Is Postmodernism Useful?

Debates about postmodernism and whether it is really a useful theory or not.



• Lyotard and Baudrillard share a belief that the idea of truth needs to be ‘deconstructed’ so that we can challenge dominant ideas that people claim as truth.

• There are always competing versions of the truth. A postmodernist cannot wish to remove one version of the truth and replace it with the ‘correct’ one. All notions of truth must be viewed with suspicion.

• Postmodernism challenges the very notion of truth….and certainly disputes the idea that we should live our lives by adhering to widely perceived ideas of the truth (through religion etc)



• Many critics see this position as offensive. They believe that it is a luxury of people who live in advanced, rich nations and democratic states to take this ‘playful’ stance on matters of truth… (JM, 138) For example, many people in sub-Saharan have to face very fundamental truths every day…truths about the need to eat to survive etc


• The denial of ‘grand narratives’ and moral principles in postmodernism is also objected to by people who have religious convictions and attach importance to moral principles.

• If truth is absent, many would argue that we sink into a moral relativism where ‘anything goes’.

• Even if you accept the idea that there is such a thing as postmodernism, many would suggest that its time has now passed. It has been argued that the events and aftermath of 9/11 have undermined postmodernism’s belief that we have reached the end of ‘grand narratives’. Religious fundamentalism is perhaps the ultimate grand narrative. Did postmodernism get it wrong? Possibly, but there is an argument put forward by some that 9/11 reminds us of why we need postmodernism to try to challenge the authority of ‘grand narratives’.

• Postmodernism has emerged from so many different disciplines that it is notoriously difficult to define. How much value can we ascribe to theory which remains so elusive? If it is difficult to define what postmodernism is all about, might we conclude that there is nothing really there: there is nothing at its heart.

• Postmodern challenges the ideas of core truths/principles. By disputing the very notion of core truths, it would be contradictory for postmodernism to establish a coherent and clear set of central ‘postmodern ideas’. It has therefore become impossible for postmodernism to coalesce around a shared ideology (it challenges the idea that you should/could have one) and as a result has postmodernism denied the possibility that it can make a difference.

• Some would argue that postmodernism is really a descriptive rather than prescriptive movement. It tries to describe current phenomena but does not really move towards any idea of how we should progress from this point. In many ways, it even disputes the idea that we can make progress.

• Can you really separate postmodernism from modernism? One criticism of postmodernism is that it is not as new as many would claim it to be. In particular, intertextuality/pastiche/parody are often seen as key characteristics of postmodernism but, it is argued, they can also be seen as characteristics of many modernist texts: ‘Joe Dante’s films may be marked by a plundering of all kinds of popular cultural sources, but then so is James Joyce’s Ulysees, a high modernist novel’.



It is important to remember that not everyone agrees with the ideas of postmodernism….Many would dispute the ideas commonly associated with postmodernism.

‘Although the omnipresence of the postmodern and its advocates would seem to suggest otherwise, not everybody subscribes to the view that language constitutes rather than represents, reality; that the autonomous and stable subject of modernity has been replaced by a postmodern agent whose identity is largely over-determined and always in process; that meaning has become social and provisional; or that knowledge only counts as such within a given discursive formation, that is a given power structure.’ Hans Bertens (1994)


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Thanks to MEDI@CHS