Lately, everyone has been talking about postmodernism.  Many of its proponents see it as a liberating force in academia.  For them, postmodernism is expected to rescue us from the stifling rationality, logocentrism, and Eurocentrism of whatever is supposed to have come before it. But postmodernism also has many opponents.  They see it as the ungrateful enfant terrible of the Western intellectual tradition.  It is destructive, relativistic, nihilistic, and worst of all, it is trendy.  My aim here is to provide a short and inevitably overly-simplistic summary of postmodernism.  My approach will be generally sympathetic - in part, because I agree with a lot of postmodernism's contentions; but also because I think its many opponents have too hastily dismissed it. 

     So what is postmodernism?  Well, this is an incredibly difficult question because in many ways the term postmodernism is a misnomer.  Many intellectuals who have been labelled postmodernists refuse to accept the label.  And even among those who accept it, there is a great diversity in approach.  Given this, there are at least two ways, I think, of approaching the question what is postmodernism?" The first is a very anti-postmodern way of approaching the problem, and that is to trace its historical development.  The other way is to look for a common philosophical (or anti-philosophical) thread among the thinkers who are referred to loosely as postmodernists.  I am going to try to do both. 

A  Genealogy of Postmodernism 

Because many postmodern thinkers are French, some have looked for its origins in events such as the Algerian War of Independence or the May 1968 student protests in Paris which led to a mini-revolution in the nation as a whole.  Although these events were important to many postmodernists, I think we can see a profound disenchantment with modernism (and its conviction to reason, rationalism, scientism, objectivity and progress) much earlier in Western history - beginning with the works of Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche. 

      Rather than discussing Nietzsche, which would be difficult and time-consuming, I have decided to quote a passage from Thus Spoke Zarathustra which I think conveys the flavour of his anti-modernism: 

"What urges you on and arouses your ardour, you wisest of men, do you call it ‘will to truth’?  Will to the conceivability of all being:  that is what I call your will!  You first want to make all being conceivable:  for, with a healthy mistrust, you doubt whether it is in fact conceivable.  But it must bend and accommodate itself to you!  Thus will your will have it.  It must become smooth and subject to the mind as the mind’s mirror and reflection.  That is your entire will, you wisest men; it is a will to power; and that is so even when you talk of good and evil and of the assessment of values.  You want to create the world before which you can kneel:  this is your ultimate hope and intoxication." 

     The next important individual in this ad hoc genealogy of postmodernism is Martin Heidegger.  His work is a continuation of Nietzsche's attack on the certainty of modernism: 

"...thinking begins only when we have come to know that reason, glorified for centuries, is the most stiff-necked adversary of thought." 

     Michel Foucault is next.  And once again, I'll quote a poignant passage rather than discuss his work at length: 

"We must see our rituals for what they are: completely arbitrary things, tired of games and irony, it is good to be dirty and bearded, to have long hair, to look like a girl when one is a boy (and vice versa); one must put "in play", show up, transform, and reverse the systems which quietly order us about.  As far as I am concerned, that is what I try to do in my work." 

     The last individual is perhaps the culmination and the epitome of postmodernism.  He is Jacques Derrida.  Much of his writing is virtually indecipherable, and meant to be so.  This is because his aim is to demonstrate the dynamic and endless play of meaning in language.  Hopefully the following quote is somewhat comprehensible: 

"Metaphysics - the white mythology which reassembles and reflects the culture of the West: the white man takes his own mythology, Indo-European mythology, his own 'logos', that is, the 'mythos' of his idiom, for the universal form of that he must still wish to call Reason." 

    In my opinion, these four "prophets of extremity" - to use Alan Megill's phrase - have led the attack against modernism, and have inspired many current postmodernists.  Now this genealogy may have given us some remote sense of the roots of postmodernism, but it tells us little about postmodernism itself.  For this we will have to look for a common thread in the works of  postmodern authors. 

The Common Thread 

In my opinion, the common thread between those who are loosely labelled postmodernists - from Nietzsche up to Derrida and also including current postmodernists such as Jean Baudrillard, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Gayatri Spivak and Julia Kristeva - is a radical anti-essentialism or anti-foundationalism.  By this I mean that they deny essences, natures, and any other universals which place a grounded and constant meaning on existence.  Thus, from a postmodernist perspective, there are no transcendent, transhistorical or transcultural grounds for interpretation. 

    The radical anti-essentialism of postmodernists leads them to criticize concepts and erase distinctions with which modernists are comfortable.  I will outline a few of these here.  Where necessary I will refer to the writings of Michel Foucault because I am more familiar with his work than with the works of other postmodernists. 

     The first concept that falls in the wake of anti-essentialism is the idea of human nature, or what some postmodernists refer to as the transcendental subject.  In the discipline of history, for instance, we assume that human beings are in some ways the same now as they were in the past.  We also assume that people in different cultures are similar to people in our culture.  This assumption allows us to study history and have some faith that our claims about the motives and actions of people in the past are correct. 

    Postmodernists argue, however, that there is nothing necessarily essential about human beings.  To assume this only reduces the otherness, the uniqueness, and the singularity of individuals.  For postmodernists, the world should be imagined as radically heterogeneous; the past as radically different from the present; and all cultures as radically different from one another. 

     Next, postmodernists dissolve the distinction between fact and fiction.  For them, there is no necessary relationship between words and things, signifier and signified, subject and object.  Thus a discourse which claims to be describing reality, such as history, has no greater relationship to its referent than fiction.  Both history and fictional narratives are substitutes for reality rather than good copies and bad copies of it.  This is the basis for the following claim by Michel Foucault: "I am well aware that I have never written anything but fictions.  I do not mean to go so far as to say that fictions are beyond the truth.  It seems to me that it is possible to make fiction work inside of truth." 

      A fundamental  category in history, I think, is the concept of the event.  It is supposed to refer to the particularity of historical occurrences.  Postmodernists argue, however, that the use of the term event only reduces the singularity of actual events to a generality.  And since there is nothing essential about events that link them to each other, the idea of the event is in fact a worthless concept. Foucault refers to the term event as a "phantasm" which hovers over a heterogeneous jumble of occurrences; it is an effect of meaning that is not identifiable with anything in the actual event. 

    There are many other concepts that dissolve under the anti-essentialist analysis of postmodernists.  The point, however, is that postmodernists are suspicious of essences and natures. This, in my opinion, is what makes their enterprise distinctive. 

Conclusion 

Many have complained that postmodernism falls into nihilism - making all philosophical (and historical) claims worthless before  they are said.  Others complain that postmodernism eliminates epistemological and ethical foundations.  But in my opinion, these criticisms miss the point. Postmodernists, to my knowledge, do not maintain that decisions on epistemological and ethical issues are not valuable or that they are futile.  They simply remove the necessity of foundations and the necessity of choosing one position over another,  allowing us the freedom to construct our own positions.  But perhaps the burden of freedom is something not all of us are willing to bear. 

    I'd like to end with a quote from Foucault: 

"The movement by which, not without effort and uncertainty, dreams and illusion, one detaches oneself from what is accepted as true and seeks other rules -- that is philosophy.  The displacement and transformation of frameworks of thinking, the changing of received values and all the work that has been done to think otherwise, to do something else, to become other than what one is -- that too is philosophy.... It is understandable that some people should weep over the present void and hanker instead, in the world of ideas, after a little monarchy.  But those who for once in their lives have found a new tone, a new way of looking, a new way of doing, those people, I believe, will never feel the need to lament that the world is error, that history is filled with people of no consequence, and that it is time for others to keep quiet so that at last the sound of their disapproval may be heard."