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By Root 912 0

tradition in philosophy, especially in one short chapter. It would be equivalent to explaining Dr. Seuss to the uninitiated with one stanza of one work and a paragraph of explanation. Simply stating that The Lorax is about environmental responsibility and then quoting The Lorax once or twice can’t do justice to the work or Dr. Seuss. But summaries are this way; they must convey a great deal of information in a small space. Authors of summaries know they will fail to convey the necessary depth or breadth for a thorough or perhaps even adequate understanding of the material they wish to summarize. The goal is almost merely to not fail too spectacularly. A summary in philosophy is especially difficult. In order to summarize a tradition of thought one must presume a continuous thread of reasoning or shared pool of ideas among a disparate group of thinkers, each with a unique perspective. In what follows I am going to attempt to provide a quick introduction to Postmodernity, and I only hope I don’t fail too egregiously, but if I do at least there’ll be some Dr. Seuss sprinkled throughout.

To put it simply, Postmodernity is a movement, one marked by an “incredulity toward metanarratives.”1 If one understands this phrase, one grasps a major thought that defines the postmodern—the driving force according to which I will define it. So this chapter will focus on explaining what it means to be incredulous toward metanarratives by defining metanarratives and “the modern” and then explaining and motivating incredulity, or disbelief. And although there can be debate about who is postmodern, I will focus on two prominent thinkers with unimpeachable postmodern credentials: Jean-François Lyotard (1924–1998) and Michel Foucault (1926–1984).

So Now I Know Everything Anyone Knows

The subtitle for this section is taken from Dr. Seuss’s On Beyond Zebra! In this book we follow the narrator and his little friend Conrad Cornelius o’Donald o’Dell. Conrad has just mastered the alphabet. He knows each letter; the sound it makes and what it stands for. “The A is for Ape. And the B is for Bear” (Zebra). He knows all the letters this way, and so he claims to know everything anyone else can know. Why is Conrad so confident? Well, if there are only twenty-six letters, and they are rule bound to make certain sounds and stand for certain things, then knowing them all and their rules would mean one knew everything anyone could possibly know about the alphabet. There would be nothing else to know beyond “Z is for Zebra.” The alphabet and its rules, therefore, form a kind of metanarrative, the rules from which all other statements, utterances, or games with letters must follow. If you want to play “I Spy,” the rules of the alphabet dictate what letter you’ll pick. You can’t spy something that begins with “C” and a dog at the same time. All games using the alphabet will follow the alphabet’s metanarrative, even if they have their own rules. But it’s not just the alphabet that is like this; all language is rule bound and so all discourses, all discussions, are merely so many language games. Every statement is a move in a game. And each game has rules about what can be said, and when, and how it will be understood. Consider Conrad’s insight, “So now I know everything anyone knows / From beginning to end. From the start to the close” (Zebra). What we can know, that is, what we can legitimate as knowledge is determined by what we can say, and what we say is determined by the kind of language game we are playing. So the rules of the language game, the rules of our discourses, determine what our world is allowed to look like and consist of. If there is one overarching rule for all the games, it is a metanarrative.

A metanarrative is the set of rules or guidelines for legitimating any utterance or statement. As such it would determine how all the other narratives or stories of our lives could be told. It’s the mark of modernity to maintain that there is a metanarrative, one Truth that governs all other statements. It’s this belief in one Truth that Lyotard wants