Is postmodernism doomed to impotent interpretations of the world around us, never able to change things for the better? Or does the deconstruction of binaries and challenging of grand narratives offer us a fruitful way to think about the age we live in, and where it might take us? Simon Glendinning responds to Mike Cole's article. 

Mike Cole begins and ends his essay on the ongoing significance of Marxism with the evocation of Marx’s own pronouncement on what is needed in our time: not merely an effort to interpret the world, something Marx regarded as the results of philosophy hitherto, but to change it. Postmodernism is regarded by Cole as the contemporary epitome of that old pre-Marxist philosophical failing: not only does it only interpret the world, it is limited to such an ambition “by definition”.

Cole does not elaborate on this claim by providing a definition of postmodernism, but he presents an example in that name in relation to an author who wrote a book about it. Cole refers to “the postmodernism of Jean-François Lyotard who was incredulous of all grand narratives”. For his part Lyotard does attempt to provide a definition of what he calls the distinctively “postmodern” outlook: he interprets it as a condition marked by “incredulity towards metanarratives”. There is nothing in Lyotard that aims or calls to overcome that incredulity by reviving our formerly modern condition.

So perhaps Lyotard was incredulous of all grand narratives himself, as Cole suggests. But Lyotard’s book The Postmodern Condition was not in the business of defending an incredulous turn of mind. He was not trying to make a case for becoming, like him, incredulous, he was claiming that we have already become so, unless we are Marxists. The world has changed – and the kind of discourse that Marxism represents belongs, in a significant part of itself, to the modern world we no longer inhabit.

History is not a matter of one such historical-present followed by another such historical-present ad infinitum.

Lyotard’s primary focus was on something that still goes on our time. His aim was to make sense of our ongoing efforts to attain scientific knowledge on any subject, the kind of work that goes on, especially, in universities. Our understanding of why we go in for that sort of thing is, Lyotard suggests, “altered as societies enter what is known as the postindustrial age and cultures enter what is known as the postmodern age” (PMC: p. 3). We have now (nearly all of us) entered what he called “a postmodern condition”, and the pursuit of scientific knowledge does not remain unaffected by that (putative) fact. Here is Lyotard presenting his “working hypothesis”: