Status Updates From Explaining Postmodernism: S...

So there is something else going on besides epistemology. Part of that something else is that postmodernists have taken to heart Fredric Jameson’s remark that “everything is ‘in the last analysis’ political.” The spirit of Jameson’s remark lies behind the persistent postmodernist charge that epistemology is merely a tool of power, that all claims of objectivity and rationality mask oppressive political agendas.

n-François Lyotard, and Richard Rorty are all far Left. And so are Jacques Lacan, Stanley Fish, Catharine MacKinnon, Andreas Huyssen, and Frank Lentricchia. Of the major names in the postmodernist movement, there is not a single figure who is not Left-wing in a serious way. So there is something else going on besides epistemology.

This is not what we find in the case of postmodernism. Postmodernists are not individuals who have reached relativistic conclusions about epistemology and then found comfort in a wide variety of political persuasions. Postmodernists are monolithically far Left-wing in their politics.

If values and politics are primarily a matter of a subjective leap into whatever fits one’s preferences, then we should find people making leaps into all sorts of political programs.

And especially in the cases of Foucault and Derrida, most major postmodernists will abandon Nietzsche’s sense of the exalted potential of man and embrace Heidegger’s anti-humanism.

The postmodernists will effect a compromise between Heidegger and Nietzsche. Common to Heidegger and Nietzsche epistemologically is a contemptuous rejection of reason. Metaphysically, though, the postmodernists will drop the remnants of Heidegger’s metaphysical quest for Being, and put Nietzschean power struggles at the core of our being.

The death of Nietzsche in 1900 brings us to the twentieth century. Nineteenth-century German philosophy had developed two main lines of thought—the speculative metaphysical and the irrationalist epistemological. What was needed was a way to bring together these two strands of thought into a new synthesis for the next century. The philosopher who accomplished this was Martin Heidegger.

Any thinker who concludes that in principle reason cannot know reality is not fundamentally an advocate of reason.

Disagreements are met—not with argument, the benefit of the doubt, and the expectation that reason can prevail—but with assertion, animosity, and a willingness to resort to force.

Principles of civility and procedural justice simply serve as masks for hypocrisy and oppression born of asymmetrical power relations, masks that must be ripped off by crude verbal and physical weapons: ad hominem argument, in-your-face shock tactics, and equally cynical power plays.

In the West, for too long the law has been a cover for the assertion of white male interests. The only antidote to that poison is the equally forceful assertion of the subjective interests of historically oppressed groups.

Herman Melville in Moby Dick may have thought that he was exploring universal themes of personal and social ambition, man and nature—but what Captain Ahab really represents is the exploitative authoritarianism of imperialistic patriarchalism and the insane drive of technology to conquer nature.

Instead of valuing individualism in values, markets, and politics—calls for communalism, solidarity, and egalitarian restraints. Instead of prizing the achievements of science and technology—suspicion tending toward outright hostility.

Postmodernism’s essentials are the opposite of modernism’s. Instead of natural reality—anti-realism. Instead of experience and reason—linguistic social subjectivism. Instead of individual identity and autonomy—various race, sex, and class group-isms. Instead of human interests as fundamentally harmonious and tending toward mutually-beneficial interaction—conflict and oppression.

So far, a remarkably lucid, comprehensive, and readable little book.