The Global Pluralistic Condition

Félix-Jäger, Steven

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-29706-0_2

The Global Pluralistic Condition

Steven Félix-Jäger²

Chapter
First Online: 03 December 2019

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Abstract

This chapter argues that the postmodern deconstruction of many modern ideals has paved the way for a new era. If postmodernism was the process of tearing a building down block by block, the global pluralistic age is the new building that was constructed out of those old blocks. The global pluralistic age is not an outright rejection of modernity, but a nonlinear trajectory that considers multiple narratives while balancing multiple modernities. We are in a post-historical age that is no longer progressing in a linear fashion toward some artistic telos. Instead, we live in a radically pluralistic world that acknowledges and values global expressions of art, and makes room for all the artistic discoveries of bygone eras. Consequently, this new lateral emphasis has caused the West to open itself back up to a globalized, cosmopolitan, pluralist present.

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Notes

1.
Nicolas Bourriaud, “Altermodern,” in Altermodern: Tate Triennial, Nicholas Bourriaud, Ed. (London: Tate Publishing, 2009), 15.
2.
Glocal is a sociological term that characterizes both local and global considerations when framing a person’s position in the world. This concept will be fleshed out in Chaps. 3 and 4.
3.
David Lyon, Jesus in Disneyland: Religion in Postmodern Times (Cambridge: Polity, 2000), 91. Lyon’s sense of the term aligns with the understanding of postmodernism that sees it as a cultural condition rather than a philosophical movement or position. While postmodernism is distinctive as a philosophical movement, it has grown to address a general sociocultural condition that effects every part of Western society. This view is not heavily contested but is used primarily in sociological contexts.
4.
Nicolas Bourriaud, The Radicant (New York: Lukas & Sternberg, 2009), 12.
5.
Lyon, Jesus in Disneyland, 7.
6.
Lyon, Jesus in Disneyland, 140.
7.
Lyon, Jesus in Disneyland, 11.
8.
Angela Dimitrakaki, “The Spectacle and Its Others: Labor, Conflict, and Art in the Age of Global Capital,” in Jonathan Harris, Ed., Globalization and Contemporary Art (West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 191.
9.
Bourriaud, The Radicant, 13.
10.
Bourriaud, The Radicant, 15.
11.
Jean François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report of Knowledge, Trans. by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1979), xxiii.
12.
Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, xxiii.
13.
James K. A. Smith, Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism?: Taking Derrida, Lyotard, and Foucault to Church (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2006), 69.
14.
Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, xxiv.
15.
Lyotard , The Postmodern Condition, xxiv. Lyotard’s usage of the terms “little narrative” and “metanarrative” are the distinctions that will be used throughout this book. Part II of this book will advocate for a “narrative-hermeneutical ” theory of art to classify and evaluate artworks. Chapter 5 will discuss the “grand narrative thesis” as the modern metanarrative of art production and consumption through disinterested appreciation. This grand narrative will be refuted for the smaller guiding narratives that drive cultural-linguistic systems. So, Lyotard’s critique of the metanarrative will be a starting point for adopting a narrative-hermeneutical theory of art.
16.
Stanley Grenz, A Primer on Postmodernism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996), 40.
17.
Lyon, Jesus in Disneyland, xi.
18.
Bourriaud, “Altermodern,” 8.
19.
Lyon, Jesus in Disneyland, 42.
20.
To this end, George Lindbeck argues for a cultural-linguistic approach to theology that adheres only to its internal logic and language. See George Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1984).
21.
Bourriaud, “Altermodern,” 12.
22.
Bourriaud, “Altermodern,” 12.
23.
Bourriaud, “Altermodern,” 18.
24.
Bourriaud, “Altermodern,” 20.
25.
Jean-François Lyotard, “Music and Postmodernity,” New Formations, Vol. 66 (Spring, 2009), 39.
26.
Lyon, Jesus in Disneyland, 7.
27.
Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 28.
28.
Taylor, A Secular Age, 1.
29.
Taylor, A Secular Age, 2.
30.
Taylor, A Secular Age, 20.
31.
Taylor, A Secular Age, 15.
32.
James K. A. Smith, How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2014), 21.
33.
Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 23.
34.
Taylor, A Secular Age, 25–26.
35.
Taylor, A Secular Age, 35.
36.
Taylor, A Secular Age, 37–38.
37.
Smith, How (Not) to Be Secular, 30.
38.
Taylor, A Secular Age, 42.
39.
Taylor, A Secular Age, 42.
40.
Taylor, A Secular Age, 44.
41.
Smith, How (Not) to Be Secular, 33.
42.
Taylor, A Secular Age, 55.
43.
Taylor, A Secular Age, 60.
44.
Taylor, A Secular Age, 542.
45.
Smith, How (Not) to Be Secular, 93.
46.
Taylor, A Secular Age, 20.
47.
Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries, 1–2.
48.
Smith, How (Not) to Be Secular, x.
49.
Arthur Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace: A Philosophy of Art (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), 44. Danto follows Hegel on his philosophy of history, and applies it as foundational for his philosophy of art.
50.
Arthur Danto, After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 10–11. While Danto is correct in differentiating the terms postmodern and contemporary, I think he is using too limited a definition for postmodern. I prefer Nicolas Bourriaud’s usage of the terms modern and postmodern as tools that allow us to “attribute time-scales to cultural eras,” because this designates a more intuitive sense of the words (Bourriaud , “Altermodern,” 6).
51.
Arthur Danto, The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 97.
52.
Danto, The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art, 97.
53.
Danto, The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art, 103–104.
54.
Danto, After the End of Art, 29.
55.
Arthur Danto, What Art Is (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), 18.
56.
Jonathan Anderson and William Dyrness, Modern Art and the Life of a Culture: The Religious Impulses of Modernism (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2016), 334.
57.
See Alex Danchev, 100 Artists’ Manifestos: From the Futurists to the Stuckists (London: Penguin, 2011).
58.
Danto, The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art, 208–210.
59.
Danto, The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art, 114.
60.
Danto, After the End of Art, 122.
61.
Danto, After the End of Art, 132.
62.
David Carrier, “The Era of Post-historical Art,” Leonardo, Vol. 20, No. 3 (1987), 270.
63.
Arthur Danto, Beyond the Brillo Box: The Visual Arts in Post-Historical Perspective (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1992), 124.
64.
Danto, Beyond the Brillo Box, 129.
65.
Danto, Beyond the Brillo Box, 129.
66.
Danto, Beyond the Brillo Box, 160.
67.
Danto, The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art, 115.
68.
Expanding on this point, the emergence of a global art market and a new global avant-garde is discussed in Chaps. 3 and 4.
69.
Arthur Danto, The Abuse of Beauty: Aesthetics and the Concept of Art (Chicago: Open Court, 2003), xii.
70.
Cooper Lawrence, Cult of Celebrity: What Our Fascination with the Stars Reveal About Us (Guilford: The Globe Pequot Press, 2009), 81.
71.
Danto, Beyond the Brillo Box, 120.
72.
Danto, After the End of Art, 150.
73.
Danto, Beyond the Brillo Box, 248.
74.
Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker, “Misunderstandings and Clarifications,” Notes of Metamodernism (2015), http://www.metamodernism.com/2015/06/03/misunderstandings-and-clarifications/ (accessed, May 27, 2017), 7.
75.
Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker, “Notes on Metamodernism,” Journal of Aesthetics & Culture, Vol. 2 (2010), 5.
76.
Vermeulen and van den Akker, “Notes on Metamodernism,” 5.
77.
Vermeulen and van den Akker, “Notes on Metamodernism,” 5.
78.
Vermeulen and van den Akker, “Notes on Metamodernism,” 5–6.
79.
Vermeulen and van den Akker, “What Meta Means and Does Not Mean,” Notes on Metamodernism (2010), http://www.metamodernism.com/2010/10/14/what-meta-means-and-does-not-mean/ (accessed May 27, 2017), 2.
80.
Vermeulen and van den Akker, “What Meta Means and Does Not Mean,” 2.
81.
Vermeulen and van den Akker, “Misunderstandings and Clarifications,” 3.
82.
Bourriaud’s concept of altermodernism is discussed in detail in Chap. 4 of this volume.
83.
Bourriaud, The Radicant, 2.
84.
Bourriaud, The Radicant, 25.
85.
Bourriaud, “Altermodern,” 2.
86.
Bourriaud, “Altermodern,” 10.
87.
Bourriaud, “Altermodern,” 10.
88.
Bourriaud, “Altermodern,” 12.
89.
Bourriaud, “Altermodern,” 3.
90.
Bourriaud, “Altermodern,” 4.
91.
Bourriaud, “Altermodern,” 4.
92.
Vermeulen and van den Akker, “Notes on Metamodernism,” 4.
93.
Hans Belting and Andrea Buddensieg, “From Art World to Art Worlds,” in Hans Belting, Andrea Buddensieg, and Peter Weibel, Eds., The Global Contemporary and the Rise of New Art Worlds (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2013), 28.
94.
Michael Wilkinson, “What’s Global about Global Pentecostalism?” Journal of Pentecostal Theology, Vol. 17 (2008), 97.
95.
Richard Jenkins, “Disenchantment, Enchantment and Re-enchantment: Max Webber at the Millennium,” Max Weber Studies, Vol. 1 (2000), 16.
96.
Lyon, Jesus in Disneyland, 64.
97.
Lyon, Jesus in Disneyland, 123.
98.
Bourriaud, The Radicant, 18.
99.
John Inazu, Confident Pluralism: Surviving and Thriving Through Deep Difference (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2016), 7.
100.
Mark Anderson and Achilleas Galatsidas, “Global Humanitarian Aid Spending Soars to Record High,” The Guardian, (2014), https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/poverty-matters/2014/jun/24/global-humanitarian-aid-spending-2013-syria-south-sudan-typhoon-haiyan (accessed 5/29/2017).
101.
“The Global, Socially Conscious Consumer,” Global, (2012), http://www.nielsen.com/us/en/insights/news/2012/the-global-socially-conscious-consumer.html (accessed May 29, 2017).

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Assistant Professor and Chair of the Worship Arts and Media program, Life Pacific University, San Dimas, CA, USA
Steven Félix-Jäger

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Félix-Jäger, S. (2020). The Global Pluralistic Condition. In: Art Theory for a Global Pluralistic Age. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29706-0_2

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29706-0_2
Published: 03 December 2019
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-29705-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-29706-0
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