Postmodernism
to Post-Structuralism and Postmodernism
(Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993) says of Baudril-
lard, ‘Personally I find many of his insights
stimulating and provocative but, generally, his
position is deplorable. In Baudrillard’s world
truth and falsity are wholly indistinguishable, a
position which I fi nd leads to moral and political
nihilism.’ Th e danger for a postmodernist world
resides in a view expressed by Lyotard: that
power has increasingly become the criterion
of – the synomym for – truth.
A key and resonating criticism of post-
modernist writers focuses on the density and
complexity of their language; to the point where
some commentators view it as meaninglessly
obscure (or obscurely meaningless!). Th e case is
summarized by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont
in Intellectual Impostures (Profi le Books, 1998).
First published in French, the book makes a
full-frontal attack on both the language and the
meaning of aspects of postmodernism.
Professors of physics, Sokal and Bricmont
direct their critique at the postmodernists
specifi cally in terms of their invoking concepts
from physics and mathematics. For example,
they target the French philosopher Lacan as
follows: ‘ ... although Lacan uses quite a few
key words from the mathematical theory of
compactness, he mixes them up arbitrarily and
without the slightest regard for their meaning.
His “defi nition” of compactness is not just false:
it is gibberish’.
In a review of Sokal and Bricmont’s book,
‘Postmodernism disrobed’ (Nature, 9 July 1998),
Richard Dawkins wonders whether ‘the modish
French “philosophy” whose disciples and expo-
nents have all but taken over large sections of
American academic life, is genuinly profound
or the vacuous rhetoric of mountebanks and
charlatans’. See sokal hoax.
▶J.F. Lyotard, Th e Postmodern Condition (Manches-
ter University Press, 1984); David Harvey, Th e Condi-
tion of Postmodernity: An Inquiry into the Origins
of Cultural Change (Blackwell, 1990); Frederic
Jameson, Postmodernism Or Th e Cultural Logic of
Late Capitalism (Verso, 1991); Christopher Norris,
Uncritical Th eory: Postmodernism, Intellectuals and
the Gulf War (Lawrence & Wishart, 1992); Angela
McRobbie, Postmodernism and Popular Culture
(Routledge, 1994); John Hartley, Popular Reality:
Journalism, Modernity, Popular Culture (Arnold,
1996); Stuart Sim, ed., The Routledge Companion
to Postmodernism (Routledge, 2001); Christopher
Butler, Post-Modernism: A Very Short Introduction
(Oxford University Press, 2002); Richard Appigna-
nesi and Chris Garrett, Introducing PostmodernismModern minds were sceptical, Postmodern
minds are cynical’. Th e prevailing cynicism is
wary of traditional attempts at explaining the
evolution of society. It discards the affi rming or
‘grand narratives’ (metanarratives) of the past
that subscribed to the view of the inevitability
of human progress; what might be described
as the Enlightenment position. Reality itself
is an uncertainty: being a creation of language
and existing in socially produced discourse, it
represents an infi nitely movable feast.
Marxism, for example, has been rejected by
postmodernist thinkers such as Michel Foucault,
Jacques Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard and
Jean Baudrillard as having ‘totalizing ambitions’,
that is off ering grandiose explanations of reality
which cannot be sustained. Th ey therefore reject
the central tenet of Marxism, its belief in the
emancipation of humanity.
The postmodernist position derives much
of its vision from the German philosopher
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), in particular
his profound antipathy to any system and his
rejection of the view expressed by an earlier
German thinker, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
(1770–1831), of history as progress. Instead
of such totalizing, postmodernism embraces
fragmentation (and this includes views on the
fragmentation of time itself, and therefore of
concepts of the past and present). It hones in
on micro-situations; the stress is on the local.
Taking a deeply sceptical position, postmodern-
ists declare that progress is a myth. If there
are no unities, then nothing fi gures; if nothing
fi gures, nothing matters, and if nothing matters
then anything goes.
Th us in architecture postmodernism scorns
traditional forms while unapologetically plagia-
rizing them. It has varyingly been described as
a culture of surfaces, of self-aware superfi ciality
characterized by the ephemeral and by discon-
tinuity. In the postmodernist approach, writes
Norman K. Denzen in a review, ‘Messy methods
of communication research’ in the Journal of
Communication (Spring, 1995), all ‘criteria are
doubted, no position is privileged’.
Taken to a logical conclusion, such a stand-
point facilitates cultural freedom and unshack-
led pluralism; it could also unhinge freedom
from responsibility on the grounds that a defi ni-
tion of responsibility could only be arrived at on
a personal, micro-level; hence the accusation
made in some quarters that postmodernism
is the cultural arm of the commoditization of
information and knowledge.
Madan Sarup in An Introductory Guide