Helen Pluckrose: Postmodernism and its impact, explained
Foucault’s argument
that knowledge is historically contingent must itself be historically
contingent, and one wonders why Derrida bothered to explain the infinite
malleability of texts at such length if I could read his entire body of work
and claim it to be a story about bunny rabbits
Those who are obsessed by language finally come to the conviction that there is nothing but interpretation: Stanley Rosen in Hermeneutics as Politics
Postmodernism, most
simply, is an artistic and philosophical movement which began in France in the
1960s and produced bewildering art and even more bewildering “theory.” It
drew on avant-garde and surrealist art and earlier philosophical ideas,
particularly those of Nietzsche and Heidegger, for its anti-realism and
rejection of the concept of the unified and coherent individual. It reacted
against the liberal humanism of the modernist artistic and intellectual
movements, which its proponents saw as naïvely universalizing a western,
middle-class and male experience.
It rejected philosophy
which valued ethics, reason and clarity with the same accusation.
Structuralism, a movement which (often over-confidently) attempted to analyze
human culture and psychology according to consistent structures of
relationships, came under attack. Marxism, with its understanding of society
through class and economic structures was regarded as equally rigid and simplistic.
Above all, postmodernists attacked science and its goal of attaining objective
knowledge about a reality which exists independently of human perceptions which
they saw as merely another form of constructed ideology dominated by bourgeois,
western assumptions. Decidedly left-wing, postmodernism had both a nihilistic
and a revolutionary ethos which resonated with a post-war, post-empire
zeitgeist in the West. As postmodernism continued to develop and diversify, its
initially stronger nihilistic deconstructive phase became secondary (but still
fundamental) to its revolutionary “identity politics” phase.
It has been a matter
of contention whether postmodernism is a reaction against modernity. The
modern era is the period of history which saw Renaissance Humanism, the
Enlightenment, the Scientific Revolution and the development of liberal values
and human rights; the period when Western societies gradually came to value
reason and science over faith and superstition as routes to knowledge, and
developed a concept of the person as an individual member of the human race
deserving of rights and freedoms rather than as part of various collectives
subject to rigid hierarchical roles in society.
The Encyclopaedia
Britannica says postmodernism “is largely a reaction against the
philosophical assumptions and values of the modern period of Western
(specifically European) history” whilst the Stanford Encyclopaedia of
Philosophy denies this and says “Rather, its differences lie within
modernity itself, and postmodernism is a continuation of modern thinking in
another mode.” I’d suggest the difference lies in whether we see modernity in
terms of what was produced or what was destroyed. If we see the essence of
modernity as the development of science and reason as well as humanism and
universal liberalism, postmodernists are opposed to it. If we see modernity as
the tearing down of structures of power including feudalism, the Church,
patriarchy, and Empire, postmodernists are attempting to continue it, but their
targets are now science, reason, humanism and liberalism. Consequently, the
roots of postmodernism are inherently political and revolutionary, albeit in a
destructive or, as they would term it, deconstructive way.
The term “postmodern”
was coined by Jean-François Lyotard in his 1979 book, The Postmodern
Condition. He defined the postmodern condition as “an incredulity
towards metanarratives.” A metanarrative is a wide-ranging and cohesive
explanation for large phenomena. Religions and other totalizing ideologies are
metanarratives in their attempts to explain the meaning of life or all of
society’s ills. Lyotard advocated replacing these with “mininarratives” to get
at smaller and more personal “truths.” He addressed Christianity and Marxism in
this way but also science.
******
Michel Foucault’s work
is also centered on language and relativism although he applied this to history
and culture. He called this approach “archeology” because he saw himself as
“uncovering” aspects of historical culture through recorded discourses (speech
which promotes or assumes a particular view). For Foucault, discourses control
what can be “known” and in different periods and places, different systems of
institutional power control discourses. Therefore, knowledge is a direct product
of power. “In any given culture and at any given moment, there is always only
one ‘episteme’ that defines the conditions of possibility of all knowledge,
whether expressed in theory or silently invested in a practice.”
Furthermore, people
themselves were culturally constructed. “The individual, with his identity and
characteristics, is the product of a relation of power exercised over bodies,
multiplicities, movements, desires, forces.” He leaves almost no room for
individual agency or autonomy. As Christopher Butler says, Foucault “relies on
beliefs about the inherent evil of the individual’s class position, or
professional position, seen as ‘discourse’, regardless of the morality of his
or her individual conduct.” He presents medieval feudalism and modern liberal
democracy as equally oppressive, and advocates criticizing and attacking
institutions to unmask the “political violence that has always exercised itself
obscurely through them.”
We see in Foucault the
most extreme expression of cultural relativity read through structures of power
in which shared humanity and individuality are almost entirely absent. Instead,
people are constructed by their position in relation to dominant cultural ideas
either as oppressors or oppressed. Judith Butler drew on Foucault for her
foundational role in queer theory focusing on the culturally constructed nature
of gender, as did Edward Said in his similar role in post-colonialism and
“Orientalism” and Kimberlé Crenshaw in her development of “intersectionality”
and advocacy of identity politics. We see too the equation of language with
violence and coercion and the equation of reason and universal liberalism with oppression.
It was Jacques Derrida
who introduced the concept of “deconstruction,” and he too argued for cultural
constructivism and cultural and personal relativity. He focused even more
explicitly on language. Derrida’s best-known pronouncement “There is no
outside-text” relates to his rejection of the idea that words refer to anything
straightforwardly. Rather, “there are only contexts without any center of
absolute anchoring.”
***********
The logical problem of
self-referentiality has been pointed out to postmodernists by philosophers
fairly constantly but it is one they have yet to address convincingly. As
Christopher Butler points out, “the plausibility of Lyotard’s claim for the
decline of metanarratives in the late 20th century ultimately depends upon an
appeal to the cultural condition of an intellectual minority.” In other words,
Lyotard’s claim comes directly from the discourses surrounding him in his
bourgeois academic bubble and is, in fact, a metanarrative towards which he is
not remotely incredulous.
Equally, Foucault’s argument that knowledge is
historically contingent must itself be historically contingent, and one wonders
why Derrida bothered to explain the infinite malleability of texts at such
length if I could read his entire body of work and claim it to be a story about
bunny rabbits with the same degree of authority.
This is, of course,
not the only criticism commonly made of postmodernism. The most glaring problem
of epistemic cultural relativity has been addressed by philosophers and
scientists. The philosopher, David Detmer, in Challenging
Postmodernism, says
“Consider this
example, provided by Erazim Kohak, ‘When I try, unsuccessfully, to squeeze a tennis
ball into a wine bottle, I need not try several wine bottles and several tennis
balls before, using Mill’s canons of induction, I arrive inductively at the
hypothesis that tennis balls do not fit into wine bottles’… We are now in a
position to turn the tables on [postmodernist claims of cultural relativity]
and ask, ‘If I judge that tennis balls do not fit into wine bottles, can you
show precisely how it is that my gender, historical and spatial location,
class, ethnicity, etc., undermine the objectivity of this judgement?”
However, he has not
found postmodernists committed to explaining their reasoning and describes a
bewildering conversation with postmodern philosopher, Laurie Calhoun,
“When I had
occasion to ask her whether or not it was a fact that giraffes are taller than
ants, she replied that it was not a fact, but rather an article of religious
faith in our culture.”
Physicists Alan Sokal
and Jean Bricmont address the same problem from the perspective of science in Fashionable
Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science:
“Who could now
seriously deny the ‘grand narrative’ of evolution, except someone in the grip
of a far less plausible master narrative such as Creationism? And who would
wish to deny the truth of basic physics? The answer was, ‘some
postmodernists.’”
and
“There is something
very odd indeed in the belief that in looking, say, for causal laws or a
unified theory, or in asking whether atoms really do obey the laws of quantum
mechanics, the activities of scientists are somehow inherently ‘bourgeois’ or
‘Eurocentric’ or ‘masculinist’, or even ‘militarist.'”
Read more:
https://areomagazine.com/2017/03/27/how-french-intellectuals-ruined-the-west-postmodernism-and-its-impact-explained/see also
Andrew Calcutt: The surprising origins of ‘post-truth’ – and how it was spawned by the liberal left
Janet Afary and Kevin B. Anderson - Revisiting Foucault and the Iranian Revolution
Farewell to reality