anthropology, has gained special importance in the emergence of the postmodernist paradigm. Levi-Strauss considered collective unconscious mental structures as a universal law governing all societies, from primitive to higher. Levi-Strauss gave a full and detailed description of the idea of mental structure in the mature years of his life - in 1958, in his book "  Structural Anthropology " [ 11] .

Roland Barthes (1915-1980) , considered the founder of poststructuralism, directly incorporates the concept of structure into aesthetics in his work "  Level Zero of Writing "  published in 1953 and emphasizes that artistic form is three-dimensional : language, style , and writing. Barthes considers language as a universal norm and draws attention to the fact that in artistic creation language stands alongside the individual style of the writer and writing , which he characterizes as a third dimension. Writing, in Barthes's view, is a barrier between the individual and reality, which forces the individual to adopt one or another value orientation [ 3, p p. 306-349 ] .

writing in the context of structuralism based on linguistic analysis was not only of great importance for the development of semantic aesthetics, but also an important source for the formation of postmodernism.

, was widely active under the name of the "  Paris Aesthetic School "  between 1964 and 1980 .

" Paris Aesthetic School " began its activities as a research center, thereby laying the foundation for post-Freudian aesthetics and post-Freudianism as a whole. The French philosopher Jacques Lacan (1901-1981) played a special role in the formation of postmodernist aesthetic thought. Lacan, the founder of post-Freudianism, gave extensive space to unconscious motives and transpsychological subjective impressions in artistic creation by analyzing aesthetic thought based on a psychoanalytic structure in his report he delivered at the Rome Congress held at the Institute of

This also includes French-speaking philosophers.

Psychology of the University of Rome on September 26 and 27, 1953, and in his main work entitled “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis,” which he published based on the materials of this report [ 10] .

Michel Foucault (1926-1984) , a French philosopher, founder of the first psychoanalysis department in France, the de facto founder of the "  Paris Aesthetic School ", and one of the most famous figures of the 20th century , applied the concept of discourse (judgment) to structuralism. The discursive analysis of aesthetic thought is reflected in his works "  Words and Objects " ( 1966 ) and "  The Archaeology of Science " (1969).

Foucault's "  Words and Things " can generally be considered the beginning of postmodernism. Although the term postmodernism was coined in 1917, postmodernism as a way of thinking found its first incarnation in Foucault's "  Words and Things ."

In this work, Foucault expresses different types of thought with the terms "  episteme " and "  configuration of knowledge " and notes three historical types of thought:

■ the Renaissance period (Foucault meant the 16th century by the Renaissance period) is characterized by the episteme of similarity. In this type of thinking, language is not yet an independent system. It is dispersed among natural objects, intertwined with them, and mixed with them.

■ the classical stage (the classical stage covers the 17th-18th centuries in Foucault's view), the episteme of presentation is characteristic. Language becomes an autonomous system of signs, almost identical with thought and knowledge. The general grammar of language provides the basis for understanding both the sciences and culture as a whole.

The modern stage (by the modern stage, Foucault means the history that began at the beginning of the 19th century) is characterized by a system and organizational episteme. At this stage, new sciences emerge that have no connection with previously existing sciences. Language becomes an ordinary object of cognition, closes in on itself, creates its own history, and becomes a repository of traditions and styles of thought [ 15] .

" Archaeology of Science ", Foucault once again noted that each stage of society has its own unique language, way of thinking, and art, and emphasized that each new cultural era builds its base on the non-repetition of cultural norms belonging to previous eras.

Jacques Derrida (1910-1995), the author of the idea of deconstruction, one of the most important ideas of the postmodernist movement, in his work "  On Grammatology ³ " [ 9] ( 1967) analyzed aesthetic thought and art based on the concept of deconstruction. The deconstructivist approach rejects traditional methods of explaining artistic creation and art and proposes a new model of their perception. This model is a model of understanding through the destruction of stereotypes . Derrida believes that meaning is constructed when reading a text. According to Derrida, the idea of deconstruction will bring innovation to the unconventional progress in artistic creation and art in the modern era, and to the perception of the essence of aesthetics as a whole.

The French philosophers Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995) and Félix Guattari (1930-1992) also distinguished themselves with their important contributions to the development of postmodern aesthetics. Like Lacan, Foucault, and Derrida, Deleuze and Guattari enriched Freudian ideas with poststructuralist elements. They carried out a structuralist and, in parallel, psychoanalytic study of art on the basis of postmodernist aesthetic thinking. During the period of poststructuralism, their aesthetic studies were mainly conducted around a number of features and motifs of the connection of the symbolic structure of personality with new socio-cultural norms in the psychoanalytic concept of Freudianism.

Grammar is the branch of linguistics that studies the relationship between the letters of the alphabet and the sounds of speech.

Anti-Oedipus (1972), the first volume of the two-volume work "  Capitalism and Schizophrenia " co-authored by Deleuze and Guattari, [ 7] c ontains a number of interesting analyses of postmodernist art.

Deleuze and Guattari, following Freud, believed that artistic products are the realization of unconscious desires in art. Deleuze and Guattari analyzed art through the method of schizoanalysis. Schizophrenia here is understood not as a psychological phenomenon, but as a mass socio-political phenomenon.

Deleuze and Guattari also put forward another concept called rhizome , and they analyzed this concept extensively in their work “ Rhizome ” (1976) [ 8] .

rhizome put forward by Deleuze and Guattari is one of the key concepts of postmodernism, so we would like to pay special attention to it. The word rhizome means root-like in French . Unlike a tree, a root -like thing lacks integrity, concreteness, and certainty; it has no beginning, no end, no center, and no centralizing principle. Rhizome is a phenomenon in social life that is also devoid of concreteness and certainty. Rhizome, as an expression of freedom, stems from the tendency to exclude the principle of determinism in the explanation of society, and the fact that different groups in society have different worldviews, oppose themselves to the integrity of society, put forward unique symbols and rituals, and demonstrate freedom characteristic of nomads is brought into the spotlight.

The widespread popularity of the idea of postmodernism throughout Europe was largely due to the name of the French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard (1924-1998).

The Condition of the Postmodern. Lectures on the Sciences " (1979) , Lyotard expressed his concern about the uncertainty, incompleteness, and richness of contradictory paradoxes of modern scientific knowledge, and considered it necessary to take a number of steps in the field of scientificization of aesthetic thinking. Lyotard, who evaluated postmodernity as a crisis of metanarratives, emphasized the need to strengthen activities aimed at preparing the scientific foundations of modern art.

Another aspect of Lyotard's analysis of art and artistic creation was that since art emerged as a product of life energy, aesthetic thought should be evaluated in terms of material efficiency, and one of the most serious goals of art was considered to be its orientation towards economic aesthetics .

Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007) can be mentioned as the last classical representative of postmodernism in French and Western European philosophy as a whole . Starting from the idea that “ we no longer live in a world where signs and symbols show us the truth, now they themselves have become the truth ”, Baudrillard poses an interesting question in his famous work “ Simulacra and Simulacra ” (1981): what lies beyond the truth? And he immediately clarifies this question: here we are not talking about a lie that is the opposite of truth, but what lies beyond the truth, that is, is there something more true than the real, more real than the real? Baudrillard answers this question through the concepts of simulation and simulacrum. Simulation is an attempt to consciously show oneself differently. Simulacrum is the image that a person creates about himself in which he wants to show himself to the people around him in this image, to present himself to society in this image, to demonstrate his existence in this image. The state that a person wants to present himself to society is, in most cases, an image of the state he wants to be in. But this does not apply to all cases. In many cases, a person wants to present himself to society in such a way that he can benefit from the image he has created about himself in the people around him, and for this purpose, sometimes he makes efforts to present himself to society in a worse image than he really is, for example, in order to avoid military service, he creates an image of himself as a patient in the people around him. However, this case, when a person tries to present himself to society in a worse image than he really is, as mentioned above, does not cover the entire scope of the concept of simulation. Most cases of the simulation phenomenon are not typical for the vast majority, a person in most cases tends to present himself not worse than he really is, but better than he really is, trying to present the state he wants to be in as it is. [ 5] .

Baudrillard answers the fundamental question mentioned above in his work “ Simulacra and Simulation ” – “ What lies beyond the truth, is there anything more real than the real ?” in another work, and this answer, unlike the previous one, has a practical rather than a theoretical character: One can only live with a distorted idea of truth. This path is the only way to live with truth [ 4, p ^{. 115 ]} . Baudrillard believes that it is impossible to show a clear boundary between simulation and truth.

Baudrillard even concludes that the world as a whole consists of simulacra that have no basis [ 2, p. 109 ] .

Postmodernist aesthetics in the context of American philosophy

American postmodernism, at least in the case of the famous philosopher Richard Rorty (1931– 2007), tended towards practicality and economic efficiency. Unlike Lyotard, Baudrillard, and other French postmodernists, Rorty, as an American, tended towards pragmatism rather than art. In his view, knowledge should serve action, and philosophy should not seek some essence or beginning of the world, but should seek and find means for human action^. [ 13] .

Although a number of critics and authors have viewed Rorty's pragmatist philosophy as a rebellion against the fundamental values and rationalist traditions of Western civilization, Rorty remains one of the classics of modern philosophy, with his distinctively American style of thought.

Thanks to new technical progress, postmodernism has led to changes not only in the stream of consciousness, not only in the spiritual sphere of social life, but also in the material structures of social life - in architecture and urban planning.

architecture and urban planning were developed by the prominent American architect, architectural historian and critic Charles Jenks (born 1939) and described and interpreted in his famous work “ The Language of Architecture and the Postmodern ” (1977). It is also worth noting that the term postmodernism gained popularity after 1977, when Jenks published this work.

Since the aforementioned work of Jenks is of exceptional importance for the history and practice of postmodernism in general, and is of exceptional practical nature, in addition to its theoretical value, we consider it necessary to dwell on it in particular. The work is composed of three parts: “ The Death of New Architecture ”, “ Methods of Architectural Communication ” and “ The Architecture of Postmodernism ”. In the first part of the book, Jenks critically analyzes the most important provisions of modernism. In the second part of the book, he considers architecture as a language, revealing such features of architecture as metaphor, word, syntax, semantics. The third part is devoted to the analysis of new theories that have emerged in architecture under the influence of postmodernism [ 21] .

he published and disseminated in his 1997 article "  Thirteen Considerations on Postmodern Architecture ."

Postmodernist aesthetics in the context of Italian philosophy

Postmodernism, of course, is not only the intellectual activity of the French and Americans. This intellectual activity also includes thinkers from other nations. Among these thinkers, the famous Italian writer, philosopher, and aesthetician Umberto Eco (1932-2016) holds a special place.

However, this does not mean that Eco, an Italian thinker, created his postmodernist works independently of the French and Americans. In his work “ Notes on the White Margins of the Pages in The Name of the Rose ”, Eco shows that when establishing the general structure of his main work, The Name of the Rose ( 1980), he referred entirely to the concept of rhizome put forward by Deleuze and Guattari [ 16, p ^{. 629]} .

Eco's postmodernist views are presented in artistic form, mainly in his "  The Name of the Rose " and other novels, and in scientific and philosophical form, in his works "  Art and Beauty in

Medieval Aesthetics ", "  Five Essays on Ethics ", "  Six Walks in the Forests of Literature ", and "  The Evolution of Medieval Aesthetics ".

In these works, a postmodernist semiotic analysis of aesthetic values has been carried out. Postmodernist semiotic analysis is based on the re-evaluation and interpretation of traditional aesthetic values. Eco interprets a number of art examples belonging to earlier stages of history or values accepted as objects of beauty on the basis of postmodernist semiotic analysis.

According to Eco, in order to conduct a semiotic analysis of the feeling of beauty during aesthetic judgments, it is important to pay attention to two substantial factors that are closely related to each other, such as direct objective properties and individual subjective psychological impressions. The first of these has an ontological character and covers the direct objective possibilities of beauty. The other point is related to the subjective qualities related to the direct psychological perception of beauty. In other words, in aesthetic studies related to the philosophy of beauty, beauty acts both as the pure inherent nature and regularity of objects and as a product of individual subjective impressions in the process of perception of beauty. According to Eco, it is important to first study the ontological issues related to the problem of beauty. Does beauty have an ontological basis? Should it be understood as a reality with an ontological essence that exists in itself? Does the fact that beauty creates a high sense of satisfaction and pleasure in people when perceived, stem from its objective nature, or are these feelings of satisfaction and pleasure subjective, symbolic states of mental processes occurring in the subject? Although Eco gives extensive space to the objective nature of beauty in this issue, he mainly accepts its symbolic, signified forms of perception or semantic expressiveness [ 17] .

Conclusion

text " that Umberto Eco has extensively analyzed is similar to the concept of "  word " that we encounter in Foucault's " Words and Things."

Like Eco's concept of "  text " and Foucault's concept of "  word ", Lacan's " imagined ", Barthes' "  writing ", Derrida's "  deconstructivism ", Deleuze and Guattari's "  rhizome ", Jencks's "  language of architecture ", Lyotard's "  metanarrative ", Rorty's "  irony ", and Baudrillard's "  simulacrum " also act as a connecting link between the object and the "mental structure" (Lévi-Strauss).

As the most striking example of postmodernist aesthetic thinking in Azerbaijan in fiction, Kamal Abdulla's Incomplete Manuscript (2004) [ 1] c an be cited.

The Heydar Aliyev Center is the most striking object-oriented embodiment of postmodernist aesthetic thought in Azerbaijan. (2012, by British architect of Arab origin Zaha Hadid (1950-2016)) . Other examples include the Flame Towers , Trump Hotel complex, Funicular entrance, Crystal Hall, White City complex administrative building, Mugham Center, Port Baku, JW Marriott Absheron, Azure, Park Boulevard, Oil Company administrative building and Aypara , currently under construction complex , Grand Life and Caspian Island architectural monuments can be noted.