"when I depict postpluralism as a specific ethos, I am not suggesting that postpluralism ‘goes beyond’ modern pluralism in an epochal and/or structural sense. 2 This disposition contrasts with pluralism, yet, it is still dependent on it. It is this complicated relationship that I aim to capture with the conceptual constellation of the ‘postplural attitude’: I argue that the concept ‘postplural’ highlights a controversy with and a dependency on pluralism. Simultaneously, the concept ‘attitude’ indicates an awareness of being a specific and situated ethos. In this sense a postplural attitude both suggests an affinity for a certain mode of being and offers an intellectual challenge in the Foucauldian sense." (51)
"The idea that a constant exists in the relation between subjectivity and ontology can be seen as an important historical source for the development of modern pluralism—via perspectivism. Perspectivism is basically the idea that different viewpoints afford certain visions of the world, or even that they constitute the realities they envision. In this sense any ‘perspective on reality’ exists ‘on a par’ with other perspectives. Accordingly, any particular world-view is exactly one out of many, a plurality of possible views. This point is of cardinal importance for pluralism. Either perspectives act as constants in relation to a variable world, or the world is constant in relation to variable perspectives. In either case, different world-views are constructed that can then be compared to other word-views. Thus, perspectivism diversifies and pluralizes the world. As such, it is based on the idea of the existence of constants: distinguishable perspectives, or an objective reality. Thus, the idea that something basic or solid constitutes our ontologies and conceptualisations of the self does not oppose pluralism. Rather, this idea is one of its important sources.
Postplurality challenges exactly this idea of constancy, inherent in perspectivism and pluralism. The idea of ‘perspectives’ as such is problematized and fragmented. Another characteristic of the postplural attitude is that it ceases to imagine a universal constant in the relation between subjectivity and ontology." (52–53)
"This interdependence, in my view, is related to the infeasibility of moving entirely beyond important modern conceptualizations. At the very least, it is very hard to imagine that they will stop impacting how we think. Thus, adopting a postplural attitude is not a call for radical transgression, nor is the aim to dissolve a modern attitude. Rather, it is a call for experimentation involving the displacement of modern demarcations, a matter of rethinking dominant conceptualizations." (72)
