Postmodernist School - Theoretical Concerns

Theoretical Concerns

Postmodernism is associated with the decline of the left's credibility, specifically in the failure of state socialism to offer an attractive and, later, even a viable alternative to western capitalism. Both Marxism and Socialism derived their philosophical foundation from the Enlightenment. Postmodernism is a critique of the Enlightenment and of scientific positivism which has argued that the world can be understood and both "truth" and "justice" can be discovered by applying the universal linear principle of reason (see Milovanovic who describes the shift from Hegelian to Nietzschean and Lacanian thought). The idea that the application of scientific principles to social life will uncover the laws of society, making human life predictable and social engineering practical and possible, is discounted. Postmodernists argue that this claim for the universality of reason was ethnocentric in that it privileged one Western view of the world while discounting other views (Kiely, 1995: 153-154). and truth claims were part of a relationship of domination, a claim to power. Given the history of colonialism and globalisation in both the physical and the intellectual world, this critique asserts righteous indignation and moral superiority. In postmodernism, "truth" and "falsity" are purely relative; each culture has its own standard for judging truth that is not inherently superior to any other. Postmodernist analysis is a method to uncover how the world is made to appear real, "thereby questioning that it is real in truth or fact, or that there is any way of making such judgements". No truth claim, and certainly not Enlightenment scientism, rests on any more secure foundation than any other. No knowledge claim is privileged.

The main weakness of relativism is that it offers no basis for evaluation. Henry and Milovanovic (1996) posit that all claims are to be considered valid, all social practices merely cultural variations, neither inherently inferior nor superior to any other. This may be potentially progressive because it challenges the absolutist assumptions of the superiority of, for example, Western economics and capitalism. But it does not challenge the status quo. On the contrary, as Kiely (1995: 155) argues, appeals for tolerance and pluralism "at its worse . . . simply ignores, or even becomes an apology for, all kinds of oppressive practices" that violate any sense of human and social rights.