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The often-maligned
movement is today's academic Rorschach blot.
By Andy Crouch | posted 11/10/00
Postmodernism
seems to mean anything, everything, and nothing. It's today's
academic Rorschach blot on which nervous modernists and others
project all their fantasies, both benign and terrifying. Whatever
they're most afraid of, that's what postmodernism is. On the
other hand, whatever they most secretly desire, postmodernism
promises. So postmodernism is not one thing. Postmodernism
originally referred to specific movements in art and architecture,
which reacted to a specific movement called modernism, which
happened quite a while ago. Postmodernism itself is no longer
as central an issue in art and architecture, and the word
has been applied in a number of new ways.
For some,
postmodernism refers to a renewed attention to "the other,"
"the marginalized." Many streams of postmodern thought
are animated by the desire to do justice to the claims of
those whom the dominant culture has excluded politically,
economically, and (probably not least of all from the postmodern
perspective) rhetorically. That is, they've simply been omitted
from the discourse within Western intellectual life. So women,
non-northern Europeans, gays, lesbians, and the poor all loom
large in the postmodernist consciousness as hitherto unrecognized
groups who deserve the same kind of historical and philosophical
attention as their polar opposites, which would be wealthy,
white, heterosexual men.
Second, this attention to the marginalized has led many postmodernists
into a profound skepticism toward modernity's assumptions
about knowledge, truth, and reason. These postmoderns question
the extent to which modernity's attempts to make truth claims
is valid. They've discovered that at the base of almost every
truth claim is a story, a story that privileges certain groups
and marginalizes others. Jean Lyotard, the French champion
of many postmodern themes, said that postmodernism requires
a suspicion of the overarching stories (often called "metanarratives")
that support our claims of truth. Any claim to know truth
or any attempt to commend truth to others is likely to be
just a power play, they argue, an attempt to impose one's
own metanarrative in the guise of an absolute truth.
In this way, postmodernism is relativist. But it's not relativist
across the board, because it actually has a certain perspective,
the perspective of the truth claims of the marginalized, who
are given quite a lot of validity in the postmodern epistemological
scheme.
Third,
postmodernism is also used to refer loosely to advanced consumer
capitalism, in which the prevalence of choice has rendered
everything level. Western consumers now find themselves in
a sea of options and choices. Everything is relativized in
this setting-not so much by the claims of the marginalized
or even by a rigorous epistemological process but by your
ability to choose anything. Everything is open to you as a
consumer.
The first
sense (concern with the marginalized) and the third sense
(consumer capitalism) of postmodern, then, have little to
do with each other. Yet both find common ground in radical
skepticism about ultimate truth, because that not only emerges
from many postmodern thinkers' reading of history, but also
makes it easier to be a good consumer.
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