ABSTRACT
Postmodernism's emphasis on the impossibility of an objective point of view is highly congenial to the ideology of the marketplace, which offers goods to anyone who wants them without regard to judgments about their ultimate value. Goldhammer's essay does not deal with the theme of universalism and difference in terms of racial, ethnic, or sexual identity. "The central difficulty with the new historicist attack upon philosophy", she states, "may be that it is insufficiently historical". The specific charges of postmodernism against the Enlightenment can be grouped under two headings: epistemological and political. According to Lyotard, the two metanarratives that prevailed from the Enlightenment to the late twentieth century were the myth of the progressive liberation of humanity and the myth of the progressive unfolding and unification of knowledge. Gerald Graff begins by denying the revolutionary character of postmodernism in relation to modern literature. Perhaps Graff exaggerates the ease with which cultural iconoclasm is absorbed into capitalist society.
