The dark side of fire: Postmodern critique and the elusiveness of the ideological

Abstract

As scholars commonly maintain, the coming of modernity raised the stakes regarding the pursuit of objective truth and inaugurated the critique of error, unfounded beliefs, prejudice, and ideological interest. In our times, postmodernism has turned the weapons of critique against modernity itself and promoted the wholesale rejection of reason; in the aftermath, without any appraisal criteria left, ideological ‘opinions’ keep growing in numbers, get decentralized and multifaceted , and are considered as equivalent voices expressing the different experiences of individuals and local groups. But is this inward and self-destructive turn of critique warranted? Unpacking the relevant arguments one finds many contradictions inside postmodernism, derivative of its peculiar antinomial relations to modernity/modernism. A discussion of the various meanings and forms of the notion of ‘meta-narrative’ demonstrates the weaknesses of both the absolutist (modernist) and radical relativist (postmodernist) positions and points the way toward a moderate, critico-pragmatic understanding of the relationships between, on the one hand, knowledge and critique and, on the other, ideology.