Post-modernism, often called by its detractors ‘PoMo’, is one of the widest-ranging intellectual fashions seen in the last 150 years. Like many of its predecessors this self-consciously radical generalized social commentary and theory originated in France and has recruited extensively amongst the American intelligentsia. Its range of influence is remarkable, because post-modernism is seen not only in academic and cultural activities from sociological theory to art criticism, but also in architectural style. It is so often and viciously derided by those who have not fallen to its fashionable influence, that those who are simply neutral tend to an instinctive sympathy, even if they neither pretend to understand or apply post-modern theory.
Post-modernism’s core conception can be guessed from its name. By describing the mode of thought as ‘post’ and ‘modern’, its advocates are claiming to reject the consensus in Western though that sees the Enlightenment, with its break with medieval thought and its celebration of rationality, as heralding an unstoppable progress in human life, understanding and experience. It is not conservative in claiming that things were somehow better before the Enlightenment, simply asserting that enlightenment rationality is as time-bound and relativist in its truths as any preceding period. The universalistic claims of rationality, and the hubris of thinking society on the way to real truth rather than local belief, are the objects of post-modern scorn.
A central concept of post-modern thinking, the idea of a ‘metanarrative’ can best display what it is all about. The modern age, post-modernists claim, thinks in terms of a great narrative or explanatory story which applies to us all, and gives us universally valid truth. Post-modernists argue that we are all prisoners of our conditions, our characteristics, our communities, and that only local narratives, no longer presented as ‘meta’ can tell us our own partial truths. Clearly this can produce what seem like very reactionary arguments. Post-modernists have very little time for grand debates about human rights, for example, and positively loathe Marxism, because both are based on claims to absolute and unvarying truths. At the same time, the typical causes espoused by post-modernism are, by those old enlightenment standards, rather radical. Gender and sexual identity, and racial and ecological concerns all figure strongly in approval and explication by post-modern thought, its proponents suggesting, with some merit, that classic liberalism and classic Marxist thought alike, were deficient in their concern for gays, transsexuals, blacks, and those who set the global ecological status higher than scientific progress, whether capitalist or Marxist.
Whether post-modernism, which is already ageing at the beginning of the 21st century, will fade away and be no more important in the long term of intellectual progress than, for example, Dadaism is yet to be seen. But as post-modernists do not believe in the concept of progress, it may matter less to them.
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