It is frequently alleged that postmodern scholars promote obscurantism, are hostile to objective truth, and encourage relativism (in culture, morality, knowledge) to an extent that is epistemically and ethically crippling.
The term marks a departure from modernism, and may refer to an epoch of human history (see Postmodernity), a set of movements, styles, and methods in art and architecture, or a broad range of scholarship, drawing influence from scholarly fields such as critical theory, post-structuralist philosophy, and deconstructionism.
Some philosophers, such as Jürgen Habermas, argue that postmodernism contradicts itself through self-reference, since its critique would be impossible without the concepts and methods that modern reason provides.
[3] Christopher Hitchens in his book Why Orwell Matters advocates for simple, clear, and direct expression of ideas and argues that postmodernists wear people down by boredom and semi-literate prose.
The symmetry of scale, the transversality, the pathic non-discursive character of their expansion: all these dimensions remove us from the logic of the excluded middle and reinforce us in our dismissal of the ontological binarism we criticised previously.It has been suggested that the term "postmodernism" is a mere buzzword that means nothing.
For example, Dick Hebdige, in Hiding in the Light, writes: When it becomes possible for a people to describe as 'postmodern' the décor of a room, the design of a building, the diegesis of a film, the construction of a record, or a 'scratch' video, a television commercial, or an arts documentary, or the 'intertextual' relations between them, the layout of a page in a fashion magazine or critical journal, an anti-teleological tendency within epistemology, the attack on the 'metaphysics of presence', a general attenuation of feeling, the collective chagrin and morbid projections of a post-War generation of baby boomers confronting disillusioned middle-age, the 'predicament' of reflexivity, a group of rhetorical tropes, a proliferation of surfaces, a new phase in commodity fetishism, a fascination for images, codes and styles, a process of cultural, political or existential fragmentation and/or crisis, the 'de-centring' of the subject, an 'incredulity towards metanarratives', the replacement of unitary power axes by a plurality of power/discourse formations, the 'implosion of meaning', the collapse of cultural hierarchies, the dread engendered by the threat of nuclear self-destruction, the decline of the university, the functioning and effects of the new miniaturised technologies, broad societal and economic shifts into a 'media', 'consumer' or 'multinational' phase, a sense (depending on who you read) of 'placelessness' or the abandonment of placelessness ('critical regionalism') or (even) a generalised substitution of spatial for temporal coordinates – when it becomes possible to describe all these things as 'Postmodern' (or more simply using a current abbreviation as 'post' or 'very post') then it's clear we are in the presence of a buzzword.
[10]Postmodern-friendly intellectuals, such as British historian Perry Anderson defend the existence of the varied meanings assigned to "postmodernism", arguing that they only contradict one another on the surface, and that a postmodernist analysis can offer insight into contemporary culture.
Sokal has critiqued similar defenses of postmodernism by noting that replies like this only demonstrate the original point that postmodernist critics are making: that a clear and meaningful answer is always missing and wanting.
[citation needed] The analytic philosopher Daniel Dennett criticized its impact on the humanities, characterizing it as producing "'conversations' in which nobody is wrong and nothing can be confirmed, only asserted with whatever style you can muster.
"[16] The historian Richard J. Evans argues that while postmodernists usually identify with the political left, denying the possibility of objective knowledge about the past is not necessarily left-wing or progressive, as it can legitimize far-right pseudohistory such as Holocaust denial.
[17] H. Sidky pointed out what he sees as several inherent flaws of a postmodern antiscience perspective, including the confusion of the authority of science (evidence) with the scientist conveying the knowledge; its self-contradictory claim that all truths are relative; and its strategic ambiguity.
He sees 21st-century anti-scientific and pseudo-scientific approaches to knowledge, particularly in the United States, as rooted in a postmodernist "decades-long academic assault on science:" Many of those indoctrinated in postmodern anti-science went on to become conservative political and religious leaders, policymakers, journalists, journal editors, judges, lawyers, and members of city councils and school boards.
[23] Richard Caputo, William Epstein, David Stoesz & Bruce Thyer consider postmodernism to be a "dead-end in social work epistemology."
They write:Postmodernism continues to have a detrimental influence on social work, questioning the Enlightenment, criticizing established research methods, and challenging scientific authority.
[27] Daniel Morley and Hamid Alizadeh of Marxist.com called postmodernism a "bourgeois philosophy, permeating large parts, if not the majority, of academia today.
"[28] Michael Rectenwald argues that postmodernism "is incompatible with liberty, first because it sees the individual as a mere product, as constructed by language, social factors, and so on.
[32]Private Eye magazine also satirized postmodernist discourse in art in a November 2018 edition, with an imaginary interview of Tracey Emin by an unduly fawning Alan Yentob.
According to Wheen, postmodern scholars tend to critique certain power structures in the west including issues of race, class, patriarchy, the effect of radical capitalism and political oppression.
Wheen reserves his strongest critique for those who defend even the most appalling systemic mistreatment of women, even in countries where Western contact and influence is minimal.
And they were often hostile to the scientific objectivity and 'Enlightenment' values so central to Marxism.Ephrat Livni, writing for Quartz, argued that postmodernists did not create the era of post-truth and fake news that we live in today, but "merely described it.
Livini concludes by saying:[41] Instead of blaming postmodernists for the messiness of our time, we should be trying to find a new kind of language — one that allows us to speak across divides, rather than rejecting opposing perspectives as inherently false.