More than one person has told me that postmodernism is dead. I do not share that position. Recently, I conducted a quick scan of books and journal articles that were published in the past several years (of course one can find postmodern theory going back to the 1960s or even earlier, but I wanted to keep the search current), and found a quick sampling of the following titles. For books, I found Pixar’s Boy Stories: Masculinity in a Postmodern Age, Postmodern Theory and Blade Runner, and Ecofeminism as Politics: Nature, Marx and the Postmodern. For academic journal articles, I found these: Heidegger’s Wrong Turn (Heidegger is sometimes used as a stepping stone to postmodernism), Postmodern Truth?, and the oddest of all, Toward a Postmodern Pragmatic Discourse Semioethics for Brain Injury Care: Empirically Driven Group Inquiry as a Dialogical Practice in Pursuit of the Peircean Aesthetic Ideal of ‘Reasonableness.’ This is a small selection, of course, but the point is, postmodernism is far from dead. To augment this assertion, search for terms like “deconstruction,” “poststructralism,” and “critical theory” in any academic database and you will find more than enough articles speaking to postmodernism’s current state.
But what is postmodernism and why do I think it is alive and well, against the opinions of my respected friends and colleagues? According to philosopher Ed Miller, postmodernism is “a contemporary interdisciplinary movement stressing the pragmatic, historically relative, and theory-laden character of judgments and knowledge” (Questions That Matter, pg. 589). Bruce Thornton explains postmodernism as a cultural and intellectual mood that denies “a stable creative order that can substitute for the fragmented social world and provide an alternative foundation for human meaning and identity,” for the postmodernist, “there are no foundations, neither for human meaning, identity, art, nor morality. Everything is fragmented and free-floating, including artistic forms, which are now completely open to unbridled experimentation, and the individual, who is no longer psychologically integrated but rather a bundle of neuroses, complexes, and multiple identities battered by indifferent cosmic, historical, and social forces” (Humanities Handbook, pg. 101). Postmodernism, therefore, encompasses a whole host of critical theories such as poststructuralism, postcolonialism, Marxism, and various literary interpretive schools generally based on racial, class, gender, and social justice issues. The most popular postmodern theorists at least during the 1990s were Rorty, Lyotard, Derrida, and Foucault. Many others can be cited as well. One can go back further, of course, and discover that in various ways Hegel, Nietzsche, Marx, Dewey, William James, and Heidegger were forerunners of postmodernism and one of the reasons I believe postmodernism is alive is that most academics have been trained in schools of thought founded by one or more of these thinkers. (I think it is a legitimate line of inquiry to ask what genuine needs of contemporary society help to explain the prevalence and acceptance of these philosophical doctrines. But that will be a topic for another post.) The idea that there are no facts, just interpretations, and all interpretations are equally valid—is part of our current postmodern condition. These core convictions of the last 50 years have not changed. Going further back in time, it is easy to see how Kant’s idealism, Hegel’s historicism, Nietzsche’s perspectivalism and even Kierkegaard’s subjective epistemology all share a postmodern anti-realism, and frankly, a conceptually incoherent approach to truth and reality. In the larger cultural and intellectual sphere, however, I don’t really see individuals or society comprehending or assimilating the logical implications of the law of non-contradiction or accepting absolutes in their lives, even when everyone functions from the assumptions of absolutes in all aspects of reality and the world (even if, ironically, the only absolute that one can accept is that there are no absolutes). In our current postmodern (or should I say postphilosophical?) cultural climate it is often forgotten that the cars we drive, the building we work and live in, the technology we use and consume, and the very economic lives we lead are built on and created by very strict standards.
There are, however, some interesting cases to be explored regarding the failure of postmodernism in some fields, and this might explain why my friends think postmodernism as an academic fad is over. It is true that some fields have returned to a common sense understanding of reality. Take the field of literature, for example. After a period from about the 1970s to 2000, when experimentation with plot structure was all the rage, imaginative literature returned to narrative and largely looks like the structure Aristotle set out in his poetics. Admittedly, this was largely due to fact that people stopped buying novels without a plot or were in other ways inscrutable. But even fields such as anthropology and sociology have experienced some misgivings of postmodernism. When I was a graduate student completing my second master’s degree, I attended a lecture by a senior anthropologist who also taught in the Honors School of the institution I was attending. This instructor gave a decidedly structural view of social order (this was a younger professor, not an older one or of a conservative bent. He was simply well versed in postmodernism but rejected it). After the lecture, I told this professor that many poststructuralists would have been sorely disappointed with his lecture. He responded to me quickly that a poststructuralist is someone who has never recovered from a head injury. The point is not that it is necessary to be intellectually mean-spirited to postmodernists but rather poststructuralism is not the final court of appeal in some academic circles. When a literature professor tells me that postmodernism is dead, what she is really saying is that the whole experimentation with plot and confused narrative is over. On the other hand, however, the racial, class, and gender struggles which are so popular today and really have their foundations in late modernity (just read Hemingway, Faulkner, or Fitzgerald on these issues) are now the adopted children of postmodernism. As an academic appellation, postmodernism may not be as fashionable as it once was. Nonetheless, the idea that all reality is historically and culturally determined is far from absent—both in academics and popular culture.
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