Postmodernism is back, though not in the way that architects such as Sam Jacob have been proclaiming. The term postmodernism has reemerged far beyond the confines of academic discussions of architecture, in public debate by the new populist “intellectuals” of YouTube. Take Jordan Peterson, a professor and social media provocateur whose videos railing against political correctness regularly top six million views and attract a large fan base, especially of young teenage men on the right of the political spectrum. If a student of architecture today tries to search out an understanding of postmodernism on the web, they are likely to come across Peterson’s videos on postmodernism and from there its broader use on the so-called “Intellectual Dark Web.” This is likely where a student in my architectural theory class found Stephen Hicks’s disreputable book, Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault, a volume inspired by Peterson. And this book likely led him to think that there was no need to read excerpts of Jacques Derrida or Michel Foucault in order to grasp the architectural discourse of the 1980s, because these figures had apparently been exposed as purveyors of a socially destructive relativism.
There is nothing new to these charges of relativism, of course. They dogged Derrida in particular throughout his career. What is new is the popular role that this old critique of postmodernism now serves on the alt-right—and even within the liberal center of politics. This is the same murky world into which Martin Jay has recently found himself wading as he attempted to parse the strange uses of the phrase “Cultural Marxism” on the alt-right and the conspiracy theories that abound about members of the Frankfurt School infiltrating the United States to sow the seeds of a destructive political correctness in America.
A little history may be in order. The term postmodernism first appeared in philosophy as early as 1917, in literature in 1934, in theology in 1939, in architecture very briefly in 1945, in poetry in 1950, and in history in 1954, though it did not gain widespread use until its fully fledged adoption in architecture and literature in the mid-1970s. In architecture, postmodernism signaled the recuperations of history and a renewed concern for tradition and meaning that was claimed to be absent in modernism. This caricaturing of modernism as functionalist and meaningless helped bind together the revivalism of Leon Krier with the playful irony of Robert Venturi. The term then entered mainstream discourse in philosophy and in social theory in the 1980s, taking on a very different meaning. Postmodernism became a focal point of intellectual debate, especially in the pages of New German Critique, Critical Inquiry, and the New Left Review, between philosophers and cultural critics such as Jürgen Habermas, Peter Bürger, Andreas Huyssen, Fredric Jameson, Jean-Franc̨ois Lyotard, Terry Eagleton, Seyla Benhabib, and Victor Burgin. During the 1980s postmodernism came to be opposed to the term post-structuralism, which, while it also named an appreciation of semiotic play and slippages within language, was more politically serious about the implications of such observations—more Nietzschean, skeptical, and concerned with power. In its distinction from postmodernism, post-structuralism could thus be used by a subsequent generation of avant-gardes from the late 1980s through the 1990s to recoup a modernist style and claim a progressive politics.
Returning to contemporary popular debates, postmodernism has largely devolved into a synonym for post-structuralism or even for “theory.” This began in philosophy departments in the United States, which have largely excluded the continental tradition; postmodernism became a catch-all phrase to name more skeptical continental philosophers, especially Derrida, Foucault, Jacques Lacan, and Gilles Deleuze. The recent recuperation of this emptied-out husk of postmodernism allowed it to maintain the appearance of radicality: “postmodernism” now signifies those who are aligned against neo-nationalist traditionalism in today’s culture wars.
Postmodernism is thus not simply back as a style in architecture—it is also back as a term of popular discourse and political debates, occupying a very different semantic position than before. Architectural educators must now wade through a morass of misinformation that fills the digital semiosphere into which our students were born and parse the real intellectuals of academia from the celebrity “intellectuals” of popular digital media, all to understand the uses and abuses of “postmodernism” that our students might encounter before they even enter our classrooms.