As pundits and scholars come to terms with the new “post-truth” era, the fingers point to a familiar intellectual culprit: postmodernism. Columnist Paul Waldman, writing in The American Prospect, argues that President Trump has turned the Republican Party into a “postmodernist party,” and that “conservatives are on their way to becoming the ultimate postmodernists, convinced that there’s no such thing as objective truth and each one of us exists in our own subjective reality.” Another columnist, Peter McKnight, offers a similar gloss: “the truth isn’t out there. It’s in here, in each of us, as we decide what counts as truth based on our political or other interests. … [I]f you can’t tell the truth, you can’t tell a lie either.” The philosopher Daniel Dennett, reflecting on the rise of Trump, goes so far as to say that “what the postmodernists did was truly evil.”
The theme of these (and many other) pieces is that postmodernism cultivated a decadent skepticism that served to detach perspective, interpretation, and reception from concrete reality. It gave people the tools to replace “absolute truth” with a range of competing partial truths based on particular perspectives. That this turn of events has boosted the right seems punishment to the left for embracing postmodernism. The reduction of scientific and political facts to competing political positions — a hallmark of the past decade or so, culminating in the 2016 election and its aftermath — is seen as liberals’ comeuppance for indulging such excesses.
If, like Marx’s “world-historic facts and personages,” postmodernism is destined to appear twice, we can debate whether its heyday in the 1980s and ’90s was a tragedy. But its reappearance in the arguments above is surely as farce. By and large, the indictments are based on a shallow caricature of the theory combined with an exaggerated estimation of its effects. Postmodernism doesn’t say what the critics claim it does. And even if it did, the power of an esoteric intellectual movement surely pales in comparison with the naked partisanship and media fragmentation driving politics — forces that postmodernist thought actually gives us the tools to understand.
Postmodernism, as both an aesthetic and a philosophical movement, emerged in the wake of the global political, social, and technological turmoil of the 1960s. The high modernism of the mid-20th century proclaimed that human society could do anything: build higher, know more, venture further. But the political upheaval of the late 1960s and the economic malaise of the early 1970s dramatically reduced that confidence. The very idea of the modern, with its implication of being always up-to-date, came to seem not so much an ever-expanding frontier as hubris tied to the heady time before the ’60s — a hubris punctured, if not immediately ended, by the exhilarating, anxiety-producing chaos of the decade that followed.
The postmodernist movement rode that rapid technological and social change, capturing the sense that it might be uncontrollable and perhaps even unknowable. In the postmodern historical moment, signs are ripped free of what they signify; symbols are manipulated separately from their material foundations. No representations are neutral; all claims, beliefs, and symbols are tied up with the structures of power and representation that give rise to them. All claims rest on configurations of power; power rests on the manipulation of symbols; and people can manipulate symbols more or less successfully based in part on how those symbols are related to other symbols.
The insight that principles and observations depend on the particular historical and cultural currents that feed them evokes the unease that many people feel when discussing postmodernism. The radical uncertainty this schema engenders is, as it is meant to be, disquieting, to say the least. But it is also accurate. We know what we know — and we don’t know what we don’t know — because of social and symbolic power that enables some paths of inquiry while foreclosing others. This insight is hardly an assault on truth. It’s a sober reckoning with the empirical realities of truth creation in our times.
The indictments of postmodernism are based on a shallow caricature of the theory and an exaggerated estimation of its effects.
Given that emphasis on the relationship between power and ideas, it’s not surprising that much of the recent criticism conflates postmodernist theory with the rise of what I’ll term “radical perspectivism,” a related but distinct political/intellectual movement that also became fashionable in the 1980s and ’90s. In radical perspectivism, ideas are shaped by the demographic identities of the people holding the ideas; the worth of those ideas becomes the social worth of the groups holding them. Claims inherently represent racial, ethnic, sexual, or similar identities, and those ideas and claims that represent oppressed identities are more valuable because of their groups’ subaltern status.
But while there is a certain affinity between such ideas and postmodernist skepticism, the two are actually quite distinct. The idea that the experience of oppression gives rise to a distinct understanding of the world far predates postmodernism. For example, it’s a key innovation in W.E.B. Du Bois’s turn-of-the-20th-century social theory, and it has roots well before that. Furthermore, key elements of postmodernist thought undermine such identity-based claims. Postmodernism’s insistence that categories and symbols are inherently unstable (Derrida writes of “contexts without any center of absolute anchoring”) is tough to reconcile with the idea of worldviews representing fixed social identities, no matter how oppressed — or representative — they are.
In postmodernism’s 1980s heyday, the movement was already being caricatured by opponents, principally scientists and political conservatives. Conservatives saw postmodernism as an assault on shared values and beliefs; scientists viewed it as an attack on science’s privileged position as the means to discover knowledge. The most famous salvo in those wars was probably the Sokal hoax. The physicist Alan Sokal wrote what he called a “nonsense” paper on the social construction of quantum gravity, and the article was accepted and published in Social Text in 1996. Revealing the hoax, Sokal emphasized that he had used the language and ideas of postmodernism to trick the journal into accepting a scientifically indefensible paper. A quip in the article that revealed the hoax shows the cynical misreading that underlies the caricature: “anyone who believes that the laws of physics are mere social conventions is invited to try transgressing those conventions from the windows of my apartment. (I live on the twenty-first floor.)”
Sokal’s use of “mere” (“mere social conventions”) turns the critique into the caricature common among many who so readily maligned postmodern theory. Postmodernism certainly comes with suspicion about claims of privileged access to truth. But it does not argue that symbols are “mere” symbols, or that therefore all opinions about anything are equally valid. Rather, symbols (and social conventions) are deeply constraining as well as enabling, and they have enormous implications by constraining and enabling future symbols and actions. The caricature assumes that the lack of an absolute anchor means that there are no inequalities in symbolic power — in other words, that because we can’t sustain absolute truth-claims, all claims are equally valid.
This is a gross misreading of the theory. Postmodernism, in fact, makes a seemingly simpler but really more profound argument: that all claims are valid (or invalid) though that doesn’t mean that they are all the same. Put another way, claims differ in many dimensions — rhetorical, aesthetic, evidentiary, emotional, historical, what have you — that affect their credibility as truth. Those symbols claiming the imprimatur of “science,” for example, display a particular kind of power because of pre-existing understandings of the practice and value of science, but that power competes with other sources of legitimacy as well. By insisting that the destabilization of truth necessarily leads to anything-goes, the caricature overlooks the roles of power, manipulation, constraint, and enabling in truth creation.
Sadly, it is this caricature that most people have come to know as “postmodernism.” It’s also this caricature that gives way to Trump’s post-truth practice. Postmodernism is not an excuse for “alternative facts,” as Kellyanne Conway put it, or for the ludicrous assumption that one perspective is necessarily as valid as any other. Instead, postmodernism demands a critical analysis of the powers and structures that make such ideas speakable in the first place.
What social, political, media, technical, and economic conditions afford Trump symbolic power and his administration the capacity to behave as it does? What symbolic configurations — of elite vs. everyday, for example; of “white working class,” Islam, immigration, race, wealth, gender, competence, criminality — provide the scaffolding for the bizarre claims emerging from the White House? What is the history and strategy by which these configurations came to be, and by which they might be changed? Postmodernist-inspired thought gives us tools to ask these urgent questions and — however provisionally — answer them.
Writers on the left and the right who blame postmodernism for the horrors of post-truth politics are effectively fleeing toward concreteness, pining for a space safe from power and contention. But such a base is a mirage, and insisting on it is an authoritarian folly. Instead, we have to come to terms with the reality that radical complexity and ideological pluralism are at the core of contemporary life. Far from undermining democracy, postmodernist-influenced thought provides valuable resources for understanding and supporting democracy. Its insistence on interrogating the origins and implications of claims and ideas would be welcome additions to a flailing public sphere.
A frank recognition of power and partiality is crucial for grasping and criticizing contemporary behavior. Don’t blame postmodernism. Use it.
Andrew J. Perrin is a professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a contributor to the sociology blog Scatterplot. His most recent book is American Democracy: From Tocqueville to Town Halls to Twitter (Polity, 2014).
