“Postmodernism” by Kevin Hart

I picked this book up more or less on a whim. I’ve read a lot of “postmodern” literature, or literature that pushes the boundaries of literature (think If on a winter’s night a traveler by Italo Calvino or House of Leaves) but I couldn’t really tell you what postmodernism is. This book cleared up some of it, and also left some confusion (which it’s bound to do, it’s postmodernism after all).

Hart tries to give a brief overview of postmodernism and who the major people in postmodernism are. He opens with the reader taking a tour of postmodernism from this French guy. No sooner does the reader leave the tour when he’s set on by another tour guide saying that everything he learned was wrong and offers to give another tour. And so on and so forth. This is a pretty cute way of showing how even the people in the middle of postmodernism argue amongst themselves and cannot agree on a chronology or set of ideas. It’s pretty amusing, and a good way to draw you in. It could have been more formal and flow better with the work as a whole, but I think this worked fine.

As for the more difficult stuff, Hart does a decent job giving the main points of most major scholars. There are times where more clarification and elaboration would have been nice, but the undeniable fact is that you will probably have to read their own works in order to completely understand what is going on. Having said that, I think that Hart did the best with what he had to work with.

In case you’re interested, here’s the basics of postmodernism. According to Hart, it revolves around three central concepts. First there’s anti-essentialism, or the idea that we are all a product of our situation. If you stripped away everything around us, everything inessential, there would be nothing left. Then there’s anti-realism. Realism is the idea that words can accurately depict the world around us. Philosophers eventually realized that there’s no way that this can be true, since there are so many different languages in the world. There’s also a side argument that ties in here about everything in the world is made up of an image of the thing (what we see) and the being-in-itself (to use a Kantian term) of the object (this portion we can never truly know). As a result, language can never fully express the being-in-itself since we can never know it. And finally there’s anti-foundationalism, or the idea that there is nothing at the basis of the world. Think about it similarly to this story about an old lady who thought that the whole world was the back of a turtle. When asked what was beneath the turtle, she said that there was another turtle below that one and “it’s turtles all the way down!” Anti-foundationalism is the belief that there are no turtles, that the universe has nothing at its basis. With these three concepts, postmodernists then apply them to various fields and argue about all sorts of different things.

It’s hard to say whether this book is for beginners or scholars of postmodernism. For beginners it’s probably a good introduction, but scholars will probably get more out of it from previous exposure to the ideas and people in it. It is a short book though, so give it a shot if you’re interested!