Postmodernism

A movement encompassing art, philosophy, linguistics, and science, postmodernism is marked by fundamental skepticism about truth and distrust of the political implications of language and action. Postmodernism may be considered a philosophy or the mood or condition of an era. Alternatively, postmodernism might be seen as a logical (perhaps inevitable) development in human understanding that began with ancient Greek, Chinese, and Muslim attempts to demystify the natural world and progressed toward a reaction to 18th-century Enlightenment and modern insistence on empiricism for economic, physical, and social engineering. Postmodernists observed that in the effort to order, control, and improve human life through religion, science, and government, some people prospered and some suffered—that some always suffer, that matters cannot be arranged to ensure the good of all, and that what constitutes the “social good” is determined in large part by those empowered by society, who can manipulate “knowledge” for their own ends.

First used to describe a style of painting considered more modern than Impressionism, the term was applied in literary criticism in the 1960s to new literary styles. In the 1980s, invigorated by feminist thinking, French poststructuralists announced “a crisis of representation,” signifying their doubts about language's capacity to describe reality and about received truths and “a crisis of legitimation,” signifying their distrust of authority and science. As modern art had reacted against representational truth by offering instead allusions to that which cannot be directly represented, postmodern philosophers reacted to the hidden relationship between truth and power.

Among the prominent poststructuralists, Foucault objected to the presumption of authority by those [Page 325](e.g., propagandists, historians, ethnographers—and, by implication, evaluators) who purport to tell the stories of others, materially diminishing others' rights. Derrida exposed the author behind the text, insisting that text—and, like Wittgenstein, Derrida said that all is text—must be deconstructed to reveal hidden and unintended agendas and to recognize how language constructs self, other, and reality. Lyotard criticized metanarratives that position real persons as nameless obscurities in such grand epics as those of Christianity and capitalism. Beaudrillard decried hyperreality, in which technology's capacity for unlimited reproduction of objects and images blurred the distinction between the real and unreal and reconstituted persons as media projections.

Postmodernist doubt aligns with poststructural recognition that language plays an important role in constructing reality and also with constructivist recognition that each person constructs an idiosyncratic understanding of the world such that objective reality, if it exists, is comparatively irrelevant. Postmodernism is a reaction against the inevitable discrepancies between tidy theory and messy reality and against science's failure to produce unequivocal truth and its record of such disasters as thalidomide deformities and the nuclear nightmare. Postmodernism opposes the use of science to legitimate privilege and power, opposes claims of proof for what is merely preference, opposes nominal or enforced consensus that marginalizes minority views and individual experience.

Extreme versions of postmodernism disavow not only the power imbalances evident today but also strategies for improvement, as even the most well-intentioned altruists have failed to create Utopia, producing instead new marginalizations and brutalizations. Extreme postmodernism spurns not only religion, history, and authorship but also rationality, criteriality, politics, and empiricism. Postmodernism's radical take on diversity denies the legitimacy of any particular ideology or strategy, leaving only one course—disengagement from the public sphere and retreat into the personal through either play or exile.

...