Recently, idiotic comics such as this have been making the rounds, leading to the inevitable deluge of buzzwords complaining about some nebulous bogeyman known as "postmodernism." Since all of these invariably get what postmodern is wrong, it is up to enterprising souls such as myself to clarify the record.

First, it is unsurprising that very few people know what postmodernism actually entails, since even well-meaning academics often fuck it up. How much of this is true ignorance and how much is willful misunderstanding, I leave to the reader to discern.

Second, a disclaimer. I am not, nor have I ever been, a "postmodernist" (because there is no such thing) or someone in the postmodern condition (because I'm not a knuckle-dragging reductivist/pragmatist). I am firmly a modernist, drawing my own philosophical inspiration form arch-modernists like Kant, Hegel, Marx, and Husserl. So believe me when I say that I am not here to defend the conclusions of philosophers like Lyotard or Deleuze, insofar as they might need my apologetics.

What I am here to do is to clarify what postmodernism is so that the good people of reddit will stop misusing the term. "You tilt at windmills, Mulligan!" will be your invariable hue and cry. I shall suffer your slings and arrows, gentle readers, because I care that much about your education.

Q: What is postmodernism?

A: An art movement.

Q: Wait, seriously?

A: Initially, yes. Postmodernism was a term used by art critics that French philosophy Jean-Francois Lyotard co-opted in 1979.

Q: Oh. So what did Lyotard mean by it?

A: He was discussing how the effect of technology and consumer capitalism upon the "grand narratives" or great projects of modernity had led to the "postmodern condition," which was not something he particularly liked, but rather a state of the degeneracy of modern learning as compared to what the modernists wanted it to be.

Q: So it's not that everything is relative and everyone but white men are being oppressed?

A: What? No, of course not. Anti-oppressive narratives are modernist narratives. Feminism, liberalism, social justice, etc., are all really modernist things.

Q: But I thought modernists were cool old dead people like Descartes, Locke, or Kant?

A: Yes, those are typical modernists. But modernism as a philosophical movement was simply a reaction to the overt religiosity of scholastic philosophy, and a (re)discovery of the rationalism of antiquity. It was an attempt to ground the objectivity of science, art, metaphysics, etc., in human reason, rather than in God.

Q: Modernism is fucking awesome!

A: Yes, at least in its goals and motivating values, modernism and rationalism are very cool. But Lyotard noticed something, which was that modernist meta-narratives, how we organized our "stories about ourselves" that we told about the modernist project. That is, it was ultimately a bit self-undermining.

Q: What, did he think he was Nietzsche or something?

A: Good observation! Nietzsche was very influential on Lyotard and his contemporaries, in particular, Nietzsche's reaction to the big modernist critical philosophies of Kant and Hegel, who were hot shit in Germany. But he's also talking about other great modernist movements, such as Marxism.

Q: Wait, I thought postmodernists were all commie pinkos?

A: I suspect a lot of the philosophers who are typically called postmodernists would have had socialist sympathies, like most European intellectuals of the day, but "postmodernism" as a movement in philosophy, to the degree that it exists, would be equally as skeptical of Marxism as it would 18th-century rationalism. The whole reduction of postmodernism, in Lyotard's parlance, was "incredulity toward metanarratives."

Q: That means nothing.

A: That's where you're wrong. You're just misinterpreting "incredulity." Lyotard remarked on the way rationalism as an ethos had surpassed the ways of knowing that the Enlightenment deposed. For example, in privileging natural science as the new arbiter of truth and objectivity, we displaced folk psychology, mythology/religion, and a whole host of other ways pre-Enlightenment cultures understood the world. We were skeptical of those meta-narratives, but it was not until Kant came along that we also applied that same incredulity to the rationalist and empiricist metanarratives. And then Hegel came along, and applied his dialectial reasoning to Kantian critical philosophy, becoming in turn incredulous at the Kantian meta-narrative. Even analytic philosophers like Kuhn noticed that historically, epistemic progress is made by rewriting the rules of the game, whether that's philosophical or scientific or artistic or whatever.

Q: Oh, like Wittgenstein's language games!

A: Bingo. In fact, Lyotard specifically discusses the "postmodern condition" in terms of language games. Natural science just happens to be an incredibly useful language game.

Q: Wait, Lyotard read Wittgenstein? But Wittgenstein is an analytic philos...

A: Let me stop you before you say something stupid. Of course Lyotard read, and understood, and applied, Wittgenstein.

Q: OK, fine. So science is a language game. It's a grand narrative we tell ourselves about truth and rationality. What, is Lyotard anti-science?

A: Not at all. Lyotard was remarking on the fact that science's language game was so successful that it began to be exclusionary of other language games (art, philosophy, ethics, etc.) because those language games lacked science's performative and public components. In other words, the products of science-qua-human-activity are things like technological advancement. Consumer capitalism. Awesome new weapons we can use to blow people up. Science is very public.

Q: Yeah, all of those things are super awesome, which is why I love science. I even liked this Facebook page, see...

A: Shut up, seriously. The problem is when we shift science away from what the modernists like Hegel wanted it to be (see, e.g., Husserl's "Crisis in the European Sciences"), an all-encompassing totality of human knowledge, and make it about producing better iPhones and bombs, science becomes instrumental. We care about science for its practical effects. We atomize it and over-specialize it, making it something that people do rather than some unifying meta-narrative. In short, scientism, the doctrine, breeds the postmodern condition.

Q: So the people who believe science is the answer to every question... are the real postmodernists?

A: As much as I hate that term, yes. People in the postmodern condition have abandoned science as being justified by self-grounding reason (a modernist conceit Lyotard and Deleuze argue was incorrect), science is now justified solely by what it can do, who can market it, and who can get rich off of it. Your average Sam Harris reader, who naively believes that science will solve every philosophical problem ever, is in the postmodern condition, not the feminist he's trolling on Facebook, who is again an outgrowth of a firmly modernist movement that has its own meta-narrative about the structures of patriarchal oppression present in society.

Q: This is... causing me to reevaluate a lot of things.

A: Which was, in effect, the point of Lyotard and his contemporaries. They were not actually making a new or even original thesis called "postmodernism." Their critique was mainly that modernism failed, ironically, on its own terms. That as soon as we began applying the methods of modernist critique (which was to assail the foundations of our cherished beliefs) to modernism itself, we saw that self-justifying and self-grounding reason, the touchstone of Descartes to Kant and beyond, was itself no less an idol than God or kings.

Q: So basically Nietzsche?

A: Eh...

Q: Why does everyone hate it, then?

A: Because of what Lyotard and his contemporaries suggested we do about it. If, they argued, modernism had reached an internal contradiction and failed, then that was our last hope at achieving some sort of grand Hegelian vision of the end of history and a final dialectical unfolding. So they suggested that it was more important that philosophy and its related disciplines engage in a free, chaotic, and creative process, something along the lines of...

Q: Wait... Nietzsche's Dionysianism?

A: Your words, but also yes.

Q: So... that's kind of anti-rationalism?

A: In only the broadest sense, yes. It is not that Lyotard et al. were anti-rationalist, but that they recognized the ironic contradiction of reason killing God only to take his place, and rather than give into what they saw as the nihilism of instrumentalism and pragmatism, they would suggest that we simply play with the consequences. To let philosophy be free, be creative, and to be more like art. To make people think and confront the irony of the postmodern condition rather than to be a grand meta-narrative, a historicist account of epistemology.

Q: That seems rather... pointless and harmless. Nothing to get worked up about or write stupid comics about.

A: Thank you. I am glad I got through to someone about it.

Q: I had a really nice time, thanks.

A: Don't worry, I'll get the check. Call you later?

Q: That would be lovely, thank you.