Pluralism in Postmodern Perspective

Abstract

Postmodernism once more-that breach has begun to yawn! I return to it by way of pluralism, which itself has become the irritable condition of postmodern discourse, consuming many pages of both critical and uncritical inquiry. Why? Why pluralism This question recalls another that Kant raised two centuries ago-Was heisst Aufkliirung?-meaning, Who are we now? The answer was a signal meditation on historical presence, as Michel Foucault saw.' But to meditate on that topic todayand this is my central claim-is really to inquire Was heisst Postmodernmismus? Pluralism in our time finds (if not founds) itself in the social, aesthetic, and intellectual assumptions of postmodernism-finds its ordeal, its rightness, there. I submit, further, that the critical intentions of diverse American pluralists-M. H. Abrams, Wayne Booth, Kenneth Burke, Matei Calinescu, R. S. Crane, Nelson Goodman, Richard McKeon, Stephen Pepper, not to mention countless other artists and thinkers of our moment-engage that overweening query, What is postmodernism?, engage and even answer it tacitly. In short, like a latter-day M. Jourdain, they have been speaking postmodernism all their lives without knowing it. But what is postmodernism? I can propose no rigorous definition of it, any more than I could define modernism itself. For the term has become a current signal of tendencies in theater, dance, music, art, and architecture; in literature and criticism; in philosophy, psychoanalysis, and historiography; in cybernetic technologies and even in the sciences.