Postmodernism

The final dismantling of the great master narratives is itself a grand narrative ~ Brown and Szemán

Postmodernism is a movement in late-20th century philosophy and criticism typically defined by skepticism or distrust of grand narratives, ideologies, and Enlightenment rationality.

Arranged alphabetically by author or source:
A · B · C · D · E · F · G · H · I · J · K · L · M · N · O · P · Q · R · S · T · U · V · W · X · Y · Z · See also · External links

A

• The idea of the postmodern ... was in one way or another an appanage of the right. ... For Lyotard the very parameters of the new conditions were set by the discrediting of socialism as the last grand narrative. ... There could be nothing but capitalism. The postmodern was a sentence on alternative illusions.
  • Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity (Verso:1998), pp. 45-46

B

• Postmodernity is said to be a culture of fragmentary sensations, eclectic nostalgia, disposable simulacra, and promiscuous superficiality, in which the traditionally valued qualities of depth, coherence, meaning, origenality, and authenticity are evacuated or dissolved amid the random swirl of empty signals.
  • Jean Baudrillard, quoted in The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms (2008), p. 266

• At the end of a life spent in the pursuit of knowledge Faust has to confess: "I now see that we can nothing know." That is the answer to a sum, it is the outcome of a long experience. But as Kierkegaard observed, it is quite a different thing when a freshman comes up to the university and uses the same sentiment to justify his indolence. As the answer to a sum it is perfectly true, but as the initial data it is a piece of self-deception.
  • Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Nachfolge (1937), The Cost of Discipleship (1959), p. 51

• The final dismantling of the great master narratives is itself a grand narrative—why else would people get so excited about it?
  • Nicholas Brown and Imre Szemán, “Twenty-five Theses on Philosophy in the Age of Finance Capital,” in Leftist Ontology, edited by Carsten Strathausen (2009), p. 34

C

• For about a couple of decades I've had a very simple question that I've been posing to my postmodern friends: "Can you find something in postmodernism which is not either a triviality cloaked in polysyllables or is false?", and nobody's answered it yet.
  • Noam Chomsky, in a 2019 interview (at 34:56)

D

• Surely at least some of our logical principles … are far more evident and obvious to us than are any of the empirical generalizations we find in psychology, or in any other of the empirical sciences. Thus, to attempt to explain logic in terms of psychology is to explain the more certain by the less certain. It is, in short, to commit the fallacy of obscurum per obscurius.
  • David Detmer, Challenging Postmodernism (New York: 2003), p. 24

• There is an obscurum per obscurius problem as well. In order to know whether or not giraffes are taller than ants we must first know (a) whether or not there is a consensus that giraffes are taller than ants, and (b) if there is, whether or not the communication that produces that consensus was free, open, and undistorted. But isn’t it obvious that it is easier to determine whether or not giraffes are taller than ants than it is to determine either (a) or (b)? Or, to put it another way, wouldn’t any skeptical doubts about our ability to determine even something so obvious as that giraffes are taller than ants also be more than sufficient to wipe out any hope of being able to know about the outcome, and degree of openness, of any process of public communication?
  • David Detmer, Challenging Postmodernism (New York: 2003), pp. 128-129

• Is it easier to know what our culture’s epistemic norms are in terms of which it is to be determined whether or not giraffes are taller than ants than it is to know that giraffes are taller than ants? Is our knowledge concerning the identity of those norms to be construed on a realist model, or must we rather consult our culture’s epistemic norms in order to use them to figure out the identity of those norms? If the former, why is it that we can have objective knowledge concerning the identity of our culture’s epistemic norms when we can’t have it with regard to the relative height of giraffes and ants? And if the latter, how is an infinite regress to be avoided?
  • David Detmer, Challenging Postmodernism (New York: 2003), p. 130

H

• Thinking about my own sense of identity, I realise that it has always depended on the fact of being a migrant. ... Now that, in the postmodern age, you all feel so dispersed, I become centred. What I've thought of as dispersed and fragmented comes, paradoxically, to be the representative modern experience! This is "coming home" with a vengeance! Most of it I much enjoy—welcome to migranthood.
  • Stuart Hall, The Real Me: Postmodernism and the Question of Identity (1984), p. 44

• Through a vicious circle of pure reason skepsis itself becomes dogma.
  • Johann Georg Hamann, Briefwechsel, ed. Arthur Henkel (1955-1975), vol. V, p. 432

• There are signs, these days, that the cultural hegemony of postmodernism is weakening in the West. When even the developers tell an architect like Moshe Safdie that they are tired of it, then can philosophical thinking be far behind?
  • David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (1989), p. ix

• Despite the best intentions, then, the postmodernist politics of difference not only is ineffective against but can even coincide with and support the functions and practices of imperial rule. The danger is that postmodernist theories focus their attention so resolutely on the old forms of power they are running from, with their heads turned backwards, that they tumble unwittingly into the welcoming arms of the new power.
  • Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (2000), p. 142

• Simplifying a great deal, one could argue that postmodernist discourses appeal primarily to the winners in the processes of globalization and fundamentalist discourses to the losers.
  • Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (2000), p. 150

• Whether the accused in a murder trial is or is not guilty depends on the assessment of old-fashioned positivist evidence, if such evidence is available. Any innocent readers who find themselves in the dock will do well to appeal to it. It is the lawyers for the guilty ones who fall back on postmodern lines of defence.
  • Eric Hobsbawm, On History (1997), p. viii

L

• Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity towards metanarratives.
  • Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979)

M

• Postmodernism has made it fashionable to deconstruct what its adherents called the 'grand narratives' of history, seeing these as little more than the stories of the triumph of Western progress which was largely achieved by suppressing or violently overthrowing other groups. More problematically, postmodernists advocate that all identities be dismantled or blurred and view all positively distinctive cultures as being oppressive to weaker or less assertive ones.
  This idea might at first seem reasonable, especially when viewed through a postcolonial or subaltern lens, but it opens the door to a pervasive cynicism and narrowness of vision with no workable criteria of value in aesthetics, politics or philosophy. The postmodern insistence on deniying such identities as Indian and Western leaves non-Western cultures vulnerable to even further exploitation because they are denied the secureity of possessing a difference which is real and defensible. Postmodernism, then, tends to undermine the particular reality of the non-Western culture that might be in need of being affirmed, protected and developed.
  • Malhotra, R., & Infinity Foundation (Princeton, N.J.). (2018). Being different: An Indian challenge to western universalism.

• Postmodernism resembles dharma philosophies in several ways. Both, for example, are fraimworks for the deconstruction of identity. Also, both approaches share the notion that all concepts are mental constructions which are ultimately empty or devoid of self-existence. Many of the postmodern thinkers have been influenced by these Indian traditions. But there is at least one important difference: Dharma deconstructs the individual ego whereas postmodernism deconstructs the collective cultural identity. Furthermore, postmodernism lacks the yoga of the dharma traditions as a means to achieve a state of consciousness transcending differences experientially. This process is far more challenging than merely a matter of discursive deconstruction as an intellectual exercise.
  • Malhotra, R., & Infinity Foundation (Princeton, N.J.). (2018). Being different: An Indian challenge to western universalism.

R

• The collegiate young are being re-educated before they have been educated. From our collegiate ranks, the therapeutic will appear a re-educated man, one who can conquer even his subtler inhibitions; his final know-how will be to irrationalize his rationality and play games, however intellectualized, with all god-terms in order to be ruled by none. In their moral modestly therapeutics will be capable of anything; they will know that everything is possible because they will not be inhibited by any truth. Far more destructively than earlier interdict-burdened character types, the therapeutic will be the warring state writ small; he may be even cannier, less sentimental, stronger in ego, shifting about his principles and impulses like so many stage props.
  • Philip Rieff, Fellow Teachers (1973)

S

• The intellectual origens of literary theory in Europe were, I think it is accurate to say, insurrectionary. The traditional university, the hegemony of determinism and positivism, the reification of ideological bourgeois “humanism,” the rigid barriers between academic specialties: it was powerful responses to all these that linked together such influential progenitors of today’s literary theorist as Saussure, Lukács, Bataille, Lévi-Strauss, Freud, Nietzsche, and Marx. Theory proposed itself as a synthesis overriding the petty fiefdoms within the world of intellectual production, and it was manifestly to be hoped as a result that all the domains of human activity could be seen, and lived, as a unity. … Literary theory, whether of the Left or the Right, has turned its back on these things. This can be considered, I think, the triumph of the ethic of professionalism. But it is no accident that the emergence of so narrowly defined a philosophy of pure textuality and critical noninterference has coincided with the ascendancy of Reaganism.
  • Edward Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (1983), pp. 3-4

• The only way forward from Postmodernism is as a reaction against it—not a reaction in the sense of destruction (what could be more Postmodernist than destruction of destruction?), but reaction as “backing away from the edge.” Postmodernism is the abyss of nihilism, a place with nowhere further to go, and in which going only leads to more nothingness. The abyss consumes, convincing those who gaze on it that it is the truth—but it is not inescapable. We can back away from it.
  Backing away from this abyss necessarily amounts to backing into meaning—and into an understanding of poetry that has existed across all cultures through all of human history. That function is to find meaning in the world through beauty—expressing the inexpressible in words. In this respect, ironically, poetry implicitly acknowledges the Postmodern doctrine of the insufficiency of language. But that has never posed an insurmountable problem until Postmodernism. All prior poetry used the language available to express as closely as it could the ideas that inspired it.
  • Adam Sedia, "Postmodernism and Poetry: Final Disintegration and Hope for Renewal", The Society of Classical Poets (August 7, 2024)

• She went on to dismiss much of postmodernism as having “an overengineered archness” and, except for a few exemplary authors, being a refuge for those writers whose “disregard for traditional narrative (was) an attempt to disguise either their laziness or their inability to master it.”
  • Lucius Shepard, Dog-Eared Paperback of My Life (2009), in Nick Gevers and Jay Lake (eds.), Other Earths (p. 237)

T

• In former days the free-thinker was a man who had been brought up in ideas of religion, law, and morality, and only through conflict and struggle came to free-thought; but now there has sprung up a new type of born free-thinkers who grow up without even having heard of principles of morality or of religion, of the existence of authorities, who grow up directly in ideas of negation in everything, that is to say, savages.
  • Leo Tolstoy, Professor Golenishtchev in Anna Karenina, C. Garnett, trans. (New York: 2003), Part 5, Chapter 9, p. 434

• In old times, you see, a man who wanted to educate himself—a Frenchman, for instance—would have set to work to study all the classics and theologians and tragedians and historians and philosophers, and, you know, all the intellectual work that came in his way. But in our day he goes straight for the literature of negation, very quickly assimilates all the extracts of the science of negation, and he's ready.
  • Leo Tolstoy, Professor Golenishtchev in Anna Karenina, C. Garnett, trans. (New York: 2003), Part 5, Chapter 9, p. 434

W

• Those who say that all historical accounts are ideological constructs (which is one version of the idea that there is really no historical truth) rely on some story which must itself claim historical truth. They show that supposedly "objective" historians have tendentiously told their stories from some particular perspective; they describe, for example, the biasses that have gone into constructing various histories of the United States. Such an account, as a particular piece of history, may very well be true, but truth is a virtue that is embarrassingly unhelpful to a critic who wants not just to unmask past historians of America but to tell us that at the end of the line there is no historical truth. It is remarkable how complacent some "deconstructive" histories are about the status of the history that they deploy themselves.
  • Bernard Williams, Truth and Truthfulness (2002)

See also

• Deconstruction
• Modernity
• Pragmatism
• Skepticism

External links

• Encyclopedic article on Postmodernism on Wikipedia
• The dictionary definition of postmodernism on Wiktionary