What is Postmodernism?

[alixtii]

Will Rogers famously said, "I am not a member of any organized political party. I am a Democrat."

Elizabeth asked me, in Ari's journal, for my definition of postmodernism, and I've been mulling over it ever since. It's not that I think, as some do, that postmodernism is particularly resistant to defining in a way that some other intellectual movements is not. Instead, any intellectual movement is given to a number of definitions, some descriptive and some prescriptive, and with postmodernism no less than any other movement these definitions sometimes work against each other.

For example, katieliz also asked me to define feminism, as part of interview meme questions I still haven't answered, I think, and one can see the same tension in my use of that term. Feminism as a sociohistorical movement includes liberal feminists and radical feminists, pro-choice people and pro-life people, people who care about intersectionality and people who don't, and even separatists and real honest essentialists and people who see sexism as bad but not systemic. But when I talk about "feminism" in this journal I'm pretty much ignoring all of them, beause I'm not talking about a diverse movement but instead an ethico-interpretative paradigm, a set of values and analytic tools which go hand in hand with each other, which I believe to be in some sense "correct." "Feminism" as used in this journal most frequently means "a theoretical system which acknowledges systemic injustice and the existence of patriarchy and provides an anti/foundation for ethics." Indeed, feminism is ethics.

So too is it with postmodernism. Much can be made by way of generalization about "postmodernists." They are prone to inapt, overburdened metaphors, often to linguistics or quantum physics, which are either poorly researched or just don't plain work. (For a good de-bunking of some postmodernist misconceptions about the way language works as an empirical object of study, the positivists at languagelog can't be beat.) They seem to embrace not only the contingency of meaning, but complete incommunicativeness and incomprehensability. They are obtuse simply for the sake of obfuscation. The consider themselves answerable to no authority or sense of intellectual honesty.

The above is a caricature, but there are postmoderns who meet that description. It is because of them that I try to eschew use of the term in certain settings, relying instead on terms which are more precise but less evocative, such as post-structuralism or deconstructionism. Let me make it clear that I do not automatically include the canonical thinkers of postmodernism (because there is a postmodern canon, no doubt about that)--Foucault, Barthes, Derrida, Lyotard, Rorty--although they all do have their moments (there's not a name on that list where I don't have some type of criticism to make against them) but I most certainly do include a number of their adherents and, let's be honest, they hurt the movement as a whole when they treat Sapir-Whorf as uncontested empirical truth or imply that learning another Earth language potentially has the power to liberate us from the laws of nature as we construct them. But with any intellectual movement, from the Enlightenment and those which preceded it to Romanticism and beyond, you will always have people parroting the fad without understanding it. So too will there be people who clearly fall within the mainstream of the movement's thought but are just wrong about something (it happens to the best of us). But these are not criticisms against the movement as a whole, for such criticisms must be made against the strongest, most coherent strand of the distilled thought of the movement--a prescriptive definition of the intellectual movement, a description of the way the movement should be. So just as when I say "feminism" I really mean "the correct feminism," there is a sense in which when I say "postmodernism" I mean "the correct postmodernism."

Some people would claim that to talk about correctness, to attempt a prescriptive definition, to look for the most coherent strand of postmodernism is to reject postmodernism entirely. That's fine; my interest is in the strand itself and its insights, not the label. As noted above, there are other, more precise labels at my disposal.

For me, the strand at the heart of postmodernism is the intellectual paradigm I will here call post-structuralism: the realization, following and moving beyond the structural accounts of Kant and Saussure (N.B.: treating Saussure as in some way indicative of how contemporary linguistics understand their tasks, or how language as an empirical object of study is understood to function, is made of fail; don't do it) in a move which in retrospect seems pretty much inevitable, that knowledge and meaning are always-already constructed and contingent, wholly dependent on context and never able to "connect" to anything outside the system. (Note that this is not the same as saying there is no such thing as truth, a claim sometimes made by "postmodernists" in the first, descriptive sense.) It's more complicated than that, of course, but I'm trying not to get too theoretical here. (And I reject the facile opposition of postmodernism and "theory.")

Postmodernism is for me (drawing upon Eco) a mode of reading which applies post-structuralist theory by looking for slippages in a text--and il n'y as pas de hors-texte; it recognizes life as primarily textual (that is to say, decipherable) and thus always-already subject to this radically de-centering mode of analysis.

There is a third definition of postmodernism. In addition to being 1) a sociohistorical movement comprised of all-too-fallible human people and 2) an abstract mode of analysis, it is also 3) a mode of (artistic) expression. Thus we can talk about postmodern literature and postmodern archictecture. In theory, these represent the application of postmodern ideals from within the artistic process itself. Whether they achieve these ends is debatable (to a postmodern in the second sense, so-called "postmodern" novels are no more given to slippages or to postmodern readings than are Homer or Chaucer) but nonetheless there is a host of characteristics which are commonly agreed to be characteristic of "postmodern" art. (I won't list those characteristics here, but Wikipedia's page on the subject is a good starting place for those who would wish to investigate more.)

Because our understanding of any type of expression cannot be divorced from the analysis we perform upon it, and because analysis is itself a form of expression, there is by necessity a great deal of slippage between the second and third definitions as I have provided them. This too inserts an ambiguity which is useful in some contexts but frustrating in others--and, again, this is where I turn to more precise terms, for no one writes a post-structuralist novel or paints deconstructionist paintings. If I use these terms, my (analytic) philosophy professors still might not agree with what I will have to say, but they will at least understand that I'm working out of a certain tradition of 20th-century thought, drawing upon certain canonical thinkers, and can rest assured that I will not hand in a blank term paper or one emblazoned with images of Campbell soup cans.

Comments

[cathexys.livejournal.com]

very nice :)

though i'm surprised you didn't touch too much on what i'd call postmodernity (or is that where you get too angry at Sapir-Whorf adherents?)

i always start out by thinking about post as after as well as against, an extension and a rejection of modernism/modernity... [which might explain, then, that you have Pynchon, Barth, Barthelme, et al in- or excluded depending on whether you consider them latelatelate modernists or postmodernists :) <- really I've only seen one critic convincingly make the argument of the former, but it was pretty interesting!]

Btw, do you have/recall any good anti-Derridean essays/books rants? I could only come up with Gasche's, but I'm trying to recall the more newspaper type ones I read..maybe Rorty? [though I always connect him to the Frankfurter vs French Fries Lyotard/Habermas debate dismissal]

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

though i'm surprised you didn't touch too much on what i'd call postmodernity

Great minds think alike, because I spent all morning while engaged in gainful employment before I read your post thinking about how I hadn't mentioned postmodernity, and why I probably should. Not sure you mean the same thing I did, of course, but I wouldn't be surprised if you did.

or is that where you get too angry at Sapir-Whorf adherents?

The problem with Sapir-Whorf isn't that it's wrong somehow; it isn't. The problem is that it isn't even wrong. I'm only angry at Sapir-Whorf adherents when they believe that it makes some type of claim about empirical reality, and that claim is in contradiction with actual social scientific research.

Btw, do you have/recall any good anti-Derridean essays/books rants? I could only come up with Gasche's, but I'm trying to recall the more newspaper type ones I read

I'm not sure what you mean by "newspaper type." I remember when Derrida died in 2004 (I was in London at the time) and there were a lot of snotty obituaries. I don't think I'd read a book-length anti-Derrida rant, unless it was critiquing him from a feminist or other perspective which I shared to some degree.

[fandrogyny.livejournal.com]

"Feminism" as used in this journal most frequently means "a theoretical system which acknowledges systemic injustice and the existence of patriarchy and provides an anti/foundation for ethics." Indeed, feminism is ethics. <--- THANK YOU.

Postmodernism is for me (drawing upon Eco) a mode of reading which applies post-structuralist theory by looking for slippages in a text--and il n'y as pas de hors-texte; it recognizes life as primarily textual (that is to say, decipherable) and thus always-already subject to this radically de-centering mode of analysis. <--- Again, thank you. Because this is what post-modernism means to me, too, and as usual Eco (or Eco-like thinking) finds a way of simplifying and clarifying things that eradicates the need for jargon.

Also, I think you should draw up a reading list for those of us who like this form of post-modernism. Because I desperately need the language with which to explain myself.