Hey Adbusters:
Posted in: Uncategorized
Hey Adbusters,
You’ve been bashing postmodernism a lot lately. Good, I say. It’s about time we moved on. But it occurs to me that the term postmodernism is misunderstood almost everywhere it’s used; some of my professors and almost all of my fellow students would be at a loss even to begin a definition of the term. So I’m thinking, maybe it would be a good idea to give your readers a bit of context. This seems important because postmodernism in itself isn’t all bad. As I understand it (and perhaps this only applies to the academic sense of the word) the postmodern movement was started in the early 1950s in Europe and America and revolves around the basic insight that what people do and think is ideologically conditioned by their social circumstances. “Incredulity to the metanarrative!” they shout, proclaiming, in very much the same way we ourselves would like to proclaim, that no one has the authority to state definitively what is and what isn’t, in the deepest sense of those words. Postmodernism was, from its get-go, a revolt against fixed and absolute meaning. The problem that I see with postmodernism is that it raised some excellent, cutting questions (like, “Would you really be saying that, if you weren’t a straight, white dude in America?”) but failed to provide any meaningful or satisfying answers to those questions. They basically destroyed the possibility of relying on absolute values, such as “the Good” or “the Beautiful” or “the Reasonable,” without setting anything up in their place. Not that they didn’t try, of course. But it’s my sense at least that they failed, and I don’t think I’m alone in that. Which leads me to why we should be bashing postmodernism today, in 2014. The postmodern question has been asked: “Why do you believe the things you believe, why do you act the way you act, knowing that there is no such thing as absolutely true value in this screwed up world?” The point now is to answer this question, to succeed where the postmodernists have failed. Environmentalism and social justice movements, as far as I’m concerned, are just starting points for this task. What we need to be able to do is compellingly articulate to ourselves and to the world why environmentalism, why social justice, why not simply lie down and forgo the small amount of active freedom each one of us is born with? We can answer these questions in one of two ways: We revive some of the old modernist values, such as citizenship, honor or compassion, or we construct a new, satisfying, dynamic system of values that takes into account changing times and different peoples. In either case, we are no longer postmodern.
In any event,
I remain,
A humble subscriber,
—?Trevor Griffith
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