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

by Christopher Butler

The most important postmodernist ethical argument concerns the relationship between discourse and power. A ‘discourse’ here means a historically evolved set of interlocking and mutually supporting statements, which are used to define and describe a subject matter. Crudely, it’s the language of the main intellectual disciplines, for example the ‘discursive practices’ of law, medicine, aesthetic judgement, and so on. These discourses, as used by lawyers, doctors, and others, do not just implicitly accept some kind of dominating theory to guide them (for example, in the guise of a paradigm as used by those engaged in orthodox science). They involve politically contentious activities, not just because of the certainty with which they describe and define people – who is an ‘immigrant’, or an ‘asylum seeker’, or a ‘criminal’, or ‘mad’, or a ‘terrorist’ – but because such discourses at the same time express the political authority of their users.