What is Postmodernism?
Exploring why poststructuralism became the dominant line of thought
My essay, Adorno’s Critique of Spengler, refuted Theodore Adorno’s essay Spengler After the Decline by addressing how Spengler’s predictive power actually works. Adorno argued that Spengler makes overarching claims about history in a categorical fashion, prompting any evidence within that category to be proof of the claim, while any evidence outside of it is disregarded as arbitrary. His philosophy of Negative Dialectics is explicitly designed as a counter to this line of thinking because he believed it was what led to the Holocaust, so Spengler, in his view, is simply following in the tradition that created it.
But Spengler’s ‘concept’ of prime-symbols is more complicated than this, and it is why, after Adorno, the Decline of the West maintained predictive power when it came to future trends like philosophical scepticism. Spengler predicted that historical relativism would grow and consume all causes into one single cause: the genetic. In the 70s onwards, Foucault’s Genealogy almost accomplished this, relativising all notions of objectivity as solely caused by power relations. The fact of his success took decades to prove, but it is there. I then suggested in a Substack note that this should rightfully place Spengler as Foucault’s superior in academia, and Germany’s loss during World War Two was the reason Spengler is today unfairly disregarded.
I would like to use this article to explore what postmodernism actually is. In university history, you can’t escape the implications of Foucault. He emerges in every essay you not only read from someone else but also the ones you end up producing, because your arguments can only ever be supported by scholars from within his tradition. In understanding the genealogy of Foucault’s philosophy better, we can make a much more effective and precise argument for why Spengler is better and should rightfully sit on his throne in a later post, but for this post, it will suffice to explain why he does not.
