No sooner do I get myself back on this list but I get the chance to sink the slipper into the bastard postmodernists! Before I impose my bigotry on you, I gotta say, I did think the following a beautifully succinct example of pomo text - a little too short properly to represent its object, perhaps, but then pomos tell us we're not able to represent anyway ...
>>R0lGODdhiwOnAoAAAP///wAAACwAAAAAiwOnAgAC/4SPqcvtD6OctNqLs968+w+G4kiW5omm
>>6sq27gvH8kzX9o3n+s73/g8MCofEovGITCqXzKbzCY1Kp9Sq9YrNarfcrvcLDoujgbL5jE6r
>>1+y2+w2Py+f0uv2Oz+v3/L7/DxgoOEhYaHiImKi4yDgoETAWKTlJWWl5iQkZoYnZ6fkJGio6
>>msL5YEqaqrrK2urahdoQ+0pba3uLm6syu8Cr+wscLDz86ptgTJysvMzcTIV8AO08TV1tfe0i
>>DaCN3e39DR6OoM0tbn6Onm5Lrt7u/g5Pyh5PX29/nzWPv8/f7/+j75/AgQQLlghoMKHChQx7
>>PWoIMaLEfwgnWryIMVzFjP8cO3oktvGjyJEkV4UsiTKlSkknV7p8CfPZw5g0a9pk0vKmzp08
>>Z+TsCTSoUBE/hxo9inTTzKRMmzp1qPSp1KlIi1K9ijWl1axcu2bc6jWs2IVgx5o9268s2rVs
The most important thing about postmodernism is that, even in naming itself, it avoids taking a position. It's simply a loud commitment to that-which-nobody-else-reckons, built on the foundation that foundations are tyrannies, and that it is an adherence to foundations that lessens, indeed makes potential Auschwitz-commandants out of, the rest of us. But there's no chair in simple contradiction of what everybody else reckons, so they exploit their founded foundationlessness by exploiting the 'fact' (a word they always ironically put in quote marks) that the class of stuff other people don't reckon is huge - this allows postmodernists much scope for ostentatious debate at restaurants and ever-larger faculties of relativistic aesthetic nihilism.
Now, all this had a genesis of course (not least the 'fact' that long-standing assumptions were in 'fact' being exposed as the culprits in disciplines that seemed ever less able to explain and predict what they were there to explain and predict). I go with Eagleton in finding the explanation for pomoism in its Gallic origins. There, the left had too long clung to the Stalinists' skirts, and by 1968, when everything from Czechoslavakia to the Paris putsch had shown them to be so dramatically wrong, they were finally forced to re-evaluate.
Having delayed this much-needed project too long, they naturally over-reacted in their re-evaluation. They threw out the agentic subject (courtesy of Althusser), history (courtesy of Althusser's pupil Foucault) and meaning (courtesy of Foucault's pupil Derrida).
All wise moves: they would never be wrong again!
In 1980, another bloke, called Lyotard, threw out explanation. Explanations needed a foundation, and these latter were tyrannical 'metanarratives', which viciously imposed their standardising power on all the fundamental differences that characterise people at both the social and intrinsic levels - this difference is an *a priori* assertion of Lyotard's, but then, so it should be. After all, to substantiate an assertion is to fall prey to power games implicit in our discourse.
The 'facts' that people do make a difference through their conscious and unconscious actions, that we are both subject and object of history, that we are able to communicate, and that we do need, seek, and find explanations in our communicative acts, are cast aside as cheap empiricism - falsified by our failure to see what appear as facts as what they really are, ideationally constructed manifestations of discourse. And discourse is therefore everything. So everything is both what happens and what brings it about. It explains itself.
Neat.
Yours recalcitrantly modern, Rob.