But I LIKE postmodernism!!

As you know, fearless and new reader, I’ve just finished the excellent book Postmodernism: A Very Short Introduction. An interested quality of the book is that its author, Christopher Butler, is as skeptical as he is knowledgeable about postmodernism, and he includes his own critiques of the movement alongside his explanations of it. He boils down the essence of his critique in his statement, during his last chapter, that “the best that one can say here, and I am saying it, is that postmodernists are good critical deconstructors, and terrible constructors.” In other words (and hugely oversimplified): Postmodernism does a great job of dismantling the ideas of “truth” and “reality,” but it doesn’t offer a practical exit strategy from the miasma its theories create. Butler seems to think that this inherent weakness makes it, despite its surface muscularity, an ultimately rather limp set of theoretical frameworks. Derrida, Foucault, and Barthes are great, but how do you use these philosophies to strategize political activism and change? What do you do with the problem that any critique of truth-making systems must depend on an idea of “truth” and the philosopher’s assumption that (s)he recognizes its imposters (even if everything is an imposter—I can hear Plato CHOKING in his grave). As a result of these critiques, Butler virtually gives up on postmodernism by the book’s end, and he predicts that its “enduring achievements” will take place in the arts rather than in politics or philosophy. Like Romanticism (via Wagner) for Nietzsche—the death of postmodernism is to become a style.

Reading Butler’s criticisms, I come to an awareness of my own prejudices regarding the viability of postmodernist theory. Since my induction into Judith Butler in college, and M. Foucault since, I have found myself skeptical of ANY theory written today that does not take into account postmodernist ideas of power, language, and discourse. I see any theory that doesn’t at least acknowledge, for example, that identity is constructed in and through language, as not fully fleshed out, based on primitive ontologies that don’t hold, and therefore not to be trusted.

I think that you can’t discount the usefulness of postmodernism theory just because it hasn’t found a way out of itself yet. I maintain a foolish Hegelian faith that it can and it will, and I am skeptical of any optimistic philosophy that does not work through—rather than around—this set of ideas that I believe have changed the face of the world. Mr. Butler seems to want us to go around postmodernism to whatever its next phase is (so do fundamentalists, in an entirely different way, but are their anxieties so far apart?). I hold out hope that we can move through it.

And may I posit, tentatively, that at least one exit strategy that is 100% a product of postmodernist theory is queerness? The idea of queer identity—which really boils down to the permission to be whomever and however you want to be, and that the only label that is allowed to even begin to contain you is your name (if you choose)— is the idea that brought me into this theoretical world to begin with and will continue to hold me in its sway. Queerness, for me, is THE truly libratory product of postmodernism, the exit strategy and the hope for the future.

Cf. Belize’s vision of heaven, delivered to a dying Roy Cohn in Angels in America, Part Two: Perestroika.

Anyway, clearly I only understand 20% of what I’ve read and 3% of what I’ve written, but that is what blogs are for.

Another idea: I am increasingly beginning to conceive the idea of “realism and its double”— that all (successful? valuable?) executions of dramatic realism are simultaneously dependent on at least one other dramatic model. Reading this book, I wonder if one can simultaneously argue for a “non-realism and its double,” for don’t all conceptions of anti-reality depend on an idea of reality as much as atheism depends on an idea of God?