Why Postmodernism Still Matters

“Finally, postmodernism influenced numerous intellectual variants that today are popular public philosophies, and we need to understand the intellectual foundations of such systems of thought if we want to evaluate them properly.”

“Among all the mutations that have affected the knowledge of things and their order…only one, that which began a century and a half ago and is now perhaps drawing to a close, has made it possible for the figure of man to appear. As the archaeology of our thought easily shows, man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end. If those arrangements were to disappear…then one can certainly wager that man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea.”

Michel Foucault, The Order of Things

The 20th century French philosopher Michel Foucault ends his 1966 book The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences by predicting the end of a universalist idea of man. While the image of a bald renegade French postmodern philosopher wrecking the accomplishments of the Enlightenment continues to fascinate, the most enduring insights of postmodernism had been made by the 1970s. By now, those arguments have been discussed ad nauseam. Is there any value in continuing to read the postmodernists?

Whether the ideas are viewed as absurd and wrong, or obviously correct, postmodernism is still relevant. For one, regardless of whether its effects are positive or negative, some of its ideas are meaningful contributions to human thought. Moreover, it continues to be relevant because radical technological innovations have affected the status of knowledge, leading the world in an increasingly postmodern direction—a direction that postmodernism is both a response to, and one that it arguably exacerbates. Furthermore, postmodernism’s criticisms of modernity’s effort to increase human autonomy arguably advanced the cause of freedom, or at least revealed some weaknesses in modernity’s armor. Finally, postmodernism influenced numerous intellectual variants that today are popular public philosophies, and we need to understand the intellectual foundations of such systems of thought if we want to evaluate them properly.