"Postmodern": A Word About A Word

[Promoted from the Comments] In an important sense I don't think there is any such thing as "postmodernism itself." Who are we actually talking about when we are talking about "postmodernism" anyway? Judith Butler, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Gayatri Spivak, Bruno Latour, Paul Virilio, Luce Irigaray, Donna Haraway, Richard Rorty, Slavoj Zizek? It's not like these folks don't disagree on more things that matter to them deeply than they agree on.

Too often "postmodern" is a word that functions exactly as "politically correct" too often does -- as a smokescreen behind which rather sensible positions disappear to be replaced by clownish caricatures mouthing facile self-referential incoherencies for their conservative foes to skewer to the snake-hiss of oblivious applause.

Now, the thing that most of the theorists who get called "postmodern" seem to have in common is antiessentialism, an emphasis on historicizing putatively universal claims. I think there are many versions of this attitude that are just as sensible as may be.

Some want to say that "postmodernists" -- whoever they may happen to be -- perniciously undermine the distinction between objective facts and opinions. There are some versions of such a thesis that make perfect sense to me, but others that do not. When critics of "postmodernism" distinguish facts from opinions do they simply mean to distinguish warranted beliefs from unwarranted ones? I think there are plenty of figures who are pilloried as "postmodern relativists" who are quite happy to affirm that there are some beliefs that are more warranted than others scientifically and that these are good in the way of belief when what is wanted is more prediction and control.

There is indeed a sense in which I think the verdicts of consensus science are opinions. I think they are opinions that eventuate from a scientific practice that inspires considerably more confidence than others on offer that their adherents will be empowered to manipulate the world and anticipate experience.

There are also moral opinions/beliefs, esthetic opinions/beliefs, political opinions/beliefs, ethical opinions/beliefs each of which eventuate from different locations in culture and accomplish rather different sorts of ends. I fail to see how this threatens consensus science, particularly, inasmuch as I am hardly tempted to identify the protocols or uses of one mode of warranted belief with any of these others.

Certainly there are some philosophers who want to say that facts are somehow more than warranted beliefs, that they say or come closer to saying the way the world is, whatever that is supposed to mean. I consider this an essentially theological attitude, and one which does nothing to secure or explain scientific practice as an enterprise that empowers prediction and control.

I think it's probably fair to say that quite a lot of philosophy generates more heat than light, especially if you ask folks door to door (even down the corridors of a Philosophy Department). I don't see that the unfortunate thinkers who have been corralled together under the banner of "postmodernism," primarily by their detractors, are more particularly vulnerable to this criticism than other philosophers are.

I cannot agree with the supremely confident claims of some critics of "science studies" or "postmodernism" that the sorts of impacts of social norms on scientific practice which preoccupy the attention of quite a bit of this sort of scholarship are always politically inconsequential -- especially in the social sciences. But I see little reason why such an observation would invalidate scientific practice as such.

It is rather surreal to be dredging up these old chestnuts, I know, fully two decades past the "postmodern" term's currency. But let me remind readers that I have returned to this well-worn path in consequence of the resurgence of the term in some liberal discourse that misnames what is afoot when Republicans disastrously undermine consensus science in the service of their market fundamentalist and religious fundamentalist agendas.

And by way of conclusion let me make the melancholy observation that students in the humanities are much smarter than students in the sciences sometimes give them credit for. And very likely the converse is just as true.