Post-Modernism

What is this ideology? and what is the leftist view of it?

Most of my experience with post modernism comes from the arts and not philosophy but I can assure post modernism is the opposite of anything that resambles logic.

I don't know what the “leftist” view of postmodernism is, since it must be varied, but in my opinion, it is generally incompatible with scientific socialism. Postmodernism refers to a broad reaction against modernist (as in Enlightenment, not necessarily early 20th century “modernist”) thought developed in the aftermath of the Second World War. Its influence has been most pronounced in the arts, humanities, and to a lesser extent, social sciences. I will focus upon philosophical postmodernism and its general unifying themes. Postmodernism is most obviously characterized by its rejection of objective or absolute truth and reason, deep skepticism of “grand stories” (sometimes called metanarratives in the jargon), and relativistic approach to such things as morality, politics, and culture. Metanarratives are broad explanations of existence and reality that are supposed to have some universal validity, such as scientific theories—including historical materialism—political ideologies, and generally accepted moral and cultural standards.

Of course, once we critically examine the foundations of postmodernism, it is quickly revealed that the entire postmodern paradigm collapses due to two logical pitfalls that reduce it to self-contradiction. The first is that postmodernism's denial of objective reality and objective knowledge is itself an absolute metaphysical and epistemological claim about the nature of being and truth. By relativizing all existence, postmodernists implicitly assume an objective reality of self-indulgent subjectivity. Two, postmodernism's focus upon highly individualized and socially constructed experiences through its dismissal of totalizing grand stories is self-contradictory, since it is essentially just another metanarrative that rejects metanarratives. Postmodernism is therefore fundamentally self-refuting. These are not the only inconsistencies in postmodern thinking, but I think they are the most fundamental.

I realize that I am generalizing the movement, but this should provide you with a broad idea of what you can expect to find in postmodernist circles. Word games and mind-numbing interpretation of literary texts using pretentious gobbledygook vocabulary, a method of analysis pioneered by Jacques Derrida called deconstruction, are especially popular among intellectuals of this type.

The subjective idealism that permeates postmodern thinking is nothing new in philosophy. It represents what Engels described as one of the two "great camps” in the history of philosophy, namely the struggle between idealism and materialism. It can be discerned in the musings of ancient Greek philosophers, Enlightenment thinkers like David Hume and George Berkeley, and existentialists like Friedrich Nietzsche, Søren Kierkegaard, and Jean-Paul Sartre. Postmodernism simply happens to be the latest tendency in this old lineage.

Thus, postmodernism is profoundly anti-scientific, ergo anti-Marxist. The Marxian economists Richard Wolff and the late Stephen Resnick have incorporated some postmodern perspectives into their work, primarily through the themes of the French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser, and they founded a journal called Rethinking Marxism that encourages this “post-Marxist” exploration, but their adherence to actual postmodern thought has been rather shallow in my opinion. There are incisive Marxist critiques of postmodernism from notable individuals like Alex Callinicos, Terry Eagleton, and Fredric Jameson, and Noam Chomsky is another prominent critic on the left. The mathematician and physicist Alan Sokal, a self-described “Old Leftist,” was responsible for the infamous Sokal affair, in which he submitted a nonsensical article on quantum gravity to a cultural studies journal that was titled using the obscure language typical of postmodern academics, which the journal's editors actually decided to publish. The incident clearly illustrated the sheer credulity of these idiots in admitting anything that corresponded with their eccentric theories as long as it furthered their anti-scientific agenda, and it also demonstrated their intellectual laziness in comparison to actual scientific investigation.