Postmodernism: A Very Short Introduction

by Christopher Butler

when we look at particular systems like this, which purport to describe the world correctly, we can see that the concepts they ‘privilege’ or make central, and the hierarchies they order them into, are not nearly so certainly in the ‘right’ order, and are much more interdependent, than we thought. For Derrideans, indeed, the revelation of their hidden interdependence ‘deconstructs’ them. They can be undone or reversed, often to paradoxical effect, so that truth is ‘really’ a kind of fiction, reading is always a form of misreading, and, most fundamentally, understanding is always a form of misunderstanding, because it is never direct, is always a form of partial interpretation, and often uses metaphor when it thinks it is being literal. It is this central use of deconstruction to subvert our confidence in logical, ethical, and political commonplaces that has proved most revolutionary – and typical of postmodernism. For the relativist claim is that once we see our conceptual systems in this way, we can also see that the world, its social systems, human identity even, are not givens, somehow guaranteed by a language which corresponds to reality, but are constructed by us in language, in ways that can never be justified by the claim that this is the way that such things ‘really are’. We live, not inside reality, but inside our representations of it. (In a notorious Derridean aside – ‘there is nothing outside the text’, only the more text that we use to try to describe or analy...