Cynical Theories E-Book

Helen Pluckrose

• Herausgeber: Swift Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 536

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

BOOK OF THE YEAR in The Times, the Sunday Times and the Financial Times Have you heard that language is violence and that science is sexist? Or been told that being obese is healthy, that there is no such thing as biological sex, or that only white people can be racist? Are you confused by these ideas, and do you wonder how they have managed so quickly to challenge the very logic of Western society? Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay document the evolution of the dogma behind these ideas, from its origins in French postmodernism to its refinement within activist academic fields. Today this dogma is recognisable as much by its effects, such as cancel culture and social-media pile-ons, as by its assertions, which are all too often taken as read: knowledge is a social construct; science and reason are tools of oppression; all human interactions are sites of oppressive power play; and language is dangerous. As they warn, the unchecked proliferation of these beliefs present a threat to liberal democracy. While acknowledging the need to challenge the complacency of those who think a just society has been fully achieved, Pluckrose and Lindsay break down how often-radical activist scholarship does far more harm than good, not least to those marginalised communities it claims to champion.

Leseprobe

‘Instead of sexual, racial and other differences becoming unimportant, critical, cynical theories have rendered them the only things of importance. A new generation has been taught to hate not just the societies from which they come, but whole races (presently white people, but it could be someone else next). For Pluckrose and Lindsay this does not seem like progress’

The Times

‘In Cynical Theories, Pluckrose and Lindsay try to explain the spread of the “great awokening” in universities by bravely delving deep into the waffling, obscure prose of the key texts of postmodernism, postcolonial theory, queer theory, critical race theory, and so on. The madness on the streets of Portland shows why it matters’

Sunday Times

‘The authors argue that academia’s embrace of “critical studies” is damaging society. A book for the year in which “woke” and “cancel culture” became buzzwords’

Financial Times

‘The authors describe a totalitarian cult that is hostile to the rule of reason and that has infiltrated academic and cultural institutions across Britain and the US. Its adherents seek to persecute those who disagree with them, censor academic discourse and promote manifest falsities to the point that silence is a treason against liberal values … The authors plead simply that those who hold the central tenets of western liberalism stand up for them, for reason, debate, tolerance, democracy and the rule of law’

TLS

‘At last comes an attempt to explain the extraordinary origins of the cultural revolution of our times — the onslaught against the liberal order by woke crusaders waging a zero-sum struggle in the cause of racial, sexual, gender, disability and other identities across our institutions’

The Australian

SWIFT PRESS

This paperback edition first published by Swift Press 2021

First published in the United States of America by Pitchstone Publishing 2020

First published in Great Britain by Swift Press 2020

This edition published by arrangement with Susan Schulman A Literary Agency, LLC and Pitchstone Publishing

Copyright © Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay 2020

The right of Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay to be identified as the Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-1-80075-032-6

eISBN: 978-1-80075-005-0

To my husband, David, who makes all things possible, and my daughter, Lucy, who never wants to hear about postmodernism again.My work there is done.

And to my wife, Heather, who just wanted a simple life and never to have learned that any of this exists.

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

INTRODUCTION

1 POSTMODERNISM

A Revolution in Knowledge and Power

2 POSTMODERNISM’S APPLIED TURN

Making Oppression Real

3 POSTCOLONIAL THEORY

Deconstructing the West to Save the Other

4 QUEER THEORY

Freedom from the Normal

5 CRITICAL RACE THEORY AND INTERSECTIONALITY

Ending Racism by Seeing It Everywhere

6 FEMINISMS AND GENDER STUDIES

Simplification as Sophistication

7 DISABILITY AND FAT STUDIES

Support-Group Identity Theory

8 SOCIAL JUSTICE SCHOLARSHIP AND THOUGHT

The Truth According to Social Justice

9 SOCIAL JUSTICE IN ACTION

Theory Always Looks Good on Paper

10 AN ALTERNATIVE TO THE IDEOLOGY OF SOCIAL JUSTICE

Liberalism Without Identity Politics

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We owe our gratitude to many people for making this work possible, accessible, and clear, and the list of those deserving extends well beyond those we have space to mention here. Our thanks go especially to Mike Nayna, the long-suffering editor of many early drafts of this book and our chief advisor on accessibility to the layperson. We hope we eventually grew sufficient ovaries for his satisfaction (well, Jim doesn’t, but nevertheless). Thanks to Peter Boghossian for his support and editorial advice and for his constant nagging of us to spend less time arguing these points on Twitter and more on writing them in the book. Special appreciation goes to Jonathan Church for the fruitful discussions of DiAngelo’s work on white fragility and his identification of the fallacy of reification, which helped us to give shape to the third stage of postmodern thought. We are indebted to Alan Sokal for his close reading of our manuscript and numerous helpful suggestions for clarifications, qualifications, and additions that greatly improved the text. We are particularly grateful to our editor, Iona Italia, for her unsurpassable wordsmithery and to everybody who provided feedback, support, and encouragement, notably including Gauri Hopkins, Dayne and Clyde Rathbone, Heather Heying, and Bret Weinstein.

INTRODUCTION

During the modern period and particularly in the last two centuries in most Western countries there has developed a broad consensus in favor of the political philosophy known as “liberalism.” The main tenets of liberalism are political democracy, limitations on the powers of government, the development of universal human rights, legal equality for all adult citizens, freedom of expression, respect for the value of viewpoint diversity and honest debate, respect for evidence and reason, the separation of church and state, and freedom of religion. These liberal values developed as ideals and it has taken centuries of struggle against theocracy, slavery, patriarchy, colonialism, fascism, and many other forms of discrimination to honor them as much as we do, still imperfectly, today. But the struggle for social justice has always been strongest when it has cast itself as the defender of liberal values universally, insisting that they be applied to all individuals, not just to wealthy white males. It must be noted that the general philosophical position that we call “liberalism” is compatible with a wide range of positions on political, economic, and social questions, including both what Americans call “liberal” (and Europeans call “social-democratic”) and moderate forms of what people in all countries call “conservative.” This philosophical liberalism is opposed to authoritarian movements of all types, be they left-wing or rightwing, secular or theocratic. Liberalism is thus best thought of as a shared common ground, providing a framework for conflict resolution and one within which people with a variety of views on political, economic, and social questions can rationally debate the options for public policy.

However, we have reached a point in history where the liberalism and modernity at the heart of Western civilization are at great risk on the level of the ideas that sustain them. The precise nature of this threat is complicated, as it arises from at least two overwhelming pressures, one revolutionary and the other reactionary, that are waging war with each other over which illiberal direction our societies should be dragged. Far-right populist movements claiming to be making a last desperate stand for liberalism and democracy against a rising tide of progressivism and globalism are on the rise around the world. They are increasingly turning toward leadership in dictators and strongmen who can maintain and preserve “Western” sovereignty and values. Meanwhile, far-left progressive social crusaders portray themselves as the sole and righteous champions of social and moral progress without which democracy is meaningless and hollow. These, on our furthest left, not only advance their cause through revolutionary aims that openly reject liberalism as a form of oppression, but they also do so with increasingly authoritarian means seeking to establish a thoroughly dogmatic fundamentalist ideology regarding how society ought to be ordered. Each side in this fray sees the other as an existential threat, and thus each fuels the other’s greatest excesses. This culture war is sufficiently intense that it has come to define political—and increasingly social—life through the beginning of the twenty-first century.

Though the problem to the right is severe and deserves much careful analysis in its own right, we have become experts in the nature of the problem on the left. This is partly because we believe that, while the two sides are driving one another to madness and further radicalization, the problem coming from the left represents a departure from its historical point of reason and strength, which is liberalism. It is that liberalism that is essential to the maintenance of our secular, liberal democracies. As we have written previously, the problem arises from the fact that,

The progressive left has aligned itself not with Modernity but with postmodernism, which rejects objective truth as a fantasy dreamed up by naive and/or arrogantly bigoted Enlightenment thinkers who underestimated the collateral consequences of Modernity’s progress.1

It is this problem that we have dedicated ourselves to learning about and hope to explain in this volume: the problem of postmodernism, not just as it initially arose in the 1960s but also how it has evolved over the last half century. Postmodernism has, depending upon your view, either become or given rise to one of the least tolerant and most authoritarian ideologies that the world has had to deal with since the widespread decline of communism and the collapses of white supremacy and colonialism. Postmodernism was developed in relatively obscure corners of academia as an intellectual and cultural reaction to all of these changes, and since the 1960s it has spread to other parts of the academy, into activism, throughout bureaucracies, and to the heart of primary, secondary, and post-secondary education. It has, from there, begun to seep into broader society to the point where it, and backlashes against it—both reasonable and reactionary—have come to dominate our sociopolitical landscape as we grind ever more painfully into the third decade of the new millennium.

This movement nominally pursues and derives its name from a broad goal called “social justice,” which is a term dating back almost two hundred years. Under different thinkers at different times, this term has taken on various meanings, all of which are concerned on some level with addressing and redressing social inequalities, particularly where it comes to issues of class, race, gender, sex, and sexuality, particularly when these go beyond the reach of legal justice. Perhaps most famously, the liberal progressive philosopher John Rawls laid out much philosophical theory dedicated to the conditions under which a socially just society might be organized. In this, he set out a universalist thought experiment in which a socially just society would be one in which an individual given a choice would be equally happy to be born into any social milieu or identity group.2 Another, explicitly anti-liberal, anti-universal, approach to achieving social justice has also been employed, particularly since the middle of the twentieth century, and that is one rooted in critical theory. A critical theory is chiefly concerned with revealing hidden biases and underexamined assumptions, usually by pointing out what have been termed “problematics,” which are ways in which society and the systems that it operates upon are going wrong.

Postmodernism, in some sense, was an offshoot of this critical approach that went its own theoretical way for a while and was then taken up again by critical social justice activists through the 1980s and 1990s (who, incidentally, very rarely reference John Rawls on the topic). The movement that takes up this charge presumptuously refers to its ideology simply as “Social Justice” as though it alone seeks a just society and the rest of us are all advocating for something entirely different. The movement has thus come to be known as the “Social Justice Movement” and its online critics often refer to it, for brevity, as “SocJus” or, increasingly, “wokeism” (due to its belief that it alone has “awakened” to the nature of societal injustice). Social Justice, as a proper noun with capital S and capital J, refers to a very specific doctrinal interpretation of the meaning of “social justice” and means of achieving it while prescribing a strict, identifiable orthodoxy around that term. Although we are reluctant to seem to concede the essential liberal aim for social justice to this illiberal ideological movement, this is the name by which it is known and so, for the sake of clarity, we will refer to it as capitalized “Social Justice” throughout this book. “Social justice” in the lowercase will be reserved to describe the broader and generic meanings of the term. Let us make clear our own social and political commitments: we find ourselves against capitalized Social Justice because we are generally for lowercase social justice.

It is becoming increasingly difficult to miss the influence of the Social Justice Movement on society—most notably in the form of “identity politics” or “political correctness.” Almost every day, a story comes out about somebody who has been fired, “canceled,” or subjected to a public shaming on social media, often for having said or done something interpreted as sexist, racist, or homophobic. Sometimes the accusations are warranted, and we can comfort ourselves that a bigot—whom we see as entirely unlike ourselves—is receiving the censure she “deserves” for her hateful views. However, increasingly often, the accusation is highly interpretive and its reasoning tortuous. It sometimes feels as though any well-intended person, even one who values universal liberty and equality, could inadvertently say something that falls foul of the new speech codes, with devastating consequences for her career and reputation. This is confusing and counterintuitive to a culture accustomed to placing human dignity first and thus valuing charitable interpretations and tolerance of a wide range of views. At best, this has a chilling effect on the culture of free expression, which has served liberal democracies well for more than two centuries, as good people self-censor to avoid saying the “wrong” things. At worst, it is a malicious form of bullying and—when institutionalized—a kind of authoritarianism in our midst.

This deserves an explanation. In fact, it needs one because these changes, which are happening with astonishing rapidity, are very difficult to understand. This is because they stem from a very peculiar view of the world—one that even speaks its own language, in a way. Within the English-speaking world, they speak English, but they use everyday words differently from the rest of us. When they speak of “racism,” for example, they are not referring to prejudice on the grounds of race, but rather to, as they define it, a racialized system that permeates all interactions in society yet is largely invisible except to those who experience it or who have been trained in the proper “critical” methods that train them to see it. (These are the people sometimes referred to as being “woke,” meaning awakened, to it.) This very precise technical usage of the word inevitably bewilders people, and, in their confusion, they may go along with things they wouldn’t if they had a common frame of reference to help them understand what is actually meant by the word.

Not only do these scholar-activists speak a specialized language—while using everyday words that people assume, incorrectly, that they understand—but they also represent a wholly different culture, embedded within our own. People who have adopted this view may be physically close by, but, intellectually, they are a world away, which makes understanding them and communicating with them incredibly difficult. They are obsessed with power, language, knowledge, and the relationships between them. They interpret the world through a lens that detects power dynamics in every interaction, utterance, and cultural artifact—even when they aren’t obvious or real. This is a worldview that centers social and cultural grievances and aims to make everything into a zero-sum political struggle revolving around identity markers like race, sex, gender, sexuality, and many others. To an outsider, this culture feels as though it originated on another planet, whose inhabitants have no knowledge of sexually reproducing species, and who interpret all our human sociological interactions in the most cynical way possible. But, in fact, these preposterous attitudes are completely human. They bear witness to our repeatedly demonstrated capacity to take up complex spiritual worldviews, ranging from tribal animism to hippie spiritualism to sophisticated global religions, each of which adopts its own interpretive frame through which it sees the entire world. This one just happens to be about a peculiar view of power and its ability to create inequality and oppression.

Interacting with proponents of this view requires learning not just their language—which in itself is challenging enough—but also their customs and even their mythology of “systemic” and “structural” problems inherent in our society, systems, and institutions. As experienced travelers know, there’s more to communicating in a completely different culture than learning the language. One must also learn the idioms, implications, cultural references, and etiquette, which define how to communicate appropriately. Often, we need someone who is not just a translator but also an interpreter in the widest sense, someone savvy about both sets of customs, to communicate effectively. That is what we set out to provide in this book: a guide to the language and customs that are presently widely promoted under the pleasant-sounding moniker “Social Justice.” We are fluent in both the language and culture of Social Justice scholarship and activism, and we plan to guide our readers through this alien world, charting the evolution of these ideas from their origins fifty years ago right up to the present day.

We begin in the late 1960s, when the group of theoretical concepts clustered around the nature of knowledge, power, and language that came to be known as postmodernism emerged from within several humanities disciplines at once. At its core, postmodernism rejected what it calls metanarratives—broad, cohesive explanations of the world and society. It rejected Christianity and Marxism. It also rejected science, reason, and the pillars of post-Enlightenment Western democracy. Postmodern ideas have shaped what has since mostly been called Theory—the entity which is, in some sense, the protagonist of this book. In our view, it is crucial to understand the development of Theory from the 1960s until the present day if we are to come to terms with and correct for the rapid shifts we have been experiencing in society ever since its inception, and especially since 2010. Of note, throughout this book, Theory (and related words, such as Theorist and Theoretical) with a capital T will refer to the approach to social philosophy that stems from postmodernism.

Cynical Theories explains how Theory has developed into the driving force of the culture war of the late 2010s—and proposes a philosophically liberal way to counter its manifestations in scholarship, activism, and everyday life. The book charts the development of the evolving branches of cynical postmodern Theory over the last fifty years and shows that it has influenced current society in ways the reader will recognize. In chapter 1, we will guide you through the key ideas of the original postmodernists of the 1960s and 1970s, and draw out two principles and four themes that have remained central to all the Theory that followed. Chapter 2 will explain how these ideas mutated, solidified, and were made politically actionable in a set of new Theories that emerged in the late 1980s and 1990s. This we will refer to as applied postmodernism. Chapters 3 to 6 will delve into each of the following in more detail: postcolonial Theory, queer Theory, critical race Theory, and intersectional feminism. Chapter 7 will look at the relative newcomers, disability studies and fat studies, which draw on all these Theories.

In chapter 8, we explore the second evolution of these postmodern ideas, beginning around 2010, which asserted the absolute truth of the postmodern principles and themes. This approach we call reified postmodernism, as it takes the assumptions of postmodernism to be real, objective truths—The Truth According to Social Justice. This change occurred when scholars and activists combined the existing Theories and Studies into a simple, dogmatic methodology, best known simply as “Social Justice scholarship.”

This book aims to tell the story of how postmodernism applied its cynical Theories to deconstruct what we might agree to call “the old religions” of human thought—which include conventional religious faiths like Christianity and secular ideologies like Marxism, as well as cohesive modern systems such as science, philosophical liberalism, and “progress”—and replaced them with a new religion of its own, called “Social Justice.” This book is a story about how despair found new confidence, which then grew into the sort of firm conviction associated with religious adherence. The faith that emerged is thoroughly postmodern, which means that, rather than interpreting the world in terms of subtle spiritual forces like sin and magic, it focuses instead on subtle material forces, such as systemic bigotry, and diffuse but omnipresent systems of power and privilege.

While this new-found conviction has caused significant problems, it is also helpful that Theory has become increasingly confident and clear about its beliefs and goals. It makes it easier for liberals—from the political left, right, or center—to get at those ideas and counter them. On the other hand, this development is alarming because it has made Theory so much more easily grasped and acted upon by believers who want to reshape society. We can see its impact on the world in their attacks on science and reason. It is also evident in their assertions that society is simplistically divided into dominant and marginalized identities and underpinned by invisible systems of white supremacy, patriarchy, heteronormativity, cisnormativity, ableism, and fatphobia. We find ourselves faced with the continuing dismantlement of categories like knowledge and belief, reason and emotion, and men and women, and with increasing pressures to censor our language in accordance with The Truth According to Social Justice. We see radical relativism in the form of double standards, such as assertions that only men can be sexist and only white people can be racist, and in the wholesale rejection of consistent principles of nondiscrimination. In the face of this, it grows increasingly difficult and even dangerous to argue that people should be treated as individuals or to urge recognition of our shared humanity in the face of divisive and constraining identity politics.

Although many of us now recognize these problems and intuitively feel that such ideas are unreasonable and illiberal, it can be difficult to articulate responses to them, since objections to irrationalism and illiberalism are often misunderstood or misrepresented as opposition to genuine social justice—a legitimate philosophy that advocates a fairer society. This dissuades too many well-intentioned people from even trying. In addition to the danger of being labelled an enemy of social justice that comes with criticizing the methods of the Social Justice Movement, there are two other obstacles to effectively addressing them. First, the underlying values of Social Justice are so counterintuitive that they are difficult to understand. Second, few of us have ever had to defend universally liberal ethics, reason and evidence against those claiming to stand for social justice. They have, until quite recently, always been understood as the best way to work for social justice. Thus, once we have finished making the underlying principles of Social Justice Theory comprehensible, we move on to discuss how to recognize them and counter them. In chapter 9, we look at the ways in which these ideas have escaped the bounds of academia and are impacting the real world. Finally, chapter 10 will make a case that we should counter these ideas through a clearly articulated mass commitment to the universally liberal principles and rigorous, evidence-based scholarship that define modernity. With luck, our last two chapters will show how we might write the last chapter in the story of Theory—its hopefully quiet and inglorious end.

This book is therefore written for the layperson who has no background in this type of scholarship but sees the influence of it on society and wants to understand how it works. It is for the liberal to whom a just society is very important, but who can’t help noticing that the Social Justice movement does not seem to facilitate this and wants to be able to make a liberal response to it with consistency and integrity. Cynical Theories is written for anyone from any part of the political spectrum who believes in the marketplace of ideas as a way to examine and challenge ideas and advance society and wants to be able to engage with Social Justice ideas as they really are.

This is not a book that seeks to undermine liberal feminism, activism against racism, or campaigns for LGBT equality. On the contrary, Cynical Theories is born of our commitment to gender, racial and LGBT equality and our concern that the validity and importance of these are currently being alarmingly undermined by Social Justice approaches. Nor will this book attack scholarship or the university in general. Quite the contrary, we seek to defend rigorous, evidence-based scholarship and the essential function of the university as a center of knowledge production against anti-empirical, anti-rational, and illiberal currents on the left that threaten to give power to anti-intellectual, anti-equality, and illiberal currents on the right.

This book, then, ultimately seeks to present a philosophically liberal critique of Social Justice scholarship and activism and argues that this scholarship-activism does not further social justice and equality aims. There are some scholars within the fields we critique who will be derisive of this and insist that we are really reactionary right-wingers opposed to studies into societal injustice experienced by marginalized people. This view of our motivations will not be able to survive an honest reading of our book. More scholars within these fields will accept our liberal, empirical, and rational stance on the issues, but reject them as a modernist delusion that centers white, male, Western, and heterosexual constructions of knowledge and maintains an unjust status quo with inadequate attempts to incrementally improve society. “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house,”3 they will tell us. To them, we concede that we are far less interested in dismantling liberal societies and empirical and rational concepts of knowledge and much more interested in continuing the remarkable advances for social justice that they have brought. The master’s house is a good one and the problem has been limited access to it. Liberalism increases access to a solid structure that can shelter and empower everyone. Equal access to rubble is not a worthy goal. Then there will be a few scholars in these fields who believe our criticisms of Social Justice scholarship have some merits and will engage with us in good faith about them. These are the exchanges we look forward to and the ones that can set us back on the path of having productive and ideologically diverse conversations about social justice.

1 POSTMODERNISM

A Revolution in Knowledge and Power

A fundamental change in human thought took place in the 1960s. This change is associated with several French Theorists who, while not quite household names, float at the edges of the popular imagination, among them Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Jean-François Lyotard. Taking a radically new conception of the world and our relationship to it, it revolutionized social philosophy and perhaps social everything. Over the decades, it has dramatically altered not only what and how we think but also how we think about thinking. Esoteric, academic, and seemingly removed from the realities of daily existence, this revolution has nevertheless had profound implications for how we interact with the world and with one another. At its heart is a radical worldview that came to be known as “postmodernism.”

Postmodernism is difficult to define, perhaps by design. It represents a set of ideas and modes of thought that came together in response to specific historical conditions, including the cultural impact of the World Wars and how these ended, widespread disillusionment with Marxism, the waning credibility of religious worldviews in post-industrial settings, and the rapid advance of technology. It is probably most useful to understand postmodernism as a rejection of both modernism—an intellectual movement that predominated through the late nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth—and modernity—that epoch known as the Modern period, which began after the end of the Middle Ages and in which we (probably) still live. This new kind of radical skepticism to the very possibility of obtaining objective knowledge has since rippled outward from the academy, to challenge our social, cultural, and political thinking in intentionally disruptive ways.

Postmodern thinkers reacted to modernism by denying the foundations of some aspects of Modern thought, while claiming that other aspects of Modern thinking didn’t go far enough. In particular, they rejected the underlying modernist desire for authenticity, unifying narratives, universalism, and progress, achieved primarily through scientific knowledge and technology. At the same time, they took the modernists’ relatively measured, if pessimistic, skepticism of tradition, religion, and Enlightenment-era certainty—along with their reliance on self-consciousness, nihilism, and ironic forms of critique—to extremes.1 Postmodernism raised such radical doubts about the structure of thought and society that it is ultimately a form of cynicism.

Postmodernism is also a reaction to and rejection of modernity, meaning “the profound cultural transformation which saw the rise of representative democracy, the age of science, the supersedence of reason over superstition, and the establishment of individual liberties to live according to one’s values.”2 Although postmodernism openly rejects the possibility of the foundations that have built modernity, it has nevertheless had a profound impact on the thinking, culture, and politics of those societies that modernity built. As literary theorist Brian McHale points out, postmodernism became “the dominant cultural tendency (it might be safer to say a dominant tendency) during the second half of the twentieth century in the advanced industrial societies of the West, spreading eventually to other regions of the globe.”3

Since its revolutionary beginnings, postmodernism has evolved into new forms, which have preserved its original principles and themes, while gaining increasing influence over culture, activism, and scholarship, especially in the humanities and social sciences. Understanding postmodernism is therefore a matter of some urgency precisely because it radically rejects the foundations upon which today’s advanced civilizations are built and consequently has the potential to undermine them.

Postmodernism isn’t just hard to define; it’s also notoriously difficult to summarize. It was and is a multifaceted phenomenon, encompassing vast tracts of intellectual, artistic, and cultural terrain. To make matters more difficult, its boundaries, nature, form, purpose, values, and proponents have always been disputed. This seems fitting for a mode of thought that prides itself on plurality, contradiction, and ambiguity, but it isn’t very helpful when you’re trying to understand it or its philosophical and cultural descendants.

The difficulties of defining postmodernism are not just philosophical; they are spatial and temporal because it has not been one unitary movement. The first manifestations of the cultural phenomenon called “postmodernism” were artistic and appeared around 1940, but, by the late 1960s, it was far more prominent within various fields of the humanities and social sciences, including psychoanalysis, linguistics, philosophy, history, and sociology. Further, postmodernism manifested differently in these different fields and at different times. As a result, nothing in postmodern thought is entirely new, and its original thinkers constantly draw upon their precursors in the realms of surrealist art, antirealist philosophy, and revolutionary politics. Postmodernism also manifested differently from country to country, producing distinct variations on common themes. Italian postmodernists tended to foreground its aesthetic elements and viewed it as a continuation of modernism, while American postmodernists leaned toward more straightforward and pragmatic approaches. The French postmodernists were altogether more focused on the social and on revolutionary and deconstructive approaches to modernism.4 It is the French approach that will be of most interest to us, because it is primarily some of the French ideas, especially about knowledge and power, which have evolved over the course of successive variants of postmodernism’s central occupation, that which is often simply called Theory. In simpler and more actionable and concrete forms, these ideas have been incorporated into Social Justice activism and scholarship and into the mainstream social conscience—although, interestingly, this has occurred more in the English-speaking world than in France itself.

Since our ultimate focus is on the applied derivatives of postmodern thought that have become socially and culturally influential—even powerful—today, this chapter will not attempt to survey the vast terrain of postmodernism.5 Nor will it address the ongoing debate about which thinkers it is acceptable to call “postmodern” and whether “postmodernism” is a meaningful term, or whether it would be better to separate the critics of postmodernity from the poststructuralists and those whose work is centered on the method of deconstruction. There are certainly distinctions to be made, but such taxonomies are primarily of interest to academics. Instead, we are going to highlight some consistent underlying themes of postmodernism that have come to drive contemporary activism, shape educational theory and practice, and inform our current national conversations. These include skepticism about objective reality, the perception of language as the constructor of knowledge, the “making” of the individual, and the role played by power in all of these. These factors underlie the “postmodern turn,” which is primarily a product of the 1960s and 1970s. Within that broad change, more specifically, we wish to explain how these foundational ideas have gained cultural popularity and legitimacy through the academy, creating a conceptual schism that underlies many of our current social, cultural, and political divisions.

THE ROOTS, PRINCIPLES, AND THEMES OF POSTMODERNISM

Postmodernism arguably emerged between 1950 and 1970—the exact dates depending upon whether one is primarily interested in its artistic or social aspects. The earliest changes began in art—we can trace them as far back as the 1940s, in the work of artists such as Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges—but, for our purposes, the late 1960s are key, since they witnessed the emergence of French social Theorists such as Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Jean-François Lyotard, who were the original architects of what later came to be known simply as “Theory.”

In Europe, in the middle of the twentieth century, a number of profound social changes happened all at once. The First and Second World Wars had shaken Europe’s confidence in the notion of progress and made people anxious about the power of technology. Leftwing intellectuals across Europe thereby became suspicious of liberalism and Western civilization, which had just allowed the rise of fascism, often by the will of aggrieved electorates, with cataclysmic results. Empires collapsed, and colonialism had ceased to be morally tenable for most people. Former imperial subjects began to migrate to the West, prompting the leftist intelligentsia to pay more attention to racial and cultural inequalities and, particularly, to the ways in which structures of power had contributed to them. Activism on behalf of women and the LGBT and, in the United States, the Civil Rights Movement, were gaining broad cultural support, just as disillusionment with Marxism—until then, the main, longstanding leftist social-justice cause—was spreading through the political and cultural left. Given the catastrophic results of communism everywhere it had been put into practice, this disillusionment was well founded and radically altered the worldviews of leftist cultural elites. As a result, confidence in science, which was still ascendant in every meaningful regard, was interrogated for its role in enabling, producing, and justifying the previously impossible horrors of the preceding century. Meanwhile, a vibrant youth culture was beginning to form, producing a powerful popular culture, which vied with “high culture” for dominance. Technology also began to advance rapidly, which, together with the mass production of consumer goods, enabled this “middle culture” to fuel a new postrationing desire for art, music, and entertainment. This, in turn, sparked fears that society was degenerating into an artificial, hedonistic, capitalist, consumerist world of fantasy and play.

This reaction often took the form of the pervasive pessimism that characterizes postmodern thinking, fueling fears about human hubris on one hand and the loss of meaning and authenticity on the other. This despair was so pronounced that postmodernism itself could be characterized as a profound cultural crisis of confidence and authenticity alongside a growing distrust of liberal social orders. Growing fears of the loss of meaning caused by rapid improvements in technology defined the era.

Postmodernism was particularly skeptical of science and other culturally dominant ways of legitimizing claims as “truths” and of the grand, sweeping explanations that supported them. It called them metanarratives,6 which it viewed as a kind of cultural mythology and a significant form of human myopia and arrogance. Postmodernism posited a radical and total skepticism about such narratives. This skepticism was so profound as to be better understood as a type of cynicism about the entire history of human progress, and as such, it was a perversion of a sweeping cultural current of skepticism that long preceded it. Skepticism of sweeping narratives—though not cynicism about them—was prominent in Enlightenment thought and in modernism and had been gaining momentum in Western societies for several centuries by the time postmodernism showed up in the 1960s.

In its earlier forms, broad but reasonable cultural skepticism was crucial to the development of scientific and other forms of Enlightenment thought, which had had to break away from previous dominant metanarratives (mostly of a religious nature). For example, during the sixteenth century, Christianity was reevaluated as a result of the Reformation (during which the religion splintered, forming numerous Protestant sects, all challenging both the preceding orthodoxy and each other). At the end of the sixteenth century, treatises against atheism also began to appear, which clearly suggests that disbelief in God had begun to circulate. During the seventeenth century, medicine and anatomy, which had previously been modeled on the knowledge of the ancient Greeks, underwent a revolution and knowledge of the body advanced rapidly. The Scientific Revolution was the result of widespread questioning of received wisdom and the rapid proliferation of different kinds of knowledge production. The development of the scientific method in the nineteenth century was centered on skepticism and the need for increasingly rigorous testing and falsification.

Beyond cynical “skepticism,” the postmodernists had concerns about the deaths of authenticity and meaning in modern society that also carried considerable weight, especially with French Theorists. These concerns were especially acutely expressed by Jean Baudrillard. For Baudrillard, whose nihilistic despair at the loss of the “real” drew heavily on the work of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, all realities had become mere simulations (imitations of real-world phenomena and systems) and simulacra (“copies” of things without an original).7 Baudrillard described three levels of simulacra: associated with the premodern, modern, and postmodern. In premodern times—those before Enlightenment thought revolutionized our relationship to knowledge—he said, unique realities existed, and people attempted to represent them. In the modern period, this link broke down because items began to be mass-produced and each original could therefore have many identical copies. In the postmodern period, he concluded, there is no original and all is simulacra, which are unsatisfactory imitations and images of the real. This state Baudrillard referred to as the hyperreal.8 This evinces the postmodernists’ tendency to seek the roots of meaning in language and to become overly concerned with the ways in which it shapes social reality through its ability to constrain and shape knowledge—that which represents what is true.

These same authenticity-threatening phenomena were central concerns of other postmodern thinkers as well. French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, for instance, argued that the self was being constrained by capitalist, consumer society.9 In a similar vein, the American Marxist scholar Frederic Jameson particularly deplored the shallowness of postmodernity, which he saw as being all surface with no deeper meaning. Like Baudrillard, he regarded the postmodern state as one of simulation—everything is artificial and comprised of mere copies, not originals. In a typical expression of the despair at the heart of postmodernism, he diagnosed a waning of affect—the idea that there is no longer any heart to anything. For Jameson, surface aesthetics preoccupy our attention and distance and distract people from caring too deeply. In this way, he also openly complained about the cynicism at the heart of postmodernity. “The death of the subject,” as he calls it, refers to a loss of individuality and confidence in a stable self. “Pastiche,” he said, had replaced parody: there was no purpose or depth to mimicry, only a relentless borrowing and recycling. The satiety provided by cheaply available experiences had evoked a constant sublime—a perpetual artificial euphoria. Overall, this aimlessness and loss of purpose and grounding had resulted in nostalgia—a constant looking backwards in search of our present.10 Crucially, all this profound hopelessness at the center of criticisms of postmodernity was largely descriptive rather than prescriptive. Prescriptions would come later.

The reactionary skepticism about modernism and modernity that characterizes postmodern thought found especially sharp expression in dissatisfaction with and anxiety about technology and consumer societies. This produced, at least in academics focused on cultural criticism, what the philosopher, sociologist, and literary critic Jean-François Lyotard would in 1979 summarize as “the postmodern condition.” This he characterized as a profound skepticism of the possibility of any broad meaning-making structure underpinning people’s lives. The anthropologist and geographer David Harvey refers to this situation as “the condition of postmodernity,” which he sees as resulting from “the breakdown of the Enlightenment project.”11 Ultimately, these thinkers are referring to a general feeling that the scientific and ethical certainties that characterized much thought about modernity had become untenable, and the loss of their preferred analytic tools rendered the situation completely hopeless. Their summary of this state took the form of an extremely radical skepticism and profound cynicism, particularly about language, knowledge, power, and the individual.12

What, though, is postmodernism? The online Encyclopedia Britannica defines postmodernism as

a late 20th-century movement characterized by broad skepticism, subjectivism, or relativism; a general suspicion of reason; and an acute sensitivity to the role of ideology in asserting and maintaining political and economic power.13

Walter Truett Anderson, writing in 1996, describes the four pillars of postmodernism:

1. The social construction of the concept of the self: Identity is constructed by many cultural forces and is not given to a person by tradition;

2. Relativism of moral and ethical discourse: Morality is not found but made. That is, morality is not based on cultural or religious tradition, nor is it the mandate of Heaven, but is constructed by dialogue and choice. This is relativism, not in the sense of being nonjudgmental, but in the sense of believing that all forms of morality are socially constructed cultural worldviews;

3. Deconstruction in art and culture: The focus is on endless playful improvisation and variations on themes and a mixing of “high” and “low” culture; and

4. Globalization: People see borders of all kinds as social constructions that can be crossed and reconstructed and are inclined to take their tribal norms less seriously.14

Many agree that postmodernism is centered on a number of primary themes, no matter how much postmodernists might resist such a characterization. (We might describe these themes as the basis of a “postmodern metanarrative.”) For Steinar Kvale, professor of psychology and director of the Center of Qualitative Research, the central themes of postmodernism include doubting that any human truth provides an objective representation of reality, focusing on language and the way societies use it to create their own local realities, and denying the universal.15 These, he explains, resulted in an increased interest in narrative and storytelling, particularly when “truths” are situated within particular cultural constructs, and a relativism that accepts that different descriptions of reality cannot be measured against one another in any final—that is, objective—way.16

The key observation, following Kvale,17 is that the postmodern turn brought about an important shift away from the modernist dichotomy between the objective universal and the subjective individual and toward local narratives (and the lived experiences of their narrators). In other words, the boundary between that which is objectively true and that which is subjectively experienced ceased to be accepted. The perception of society as formed of individuals interacting with universal reality in unique ways—which underlies the liberal principles of individual freedom, shared humanity, and equal opportunities—was replaced by multiple allegedly equally valid knowledges and truths, constructed by groups of people with shared markers of identity related to their positions in society. Knowledge, truth, meaning, and morality are therefore, according to postmodernist thinking, culturally constructed and relative products of individual cultures, none of which possess the necessary tools or terms to evaluate the others.

At the heart of the postmodern turn is a reaction to and rejection of modernism and modernity.18 According to Enlightenment thinking, objective reality can be known through more or less reliable methods. Knowledge about objective reality produced by the scientific method enabled us to build modernity and permits us to continue doing so. For postmodernism, by contrast, reality is ultimately the product of our socialization and lived experiences, as constructed by systems of language.

The sociologist Steven Seidman, who coined the term “the postmodern turn,” recognized the profundity of this change in 1994: “A broad social and cultural shift is taking place in Western societies. The concept of the ‘postmodern’ captures at least certain aspects of this social change.”19 Walter Truett Anderson, writing in 1996, puts it more strongly: “We are in the midst of a great, confusing, stressful and enormously promising historical transition, and it has to do with a change not so much in what we believe but how we believe. . . . People all over the world are making such shifts in belief—to be more precise, shifts in belief about belief.”20 What Seidman and Anderson are describing here are changes in epistemology—that is, in how we obtain and understand knowledge. The postmodern turn is primarily characterized by a rejection of Enlightenment values, especially its values regarding the production of knowledge, which it associates with power and its unjust application. The postmodern view of the Enlightenment is therefore a very narrow one that is accordingly easy to be cynical about.21 Ultimately, the Enlightenment that postmodernists rejected is defined by a belief in objective knowledge, universal truth, science (or evidence more broadly) as a method for obtaining objective knowledge, the power of reason, the ability to communicate straightforwardly via language, a universal human nature, and individualism. They also rejected the belief that the West has experienced significant progress due to the Enlightenment and will continue to do so if it upholds these values.22

TWO PRINCIPLES AND FOUR THEMES

Postmodern thinkers approached the rejection of modernism and Enlightenment thought, especially with regard to universal truths, objective knowledge, and individuality, in strikingly different ways. But we can spot a few consistent themes. The postmodern turn involves two inextricably linked core principles—one regarding knowledge and one regarding politics—which act as the foundation of four significant themes. These principles are

•The postmodern knowledge principle: Radical skepticism about whether objective knowledge or truth is obtainable and a commitment to cultural constructivism.

•The postmodern political principle: A belief that society is formed of systems of power and hierarchies, which decide what can be known and how.

The four major themes of postmodernism are

1. The blurring of boundaries

2. The power of language

3. Cultural relativism

4. The loss of the individual and the universal

Together, these six major concepts allow us to identify postmodern thinking and understand how it operates. They are the core principles of Theory, which have remained largely unchanged even as postmodernism and its applications have evolved from their deconstructive and hopeless beginnings to the strident, almost religious activism of today. This is the phenomenon we wish to examine, which arose from various theoretical approaches in the humanities, particularly that going by the term “cultural studies,” mainly over the last century, and developed into the postmodernist Social Justice scholarship, activism, and culture we see today.

THE POSTMODERN KNOWLEDGE PRINCIPLE

Radical skepticism as to whether objective knowledge or truth is obtainable and a commitment to cultural constructivism

Postmodernism is defined by a radical skepticism about the accessibility of objective truth. Rather than seeing objective truth as something that exists and that can be provisionally known (or approximated) through processes such as experimentation, falsification, and defeasibility—as Enlightenment, modernist, and scientific thought would have it—postmodern approaches to knowledge inflate a small, almost banal kernel of truth—that we are limited in our ability to know and must express knowledge through language, concepts and categories—to insist that all claims to truth are value-laden constructs of culture. This is called cultural constructivism or social constructivism. The scientific method, in particular, is not seen as a better way of producing and legitimizing knowledge than any other, but as one cultural approach among many, as corrupted by biased reasoning as any other.

Cultural constructivism is not the belief that reality is literally created by cultural beliefs—it doesn’t argue, for instance, that when we erroneously believed the Sun went around the Earth, our beliefs had any influence over the solar system and its dynamics. Instead, it is the position that humans are so tied into their cultural frameworks that all truth or knowledge claims are merely representations of those frameworks—we have decided that “it is true” or “it is known” that the Earth goes round the Sun because of the way we establish truth in our current culture. That is, although reality doesn’t change in accordance with our beliefs, what does change is what we are able to regard as true (or false—or “crazy”) about reality. If we belonged to a culture that produced and legitimated knowledge differently, within that cultural paradigm it might be “true” that, say, the Sun goes round the Earth. Those who would be regarded as “crazy” to disagree would change accordingly.

Although the claim that “we make reality with our cultural norms” is not the same as the claim that “we decide what is true/what is known according to our cultural norms,” in practice this is a distinction without a difference. The postmodern approach to knowledge denies that objective truth or knowledge is that which corresponds with reality as determined by evidence—regardless of the time or culture in question and regardless of whether that culture believes that evidence is the best way to determine truth or knowledge. Instead, the postmodern approach might acknowledge that objective reality exists, but it focuses on the barriers to knowing that reality by examining cultural biases and assumptions and theorizing about how they work.23

This is what the American postmodern philosopher Richard Rorty refers to when he writes, “We need to make a distinction between the claim that the world is out there and the claim that the truth is out there.”24 In this sense, postmodernism rests upon a broad rejection of the correspondence theory of truth: that is, the position that there are objective truths and that they can be established as true by their correspondence with how things actually are in the world.25 That there are real truths about an objective reality “out there” and that we can come to know them is, of course, at the root of Enlightenment thinking and central to the development of science. Profoundly radical skepticism about this idea is central to postmodern thinking about knowledge.

French philosopher Michel Foucault—a central figure of postmodernism—expresses this same doubt when he argues that, “in any given culture and at any given moment, there is always only one episteme that defines the conditions of possibility of all knowledge, whether expressed in a theory or silently invested in a practice.”26 Foucault was especially interested in the relationship between language, or, more specifically, discourse (ways of talking about things), the production of knowledge, and power. He explored these ideas at length throughout the 1960s, in such influential works as Madness and Civilization (1961), The Birth of the Clinic (1963), The Order of Things (1966), and The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969).27 For Foucault, a statement reveals not just information but also the rules and conditions of a discourse. These then determine the construction of truth claims and knowledge. Dominant discourses are extremely powerful because they determine what can be considered true, thus applicable, in a given time and place. Thus, sociopolitical power is the ultimate determiner of what is true in Foucault’s analysis, not correspondence with reality. Foucault was so interested in the concept of how power influences what is considered knowledge that in 1981 he coined the term “power-knowledge” to convey the inextricable link between powerful discourses and what is known. Foucault called a dominant set of ideas and values an episteme because it shapes how we identify and interact with knowledge.

In The Order of Things, Foucault argues against objective notions of truth and suggests we think instead in terms of “regimes of truth,” which change according to the specific episteme of each culture and time. As a result, Foucault adopted the position that there are no fundamental principles by which to discover truth and that all knowledge is “local” to the knower28—ideas which form the basis of the postmodern knowledge principle. Foucault didn’t deny that a reality exists, but he doubted the ability of humans to transcend our cultural biases enough to get at it.

The main takeaway from this is that postmodern skepticism is not garden-variety skepticism, which might also be called “reasonable doubt.” The kind of skepticism employed in the sciences and other rigorous means of producing knowledge asks, “How can I be sure this proposition is true?” and will only tentatively accept as a provisional truth that which survives repeated attempts to disprove it. These propositions are put forth in models, which are understood to be provisional conceptual constructs, which are used to explain and predict phenomena and are judged according to their ability to do so. The principle of skepticism common among postmodernists is frequently referred to as “radical skepticism.” It says, “All knowledge is constructed: what is interesting is theorizing about why knowledge got constructed this way.” Thus, radical skepticism is markedly different from the scientific skepticism that characterized the Enlightenment. The postmodern view wrongly insists that scientific thought is unable to distinguish itself as especially reliable and rigorous in determining what is and isn’t true.29 Scientific reasoning is construed as a metanarrative—a sweeping explanation of how things work—and postmodernism is radically skeptical of all such explanations. In postmodern thinking, that which is known is only known within the cultural paradigm that produced the knowledge and is therefore representative of its systems of power. As a result, postmodernism regards knowledge as provincial and intrinsically political.

This view is widely attributed to the French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard, who critiqued science, the Enlightenment, and Marxism. Each of these projects was, for Lyotard, a prime example of a modernist or Enlightenment metanarrative. Ultimately, Lyotard feared that science and technology were just one “language game”—one way of legitimating truth claims—and that they were taking over all other language games. He mourned the demise of small local “knowledges” passed on in narrative form and viewed the loss of meaning-making intrinsic to scientific detachment as a loss of valuable narratives. Lyotard’s famous characterization of postmodernism as a “skepticism towards metanarratives” has been extremely influential on the development of postmodernism as a school of thought, analytical tool, and worldview.30

This was the great postmodernist contribution to knowledge and knowledge production. It did not invent the skeptical reevaluation of well-established beliefs. It did, however, fail to appreciate that scientific and other forms of liberal reasoning (such as arguments in favor of democracy and capitalism) are not so much metanarratives (though they can adopt these) as imperfect but self-correcting processes that apply a productive and actionable form of skepticism to everything, including themselves. This mistake led them into their equally misguided political project.

THE POSTMODERN POLITICAL PRINCIPLE

A belief that society is formed of systems of power and hierarchies, which decide what can be known and how

Postmodernism is characterized politically by its intense focus on power as the guiding and structuring force of society, a focus which is codependent on the denial of objective knowledge. Power and knowledge are seen as inextricably entwined—most explicitly in Foucault’s work, which refers to knowledge as “power-knowledge.” Lyotard also describes a “strict interlinkage”31 between the language of science and that of politics and ethics, and Derrida was profoundly interested in the power dynamics embedded in hierarchical binaries of superiority and subordination that he believed exist within language. Similarly, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari saw humans as coded within various systems of power and constraint and free to operate only within capitalism and the flow of money. In this sense, for postmodern Theory, power decides not only what is factually correct but also what is morally good—power implies domination, which is bad, whereas subjugation implies oppression, the disruption of which is good. These attitudes were the prevailing mood at the Sorbonne in Paris through the 1960s, where many of the early Theorists were strongly intellectually influenced.

Because of their focus on power dynamics, these thinkers argued that the powerful have, both intentionally and inadvertently, organized society to benefit them and perpetuate their power. They have done so by legitimating certain ways of talking about things as true, which then spread throughout society, creating societal rules that are viewed as common sense and perpetuated on all levels. Power is thus constantly reinforced through discourses legitimized or mandated within society, including expectations of civility and reasoned discourse, appeals to objective evidence, and even rules of grammar and syntax. As a result, the postmodernist view is difficult to fully appreciate from the outside because it looks very much like a conspiracy theory. In fact, the conspiracies it alludes to are subtle and, in a way, not conspiracies at all, since there are no coordinated actors pulling the strings; instead, we’re all participants. Theory, then, is a conspiracy theory with no conspirators in particular. In postmodern Theory, power is not exercised straightforwardly and visibly from above, as in the Marxist framework, but permeates all levels of society and is enforced by everyone, through routine interactions, expectations, social conditioning, and culturally constructed discourses that express a particular understanding of the world. This controls which hierarchies are preserved—through, say, due process of law or the legitimizing mechanism of scientific publishing—and the systems within which people are positioned or coded. In each of these examples, note that it is the social system and its inherent power dynamics that are seen as the causes of oppression, not necessarily willful individual agents. Thus, a society, social system, or institution can be seen as in some way oppressive without any individual involved with it needing to be shown to hold even a single oppressive view.

The postmodernists do not necessarily see the system of oppression as the result of a consciously coordinated, patriarchal, white supremacist, heteronormative conspiracy. Instead, they regard it as the inevitable result of self-perpetuating systems that privilege some groups over others, which constitute an unconscious, uncoordinated conspiracy inherent to systems involving power. They believe, however, that those systems are patriarchal, white supremacist, and heteronormative, and therefore necessarily grant unfair access to straight, white Western men and work to maintain that status quo by excluding the perspectives of women and of racial and sexual minorities.

Put more simply, one central belief in postmodern political thought is that powerful forces in society essentially order society into categories and hierarchies that are organized to serve their own interests. They effect this by dictating how society and its features can be spoken about and what can be accepted as true. For example, a demand that someone provide evidence and reasoning for their claims will be seen through a postmodernist Theoretical lens as a request to participate within a system of discourses and knowledge production that was built by powerful people who valued these approaches and designed them to exclude alternative means of communicating and producing “knowledge.” In other words, Theory views science as having been organized in a way that serves the interests of the powerful people who established it—white Western men—while setting up barriers against the participation of others. Thus, the cynicism at the heart of Theory is evident.

Because they focused on self-perpetuating systems of power, few of the original postmodern Theorists advocated any specific political actions, preferring instead to engage in playful disruption or nihilistic despair. Indeed, meaningful change was largely regarded as impossible under the original postmodernism, due to the inherent meaninglessness of everything and the culturally relative nature of morality. Nevertheless, throughout postmodern Theory runs the overtly left-wing idea that oppressive power structures constrain humanity and are to be deplored. This results in an ethical imperative to deconstruct, challenge, problematize (find and exaggerate the problems within), and resist all ways of thinking that support oppressive structures of power, the categories relevant to power structures, and the language that perpetuates them—thus embedding a value system into what might have been a moderately useful descriptive theory.

This impulse generates a parallel drive to prioritize the narratives, systems, and knowledges of marginalized groups. Foucault is the most explicit about the ever-present danger of oppressive systems: