Everyone thinks they're an expert on postmodernism by invoking the common dictum that postmodernism is indefinable. The 'anything goes' nature of pop-postmodernism makes it a regular theme of ironic discussion. 'That's so postmodern' is rarely, if ever, voiced with earnesty.
At some point the fruits of the academic study of postmodernism, whatever their merits, escaped from university departments and Morningside Heights book circles and permeated popular culture. Before too long, the likes of David Horowitz were proclaiming the end of civilization as we know it, because this insidious thing called postmodernism would convince everyone, wrongly, that all knowledge is relative, there is no moral distinction between right and wrong, and all value is contingent. Though postmodernism played perhaps its most prominent role in the culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s, it survives today as a boogeyman of both the anti-academic right and the anti-humanities 'new scientism.'
Curiously the claims made about postmodernism by these very distinct groups are actually very similar. For anti-academic conservatives, the fear is that postmodernism is a tool of left-wing indoctrination, which enables radical, left-wing professors to undermine the stable, 'traditional' values that students learn in the home before being released into university. For proponents of scientism, there's a similar fear that a kind of right-wing postmodernism will destabilize scientific knowledge such that people can equate the scientific validity of, for example, creationism with that of evolution. In both cases, but from very different political motives, postmodernism is the vile stuff that will eat away at the concept of truth until truth, in any meaningful sense, becomes a thing of the past, and chaos reigns.
Well, for everyone who fears the triumph of postmodernism over human reason and all meaningful and practicable categories of truth, I have news for you: truth has been beaten severely and left for dead, but postmodernism didn't do it.
Consider Mitt Romney. In this political ad against President Obama, the Romney campaign shows footage of Obama speaking in 2008, saying 'if we keep talking about the economy, we're going to lose.' This ad is made to make Obama look silly for trying to sweep the major issue--the economy--under the rug, as though candidate Obama thought in 2008 that the economy was no big deal, not worth talking about.
Of course, the full quote from Obama was actually: 'Senator McCain's campaign actually said, and I quote, if we keep talking about the economy, we're going to lose.' The Romney ad took a quote from Obama in which Obama was actually quoting McCain, and chopped off the part of the quote in which Obama attributes it to McCain. The objective, then, was to make it look like Obama, and not McCain, was the one who thought talking about the economy was a losing strategy. Even more despicable, the Romney ad attempts disingenuously to criticize Obama for espousing an idea that it knows was not Obama's idea, but an idea of Obama's Republican opponent that Obama himself was criticizing in that speech.
If that Romney campaign lie is too convoluted to sink in, consider Romney's most recent lies. In this case Romney simply made up his claim that the government investments in failed Solyndra resulted in money being given to Obama friends, family, and campaign contributors. And most recently, Romney mischaracterized an argument in Noam Scheiber's book, claiming that the Obama administration passed health reform knowing that it would slow down economic growth, a blatant lie for which Scheiber himself felt compelled to stand up and tell the world that Romney was just making stuff up.
My purpose in including here these recent examples of total disregard for truth--even total disregard for truth as a category of knowledge--is to show you that this most insidious form of lying and misrepresentation is most certainly not the spawn of left-wing, postmodernist literature professors. I doubt Mitt Romney was ever an acolyte of Derrida or Paul de Man. I doubt his political campaign keeps copies of Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus on its headquarters' bookshelves.
As I see it, it turns out, despite decades of hand-wringing about the perilous effects of postmodernism, both within and beyond the academy, postmodernism has done little more, in effect, than direct our critical attention from time to time to the very assumptions that an unquestioning relationship to truth can result in. In this way postmodernism, ironically, may actually be part of the antidote to rampant disregard for truth, or to truth as simply that which is asserted with theatricality and authority.
What, then, is responsible for the abuse of truth that our politicians and pundits practice on a daily basis? In short, I think it's a combination of two things (for another discussion, both). One, information theory, which is responsible for de-coupling information and meaning, treating information as a mathematical abstraction with no necessary ties to meaning. Two, the rise of technocracy, which has resulted in the naive and uncritical treatment of the quantitative findings of technical experts as truth by and of the fact that they're quantitatively derived by technical experts. In other words, you can always find an economist, a pollster, a climate scientist, etc. who can use scientific and quantitative methods to justify an opposing viewpoint.
With so many experts and so much data and information, it's easy for those with the adequate resources at hand to tell lies and get away with it, and sometimes even to have seen enough charts to believe the lies they're telling. The more we fear the idea of instability that postmodernism represents, the more we empower technocracy to become the new postmodernism.
