Postmodernism: A Very Short Introduction

by Christopher Butler

but only the endless struggle of local narratives vying with one another for legitimation.

Postmodernism thus involved a highly critical epistemology, hostile to any overarching philosophical or political doctrine, and strongly opposed to those ‘dominant ideologies’ that help to maintain the status quo.

The deconstructive methods of philosophy were easily adapted to the paradox-hunting, metaphor-undoing techniques of literary theory, to which they gave an often spurious and portentous significance.

The best protection against this kind of critique, and the best way of signalling that one was up to date enough to be aware of it, whether in doing philosophy, making theory, or creating art, was to become very self-conscious indeed concerning one’s own position, and to build in the appropriate qualifications about it. This self-conscious reflexivity, whose symptom was a frequent recourse to metalanguages, was seen by some as the hallmark of philosophy under postmodern conditions.

it came to be thought that any text, from philosophy to the newspapers, involved an obsessional repetition or intertextuality. Just as much as philosophy, which since Plato has worried away at the same old problems, the novel will inevitably reproduce or re-represent earlier positions, earlier ideas, conventional modes of description, and so on.

because all texts are seen as perpetually referring to other ones, rather than to any external

reality. No text ever finally establishes anything about the world outside itself. It never comes to rest, but merely, to use Derrida’s term, ‘disseminates’ variations on previously established concepts or ideas.

As I have already asserted, all this activity kept realism of all kinds in the dock. To attempt any form of realism was to fall into philosophical error, and so the attempt to write history from the hitherto dominant positivist or empiricist point of view was doomed to failure. Once again, postmodernist thought, by analysing everything as text and rhetoric, tended to push hitherto autonomous intellectual disciplines in the direction of literature – history was just another narrative, whose paradigm structures were no better than fictional, and was a slave to its own (often unconsciously used) unrealized myths, metaphors, and stereotypes. Its sources, however objective or evidence-based they might seem to be, were in the end just another inter-related series of multiply interpretable texts, and even its causal explanations could be shown to derive from, and hence to repeat, well-known fictional plots.

Historians can’t simply tell us how things were, or how they are, because, as Alun Munslow puts it, all ‘meaning is generated by socially encoded and constructed discursive practices that mediate reality so much that they effectively close off direct access to it’. History is therefore at base just another more or less socially acceptable narrative, competing for our attention and our assent; just another way of putting things, which will survive, or not, through a process of discussion and debate. What is more, its elaborate causal constructions and explanations are essentially put together in the way that fictional narratives are.

It doesn’t matter whether the storyteller here is a great historian or William Shakespeare: they both fix upon a narrative shape or genre for what they have to tell us, which they will borrow from the currently available conventions for making them.

Apart from anything else, the relationship between the ‘invented’ or ‘constructed’ and the ‘found’ or the ‘evidential’ will always be a matter of dispute or interpretation.

And the cultural selectivity (from this point of view) of most historical accounts has been amply demonstrated by feminist historians.

What is more, at the most basic level, the novelist and the historian will be using a language full of tropes or metaphors; these also signify to us the way in which history is far from being concerned with mere literal facts. It isn’t just the causal relationships of the historical plot that are at issue here, but all the conventional and not-so-conventional pathways in language that we have inherited.

Most obviously, if the very possibility of a realist history is denied, if facts are always to be seen as merely relative to the theoretical presuppositions which constitute them, and to the interpretations which are made of them, and if the evidence is always to be seen in relation to the construction of a context for it, even the most dry-as-dust, apparently non-narrative approach to historical evidence or ‘primary sources’ will inevitably carry narrrative presuppositions.

If direct access to the past is denied, all we can have are competing stories, which are variously given coherence by their historian narrators, and the past is no more than what the historians, whom we rely upon for various cultural reasons, try to say that it is.

Postmodernist relativism needn’t mean that anything goes, or that faction and fiction are the same as history. What it does mean is that we should be more sceptically aware, more relativist about, more attentive to, the theoretical assumptions which support the narratives produced by all historians, whether they see themselves

as empiricists or deconstructors or as postmodernist ‘new historicists’.

An exact correspondence between narrative and ‘the past’ is not possible.

The best we can have is a debate about the nature and meaning of past events, and postmodernists (and plenty of others) say that this debate should be

kept as open and as rigorous as possible. The penalty of a lack of vigilance is that some ‘official version’ may come to represent for us a true and final account of the past. It may also thus come to form part of an unjustifiable, because clearly distorting, ‘dominant ideology’ within its receiving society, as seems to have happened to both sides in the period of the Cold War. On this account the deconstructionist historian differs from the others only in a tendency to worry aloud, as he or she writes, about the difficulties of the job.

They have attacked the basic claims traditionally made by scientists: (1) that they can describe and analyse, objectively and truthfully, and therefore with a universal application, the physical reality which surrounds us, and (2) that their scientific inquiry is a disinterested pursuit of truths about reality, which are also universalizable, in that

they are true everywhere, quite independent of any merely local cultural constraints, and in particular independent of any of the more or less hidden moral or ideological motivations which may have inspired their discovery. For postmodernists, who are good relativists, scientists can have no such privileges: they promote just ‘one story among many’, their pretensions are unjustified. They do not so much ‘discover’ the nature of reality as ‘construct’ it, and so their work is open to all the hidden biases and metaphors which we have seen postmodernist analysis reveal in philosophy and ordinary language. The key questions about science should not therefore just centre on its inflated (logocentric) claims to truth, but on the political questions aroused by its institutional status and application, shaped as they are by the ideological agendas of powerful elites.

But these contextual judgements can be accepted without it following that the core activities of scientists are somehow unsuccessful in arriving at the most reliable way of analysing nature we can manage. There is something very odd indeed in the belief that in looking, say, for causal laws or a unified theory, or in asking whether atoms really do obey the laws of quantum mechanics, the activities of scientists are somehow inherently ‘bourgeois’ or ‘Eurocentric’ or ‘masculinist’, or even ‘militarist’. This is, partly at least, because the truths of science, rather than those of politics or religion, seem as a matter of fact to be equally valid for socialist, African, feminist, and pacifist scientists (though some persons in these categories deny this). For empirical scientists only accept truths that have this universalizable character. Aspirin works everywhere. It is one of the things that they are not willing to be (politically or culturally) relativist about.

And so one reply from scientists to postmodernists is that the latter may have an entirely worthy interest in the sociology and politics of science, but simply don’t understand its actual workings, and the nature of the truths it attempts to establish, very

well.

Their eagerness to embrace what seem to be ‘politically correct’ positions has too often led them to express utterly bizarre and ill-informed, not to say politically biased, accounts of what scientists are doing.

All these radical postmodernist arguments are now under severe attack, but they have very much changed the way in which the scientific disciplines are perceived within American and European culture, towards a more sceptical, and politicized, view.

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.

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.

All reasonably systematic uses of language are to be seen as having a particular power-enforcing function. You believe what the young surgeon tells you, and so give him permission to anaesthetize you, cut you up, and help you recover. The language game of the discourse expresses and enacts the authority of those who are empowered to use it within a social group, which includes hospitals, law courts, boards of examiners, and professors like me writing books like this. It can also be used to subordinate or exclude or marginalize those who are outside it

He tries to show that the will to exercise power beats humanitarian egalitarianism every time, and implies that even the Enlightenment reliance upon universal principle and reason is always incipiently totalitarian, because the appeal to an always-correct Reason is itself a system of control and will always exclude what it makes marginal, simply by seeing it as non-rational.

In doing this, he looks for what he calls the ‘episteme’, that is, the largely unconscious assumptions concerning intellectual order that underlie the historical states of particular societies.

These conditions lie below perception, they are not always explicit, so that the episteme is a kind of epistemological unconscious for an age.

Sexists, racists, and imperialists all use similar techniques – they make their ‘normalizing’ discourse prevail, and, in doing so, they can actually create or bring into being the deviant or what many postmodernists call the other. Their discourse actually helps to create the subordinate identities of those who are excluded from participation in it.

We thus talk people into being (just as we do universities and the Euro). But the postmodernists go on from this to make an important, more general point. ‘Discourse’, from this point of view, is like a Derridean language – it isn’t the property of controlling individuals; it goes beyond them. Nor is it only to be found in obviously formal contexts, like that of the law court. It is out and about in society from top to bottom, from the pronouncements of judges to scientific journals to TV advertisement, pop songs, and the broadsheets of the day. And the more dominant a discourse is within a group or society, the more ‘natural’ it can seem, and the more it tends to appeal to the ways of nature to justify itself.

Foucault objects to particular regimes of power not on moral grounds . . . but simply on the grounds that they are regimes as such, and so, from some vague libertarian standpoint, repressive.

Just as importantly, in looking at the functions of discourse, Foucault fails to allow for the ways in which it actually works through individuals, and so he underestimates the importance of individual agency and responsibility.

The analysis of the relation between discourse and power had a further and important consequence for postmodernists. It led to a distinctive view of the nature of the self which was a challenge to the individualist rationalism, and the emphasis on personal autonomy, of most liberals. Indeed, the term preferred by postmodernists to apply to individuals is not so much ‘self’ as ‘subject’, because the latter term implicitly draws attention to the ‘subject-ed’ condition of persons who are, whether they know it or not, ‘controlled’ (if you are on the left) or ‘constituted’ (if you are in the middle) by the ideologically motivated discourses of power which predominate in the society they inhabit.

The extraordinary achievement of Foucault and those who thought like him was, given their analysis of the workings of power, to go on to make one of the most influential of postmodernist claims – the claim that such discourses entailed, imposed, demanded (the many possibilities here constitute the interest of the claim) a particular kind of identity for all those who were affected by them. In postmodernist jargon, they ‘constitute the subject’. Of course, the fact that institutions and their discourses demand that you be a particular sort of person, to ‘fit in’, was hardly unknown.