Jon R. Snyder

Bio: Jon R. Snyder is an academic researcher. The author has contributed to research in topics: Hermeneutics & Nihilism. The author has an hindex of 4, co-authored 5 publications receiving 448 citations.

The End of Modernity: Nihilism and Hermeneutics in Postmodern Culture

Abstract: Gianni Vattimo reexamines the roots of modernism and postmodernism in Nietzsche, Benjamin, and Heidegger. Exploring the links between concepts of nihilism and destiny in nineteenth-century humanism, Vattimo follows these trends in aesthetic and scientific theory from Benjamin to Bloch, Ricoeur, and Kuhn.

Myth and the Fate of Secularization

Abstract: Philosophical thought about the presence of myth in the contemporary world cannot be founded upon an essential or metaphysical definition of myth. This is due in part to the fact that the dream of philosophy as a rigorous science has been definitively ausgetr?umt. More specifically, though, it is due to the fact that the theme of myth itself appears to us today in an uncertain light. No satisfactory theory of myth ? one that would define its nature and its connection with other forms of

Liberatory Postmodernism and the Reenchantment of Consumption

Abstract: In this article, we elaborate on various key ideas about consumption and consumer from a theoretical position that we have labeled "liberatory postmodernism." By unmasking the limitations of modernism that have to do with the onerous nature of its metanarratives and narrow conventionalism, we show that postmodern developments offer alternate visions of consumption processes that have an emancipatory potential. The analysis in our article begins with a discussion of the philosophical foundations of modernism and postmodernism followed by a cultural critique of modernism-exposing, for example, the modernist distinction between production and consumption and the privileging of production over consumption. We demonstrate how postmodernism is concerned with the reversing of the conditions of modernity and with a wide range of issues regarding the construction of the subject (i.e., the consumer), the role of the symbolic in consumption processes, the notion of the spectacularization of life, the creation of the hyperreal, and the cultural signification of fragmentation. We conclude the article with a proposal for an epistemology of consumption that subsumes scientific knowledge under a broader category of narrative knowledge and recognizes multivocality of consumption forms.

From Modern to Postmodern Organizational Analysis

Abstract: The terms 'modem' and 'postmodern' have become common currency in intel lectual debates within organization studies. The postmodern is variously inter preted as an 'epoch', a 'perspective', or a new 'paradigm' of thought. In this paper the author argues that what distinguishes the postmodern from the modem is a 'style of thinking' which eschews the uncritical use of common organizational terms such as 'organizations', 'individuals', 'environment', 'structure', and 'culture', etc. These terms refer to the existence of social entit ies and attributes within a modernist problematic. This is because a modernist thought style relies on a 'strong' ontology (the study of the nature and essence of things) of being which privileges thinking in terms of discrete phenomenal 'states', static 'attributes' and sequential 'events'. Postmodern thinking, on the other hand, privileges a 'weak' ontology of becoming which emphasizes a transient, ephemeral and emergent reality. From this thought style, reality is deemed to be...

Ethnography and the Meta‐Narratives of Modernity1

Abstract: Current attempts to increase the relevance of sociocultural anthropology encourage anthropologists to engage in the study of modernity. In this discourse dominated by sociologists, the contribution of anthropology is often to reveal cultural diversity in globalization, leading to the notion of multiple modernities. Yet such ethnographic accounts draw upon familiar sociological abstractions such as time‐space compression, commodification, individualization, disenchantment, and reenchantment. This article shows how an underlying meta‐narrative preempts social scientific argument by making shifts in analytical scales look natural, as in the alleged need to “situate” the particular in “wider” contexts. This analytical procedure undermines what is unique in the ethnographic method—its reflexivity, which gives subjects authority in determining the contexts of their beliefs and practices. Two ethnographic case studies are presented to support this argument, one from Melanesia on current interests in white people...

Cultural Criminology: The Long and Winding Road

Abstract: This article will offer a thumbnail sketch of some of the key theoretical antecedents that have underscored the cultural analysis of crime and criminality in both the United States and Britain. It ...