Postmodernism: An Idea Whose Time Has Come to Die

An edited presentation given at the symposium, “The Crisis of Knowledge & The American University: James Baldwin and the Struggle for Our Human Future” on June 2nd, 2024.

I want to begin by saying that I am not hard to find. By this I mean, I am a product of a certain environment, a certain social system that has shaped many more people like me. It has, in all likelihood, also shaped or impacted you.

What also connects us is that we are all living through the same time: right now. We are, all of us, experiencing and taking part in history together. This is an obvious statement, but an important one. Because the question before us is whether we as a gathering, as a society, and as a nation are capable of arriving at a common meeting ground: not merely group consensus, but Truth—or what James Baldwin called Reality. It is upon this ground that we can deliberate and decide on what comes next.

Immediately we are faced with a problem. There is a voice that says, Truth is impossible; unity is impossible; the world is too “complex”; people are too different, too selfish, too prejudiced; “ideology” always gets in the way. Ironically, this way of thinking also comes from an ideology. Its name is postmodernism.

My main argument today is that postmodernism must die for humanity to live. It is often said that there is nothing so powerful as an idea whose time has come. We rarely say what’s implied by this: in order for a new idea to arise, there must also be another idea whose time has come to die.

It is of course one thing to say you simply disagree with a set of ideas. It is another thing to insist those ideas must die. I’m not calling for anybody to be censored or arrested. But I am saying that there comes a time when people have to decide for themselves, on their own terms, whether a certain way of thinking is useful to them at all—or whether it should be seen for what it truly is, and discarded in search of something more worthy of human life and possibility.

I stake my claim on these terms: first, that postmodernism and its various academic and cultural manifestations constitute an anti-human philosophy, which feeds every counter-revolutionary current in what may be a pre-revolutionary moment in America. Second, the human evidence: I have seen what kinds of people are produced by this philosophy, and I know: they will not survive the hard days that are ahead.

Because postmodernism is so removed from human beings, this means it inevitably produces a delusional way of thinking—to say nothing of decadence, nihilism, and immorality. It produces people who think they are very intelligent but are completely caught off guard when life comes roaring at them, no matter how frantically they shelter behind the safety of their books, social status, and sophistication.

I saw this when I went to college at an elite university. I decided to become a student of literature. I had been socialized to seek approval from my professors, to prove to them that I could “get it,” that I could master whatever jargon they threw at me. But I also had a genuine desire to learn. All young people arrive at their colleges and universities harboring this real desire to learn, to see the world and to know it.

It is astonishing to realize how swiftly and how mercilessly the university kills this impulse within you, or pollutes it into something unrecognizable. I didn’t understand what was happening at first. I simply thought I was interested in questions of identity, in examining the perspectives of marginalized people. So I began to take classes in which our professors encouraged us to hyper-fixate on “lived experiences.”

On face value there is nothing wrong with this. What it actually meant, though, was that we were told to indulge our traumas and perceived sense of victimhood, and to revel in the most ambiguous, most disconcerting forms of art and literature. That’s why all “postmodern” art is weird and off-putting: the artists are deliberately trying to create art that is unsettling for its own sake. They are not exercising creativity at all; they are simply and dogmatically applying what we all learned in the same theory seminars at our universities and institutes. We were not really studying oppression. We were being trained to make monuments and idols of ourselves.

I became particularly attracted to what is called trauma theory in literary studies. I lost my brother in high school, so it wasn’t hard to imagine why.

This was my first real encounter with postmodernism as a school of thought; with some trepidation, I knelt before a pantheon of impressive-sounding names like Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, Ferdinand de Saussure, Jacques Lacan, Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, Walter Benjamin—all very impressive, all very European. There were other, less impressive-sounding, but still important American names mixed in as well: Judith Butler, Donna Haraway, Cathy Carruth, Christina Sharpe.

Where did postmodernism come from? The simplest answer is the Second World War. Faced with the disaster of fascism and Nazism, European continental philosophy suffered a breakdown. A group of thinkers emerged who had little to no background in political movements, who had never struggled for anything—yet gained traction because they filled the ideological vacuum left by the wreckage of war and the failure of socialism in Western Europe.

These thinkers announced that the problem plaguing Western civilization was ideology itself. Fascism, Nazism, Communism, Marxism, Socialism, Nationalism: all such ideologies were lumped together as equally guilty for the atrocities of the 20th century. The idealism of the modern gave way to the cynicism of the postmodern. The very term postmodern does not signal a forward movement, but a stagnation. It signals a condition of perpetual disillusionment within the bowels of Western modernity, an insistence that humankind cannot progress to a new stage of history—because to believe in human progress is to reveal oneself as either naive or authoritarian.

Perhaps the greatest claim of the postmodernists was their supposed critique of the West. Yet their message of pessimism arrived at exactly the same time that the great majority of humanity was leaping toward freedom as a result of the world anti-colonial movement. It is no surprise, then, that postmodernism gave birth to postcolonialism, an entire discipline crafted around the notion that the anti-colonial struggles ultimately failed.

Postmodernism thereby became a universalizing force for Western hegemony in the world of ideas and institutions: the exact thing it claimed to oppose. (One can take the career of Gayatri Spivak as a case in point: Spivak’s first claim to fame was translating Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology in 1976. This then paved the way for her to become an academic icon and an authority on the “postcolonial” condition.)

Likewise, these theories were being developed in Europe right as the United States was locked in the throes of a titanic struggle—the Black Freedom Movement, America’s Third Revolution. Postmodernism would come to provide an easy way out for a generation of intellectuals and artists who were too weak to confront the central contradiction in American life, and too arrogant to recognize a budding new universe of thought, grown directly on our own soil: what we now call the Black Freedom Tradition of W.E.B. Du Bois, James Baldwin, Martin Luther King, Paul Robeson, and many others. All of this was terribly convenient for the American ruling elite.

In the late 1960s, the ruling class launched a counter-revolution to assassinate King and smash the Civil Rights Movement. It was in the wake of this counter-revolution that postmodernism arrived on our shores. Legions of academics were more than happy to swarm in like vultures and make their careers waxing poetic about the mass confusion, disillusionment, and breakdown of social meaning that ensued in the 1970s and 80s. Postmodern theories exploded in humanities and social studies departments, especially at Ivy League and elite West Coast universities. 

Later, when the Soviet Union fell in the 1990s and the American ruling elite gloated about the “End of History,” the postmodernists were there to corroborate the same basic idea in their own obscure language—that history had ended, the West had won, and there was nothing left to do except spout lifeless critiques about society and culture for the next thousand years.

This popularization of postmodernism in American academia took hold through figures like Judith Butler, who has openly taken credit for bringing “French Theory” to the U.S. through the vehicle of gender theory. To this day, Butler leans heavily on their European predecessors, sharing their anxieties and frames of reference. For Butler, the dominant historical event that anchors their thinking is the rise of fascist regimes and the Holocaust in Europe; consequently, the threat of resurgent authoritarianism (in which fascism is animated by the fear of gender) looms in their imaginary as the great specter hanging over the world today. It is a fragile, neurotic, paranoid worldview, completely unmoored in the history or reality of America.

More fundamentally, Butler’s anxiety about authoritarianism matches the absurd crusade of “democracy against authoritarianism” currently being waged by the Biden administration against darker humanity. It is a discourse of, and for, a ruling elite who are going mad in the face of widespread popular discontent at home and the collapse of their empire abroad.

Let’s compare this with someone like James Baldwin: although Baldwin spent time in Europe, his primary frame of reference is not European. As he writes, “This music begins on the auction block.” Baldwin’s frame of reference, his touchstone is the enslaved proletariat in America—on one hand, their centuries of oppression here on these shores; and out of this, their music, their philosophy, their religion, their ways of seeing the world, their epistemology of freedom—in short, their song. 

There is no equivalent to the worldview and human personality produced by the history of Black people in this country. A thousand Judith Butlers will never equal one James Baldwin.

As a young person trying to make their way in American society, I see no reason why I should base my own frame of reference on a single event in European history rather than two or three hundred years of a people’s struggle here to be free, to achieve their own sense of humanity, and to transform the basic nature of American life.

How can I put it? As I mentioned, in my literature courses I was being pushed toward trauma theory, which—as luck would have it!—also emerged out of the Holocaust. At the same time, I was beginning to read Baldwin outside my classes with a group that included others who are now part of Free School. Trauma theory does not seek to resolve trauma, but to continually reopen a traumatic wound. Unfortunately, I took this quite literally. We often talk about mental illness in universities. For me, this meant sinking into a state of anxiety, panic attacks, and self-harm—in which I imagined I was putting into practice what I was reading and writing about in my classes.

I’m not exaggerating when I say that I may not be here today if not for James Baldwin. Baldwin dealt with pain, with death, with suffering in a way I had not encountered before. It is very common for people who go through traumatic experiences to develop a kind of narcissism about it; you start to fashion your sense of self around your own misery. Baldwin tells you, first, that you are not as alone as you want to believe; what you’ve experienced is connected to what people have endured throughout human history. But this also means that you have to grow up. The universe doesn’t begin and end with you. There are more people, new generations coming along the way, and you have a responsibility to them whether you like it or not.

All that to say: for a while I tried to straddle these two worlds, but at a certain point I broke toward Baldwin and the education we were pursuing outside our classes. This was very upsetting for some of our professors; we had defied their authority and moved beyond the bounds of what they envisioned for us. But what was there to respect? As Baldwin says, “One watched the lives they led.” 

Most of our professors led small, empty lives; they had built not just their careers but their whole sense of reality on ideas that ultimately amounted to very little. So we asked a basic question: Why should I want to be like you? Of course our professors couldn’t understand why we didn’t want to be like them, and lashed out at us for it.

I will tell you one more thing about postmodernism. The postmodernists developed an obsession with language (the fancy name for this is post-structuralism). Jacques Derrida declared that for millennia, the spoken word had ruled tyrannically over written text. He then insisted famously: “There is nothing outside the text.” The world as we know it is an infinite mirage of different texts layered upon each other (not just books but society, culture, ideologies, wars), and there is no way to find the true “meaning” of anything, because all meaning is constantly changing in relation to other meanings floating between all these different texts. When everything is text, there is no truth.

This is where the term deconstruction comes from: for post-structuralists, deconstruction is not about breaking things down into their component parts, but about destabilizing the meaning of everything and finding endless hidden meanings trapped within other meanings. If it sounds confusing, it is. It’s supposed to be. In a course I took during my junior year, we were told by our professor: “All of you came to this class with a desire for theory, which is a promise of truth. This is a promise which the theorist (the professor) has no intention of fulfilling.”

The aim of postmodern theory is not to clarify, but to confuse. You can say whatever you want and have it pass for “scholarship” without consequence. For the intellectual or artist who engages in this endeavor, it is a way of fleeing reality and therefore fleeing responsibility. The theorist, the artist, the professor smilingly performs the role of a trickster. The message for the student is clear: either you learn to play along with the trick, or you cannot join the club.

This game has transpired for several decades. It has destroyed the human potential of tens of thousands of young people. Now its time is ending. Postmodernism no longer enjoys the same ideological stranglehold it once did, especially over the young. In the past few months, the genocide in Gaza has burned away a great deal of our pretensions and will burn away more still. Gaza has left many of us with nowhere to hide; there is only the reality of America’s complicity in this genocide and what you decide to do in the face of it. I said earlier that postmodernism must die; but in a way, it’s already dying. “The real question,” as Baldwin put it, “is just how long, how violent, and how expensive the funeral is going to be.”

The great irony of postmodernists is that for all their obsession with language, they never even came close to penetrating the language of Western modernity; all they could do was pile more words on top of words, without endangering any semblance of power. Their impotence, their cowardice, and their deception will go down in history as a minor footnote between a change of epochs. For we are about the business of forging a new language, which means a new morality, a new way of relating to one another, a new sense of life, a new civilization. I will end with one last quote from Baldwin:

“And, finally, the air of this time and place is so heavy with rhetoric, so thick with soothing lies, that one must really do great violence to language, one must somehow disrupt the comforting beat, in order to be heard. Obviously, one must dismiss any hopes one may ever have had of winning a popularity contest. And one must take upon oneself the right to be entirely wrong—and accept penalties, for penalties there will certainly be, even here.

‘We work in the dark,’ said Henry James, ‘we do what we can, our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.’ This madness, thank heaven, is still at work among us here, and it will bring, inexorably, to the light at last the truth about our despairing young, our bewildered lovers, our defeated junkies, our demoralized young executives, our psychiatrists, and politicians, cities, towns, suburbs, and interracial housing projects. There is a thread which unites them all, and which unites every one of us. We have been both searching and evading the terms of this union for many generations.

We are the generation that must throw everything into the endeavor to remake America into what we say we want it to be. Without this endeavor, we will perish. It is the writer who must always remember that morality, if it is to remain or become morality, must be perpetually examined, cracked, changed, made new. He must remember, however powerful the many who would rather forget, that life is the only touchstone and that life is dangerous, and that without the joyful acceptance of this danger, there can never be any safety for anyone, ever, anywhere.”