What Is Post-Modern Thought?

There’s also a flip side to the merits of postmodern thought, and in most public matters these days, the flip side is what dominates.
The postmodern method is a great hammer. It can be used for good, but it also can be used to turn everything into a nail, and then hammer it until it’s done for.
Foucault was messed up inside and had MAJOR daddy issues. Therefore he saw everything through the lens of power relations, and set out to expose them. And he did find some indeed. But now his work is used to reduce every single thing in society to power struggle, and surprise surprise, by people who are only looking to get ahead in theirs, with no regard for who gets hit or what the fallout is.
By the time of postmodernism proper, nobody really cares if what they are talking about really exists. The tendencies were there already in poststructuralism, but pomo took it all the way. If everything is a social construct, turns out the ding-an-sich is irrelevant, and every interpretation and opinion is as valid as the other one. The end result is that the one who screams the loudest, or is willing to beat up everyone, wins.
And I’m not only talking about social justice warriors, either.
The good ol’ money quote: “The aide said that guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality-based community,’ which he defined as people who ‘believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.’ […] ‘That’s not the way the world really works anymore,’ he continued. ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do’.”
The objective reality does not matter. On any turf we fancy, we go out and erase what was there, and make our own. Gaza is a prime example of this, but really, look at anything the West does, and see if they pay any attention to what is actually going on.
And so it is that the very core project of the Western Civilization, the idea that power should be limited and responsibly used, has been torn down by the postmodernism that was traumatized by the fact that the project was not finished yet.

Am home with Covid, so apologies for any unclarity below. Also note that I haven’t read Foucault since grad school in any real way, 18 years ago. I have nevertheless dealt with a lot of postmodernism since that time:

I want to second a lot of j’s points above. In fact, j even used the same Karl Rove quote that I use to show what I think of as the baleful effects of postmodernism.

One of my problems with Foucault is that once you accept his central point — that systems will tend towards the masking of various power structures — you get to a second question, which naturally follows: if we’re going to have power structures, necessarily, just as a function of having systems, what kind of power structures are we going to have? Foucault doesn’t really answer that question to my satisfaction. That, I would suggest, is the central question of our age, and where various ideologies, even the oft-maligned liberalism, have an answer to that question, however cursory and minimal, Postmodernism doesn’t.

Postmodernism is itself a product of the material effloresence of late capitalism. It is in many ways the last of the siblings that include Liberalism and Socialism (republicanism is an older cousin) and were distinctive products of the modern (post-1789) period.

It is ironic indeed that the often-nihilistic critique of Enlightenment reason that various campus postmodernists engaged in did not bring a new age of liberation, but rather, one where the Karl Roves and now Ron DeSantises of the world assail empirical reality, including germ theory. This was also eminently predictable.

Thanks for this, mostly agreed. It’s a very liberating analytical framework, because it tells us that the bad things about society can be changed; they are not inevitable.

To j: I don’t understand this criticism. Do you really think the reason the W. Bush administration was so horrible was because they understood post-modernism? I doubt many of them knew anything about it!

In reality, the opposite is true: post-modernism tells us that power can be used for good rather than evil, that many hard trade-offs are no such thing. Indeed, it tells us that the long line of awful people who ran societies did have a choice to do better and that we can now.

And no, it does not say that physical reality is irrelevant, just that all of reality is interpreted by human observers/actors and our interpretation is subjective and variable. So we have to be careful with the concepts we use to deal with reality, because we can introduce some unintended problems.

Something I need to take issue with . . . I agree with Senator-Elect that you can’t blame postmodernism for Karl Roves and Ron deSantises. Yes, these people are often operating as if they have weird relativist ideas about truth, which have weird resonances with postmodernism, which is ironic since they would profess to hate everything about postmodernism. But come on, they’re not in a weird relationship with the truth because they somehow picked up postmodern ideas, that’s ludicrous. They’re in a weird relationship with the truth because fascist types are allergic to the truth, always have been since well before postmodernism was a thing, always will be.

I will say that the rise of postmodern ideas did tend to drain a lot of the content out of leftism on campuses. People who started talking about postmodernism seemed to stop talking about class. And there are some indications that some behind the scenes actors encouraged this, in somewhat the way the CIA bankrolled art criticism that pushed people like Jackson Pollock whose art had no objective content. Relatively pure abstraction in art was at the same time an artistic approach that the Cold War US could push as being all about freedom, and an artistic approach that was inherently completely unthreatening to power. Postmodernism had some similarities.

S-E – post-modernism does not tell us that power can be used for good rather than evil, that is what enlightenment and humanism tells us. Postmodernism tells us there is no good and evil, these are nothing but social constructs. The only thing there is is different equally valid viewpoints. Postmodernism cannot tell us that we can do good, because it cannot tell good from bad.
The wielders of postmodern theory will certainly tell you that they are the representatives of all truth and good though, and if only you gave them free reign all of our problems would surely be solved soon enough. The wielders of postmodern theory will certainly dismantle one opressing social construct, and erect in it’s place another one, redistributing opression, problems and power in a way that more suits them. This is of course completely unoriginal. The means are novel, but the ends – banal. In that postmodernism is nothing but just another tool of power struggle.

PLG – Postmodernism is indeed an overreaction. Specifically, it’s an overreaction to the horrors of the world wars. Those were seen, not without merit, as a product of modernism, and the modernist ideals kind of died with that.
But the idea that “at least some of the “there” that you think is there, isn’t there”… that’s as old as humanity itself. But let us remind ourselves of Plato’s cave, and Kant’s ding-an-sich/ding-für-uns in particular, as two very important milestones of our attmpts of dealing with that.
In this regard I see postmodernism as a fall in public intellectual capacity. It used to be that everyone with basic brain function understood that there are limits to our knowledge of the world. But then somehow arrives a time where we need a whole all-encompassing intellectual movement to not forget the simple fact.
I think a healthy relationship would be something like 90% modernism, 10% pomo. You need all of modernist vision, idealism, pragmatism and engineering based approach to build things, and pomo to guard them, and critique them to make them better. Instead pomo has been used to tear everything down relentlessly.

My point about the empire is not so much about the apparachiks taking postmodernism lessons, although they certainly do, and let us not be fooled by whatever show they put on. The utter lack of truth in the US public discourse, and the complete disconnect between the talk and walk of the government, these are postmodern through and through. And it’s not like that by accident either, it’s by design, and created as such by people who had degrees and knew what they were doing. Yes there is morons running around spewing mental diarrhea, but they can do it because they fit a system that on the public side fits their persona like a glove, and on the private side only cares about their ability to climb ahead.

My point is more about the fact that postmodernism has destroyed our ability to understand and condemn the empire for what it is doing. Any hope of truth drowns in the endless barrage of talking heads, everyone advancing their careers by trying to invent yet unheard yet party approved approaches to the issues of the day, unrestrained by any responsibility for their words, unchained by any moral qualms about any objective reality in their content. Exactly like postmodern scholars make careers spewing fancy words in long, windy, and meaningless passages; how philosophers make careers in squeezing never seen before interpretations out of random Plato’s tidbits; how “alphas” lecture us about how to be a man, and “feminists” lecture us about how to beat a man… Afghanis killing US soldiers is morally equivalent with US soldiers killing afghanis, Hamas killing israelis is morally equivalent to israelis killing gazans, and being against a genocide is the same as being pro Holocaust. War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength. Any hope for any movement in any direction is pre-empted, cancelled, and given up on long before it could have been something. All that remains is an empty playing field for power.

If that is not enough, the powers that be will of course be happy to flex the good ol’ state muscle and ban, bury, demonetize and deplatform, and to close TikTok and whatnot. In our current state of the world, this also cannot be understood, nor condemned. The empire’s hate of truth is not fascistic though, the hate towards truth by power is universal, and transcends all time, space, cultures, nations, governments and ideologies. Truth exposes the shortcomings of power, and the ridiculousness of those in power, and therefore, it must be banished. This is exactly why we have freedom of speech. It is paramount to progress that truth be able to do those two things. Since that is no longer the case, there’s nowhere to go but down.

P.S. The left lost and got buried when they stopped talking about class. Like the devils greatest trick was to make us think he does not exist, so the greatest trick of the ruling class was to make us think class does not exist. And so here we are, all confused and no place to go.