What is postmodernism in simple terms and how does it conflict with Marxism?
Is postmodernism relevant today?
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It won't be simple. So that's it. Postmodernism is a general characteristic of a number of philosophical trends (deconstructivism, poststructuralism, schizoanalysis, etc.), which combine the following features::
1. Pluralism (or rejection of logocentrism). That is, there are no integrating ideas or universal premises at all-neither in nature, nor in culture, nor in the human mind. If Marxists have a” generic essence ” of man, which must be freed from the oppression that has arisen in the course of human history, then postmodernism does not.
2. Pessimism. The inability of a person to change the world of things radically. All attempts to change the world radically are doomed, because there is no connection between the world and man. If in Marxism it is proposed to change the world, moreover, this is the main task of philosophy, then here we see a refusal to change.
3. Asystemness. Refusal to create any systems and schemes that would organize reality for us. Postmodernists insist on describing what exists without the compulsion to think that we can fit everything adequately into the box of a system. Marxism itself is a system.
4. Non-binary. Thinking should be outside of oppositions, such as male-female, internal-external, power-subordination, top-bottom, scientific-ordinary, and so on. It is argued that binary thinking interferes with the description and interpretation of the “world as text”. At the same time, Marxism uses dialectics, which operates with a complex binary as the principle of unity and struggle of opposites, and also builds triads (thesis-antithesis-synthesis).
5. The world as text. The world in postmodernism is perceived as a product of the consciousness and experience of generations of people, as a kind of confusing “text” that needs to be read. At the same time, we do not see the original source, we see only the totality of other people's interpretations. This “text” is placed in the field of culture of past generations and becomes meaningful only in a specific reference to culture, there are no uniform principles for its interpretation. It's like being led into a maze and being told, ” Here's the map, but everyone uses it to find their own way out of the maze.” Marxism distinguishes between theory and reality, that is, reality is attainable, it can be known, and there is truth (absolute and relative).
6. “Death of the subject” (“death of the author”). This postmodern concept asserts that there is no separate author or point of view (see above), there is a cultural field, there is a text, and it does not matter who speaks through it. Regardless of the will of the subject or the author, forces are manifested through him that are beyond his control and completely determine him. In Marxism, individuals, classes, and humanity act as real subjects and influence nature and culture.
I would say that postmodernism from the point of view of Marxism (or any progressivism) is a reaction of Western culture to the emergence of global capitalism and the formation of a new coercive symbolic and informational power (the mass media machine), within which truth and falsehood, subject and object really lose their meaning. Powerless to separate the reality of the ” imposed machine “from the real reality, thinking that the knowledge of truth is” totalitarian”, that it leads to” loss of sensitivity”, Western leftist intellectuals have erected a wall between themselves and the huge machine of information and manipulation war. This wall was postmodernism. Within the framework of this wall, the importance of individual propagandists of the machine was denied, progress was denied (since the word “progress” for the propagandists of capitalism now meant “oppression of other peoples”), binarity was denied, since binarity now formed conformal thinking, when the “outcast” was ridiculed in the media by the masters of discourse, and so on.
Simply put, postmodernism is a reaction to the fact that a Western intellectual was inspired with the idea “socialism like in the USSR is bad, it is totalitarianism” and from the other side he saw this Western capitalist “consciousness manipulation machine”. And the intellectual decided – I will go into the world of culture and art and from there I will pave a path through your “labyrinth” of binary oppositions to the knowledge of meaning, at least for myself. Let me get lost in this maze, let the words “truth” and “morality” are now obscenities for me (because they are not the same as the words “truth” and “morality”). I suspect that you, the masters of life, will catch us on these words as on a hook) – better so than complete defeat. So yes, postmodernism is relevant as the first philosophy to describe the new global capitalism in all its behind-the-scenes glory. But it is not relevant because it does not provide a way out of the maze. He gives the advice “find a way out yourself.” Therefore, we need either a different theory (a third one) besides Marxism and postmodernism, or we just need to develop the Marxist theory further.