Pocket Guide to Postmodernism

Chapter 6. Postmodern Strategy Having toured the history of the collectivist Left and all its schisms, how did postmodernism eventually take hold as its guiding framework with its skeptical and relativist epistemology? Was it out of desperation, since all other avenues had failed, or was it by design and conviction that postmodernism be the logical and necessary end?

The status of language became a strategic focus. The epistemological position one advances necessarily renders consequences for language, not only in its content, but also its methods. In postmodernism, language merely expresses opinion and persuasion rather than facts and logical argument. This is why deconstruction, a concept of postmodernism, is an endless process of unpacking what words mean, for there is no bottom or foundation to meaning. To the realist modernist, words are concepts that are tied to reality in some fashion, either by a perception about reality or another concept. Rhetoric becomes a method of best revealing the cognitive connections one makes to reality, i.e., the facts.

Rorty articulated the postmodern position on language.

In The Contingency of Language, he wrote, “the world does not tell us what language games to play” and as a result, “human languages are human creations.” Rorty is actually the least extreme of the postmodernists; he acknowledges that language can be used in resolving social conflict, although he insists, as many postmodernists have adopted from the collectivist Right, that we may only be able to socially interact empathically with our own ethnicity, and “we must, in practice, privilege our own group.” Most postmodernists,