ABSTRACT
Every age has its special vanity. In the case of ‘postmodernity’ this takes the form of an emphatic relativism (in all spheres of knowledge and value) which posits itself as a radical break with the foundationalist and utopian traditions of the modern intellectual world. I will analyse this relativism in detail as the present work progresses. Suffice it to say that it centres on the general notion that there is no perspective-free analysis of knowledge and value; or, to put it another way, that there is no theoretical framework which is not, in some way, fatally tainted by the particular nature of its socio-cultural origins and by the complexities of signification as such. All that we have are cognitive perspectives whose validity does not outreach the interests and prejudices of those who formulate them. Indeed, the very claim that there is a more general foundation to knowledge should itself be taken to be no more than the expression of a perspective based on white, male, middle-class, western, dominant-class interests. A number of related notions constellate around this central viewpoint – for example, the supposed ‘ex-centricity’ of the self and the primacy of signification in all cognitive contexts. And there are also many associated negative notions – such as the use of the terms ‘metaphysics’, ‘high culture’, and (even) ‘modernist’ itself, as terms of intellectual abuse.
