What is Postmodernism?
An all-star response
“What exactly is postmodernism, anyway?” a friend asked as we waited for tacos. “Give me the simple answer.”
“There's not a simple answer,” I said, before flailing around for a definition.
“It's this idea that language changes reality,” I said.
But that wasn't right. That makes it sound like a benign positive thinking movement. Postmodernism is much more dangerous than that.
“It's a rejection of all 'structures,'” I said. “As in, marriage, church, school, government, logic, reason, justice, truth.”
I thought a moment, stirring my iced tea.
“Oh, and postmodernists have a problem with binaries,” I added. “They believe nothing is harmful on its own; the harm comes when we name a thing and classify it in opposition to something else.”
My inability to concisely articulate the collection of ideas commonly called postmodernism inspired me to ask some smart, thoughtful people in my network to weigh in. I asked for their off-the-cuff impression, not some well-researched essay. Their responses, for your edification, are presented here.
“I’d say postmodernism is extreme skepticism of objective reality and universal truth. It’s profoundly cynical, in that the critical theories it has spawned promise some sort of liberation but only seem to lead to nihilism, confusion, and disharmony. But its radicalism continues to seduce. Rather then creating new knowledge, postmodernism is an endless interrogation of existing knowledge, leading nowhere. It allows theorists to mentally masturbate for hours, years, decades, before they die.”
-Ben Appel, journalist, award-winning creative nonfiction writer, substacker, author of the forthcoming Cis White Gay: The Making of a Gender Heretic
“Postmodernism: a way of viewing the world simultaneously through the lens of various identities/categories and through the lens that all identities/categories are constructed and malleable, whether that applies to people or art or architecture. A divorce from history, a co-optation of it, a reinterpretation of it, an erasure of it. It is living in the future.”
-Lisa Selin Davis, journalist, author of Tomboy: The Surprising History and Future of Girls Who Dare to Be Different and other books, substacker
“I remember learning about postmodernism in college as a non-traditional student in the mid-to-late 1990s. It was introduced as a way to "deconstruct meta-narratives" (i.e. that positioned heterosexuality as superior to homosexuality), and it cast the nuclear family as oppressive and championed "lifting up other ways of knowing" that put formerly "alternative" ideas (subjective truth) on par with objective truth. As a thirty-something-year-old dyke engaged in on-campus and off-campus activism, I partially, but not entirely embraced these new (to me) ideas. I appreciated the desire to normalize homosexuality in a society that denigrated, demonized, or dismissed gay men and lesbian women and denied us the right to formalize our partnerships (get married). However, most people I knew who entirely bought into postmodernism also embraced ideas I did not support, such as demolishing the US military and destabilizing the nuclear family, as a US Coast Guard veteran who was (is) proud to have served my country and a staunch supporter of strong, healthy family structures.”
-Zander Keig, social worker, co-founder of the LGBTQ Caregiver Center, motivational speaker, host of The Umbrella Hour radio show, author, editor of Letters For My Brothers: Traditional Wisdom in Retrospect and other anthologies
“Postmodernism is basically the idea that all truth (not just "moral" truth) is relative and culturally determined - and that the truth claims people make are actually just covers for their selfish pursuit of power.
This philosophy is, of course, horse shit. If there is no objective factual basis for claims, why should we believe anything the pomo advocate says? Beyond that, Blacks or liberal feminists are certainly as powerful as (say) Appalachian whites: Why should anyone simply accept our 'power-seeking' claims over theirs?”
-Wilfred Reilly, political scientist, co-host of Cut the Bull podcast, author of Hate Crime Hoax: How the Left is Selling a Fake Race War
“Postmodernism denies —and obscures through use of incomprehensible language—the existence of material objective reality in favor of performance and subjectivity—there is no objective truth and everyone’s opinions are equally valid. By denying reality, it also obscures structural oppression based on class, sex, and race, and thus, despite its radical verbiage, is a retreat from radical politics (Marxist or feminist), reinforcing the status quo.”
-Ann Menasche, civil rights attorney, founding member of Feminists in Struggle (FIST), author of Leaving the Life: Lesbians, Ex-Lesbians and the Heterosexual Imperative.
“Essentially it says that value, be it moral, artistic, scientific, societal, etc., is relative, hence there is no such thing as hierarchy. Nothing can be proven to be of more import than anything else... The chaos that it serves up is convenient only for those who would avoid all forms of accountability. What it does not take into account are the destructive consequences of its nihilism. It courts chaos and mediocrity, dismembering culture with a breezy indifference that is staggering.” (Quote taken from a separate conversation.)
-Gabrielle Bakker, multiple award winning painter whose “beautifully executed” work, artist William Bailey has said, “has a clarity and light rarely seen in our time."
“Most of the people I run into who embrace some form of postmodern ideology, whether it's gender ideology or queer theory, seem to have a real difficult time agreeing on what is real and what isn't. Because if something is real and it offends them, they try to come up with a bunch of definitions that make [it] unreal.” (Quote taken from a separate conversation.)
-Corinna Cohn, activist, co-host of Heterodorx podcast, editorialist, substacker.
And lastly, a historical perspective by science writer Michael Shermer:
“Postmodernism is a late 20th-century movement challenging the Enlightenment worldview that objective truth exists and can be discovered through the tools of science and rationality. My first collision with the movement was in a Ph.D. program in the history of science in the late 1980s, in a graduate seminar co-taught by an anthropologist and a historian when both fields were being deconstructed by social theorists and postmodern literary critics. I enrolled in the course after having studied the field in the 1970s, eager to learn what new science had uncovered about the customs, rituals, and beliefs of indigenous pre-industrial peoples around the world. Much to my consternation I found myself bogged down in such books as Michael Taussig’s The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America, with such chapters as “Fetishism and Dialectical Deconstruction” and “The Devil and the Cosmogenesis of Capitalism.” I was confused until the professors explained that theirs was a Marxist interpretation of history in which the past is interpreted in terms of economic exploitation and class conflict. Make what you will of Taussig’s analysis of South American indigenous peoples:
Marx’s work strategically opposes the objectivist categories and culturally naive self-acceptance of the reified world that capitalism creates, a world in which economic goods known as commodities and, indeed, objects themselves appear not merely as things in themselves but as determinants of the reciprocating human relations that form them. Read this way, the commodity labor-time and value itself become not merely historically relative categories but social constructions (and deceptions) of reality. The critique of political economy demands the deconstruction of that reality and the critique of that deception.1
Sure.
I next encountered postmodernism in my coursework on the history and philosophy of science, which was undergoing its own revolution in overturning an earlier model of science as a progressive march toward a complete understanding of Reality in an asymptotic curve to Truth. In a paroxysm of postmodern deconstruction, philosophers and historians proffered a view of science as a relativistic game played by European white males in a reductionistic frenzy of hermeneutical hegemony, whose ultimate aim was the suppression of the people beneath the thumb of dialectical scientism and technocracy. One even called Newton’s Principia a “rape manual.”2 Seriously.
By the mid 1990s postmodernism had filtered out of the humanities departments and wafted into some science departments, so we devoted several articles in Skeptic to what became known as the “science wars,”3[iii]which were being fought over the nature of truth and whether science was the royal road to it. Many thought not, coming to believe that there are no privileged truths, no objective reality to be discovered, and no belief, idea, hypothesis, or theory that is closer to the truth than any other.”
-Michael Shermer, science historian, founder of Skeptic Magazine, host of The Michael Shermer Show podcast, journalist, author of Conspiracy: Why the Rational Believe the Irrational and other books.
Taussig, Michael T. 1980. The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America. The University of North Carolina Press, 229.
The exact quote by the feminist philosopher Sandra Harding is: “why is it not as illuminating and honest to refer to Newton’s laws as ‘Newton’s rape manual’ as it is to call them ‘Neton’s mechanics’?” Harding, Sandra. 1987. The Science Question in Feminism. Cornell University Press, 113.
Levitt, Norman. 1997. “More Higher Superstitions: Knowledge, Knowingness, and Reality.” Skeptic, Vol. 4, No. 4. https://bit.ly/2o2i7vt
Postmodernism is sophistry. Sophistry is ancient. Esotericism is intrinsic to the sophist's project. My own favorite example is the Duck of Theseus. The "Ship of Theseus" is a real phenomenon in ship construction and maintentance: as a sailing ship is slowly replaced one board at a time, is it still the same ship or a new one? No less a critical thinker than Katy Montgomerie has used this one, in his case to argue that a person could transform into a duck one part at a time. So there you have it, a 3,000 year-old parlor trick of ancient Greeks repurposed as postmodern QT.
Postmodernism is the replacement of objective independent reality by subjective anthropocentric moral discourse. And all of the above, too, of course.
It's also a way to gain status, using impenetrable language.