What is Postmodernism? YMMV
Postmodernism has become a big right-wing talking point in the last few years. In an interview with Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson explains postmodernism as a framework in which the world is primarily understood as categories of people or identity groups struggling with one another for power, sometimes through oppressor-oppressed dynamics (he also calls this postmodernism-marxism, but in my field this would be called conflict theory). He further explains that postmodernism is the belief that there are an infinite number of ways to interpret the world, and there’s no way to evaluate those interpretations as better or worse than one another. Further, Shapiro and Peterson discuss the idea that postmodernism is a failed critique of truth and the worthiness of the pursuit of truth — Peterson says that the belief that “truth” is arbitrary is the foundational belief of postmodernism. The clip ends with a short, ironic soliloquy about the importance of understanding where your area of expertise ends and being willing to listen to people who know more than you about a given topic.
With that in mind, let’s talk about postmodernism.
The best example I can give for postmodernism is the idiom “your mileage may vary” — postmodernism is an active engagement with the idea that human experiences are meaningfully different from one another in ways that are worth knowing about and considering. YMMV says “I know about this, but I can’t know what you’re going to experience.” It doesn’t devalue the knowing, but it opens up the possibility for the unknown.
Postmodernism is a broad intellectual and creative movement that grapples with and critiques modernism and especially the assumptions underlying Enlightenment-era notions about rationality — that it is possible and desirable, for instance, for humans to operate without emotion or to engage in a search for knowledge without bias or emotional influence. Postmodernism frequently criticizes Enlightenment notions about perfect universals, including morality, truth, and objective reality — which folks like Peterson can expand into beliefs that there is no such thing as morality, truth, or reality.
Critics like Shapiro and Peterson see postmodernism as a nonsensical free-for-all in which nobody has any interest in finding a useful, functional, or accurate representation of the world. I often hear that postmodernists are anti-science, because they want to tear down empiricism and devalue the very notion of evidence. As a researcher who works largely within postmodern paradigms, it’s difficult for me to understand the viewpoint of someone who genuinely believes that there are millions of PhDs in the US laboring in dozens of fields who just don’t give a flying fuck about creating work that is accurate or useful. I wonder if he has talked to any of those people, what he thinks they’re doing all day, and why they would bother.
Unfortunately, these are questions a postmodernist would ask. You can’t measure them empirically.
A basic principle of the Enlightenment paradigm of positivism is that all knowledge (anything worth knowing or true) can be collected in ways that are inherently separable from the researcher — i.e. could be learned by anyone of adequate mental capacity and training . Thus, allowing the educated men of Europe to observe, measure, and count phenomena is totally sufficient to collecting all possible knowledge. This contains socially conservative ideological implications, because it means that educating people outside the traditional elite — women, people of color, the poor — would offer no benefit to society. If wealthy white men can know everything, their voices are adequate on every topic. Allowing women, people of color, or the poor to even become literate would be pointless. This framework de-emphasizes the researcher, creating the impression that any researcher going through the same movements would produce the same results.
In contrast, postmodernism says that there are certain things that are true and worth knowing that cannot be adequately learned in this way — and that methods that make such explorations possible should be considered valid. Postmodernist ideas about standpoint, for instance, say that people are experts in their own lives, and empowering people to educate the world about their own communities and experiences will result in better quality knowledge than observation from an outsider. For example, anthropologists who engage in ethnographic research methods within cultures to which they have a personal link are often able to access more information and produce more insightful analysis than relative outsiders. People in insular or marginalized communities may trust a similarly-positioned person more than an outsider — and the inside researcher is more likely to maintain trust and avoid faux pas. Keeping the formal research methods exactly the same, one researcher may be able to learn substantially more than another because of who they are relative to their subjects.
Medical science is generally thought to be in the positivist camp — people who rely on empirical, detached methods to learn about hard truths. Medical studies about human pain are generally reliant on participants verbally explaining their experience of pain to researchers. In empirical terms, pain isn’t “real.” It cannot be measured except through the subjective experiences of those who experience it. Does this mean that pain doesn’t exist, or that it is not fit for scientific study? Of course not. It means we have to rely on subjective data to learn about pain. Postmodernism says that using subjective data is okay, because it’s worthwhile to learn about stuff that can’t necessarily be measured by empirical means.
It also says that even though physicians know a lot more about medicine than most of their patients, there are certain pieces of medical knowledge that only patients have access to — and these pieces of medical knowledge matter. Since the birth of postmodernism, medicine in the US has gone from being very authoritarian in nature, wherein the provider knows everything and shares certain knowledge with the patient, to more collaborative, wherein the provider and patient share information with one another. The provider’s job is to combine their medical knowledge with the patient’s self-knowledge — and including patient self-knowledge in evaluation and treatment is empirically linked to better outcomes for both patients and providers.
Postmodernism questions whether scientific study can ever really be detached or unbiased. Research is resource-intensive. People invest in it for reasons, and their approaches to research contain inherent assumptions about the world — and they have to, because otherwise you’d have to objectively prove the existence of the universe on page one of every study! Thinking about a pain study, why would people invest the resources in studying pain? What assumptions have to be present? Well, we have to assume that people experience pain. There may be an assumption that experiencing pain is non-optimal — studies of pain usually focus on populations that are experiencing unwanted pain, rather than, for instance, BSDM practitioners who are experiencing pain voluntarily. In a medical study, we are likely operating from ideas that it is possible and desirable to reduce pain, either by identifying causes of pain or by evaluating pain reduction methods. And as mentioned earlier, we have to assume that we can collect valid measurements of pain, even though we cannot usually measure pain empirically.
Studying stuff that can’t be measured by empirical means presents some unique challenges. Sometimes subjects tell us stuff that’s really outrageous — by which I mean that it’s far outside our expectations. The postmodern value of honoring different perspectives means that a researcher should consider what could explain a very surprising piece of data rather than immediately dismissing it. Often this can point to a mistaken assumption about the world. For example, I did a study about fat trans people’s experiences of transitioning. When subjects talked about feeling like people invalidated their gender post-transition because of their body size, that fit with my preconceptions about how gender transition interacted with size policing. However, I was surprised by people saying that pre-transition, their assigned genders were also invalidated because of their body size. This did not fit with my assumptions about the world. Standpoint theory suggested that these lived experiences were a valid source of knowledge — that their interpretations of their own social experiences were more likely to be correct than my assumption about the world (even though my assumption was grounded in my understanding of theory).
This kind of mismatch could also point to differences in interpretation. It could be that transgender people are more likely to interpret certain types of interactions as body policing, where cisgender people would interpret the same interactions differently, so this pattern did not appear in studies of cis people that I had read. Depending on the purpose of the research, a researcher might describe this mismatch between cisgender and transgender perceptions in different ways. A positivist framework would be more likely to start from a picture of a universal “normal” human experience based on more-studied populations (cisgender people), and assign a negative value judgment on transgender experiences by describing them as deviant. This could mean noting that trans people tend to misinterpret social situations or experience social paranoia. A postmodern framework would be more likely to understand trans experiences as valid even if they differ from cis experiences, and describe increased vulnerability to body criticism in terms of microaggressions or minority stress.
I’m using language like “could” because this bit is conjecture! There were some pretty clear findings from my research about what kind of experiences trans people have around body fat at different stages of transition and where it can create barriers to care, but what gives rise to those experiences is outside the scope of my study. Even though my research is subjective, I still draw a clear line between things I can back up with evidence and things I can only speculate about.
Does postmodernism mean every perspective is equally correct? Of course not. If you ask 1,000 random Americans how many US presidents there have been, you can learn a lot — you can learn about conventions of US behavior around embarrassment and not-knowing, you can learn how effectively the US education system instills lifelong awareness of political history, you can learn English curse words — but you may or may not learn how many US presidents there have been. Public awareness of the presidency has no effect on the actual number of people who have held the office, and it’s not anti-postmodernist to say so.
As a postmodernist scholar who values individual perspective, I think Jordan Peterson’s description of postmodernism can teach us a lot about political polarization in the academy, the efficacy of pseudo-academic propaganda campaigns on highly educated people, and the low degree to which academic disciplines understand and value one another — but unfortunately (or fortunately, ymmv) it cannot teach very much about postmodernism itself.
