Postmodernism: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions Book 74)

by Christopher Butler

This battle between postmodernists and others in philosophy and theory and history and science was basically about the claims of unificatory versus contradictionist talk, the contrast between cooperative constructing and individualist deconstructing. But each side needs the other. Postmodernists liberally opposed all holistic explanations (even if they sometimes readmitted them through the back door by promoting arguments which were in sympathy with those of Freud and Marx), and their oppositional, negative postmodernist critique was, as we shall see, in many ways immensely liberating, certainly for women, for cultural minorities, and for much of the artistic avant-garde. An artist’s ideas can perhaps more truly be seen as ‘play’ than those of a historian or scientist, or indeed of a lawyer, who could hardly apply a postmodernist scepticism to the law of evidence or to the notion that one way or another the courts are designed to test the truth or probability of two alternative accounts of what actually happened.