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So the debate about postmodernity was on again, a long-term as predictable and invigorating as an old episode of “Home to the farm.” It has been going on for more than three decades, since the late eighties.
This time it was right-wing literary and polemicist Johan Lundberg who cast the first stone, but it could have been another of the old warhorses, like Göran Greider, for example, who last week drew his old show on ETC. According to him, postmodernism is a dangerous stream of ideas that paved the way for everything from neoliberalism to class contempt.
I am equally surprised and confused every time the discussion starts. I find it difficult to orient myself, I get dizzy and sleepy, although I know quite well all the names that pass through the air: Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard.
Sometimes, in bouts of low self-esteem, I have thought that I have misunderstood all these philosophers, social critics, and interpreters of late 20th century capitalist society; that I’m just a bit easy to buy. Show me a French poststructuralist and I will yawn in admiration and cheer up happiness!
I want us to abandon the concept of postmodernism, never use it again in public debate.
But deep down, I know my confusion is fully justified. Postmodernism does not exist, at least not in the sense that Johan Lundberg and Göran Greider want it to exist. The only thing that exists is a label affixed to an expanding collection of theorists who have all, more or less successfully, tried to understand their contemporaries and such things as the essence of thought and power. Yes, the phenomenon of postmodernism is so elusive that no one, as far as I know, has managed to create a uniform and satisfactory definition. Is it a literary theory, a philosophy, a method or a diagnosis of a state of society? Say it.
And this is exactly what I think is the real heart of the debate. Postmodernism is an empty concept, it doesn’t mean anything, at least not anymore, and therefore everything. Johan Lundberg, Göran Greider and everyone else can fill it up with a little bit of each. Postmodernism is like a buffet for those who are hungry for conspiracies. That is why people on the right and left can be united in their contempt: they still fight only against their own fantasies.
As a result of all this, I have a simple wish. I want us to abandon the concept of postmodernism, never use it in public debate again, because it creates more confusion than clarity. Only when we have discarded this concept do I think we can go back to the original theories and take them for what they are, attempts to describe the world and society, attempts that are sometimes interesting, but just as often just nonsensical. But the same is true of all forms of intellectual activity. Sometimes it gets good and sometimes it gets bad.
Read more texts by Mattias Hagberg:
READ MORE: Reinfeldt fails as a historian
READ MORE: Review: “She, whose heart was like mine”, by Göran Greider
READ MORE: Mona Sahlin’s Bitter Political Will
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