The essential bases of --- are the opposite of those of modernity. Instead of natural reality, anti-realism. Instead of experience and reason, the sociolinguistic subjectivism. Instead of individual identity and autonomy, various groups of race, sex and class. Instead of seeing human interests as essentially harmonious and aimed at mutually beneficial interaction, conflict and oppression.
Instead of appreciating individualism in matters of values, markets, and politics, it calls for communalism, solidarity, and the application of equalizing restrictions. Instead of valuing the achievements of science and technology, he suspects them with a marked tendency to outright hostility.
This comprehensive philosophical opposition shapes the more specific postmodern aspects of the various academic and cultural debates.
Post-modern academic topics
The --- rejects the notion that literary texts have real objective meanings and interpretations. All these claims of objectivity and truth can be deconstructed. In one of the versions of deconstruction, represented by those who agree with Fish's quote on page 2, literary criticism becomes a form of subjective play in which the reader pours subjective associations on the text.
In another version, objectivity is replaced by the view that the author's race, sex or some other group membership has carved more strongly into his opinions and feelings. The task of the literary critic, therefore, is to deconstruct the text to reveal the interests of race, sex or class of the author. Authors and characters who give less body to correct attitudes are naturally subject to the greatest dose of deconstruction.
Nathaniel Hawthorne, for example, in The Scarlet Letter he seems at least ambivalent as to the moral status of Hester Prynne — and this ambivalence reveals that he has been sold to a male, authoritarian, conformist, and repressive religious “establishment”. [ ^ 20] Or Herman Melville at Moby Dick might have believed he was exploring the universal themes of personal and social ambition, man and nature — but what Captain Ahab really represents is the exploitative authoritarianism of imperialist patriarchalism, imperialist exploitation, and the insane drive of technology to conquer nature. [ ^ 21]
In laws, the versions of --- and --- embody the new wave. For the pragmatic version of postmodernism, no abstract and universal theory of the Law is trustworthy. Theories are worth it only to the extent that they provide the lawyer or judge with useful verbal tools. [ ^ 22]. The standards for utility, however, are subjective and variable, so the legal world becomes a post-modernist battlefield. Since there are no universally valid principles of justice, arguments become rhetorical battles of wills.
Critical legal theorists represent the race, class, and sex version of legal postmodernism.
According to the Crits, legal constitutions and their precedents are essentially indeterminate, and so-called objectivity and neutrality of legal reasoning are fraud. All decisions are inherently subjective and driven by political preferences and issues. The law is a weapon to be used in the social arena of subjective conflict, an area driven by rival wills and by the coercive affirmation of the interests of one group over those of other groups.
In the West, for too long the law has been a euphemism for the affirmation of the interests of the white male. The only antidote to this poison is the no less intense assertion of the subjective interests of historically oppressed groups. Stanley Fish links the approaches of pragmatists and critics by arguing that if lawyers and judges come to think about themselves as “supplemental,”and not as “textualists,”they “will thus be marginally freer than otherwise they would be, to instil in constitutional law their present interpretations of the values of our society”. [ ^ 23]
In education, postmodernism rejects the idea that the primary purpose of education is to train a child's cognitive ability within reason in order to produce an adult capable of functioning independently in the world. This idea of education is replaced by the view that education is to take an essentially indeterminate being and confer on him a social identity. [ ^ 24]
The method of modeling education would be linguistic, and therefore the language to be used is one that will create a human being sensitive to his racial, sexual, and class identity. Our current social context, however, is characterized by oppression that benefits whites, men, and the rich at the expense of everyone else.
Such oppression in turn leads to an educational system that primarily or only reflects the interests of those in power. To counteract this bias, educational practice must be completely reshaped. Post-modern education should emphasize work that is not included in the canon; it should focus on the achievements of people of color, women, and the poor; it should highlight the historical crimes of whites, males, and rich; and it should teach students that the scientific method has no better reason for claim to be better in reaching the truth than any other method and therefore students should be equally receptive to alternative modes of knowledge. [ ^ 25]
Stephen R. C. Hicks, Explaining Postmodernism , Chapter 1, “What is Postmodernism”, translation: Walter Jerusalem