Postmodernism’s Progressivism and Censorship
All of these intellectual trends emerged before Postmodernism and existed independently of it. Each contributed something essential to Postmodernism and, over time, began to develop within its context, merging to varying degrees. Still, all approaches, their intersections and points of dialogue, real or imagined, remain viable entirely outside the postmodernist paradigm.
Postmodernist thinkers will object. To them, any non-postmodernist interpretation of these movements has already been preemptively invalidated by Postmodernism. Outside the postmodern framework, these traditions are seen as merely archaeological.
Postmodernism insists that these disciplines and schools have become mere objects within the postmodern subject, which now possesses absolute interpretive control. All such lines of thought are regarded as surpassed, sublated in the Hegelian sense, and thereby stripped of sovereign interpretative rights. They are only permitted to exist within Postmodernism, according to its rules. Taken on their own, they are not simply outdated but toxic when severed from the postmodern context.
Yet all these directions arose around the turn of the twentieth century and represent a systemic turn within Modernity itself. In these currents, Modernity confronts its deepest crisis, its incoherence, and its inevitable end. Importantly, this confrontation occurred before Postmodernism assumed its definitive characteristics. These traditions nourished Postmodernism, shaping its intellectual climate, its language, and its conceptual apparatus. Yet within Modernity, they existed in a different context, policed by the “guardians of orthodoxy” whom Postmodernism originally sought to challenge. Just as Modernity overthrew the premodern under the banner of anti-dogmatism but soon erected its own dogmas, and just as communist regimes seized power by opposing oppression only to establish even greater violence and control, so too has Postmodernism rapidly assumed an exclusivist and tyrannical character.
The paradox is this: Postmodernism elevates relativism to the status of universal value and then defends this “achievement” through the harshest, most absolutist globalist measures. Transgression transforms from possibility to imperative. The pathological becomes normative. Everything preceding this new order is subject to ruthless exclusion.
A close look at the aforementioned traditions reveals that while many frame themselves within Modernity, they also highlight its deficiencies. Others go further, portraying Modernity as an inherently dark, distorted, nihilistic, and erroneous phenomenon.
Read the full essay here:
https://www.multipolarpress.com/p/alternative-postmodernism
