Before I get under way: why “remembering” postmodernism? Several reasons: back when I was an undergraduate, I came across a book about Canadian art titled Remembering Postmodernism. It struck me on two points: one, that the afterword was written by Linda Hutcheon, whose books and articles on postmodernist fiction had been my gateway drug into the topic; and two, that the title was pleasantly cheeky, considering that as far as I was concerned at the time, postmodernism was an ongoing thing.
Now, I never actually read the book, mainly because postmodernist art was—however interesting I found it—somewhat outside my wheelhouse. But the title stuck with me. Two years ago I taught a fourth-year course on American postmodernist fiction, which I titled “Remembering Postmodernism.” In that instance, the expression was a straightforward acknowledgement of postmodernism as an historical period: we started with Thomas Pynchon’s 1966 novel The Crying of Lot 49 and ended with Monique Truong’s The Book of Salt (2003), and a large part of our discussion of Truong’s novel was whether it was, in fact, postmodernist, or whether it represented whatever the next (as yet unnamed) historical phase was.
Now I’m doing these posts and contemplating whether it’s worthwhile to write a book called The Idiot’s Guide to Postmodernism, for the simple fact that there’s an awful lot of talk about postmodernism and postmodernists these days, and none of it seems to have the slightest clue about it. It is rather a term of disapprobation that seems designed on one hand to vilify contemporary university humanities programs as irredeemably “woke,” and as a shorthand to encompass the varying iterations of “wokeness” on the other.
Hence, as far as I’m concerned, we need to remember what postmodernism was and think about what it might still be. And remembering is a useful term insofar as it means both the calling to mind of things forgotten, as well as the act of re-assemblage.
If I were to ask you what the opposite of “remember” is, you’d most likely say “forget,” for the simple reason that that is entirely correct. But in a more strictly linguistic and semantic way, the opposite of “remember” is “dismember.” Sometimes when we remember something, it’s a simple matter of that something simply springing into our mind—where we left our car keys, for instance, or the fact that today is someone’s birthday. The more laborious process of remembering, however, is one of re-membering, of finding those sundered scraps of the past and putting them together like Isis reassembling Osiris’ dismembered body.
And lest you think this post is just an excuse for me to nerd out over semantics (which, to be fair, it totally is—more of that to come), the fallibilities of memory and their relationship to how we conceive of history are quite germane to postmodern thought.
So, I want to do a deep dive on postmodernism over a series of posts. And to be clear, by “deep dive” I actually mean more of a SparkNotes-type run-through of its history, its basic premises, and what it means in the grander scheme of things. I’ve been studying and writing on postmodernism for the better part of my academic career, starting with my undergrad years, and there are libraries-worth of scholarship on the subject. So I’m hardly going to do much more in a handful of blog posts than offer the general contours.
Why, then, do I want to even bother? Two reasons: first, as I posted previously, because I want to use my blog this summer to work through my confused thoughts on a variety of issues. And second, because nobody honking off about it in the present moment—outside of those who have actually considered postmodernism within the confines of academe—seems to have any bloody clue what they’re talking about. As a case in point, I recently read an otherwise interesting article in The Bulwark, an online publication by anti-Trump conservative thinkers, on anti-democratic intellectuals of the new Right who opine that the tenets of “classical liberalism” in fact contain the seeds of tyranny. The article in question was a reasoned and persuasive defense of Enlightenment thought and its influence on the United States’ founding fathers. But then there was this paragraph:
Contemporary “political correctness” or “wokeness” comes from Marx and Nietzsche by way of the Postmodernists, not from John Locke or the Founding Fathers. A serious person would feel the need to at least attempt to trace some of that intellectual history and confront the ideological differences.
Yes, a serious person would feel the need to at least attempt to trace some of that intellectual history and confront the ideological differences—which the author of this article obviously did not do when throwing Marx, Nietzsche, and postmodernism into the same bucket and tacitly ascribing a causal line of influence. He is smart enough at least to cite Marx and Nietzsche—which is more than most people invoking the dreaded specter of postmodernism do—and obviously knows enough to understand that there is a relationship between those two thinkers and some aspects of postmodernism. In other words, there is a very general sense in which he isn’t wrong, but any number of specific senses in which everything about that statement betrays a profound ignorance of all three of its subjects—starting with the basic fact that Marxism and postmodernism are, if not strictly speaking antithetical, then extremely antagonistic.1
But what is postmodernism? Well, let’s start with the pervasive misapprehension that it constitutes a sort of absolute relativism—a contradiction in terms, yes, but one that ostensibly obviates the possibility of objective meaning. After all, if everything is relative to everything else, where is the capital-T Truth?
As with the paragraph I quoted above, this understanding gets some things right, but remains a basic misapprehension for the simple reason that there is no singular “postmodernism.” The rejection of absolutes, the fundamental skepticism about grand narratives, and the understanding of power not as something external to ourselves but bound up in the flux of discourse and language, are all key aspects of what I’ll be calling “postmodern thought.” Postmodern thought is what Jordan Peterson is referring to when he asserts that, for postmodernists, all interpretations of anything at all are equally valid. I will have occasion in future posts to explain why this is completely wrong (which doesn’t differentiate it from most of his assertions), but for my first few posts I want to distinguish between the various intellectual strands of thinking that emerged from postmodernism, and postmodernism as the cultural condition that gave rise to postmodern thought.
Because the one thing I want to clarify, even if I don’t manage to make anything else clear in these posts, is that postmodernism—or more specifically postmodernity—is above all other things a cultural condition emerging from a confluence of historical circumstances and contexts. The tacit understanding of postmodernism when deployed as a term of disapprobation is that it is a pernicious relativist mode of thinking that exerts a profound and deleterious influence on, well, everything; in the crudest and most conspiratorial version of this thinking, such contemporary social movements that enrage conservatives like feminism, trans rights, Black Lives Matter (and the current bête noir, “critical race theory”) , and a host of other “woke” causes, can be traced back to a handful of French intellectuals in the late 1960s who invented postmodernism as a means of pursuing Marxism and the destruction of Western civilization by other means.2 And while the loose assemblage of schools of thought I’m calling “postmodern” has undoubtedly shaped contemporary attitudes—sometimes positively, sometimes not—my larger argument is that they have emerged in response to cultural conditions; what postmodernism’s detractors call “postmodernism” has usually been less a tool of cultural change than a series of attempts to find language to describe the dramatic cultural transformations of the post-WWII landscape. The cultural changes in question, from intersectional understandings of identity to the normalization of gay marriage, might have been facilitated in part by aspects of postmodern thought, but have been far more facilitated by the technological and economic transformations of postmodernity.
Which, once again, brings us back to the basic question of just what postmodernism is. As I say above, it is a lot of things, including but not limited to:
- The cultural logic of late capitalism.
- The breakdown of faith in such societal grand narratives as religion, governance, justice, science, etc.
- A set of aesthetic practices in art, fiction, film, and architecture (among others) that reflect and articulate such breakdowns.
- The rise of multinational corporate capital, and its transformation of the imperialist project from a national, colonial one to the subjugation of national interests to the global market.
- The ascendancy of neoliberal free-market fundamentalism.
- The snowballing of technology, especially communication technology—from television to the internet to social media—and the concomitant erosion of traditional informational gatekeepers (e.g. legacy media).
- The inescapability of consumer culture and the culture industry.
- A set of philosophical, theoretical, and critical attempts to adequately describe all of the above.
So … that clears things up, right? Just kidding—of course it doesn’t. But hopefully that starts to communicate the complexity of the subject.
I do want to make clear that this series of posts is not meant as an apologia for postmodernity, postmodernism, or postmodern thought. I have for many years studied postmodernism and written about it and taught it in university classrooms, but I would not call myself a postmodernist (though others, mostly the people who don’t really understand it, certainly would). My own thinking and philosophical inclinations bend toward pragmatism (the philosophical kind) and a sort of small-h humanism; my lodestars in this respect are Richard Rorty and Terry Pratchett. I passionately love some aspects of postmodern culture, mostly its aesthetic incarnations—the fiction of Toni Morrison and Don DeLillo, for example, or films like Blade Runner—and I find the theoretical armature defining postmodernism, whether it’s celebratory like that of Linda Hutcheon or Brian McHale, or damning like that of Fredric Jameson, fascinating; but huge swaths of what I’m calling postmodernity are pernicious and harmful (corporate capitalism and social media among them).
This series of posts is rather a quixotic attempt to re-inject some nuance into what has become an impoverished and overdetermined understanding of a bewilderingly complex concept. More importantly, it is my own way of working through my own thoughts on the matter. So bear with me.
NOTES
1. There is also the rather amusing thought of just how disgusted Nietzsche would be with “woke” sentiments.
2. More on this in my future post on “The Conspiracy Theory of Postmodernism.”
it's all narrative 