Note on postmodernism

Meaning of postmodernism

Postmodernism began as a reaction to modernism, the product of the industrial era in which reason and science replaced traditional explanation and produced grand narratives and all-embracing theories. It sees modernism as centralised and monolithic, suppressing minor identities and voices, and it rejects the idea of a single meaning of truth; it favours a multiplicity of narratives and denies that meta-narratives are possible. It cannot be reduced to a single definition, since it resists definition by nature, and there is disagreement even on whether it is a break with modernity or a continuing critique of it. Eagleton characterises it as a mode of thinking that distrusts the traditional ideas of truth, reason, identity and objectivity, doubts universal progress and emancipation, and rejects single frameworks, grand narratives and final grounds of explanation; set against Enlightenment norms, the world appears contingent, diverse and unstable. The syllabus places it with feminism as a critical perspective in Unit IV.

Main thinkers. Lyotard defined the postmodern condition as "incredulity towards metanarratives" and said that knowledge has become a commodity; Derrida developed deconstruction, which reads texts to reveal their internal conflicts, and attacked logocentrism and fixed meaning; Foucault analysed discourse and the link between power and knowledge; Laclau and Mouffe proposed a post-Marxist "radical democracy".

Criticism. The main objections are that postmodernism has become a grand narrative itself, that it uses reason while preaching the irrational, and that it leaves the roots of oppression unanswered.