Theory

Postmodern theory, Mike Featherstone says, “argues for the abandonment of longstanding ambitions within modernity to develop foundations for knowledge: in effect the abandonment of the quest for unity, generality and synthesis.” Postmodern theory claims to find greater complexity than other modes of theorizing can encompass, and he complains that “master narratives occlude more complex combinations of differences, local diversities and otherness, the voices which were ignored or suppressed in the unified models.” Massive theoretical frameworks are deconstructed, and postmoderns attend to particulars.

The most “excessive” forms of postmodern theory reject “all attempts at generaliation and the construction of unities as misguided and false,” and “challenges the attempt to give form to life as ill-conceived.” But this is an impossible pursuit: “unless we are prepared to jettison the concept of form altogether and sink back into the flux of life, any attempt at theorizing entails the construction of forms and modes of representation.”