Parochial Postmodernism

Butler points out that postmodernism’s claims that grand narratives are passe is very culturally specific, even parochial, and cannot be sustained as a sociological claim: “allegiances to large-scale, totalizing religious and naturalist beliefs are currently responsible for so much repression, violence, and war . . . . It is obvious to any reader of the newspapers that men and women are still more or less willing to kill one another in the name of grand narratives,” and academics can get away with pretending otherwise because their “societies are not torn apart by contrary ideologies.”