Incredulity towards total narratives

A critical reflection on post-modernism

Image by Jakayla Toney on Unsplash

In his book Metamodernism, Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm offers an intriguing idea: to make progress and move beyond current debates, we need to apply current intellectual approaches back onto themselves. That is, we need to deconstruct the deconstuctionists and apply a critical lens to critical theory. While this might sound like sophistry, or a high school debating technique, it opens up some interesting ideas. In this vein, I want to take a look at the movement known as post-modernism, and especially Jean-Francois Lyotard's pithy summary of it as "incredulity towards meta-narratives."

While post-modernism has inspired many current thinkers, there are few explicit post-modernists today. One of the reasons is the common, and repeated, critique that it is an incoherent position: the attitude that we should disbelieve all meta-narratives is itself a meta-narrative. However, if we follow a post-modern approach and pay attention to the history, or genealogy, of the intellectual and cultural tradition in which post-modernism arose, we can see that there is more to the story.

The historical context

Post-modernism, along with related approaches like Deconstructionism and Critical Theory, was pioneered by a range of European intellectuals who grew up in the first half of the twentieth century. One of the defining features of the political and intellectual culture of that time is that it ended up being dominated by a few meta-narratives that were explicitly totalitarian - they sought to explain and control everything. Nazism, plus various forms of Fascism, and Communism are the archetypal examples.

Importantly, adherents to each of these meta-narratives saw their views as a natural end-point of the Modern, or Enlightenment, intellectual tradition in Western thought. This tradition had sought to clear away old superstitions and establish knowledge, and therefore human societies, on a sound, rational footing. As we all know, the combination and confrontation of these meta-narratives lead to the complete destruction of much of Europe during the Second World War. Given this history, it was natural for intellectuals to reject many of the assumptions that contributed to such horror and destruction.

An important ambiguity

However, if we examine these ideas more carefully, we can see that this context masked a fundamental ambiguity in the concept of a meta-narrative. There are at least two distinct meanings that are worth distinguishing.

Post-modernists, and many others, justifiably reacted to the type of meta-narrative provided by Nazism or Leninist Communism: a totalising narrative that seeks to explain and control all of life. To put it simply, this sort of meta-narrative is a total story that seek to encompass everything.

However, if we consider the meaning of the term ‘meta-narrative’ independently of that cultural context, it denotes an overarching narrative that seeks to explain other, more local, narratives. In other words, it is a big story that seeks to explain things on a macro level but may leave many details or areas of inquiry out.

A couple of examples might make the distinction clearer.

The two famous revolutions of the late 18th century adhered to each these distinct types of meta-narrative. The French Revolution was built on a total story: the revolutionaries sought to completely reconstitute society and the economy - from institutions, to measurements, to all laws and family structures. The American Revolution, on the other hand, offered a big story about the nature of humans (“All Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness……”) but was nevertheless limited in scope. Family structures, many laws, and economics were some of the spheres of society that were left open.

Another example is in the differing practices of religions. Certain schools of Islamic thought, such as the form of Islamism practiced by ISIS or Al-Quaeda, are total stories that seek to explain and regulate the entirety of human life. Others, such as traditional Christianity or Buddhism, are big stories that leave areas of life under-explained or outside direct instruction. There is no canonical Christian or Buddhist economics or legal theory, whereas Islamists have strong commitments in all these areas.¹

Incredulity towards what?

When we take this distinction seriously, we end up with two quite different readings of Lyotard's definition. If we interpret a meta-narrative as a big story, then the common critique of post-modernism still holds. The ‘disbelief of meta-narratives’ is surely itself a big story as it is describes a foundational principle for knowledge and life. However, if we interpret a meta-narrative as a total story, along the lines of the early twentieth century ideologies, then post-modernism is a far more coherent position. Incredulity toward total stories is not itself a total story, as it leaves many things out, even if it is still a big story.

Incredulity towards total stories is not only a coherent position, but it is one I would argue has strong justification. As humans, our knowledge always consists in incomplete pictures or models of the world and so we are never likely to find a theory, or narrative, or story, that can coherently explain everything. In other words, incredulity towards total narratives is a statement of epistemic humility.

In summary, if we tease apart (or deconstruct) one of the core claims of post-modernism we can see there is a deep, but important, ambiguity. The stronger version of the claim, disbelief of big stories, remains hard to hold as it undermines itself. However, a weaker claim, incredulity towards total narratives, is coherent and, as a statement of epistemic humility, is a natural consequence of both the history of ideas and world events.

We should, however, resist the temptation to claim that either one of the different conceptions of meta-narrative is what postmodern thinkers were really on about. My readings suggest that this distinction often isn't clear in their work. Instead, it allows us to cast a critical eye on various post-modern schools of thought so we can distinguish between the lessons worth learning and those where they might have gone too far.

1. This is obviously a simplified account. One complication is that schools of thought within different religions are often totalising while the religious tradition as a whole isn’t.