My friend Evan was complaining about postmodernism.  I said, Oh, don't worry, postmodernism was a fad, but that fad is pretty much over now.  Culture has moved on.  He said that I should contact him and give him information about how we are moving beyond postmodernism.  So here is my response to Evan.

Before I get started, I just want to note that I've written (a LOT) on this topic before, so here's some links to some other things I've written.  Some of these are finished, some are not finished.

I'm opposed to postmodernism.  Here's why:  "Why I am not a postmodernist" - better yet, "Why Postmodernism is Annoying".  I try to clarify my position here: Anti-Postmodernism.  I'm trying to clarify it, to distinguish my own attitude from those of certain other people who complain about postmodernism - here: "Postmodernism sucks, but it doesn't suck as much as you think it does."  If you want the short version, here's "My response to postmodernism in a couple of sentences."

Okay, but what IS postmodernism?  By and large, when I talk about postmodernism, I'm responding to postmodernism the way Jean-François Lyotard defines it, in this book, as a condition of society marked by "incredulity towards metanarratives."  That said, I also acknowledge that it can mean different things, here.  So I think Lyotard is wrong, that in fact there are several metanarratives of postmodernity - a concept that I explore here and here.  

I'll admit that the way I look at postmodernism is a little different from the way lots of other people see it.  And I explore it in various ways.  For one, I wrote that postmodernism arose out of French Catholicism. But I also say (this is just a fragment) that postmodernism is the period of solidification of U.S. hegemony.  And at the same time, if there's one person that I see as the culprit behind postmodernism, it's Wittgenstein (and that's why I hate him).  (But I also slightly blame Popper, and other analytic philosophers.)  I realize that these three ways of looking at postmodernism sit uncomfortably with each other, but in my mind, it all works together.

Besides Lyotard, I've also responded to a few other theorists.  Here, I identify the problem with structuralism.  I call Althusser an idealist, Derrida a mystic (with some more on Derrida here), Lacan a theologian, and I wrote a polemic "against Foucault and all his progeny". I also point out the interesting similarities between Foucault and Trump.  It's a little off-topic, not dealing with postmodernism directly, and yet I think it really is on-topic to bring up this essay, on what I call "liquefactionism" - in my own opinion, one of the best things I've written.  (Foucault, Derrida, etc., were all liquefactionists, in my book.)

So why, and how, did postmodernism end?  That's the subject of an essay that, alas, I never finished.  I have to get back to writing it, some day.  But I also allude to the end of postmodernism in this essay on Nietzsche, which is another one of my personal favorites. 

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