2020 JETIR February 2020, Volume 7, Issue 2 Struggles Of .

2020 JETIR February 2020, Volume 7, Issue 2www.jetir.org (ISSN-2349-5162)So again, what is at stake with postmodernism is a severe scepticism of the attainability of truth (as a‘metaphysical totality’) and with that “the idea and ideal of ‘objectivity’” which lies at the very centre of“professional historical venture” (Novick quoted in Jenkins 1997: 11). In this context, one cannot avoid referringto the French philosopher and social theorist Michel Foucault who, in a lecture given at the University ofCalifornia at Berkeley in 1983, confronted his audience with the following questions:Who is able to tell the truth? What are the moral, the ethical, and the spiritual conditions which entitle someoneto present himself as, and to be considered as, a truth-teller?” About what topics is it important to tell the truth?(About the world? About nature? About the city? About behavior? About man? ) What are the consequences oftelling the truth? [ ]And finally: what is the relation between the activity of truth-telling and the exercise ofpower, or should these activities be completely independent and kept separate? What Foucault does here is toproblematize not truth itself but the process of its installation by and through our conceptualization of it. To him,truth and knowledge are ‘home-made’ since conceptualized in relation to the historical, social and politicalcircumstances that prevail in the moment of their articulation. Whenever someone claims to be a truth-teller, heor she does so while being part of fixed socio-cultural and political entities which ‘institutionalize’ his or herways of perceiving and attaining knowledge, “for we always act and use language in the context of politicodiscursive conditions” (Hutcheon 1991: 105).Effects on literary output & social realitiesConsequently, postmodern theories of knowledge do not only deal with how we “order, configurate, assembleand display knowledge (in verbal written or image form)” (Brown 2005: 9). They also call attention to how wesubjectively experience knowledge and in how far our perceptions are governed by those societal entities (peopleand institutions) with power, which exclude and include, forbid and allow what is to be known and what is not.Applied to the concept of history, this means that there can never be only one history or one truth. On the contrary,there must be a huge variety of histories of ‘the other’, of the outcasts, of those marginalized by the prevailingsocietal power structures since historians, too, are subjective interpreters rather than objectifying researchers.With this in mind, Foucault demands that historians should not pursue an absolute (scientific) truth shiningthrough the evidence of primary sources but rather aim at analysing how and why these sources come into beingin the first place. They “should examine the linguistic basis (i.e. narrative statements) that constitute s history,rather than correspond to, or unproblematically represent, the real world of things, that is, to abandon the searchfor original meaning”.In making a case against all kinds of totalizing concepts of knowledge and meaning Foucault argues in line withother postmodern thinkers such as Jean-François Lyotard who, in the context of his thesis of the “postmoderncondition” (Lyotard in Jenkins 1997: 36) of knowledge, defines “postmodernism as incredulity towardmetanarrative” (ibid.) - metanarrative understood “in terms of the production and transmission of meaning, thatJETIR2002460Journal of Emerging Technologies and Innovative Research (JETIR) www.jetir.org362

2020 JETIR February 2020, Volume 7, Issue 2www.jetir.org (ISSN-2349-5162)is [in terms of] a conceptual instrument of representation” (Readings 1991: 48). To Lyotard, metanarratives are“a form of ideology which function violently to suppress and control the individual subject by imposing a falsesense of ‘totality’ and ‘universality’ [of meaning] on a set of disparate things, actions and events” (Nicol 2009:11), among them of course history. In other words, metanarratives aspire to unite the disparate and subjectivediscourses of a culture into totalizing concepts which claim to account for absolutes of (past) human life andexperience. In the tradition of the Enlightenment narrative, “in which the hero of knowledge works toward a goodethico- political end - universal peace” (Lyotard in Jenkins 1997: 36), metanarratives thereby aim at legitimating(social) knowledge and the governing institutions behind it, while creating objectifying prerequisites for a societalconsensus which foreshadows “the end of freedom and of thought” (Bertens 1995: 127). According to Lyotard,postmodernism rejects these metanarratives and claims “that the stakes have changed once we recognize thatpolitics, art, history and knowledge don’t fit together anymore within the patterns of [ ] rational discourseestablished by the Enlightenment” (Readings 1991: 48/49). Like Foucault, he calls for a greater awareness of theinstability and relativity of all kinds of representation and demands to engage with ‘the other’ excluded bymetanarratives, namely the ‘little narratives’ which do not intend to unlock absolute (cultural) meanings but ratherwork to install a dissensus, one allowing “us to experience freedom and to think, that is, to extent our possibilities”(Bertens 1995: 127).Ideological moorings of BarnesHowever, history ‘as we know it’ and as it is taught at schools and universities rather works into the direction ofconsensus and can easily be presented as an if not the prime example of western metanarrative since it stillincorporates the “dream of a ‘total history’” born from the “mastery of a documentary repertoire [aimed at]furnishing the reader with a vicarious sense of [ ] control in a world out of joint” (LaCapra 1985: 25). Yet, eventraditional(ist) historians such as Arthur Marwick (1995) have to admit that “history can no more form one unifiedbody of knowledge than can the natural sciences” (12) or any science at all. History theory has actually undergonea number of changes and transformations since the time of the Enlightenment and if one investigates in thearchives, numerous attempts can be found which entertain the thought that “no enterprise as laborious and longdrawn-out as historical research can be pursued without deeply held convictions as to its purpose andsignificance” (Tosh 2000: 1) and that “our response to a particular work of history will inevitably be influencedby its writer’s stance” (ibid.). Postmodernism here asks: But if historiography is such a subjective and selfreflective craft, is it not practically fiction? And if so, “if one treated the historian’s text as what it manifestlywas, namely a rhetorical composition” (White 1995: 240), would this not mean “that historians effectivelyconstructed the subject of their discourse in and by writing?”.JETIR2002460Journal of Emerging Technologies and Innovative Research (JETIR) www.jetir.org363

2020 JETIR February 2020, Volume 7, Issue 2www.jetir.org (ISSN-2349-5162)This postmodern problematization of the fictive character of history writing and of language as a tool ofrepresentation has to be put in the context of the so-called ‘linguistic turn’ at the beginning of the 20th centurywhich, on the basis of Saussurian linguistics, came to be one of the most influential paradigm shifts in the historyof science (cf. Schäfer 2009: 29). Saussure, whose oeuvre can be seen as the origin of structuralist linguistics,basically argues that language is a closed system independent of outer substances, which is based upon afunctional sign-structure. This structure is composed of signifiers (words, visual images, etc.) and signifieds (the‘things’ or concepts called to mind by the signifier) that are arbitrarily put together and, therefore, make senseonly in the context of their linguistic ‘code-system’. So when someone talks about a certain ‘real world’- referent,say a book, he or she can only be understood by means of the linguistic code determining the relation betweenthe word ‘book’ (the signifier) and the (culturally generated) concept (the signified) it evokes in us - even withoutthe actual referent at hand (cf. Nicol 2009: 7). In any discourse - be it ideological, literary or artistic -any word’smeaning, then, does not derive from the word itself but from its structural context since it “only exists within itsmeaning system as a product of the interaction of semantic elements” (Russel 1993: 295/296). Consequently,meaning becomes the “Ergebnis von Differenzen innerhalb eines Spiels [der Wörter], das sich nach Außenabgrenzt [ ], um in sich ein geschlossenes System von Sinn bilden zu können“ (Schäfer 2009: 31).Intellectual influences on BarnesPost-structuralists go even further in complicating the matter by criticizing and re - inscribing Saussure’s theories.Within his assumption of the sign’s separation into concept and sound image, for example, they claim to havedetected a kind of metaphysical ‘logocentrism’ (cf. Newton 1988: 147) that, according to Jacques Derrida, istypical of the Western thinking tradition which promulgates “that meaning is conceived as existing independentlyof the language in which it is communicated and is thus not subject to the [free]play of language” (ibid.).Following Derrida’s criticism of Saussure, this distinction implies (within the existence of the signified) theexistence of an original or transcendental concept that stands for itself and, therefore, operates outside ofdiscourse. Derrida is highly sceptical of the possibility of such a “point of presence, [such] a fixed origin” (Derrida1988: 149) because it supports the metaphysical presupposition of “a truth shining through from behind the signs”(Voss and Schütze 1989: 137) and the possibility of an “extralingual, intelligible logos” (ibid.) which, in poststructuralist thinking, simply does not exist. Derrida states that there are no certainties, no fixed meanings; thereare only discourses and/or ‘texts’ which are all “implicated in an endless intertextuality” (Waugh 1992: 6),drawing from “innumerable centres of culture” (Barthes 1977:146). Every signified is built upon and constructedthrough a signifier a

Julian Barnes is an ironist, a post-modern fiction writer and literary critic who occasionally moonlights in the crime and mystery genre. Julian Barnes is a contemporary English writer of Postmodernism in literature. He was more famous for his prosaic style, who was born in Leister on 19 January 1946 and was educated at the city of