“Finally, postmodernism influenced numerous intellectual variants that today are popular public philosophies, and we need to understand the intellectual foundations of such systems of thought if we want to evaluate them properly.”
“Among all the mutations that have affected the knowledge of things and their order…only one, that which began a century and a half ago and is now perhaps drawing to a close, has made it possible for the figure of man to appear. As the archaeology of our thought easily shows, man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end. If those arrangements were to disappear…then one can certainly wager that man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea.”
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things
The 20th century French philosopher Michel Foucault ends his 1966 book The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences by predicting the end of a universalist idea of man. While the image of a bald renegade French postmodern philosopher wrecking the accomplishments of the Enlightenment continues to fascinate, the most enduring insights of postmodernism had been made by the 1970s. By now, those arguments have been discussed ad nauseam. Is there any value in continuing to read the postmodernists?
Whether the ideas are viewed as absurd and wrong, or obviously correct, postmodernism is still relevant. For one, regardless of whether its effects are positive or negative, some of its ideas are meaningful contributions to human thought. Moreover, it continues to be relevant because radical technological innovations have affected the status of knowledge, leading the world in an increasingly postmodern direction—a direction that postmodernism is both a response to, and one that it arguably exacerbates. Furthermore, postmodernism’s criticisms of modernity’s effort to increase human autonomy arguably advanced the cause of freedom, or at least revealed some weaknesses in modernity’s armor. Finally, postmodernism influenced numerous intellectual variants that today are popular public philosophies, and we need to understand the intellectual foundations of such systems of thought if we want to evaluate them properly.
Postmodernism Sheds Light on the Meaning and Value of Modernity
Any understanding of postmodernity must begin by viewing it in relation to modernity. Broadly speaking, in philosophical terms modernity is a period that encompasses the Renaissance through the Enlightenment, but is best characterized by Enlightenment ideas. The spirit of the age of modernity is exemplified by the belief that the individual can be liberated through the use of reason. In 1784, Immanuel Kant made this famous opening remark in an article responding to a question about the definition of Enlightenment:
“Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s understanding without guidance from another. This immaturity is self-imposed when its cause lies not in lack of understanding, but in lack of resolve and courage to use it without guidance from another. Sapere Aude! ‘Have courage to use your own understanding!’—that is the motto of enlightenment.”
In his 1985 book The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, Jürgen Habermas attempts his own definition of modernity while also explaining and critiquing postmodernity’s break with it. Habermas, a philosopher associated with the Frankfurt School which is famous for its critiques of the Enlightenment, capitalism, and reason, nevertheless believes that the project of the Enlightenment still contains the possibility to promote progress.
For Habermas, the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Hegel characterized modernity best when he called it a decisive rupture with the past. That is, “Modernity can and will no longer borrow the criteria by which it takes its orientation from the models supplied by another epoch; it has to create normativity out of itself.” In other words, in modernity, tradition is cast overboard in favor of reason when deciding how to act. Modernity is marked by the principle of subjectivity, which includes individualism, the right to criticism (i.e., that only those things that are rationally justifiable are entitled to recognition) and the idea that individuals are responsible for their own lives.
Postmodernity is the culture or spirit of our own age. In some sense, it turns modernity against itself by problematizing reason and the alleged universality of modern ideas. As we will see, postmodernists share some of the same goals as modern thinkers but wish to expand human autonomy by critiquing oppressive categories that modernity left intact. The break between postmodernity and modernity occurred when proponents of reason realized that it lacks the unifying power of religion and mythology. While others tried to salvage the dreams of modernity, Habermas believes Friedrich Nietzsche initiated postmodernity by abandoning reason, attempting to show that the concept of the unified self is a myth, and holding that conventional morality is merely what is socially useful for particular groups. The Nietzschean view is that concepts like truth and morality are instruments of the will to power, motivated by no more than valuations of good and bad. Habermas thought that Nietzsche’s teaching amounts to the claim that “behind apparently universal normative claims lie hidden the subjective power claims of value appraisals,” and he argues that this subsequently went in two directions in postmodern philosophy. One pole is represented by Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida, who were influenced by Nietzsche’s metaphysical critique of subjectivity. The other, of which Foucault is the paradigmatic figure, interprets truth claims as power moves in which reason excludes alternative forms of thinking.
Postmodernism is the Philosophy of Postmodernity, or the Information Age
Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, and Derrida—are these not just the names of pointy-headed philosophers whose ideas, though perhaps influential, are hardly relevant for understanding events in 2024? One reason for answering “no” is that postmodernity’s reaction to modernity is in some sense a reaction to, or an accommodation with, ongoing technological changes that call into question modern notions of truth, objectivity, and man.
There is a positive feedback loop between postmodern thought and communications technologies. Changes in the status of knowledge sparked postmodern ideas and continue to do so, but postmodern ideas themselves may also be influencing the status of knowledge. Either way, there is a close affinity between technology, the status of knowledge, and postmodern philosophy.
In 1979, a book by Jean-Francois Lyotard analyzed postmodernism as a social condition marked by radical changes in the status of knowledge. He attributes this to two things. For one, advancements in information production and processing were turning knowledge into a valuable commodity in the global competition for power. He predicted that these power struggles would more and more be over who gets to control information and legitimate knowledge. The second reason for the changed status of knowledge is the realization that science is unable to legitimize itself without reference to mythology. That is, whenever science needs to justify itself before the public, it typically casts itself as the “hero of science” or tells some other non-scientific story about why we should be funding its endeavors. In other words, science is unable to justify itself within the rules of its own system.
As a response to the postmodern condition, Lyotard thinks we need new ways to model society. He thought that the proper model for analyzing a postmodern society is as a plurality of language games. In this model, science is a language game like any other. A language game is a set of rules that govern the use of language in any particular context. This is a concept that Ludwig Wittgenstein coined in his 1953 book Philosophical Investigations, where he argued that language is intelligible because of its uses as part of a form of life. Language can be used in a multitude of different ways: to tell stories, to command, to speculate, or to joke. It is not possible to nail down one theory that explains how we use and understand language, and having well-defined concepts is not an adequate explanation of meaning. Rather, understanding comes from comprehending the rules of the game in a particular context. If we understand society as a set of different language games which attempt to explain and navigate the world, it is no longer possible to believe in totalizing metanarratives.
Lyotard thinks such metanarratives were only ever able to define something as “true” because they had the power to impose a worldview on everybody. With this new conception of society as lots of language games, it is clearer than ever that power and knowledge have always had a close relationship and that myths, science as much as religion, are good at masquerading as objective truths.
Lyotard was prescient about the role of technology, but perhaps understated. Since 1979, we have seen the emergence of the Internet, the iPhone, and social media companies, just to name a few inventions. These technologies exacerbate the postmodern condition Lyotard described by raising obvious philosophical questions about truth, reality, and knowledge. What is the meaning of truth in the world of deep fakes and artificial intelligence (AI)? How do we discern it from falsity? If truth is a correspondence between the world and a statement, what is the significance of the interpolation of a sort of new reality—the digital world? We do not know the answer to these questions.
True to the nature of the postmodern condition, which is not shy about embracing contradictions, new technologies have paradoxical effects. YouTube, Substack, X, and many others are fragmenting the information landscape, supplementing and even displacing legacy media while multiplying the quantity of information. They allow previously unauthorized voices to be heard and allow authorities and metanarratives to be questioned more easily. At the same time, the nature of digital technology is such that it often can lead to central control, surveillance, censorship, and anonymous data collection. Thus, as Lyotard predicted, while language games have proliferated, there is also an ongoing struggle between competing groups that are attempting to control narratives and categorize information as true or false.
Where Lyotard used the concept of language games to describe the changing nature of knowledge amid revolutions in the digitization and storage of information, Jacques Derrida used a metaphysical critique to describe the inability of language to arrive at definitive truth. Derrida’s philosophy, which also fragmented the public discourse and encouraged suspicion of metanarratives, is similarly relevant to the digital age. The difference is that Derrida performs his dissection of totalizing narratives through an often abstruse critique of the metaphysics of presence, which is the idea, dating back to Plato and the origins of Western philosophy, that we must look to what is immediately at hand to find what is most pure and real. For instance, the metaphysics of presence assumes that speech is superior to writing because, in speech, a person’s inner thoughts are immediately available. Moreover, this commonsense view says we are less likely to misinterpret speakers than authors of texts, since authors are not around to tell us what their intent was.
Derrida disagrees. He claims that speech is just as liable to be misunderstood as writing, for a number of reasons. First, words carry the traces of many other meanings, and second, language is “iterable” in the sense that it is structured precisely so that it can be repeated and understood even in the absence of the original context of the utterance. Thus, every use of language is susceptible to many interpretations. The possibility of misinterpretation is the condition of the possibility of communication. Every attempt at communication needs to be able to function in the absence of its sender for the receiver to be able to decipher it.
The lack of pure presence means that philosophy never offers any final meaning, though we like to pretend that it does. In the lecture Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences, which appears as a chapter in Writing and Difference, he argues that Western philosophy has consistently substituted one supposedly eternal center (the Platonic idea, God, man, etc.) for another to provide the reassuring stability that makes the entire system intelligible. The center is the unquestioned idea that holds up the rest of the system. However, Derrida thinks the work of Sigmund Freud, Nietzsche, and Heidegger made that idea seem silly.
Freud’s idea of the subconscious undermines the notion that we are fully conscious of ourselves. Nietzsche’s genealogical analysis purports to show that truth and morality are rooted in nothing more solid than the will to power of different kinds of people. Good and evil are whatever is good and bad for the strong or the weak—whichever of the two is in power. And Heidegger held out the proposition that all supposedly eternal truths are merely historical encounters with Being that reveal a certain relation to the world, each one different but in no way more “true” or “central” than the rest. If we give up the idea of a final truth, or an unconditioned premise to philosophizing, Derrida thinks we realize that philosophy has been literature all along.
There are, therefore, very similar themes in the work of Derrida and Lyotard that perhaps unwittingly provide the intellectual justification for the changes to the status of knowledge that are engendered by new technologies. Both think there is something tyrannical about the idea of a metanarrative or a “transcendental signifier,” which unites society under the banner of a single uncontested truth. This goes hand in hand with technological innovations that multiply the available language games that people can play. Lyotard derives his ideas from these transformations in knowledge as well as from the recognition that science is itself a language game, while Derrida obtains his conclusion from metaphysical speculations. Both conceive of society as centerless, composed of language games that recognize other language games as incommensurable.
Postmodernism in the Public and Academic Discourses
Postmodernism also matters because influential and popular academic fields like queer theory, post-colonial theory, and critical race theory all have a strong postmodernist flavor. It is true that in such fields one hears the echoes of Heidegger and Critical Theory, among others. The extent to which other influences are present in these fields is a legitimate question, but many of their fundamental axioms are undeniably postmodern. A paradigmatic case is one of the most cited scholars in the social sciences, Foucault, and his disciple Judith Butler. A thinker like Foucault laid the groundwork for other academics like Butler, who developed the concepts that escaped the confines of the ivory tower and are heard today in the media and in everyday conversations.
We need to understand what Foucault believed if we wish to discern his influence on subsequent social activism and academics. His basic move is to deny the Enlightenment claim that greater knowledge of the world and the self inevitably leads to emancipation from unjust and arbitrary authority. Foucault thinks instead that the will to knowledge operative in the human sciences intensifies power and enables ever-greater reductions of human freedom. The accumulation of knowledge disciplines the minds and bodies of those subject to advancements in methods of control, which seek to strictly define reason while suppressing and confining other forms of thinking. This is the reason Foucault writes about the mad, the ill, and other socially excluded groups—he wants to tell the story of the “other” of reason.
The study of these “others” reveals that humanity and reason are defined in an exclusionary way. The typical narrative of the human sciences is that they reveal the truth of human nature. Economics, for instance, claims that it is the study of human decision-making under conditions of scarcity. It claims to be valid for all times and all places, not just a single time and place . Foucault argues that economics, anthropology, and other social sciences are inventing what they claim to be an eternal human nature. However, those who accumulate knowledge also have ulterior motives.
Indeed, Foucault argues that power is inseparable from knowledge, a fact enshrined in his use of the term power-knowledge. He conceives of this power as a web that extends in all directions without any clear center. Discourse is an important concept in this metaphor. The lifeblood of the web, discourse can be thought of as the totality of the statements circulating about a subject. It is the relationship between language and power, between what it is possible to say, who gets to decide, and the purpose for which knowledge is produced and power is exercised. In The History of Sexuality: Volume 1, which was first published in 1976, Foucault applies this concept to human sexuality. He claims that to understand the discourse of sexuality, we need to ask questions like: “Why has sexuality been so widely discussed, and what has been said about it?” “What were the effects of power generated by what was said?” Foucault shows no interest in the beliefs of individuals or whether the claims circulating in the discourse have truth validity because the will to knowledge is not the product of a search for truth or a human will. The supposedly humanistic interventions in fields such as psychiatry and the criminal justice system, which Enlighteners claimed were motivated by human rights and truth, were in truth instigated by a new discourse that strengthened the grip of power over the minds and bodies of those ensnared in the web. Thus, Foucault unmasks reason and the idea of human nature as tools of domination: Every new bit of knowledge about us authorizes additional categorization, surveillance, and standardization of behavior or thought that tightens social control.
A key idea in Foucault is his insistence that power is productive rather than repressive. While power is also a central theme in Marxist and Freudian theory, it is envisioned there as a repressive power that attempts to clamp down on an authentic self that is struggling to be free. In the case of Marxist theory, the entity struggling to be free is the will of the oppressed classes subject to false consciousness. In psychoanalytic theory, it is the authentic self that struggles to integrate conscious and unconscious processes. What distinguishes Foucault is that he does not accept the concept of a pre-existing subjectivity with a truth begging to be discovered.
These theories are taken up in Butler’s 1990 book Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. In this work, Butler launders Foucault’s abstract philosophy using convoluted academic jargon for the purpose of converting it into concepts useful for effecting social and political change. In this book, Butler argues that gender and sex are performances of roles assigned by a discourse. This is the origin of the idea of gender performativity, which is based on the idea that we are all actors performing roles provided to us by discourses. Prior to discourse, there is no “natural way” to conceive of bodies. Discursive notions of sex serve the function of unifying an unbelievably complex array of body parts, urges, and functions into one neat package. But that does not make such identities more real than other possible identities.
Gender Trouble concentrates on one particular identity—woman. In a very Foucauldian way, Butler wants to “trace the political operations that produce and conceal what qualifies as the juridical subject of feminism.” This process reveals that the boundaries of womanhood are patrolled to protect the reproductive sexuality discourse and that sex is an “illusion discursively maintained for the purposes of the regulation of sexuality within the obligatory framework of reproductive sexuality.”
Butler is just as critical as Foucault of modernity’s claim to have freed humanity from arbitrary authority. The problem is that the Enlightenment did not go far enough. It left many traditional categories and concepts unexamined because they were thought to be natural, but as the case of the sex discourse shows, they are discursively constructed and serve the cause of domination.
Butler acknowledges that all this would seem to leave little room for agency or freedom. If we all just take up subject positions that already exist and act them out, how can we ever change things? One strategy Butler promotes is parody of sex and gender, which will alert people to the artificiality of the categories. More important from a philosophical perspective, Butler argues that we should “fragment” concepts by blurring their boundaries until they lose their force. This is an ethical imperative because when concepts like sex and gender are rigidly defined it leads to the exclusion of people who do not fit those definitions, and those definitions do not describe any underlying reality anyway. Just like Foucault, Butler does not believe that there is some essence of each person that is attempting to be freed. But fragmenting the concepts of discourse permits the individual a radical freedom to remake one’s identity in whatever way one chooses, untethered to anything prior to discourse or to any particular discursive identity.
Butler’s theory is just the tip of the iceberg of academic schools influenced by postmodernism. Each is interested in identity, the relationship between knowledge and power, and the way certain narratives claim to be objective truth. An additional example of the reach of postmodernism is found in critical race theory (CRT). The book Critical Race Theory: An Introduction makes it clear that CRT is influenced by Critical Theory, Marxism, and other frameworks. For example, the book’s focus on material conditions as a major determinant of social realities has unmistakable Marxist connotations. Yet the influence of postmodernism epistemology is the glue that holds all the pieces together. Two tenets of CRT highlighted in the book are intersectionality and standpoint theory, both of which hold that people’s identities provide them with unique forms of knowledge that are not available to others.
In an epistemological framework that insists different identities permit access to different truths, objectivity and neutrality are not feasible. This is axiomatic for CRT. To deal with the presupposed lack of the possibility of neutrality and objectivity, CRT encourages people to tell their own stories using their unique knowledge about experiences that may contradict law’s “master narratives.” This storytelling movement is connected to CRT’s explicit repudiation of neutral law and rights-based liberalism, which is in turn explained with reference to Lyotard’s concept of the differend. The differend refers to the condition in which a person is wronged by the rules of justice in a language game to which he does not belong. To counter the injustice that may arise when the legal system casts judgment on someone who is playing a different language game, the legal storytelling movement urges us to consider whether a different narrative may illuminate a different interpretation of the facts of a case, or even whether specific “facts” are relevant to the alternative language game. The simple yet often unstated assumption is that power lurks behind specific claims to truth and objectivity.
What Postmodernism Offers and Where it Goes Wrong
If gaining an understanding of the assumptions that guide influential public philosophies is not reason enough, the classic postmodern philosophers also matter because they offered genuine insights on the human condition and the contemporary world. Foucault gives us valuable tools with which to question modern science’s pursuit of knowledge. What is supposedly done in the name of humanism or science may sometimes really be a cover for power. Further, Foucault convincingly shows that the categories we use to define ourselves and condemn or outlaw others are not to be blindly trusted. They may be creating the forms of identity that they claim to be merely representing.
Postmodernism also encourages an approach to scientific inquiry that asks us to stop and question whether we are remaining true to a spirit of objectivity and neutrality or are simply imposing a worldview on others. Although postmodernists may deny it, it is possible to do this while retaining the ideal of objectivity. In addition, postmodernism reminds us that human beings are capable of perceiving reality as a set of facts but often view their lives and social worlds as a story; or to put that another way, people see the world in terms of value. To rigidly impose one grand narrative on everybody has the possibility of doing great harm and of deracinating people from the worlds they inhabit.
On the other hand, the critics are right when they say that there are serious problems with postmodernism and its descendants. Knowing what those problems are is important for offering valid criticisms and pointing out where postmodernism falls short of its own goals. For one, many critics object to the way it collapses the distinction between literature and other forms of thought. Richard Rorty, who was a proponent of such a move, argues in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity that debates about truth are really just arguments about contingent, rival descriptions of the world, or language games, none of which is in any sense closer to objective truth. Thus, disputes are not decided by rational debate, but by the fact that people gradually lose the habit of using certain words and instead choose to take up new ones. He calls the set of words that explain and justify a person’s beliefs and actions their “final vocabulary.” These final vocabularies are never going to line up perfectly with the world because language is a tool for human communication, not a method for describing objective reality. In the face of this, he advocates becoming an “ironist”—that is, someone who replaces debate about what is true with attempts to discover inventive, new uses of language, and then persuades other people to take them up. Vocabularies are adopted because people find them more palatable or useful than alternatives.
This “genre leveling” between literature and philosophy is a tactic that Habermas criticizes in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. On Derrida, Habermas writes that he “… is particularly interested in standing the primacy of logic over rhetoric, canonized since Aristotle, on its head…Derrida wants to expand the sovereignty of rhetoric over the realm of the logical in order to solve the problem confronting the totalizing critique of reason.” That is, rather than try to salvage reason while accepting legitimate criticism (the procedure of Habermas), Derrida chooses to subordinate logic and philosophy to rhetoric. That lets him creatively re-interpret the texts he analyzes, which he does by exposing small contradictions in the works he examines. As Habermas puts it, Derrida “…finds something like indirect communications, by which the text itself denies its manifest content….In this way, he compels texts by Husserl, Saussure, or Rousseau to confess their guilt, against the explicit interpretations of their authors.”
The criticism that Habermas is leveling is that those who engage in this rhetorical sleight-of-hand ignore the fact that language claims must be submitted to intersubjective tests of validity. Good reasons must be given for the claims we make that others can reject or accept. Moreover, Habermas thinks Derrida ignores the everyday uses we make of language and focuses excessively on what Habermas calls the poetic “world-disclosive” aspect of language. The latter are the creative uses of language that constitute our shared world of norms, while the former are uses that we all intuitively understand because of shared background knowledge and assumptions. Collapsing all uses of language into the Heideggerian poetic-disclosive form is to ignore that we must already agree about a whole host of things if we want to collaborate and solve problems.
Another problem with postmodernism is its resemblance to mythological modes of thinking. In The Theory of Communicative Action, Habermas compares the mythological and the modern minds and proposes that mythological thinking is characterized by a confusion of nature and culture, as well as the belief that linguistic utterances constitute the actual world. Taken to an extreme, this second feature of mythological thought means that “…a linguistically constituted worldview can be identified with the world-order itself to such an extent that it cannot be perceived as an interpretation of the world that is subject to error and open criticism.” A mythological worldview that claims it is not an interpretation immunizes itself from criticism by making certain presuppositions of the system taboo. Habermas writes that “…this stands in contrast to the readiness to learn and openness to criticism that are the outstanding features of the scientific spirit.”
There are several similarities between the mythological mindset and postmodernism that are cause for concern. For one, postmodernism and fields it influenced confuse nature and culture by arguing that reality is socially constructed. Postmodernists generally deny we can know “the world,” so we cannot appeal to a shared objective world when there are disagreements about the facts of the world. Second, postmodernism reifies language by treating languages as concrete beings that, as Habermas argued, do not admit of error and criticism, rather than as interpretations of the world. In this context, reification means that abstract, immaterial entities like words and concepts are afforded a dignity that suggests their mere existence qualifies them as representing the world accurately. Such features of postmodern thinking have made criticism of certain language games, particularly non-Western ones, taboo. For instance, postmodern philosophy has heavily influenced the ideas of Critical Social Justice, a belief system that could be described as mythological: it outlaws criticism of itself, reifies a linguistic worldview, and confuses nature and culture.
These issues are also problematic to the extent that postmodernism seeks to expand human autonomy through a critique of modernity, reason, and Enlightenment. They make it less likely that this philosophy and its successors will be nimble enough to cope with novel threats to autonomy from new and unforeseen problems. Postmodernism has become increasingly impotent as it hardens into worldviews that are centered on the by-now trite and dogmatic assertion that Enlightenment values are mere tools of domination. As Habermas sees it, treating philosophy as literature “dulls the sword of the critique of reason itself” and leaves postmodernism in a position in which it is unable to effectively criticize the world.
Conclusion
Although there are some good and some bad elements of postmodernism as a philosophy, it is difficult to imagine that a society run on the postmodern worldview could function smoothly for very long. In Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Rorty recounts that Habermas thinks society needs to agree on certain philosophical ideas to function well. Without such agreement, people like Habermas believe liberal societies would “weaken and dissolve.” Rorty disagrees. He counters that liberal societies only need the belief that their societies are preferable to non-liberal ones, and the hope that they will continue to function well.
Nevertheless, Rorty admits that he only promotes private skepticism of the existing social order. He admitted that “I cannot imagine a culture which socialized its youth in such a way as to make them continually dubious about their own process of socialization….Irony is, if not intrinsically resentful, at least reactive.” And yet, the youth are being socialized to be dubious about the final vocabulary of the West through exposure to postmodern ideas. This is the last reason that postmodernism still matters. Whatever its virtues as a philosophy, it is difficult to believe that a social order could survive while everybody holds postmodernist views that not only call into question the truth of their own system, but also proclaim that it is inherently bad. The dilemma of our time is how to reconcile a society of postmodernists with the need for agreement in public life, and the solution of that problem requires an understanding of postmodernism.
J. Michael Yarros is an American writer who covers philosophy and political theory.
