I never imagined I’d say this, but I miss postmodernism.

I was a foe of postmodernism back when it was still at the centre of intellectual life, and my criticisms of it – for its self-contradictory relativism as well as its political self-undermining – still stand. Yet for all those flaws, I sometimes find myself pining for the days when postmodernism ruled the intellectual roost.

Postmodernism was terrible at achieving political change – in contrast to the Social Justice movement, which did make valuable change around gender (even as it failed around race). But sometimes political change isn’t the most important thing.

In postmodernism’s heyday I took a course on nationalism at Cornell with the late Benedict Anderson, where we read Jacques Derrida’s piece on declarations of independence. What I’ll always remember from that course was the context that Anderson gave to Derrida’s work: growing up in Algeria under Vichy France, the young Derrida was expelled from his high school for having Jewish ancestry. Anderson added, “and this gave him a lifelong antipathy to being” – he paused for emphasis – “classified.”

If you know Derrida’s thought at all, you know a hostility to classification is one of its central motifs – always insisting the world is more complex than that. And these days I keep returning to the biographical point that inspired it all, on how Derrida himself hated being classified. Because boy do I relate.

Derrida and I both bristle at having an identity forced upon us based on our ancestry. I’m no more Indian than I am white, but North American racial discourse has always refused to see that. In postmodernism’s heyday, being classified as “Indian” was a rare and minor annoyance to me. But in the 2010s, the binaries of the Social Justice movement put it front and centre, dividing everything between the white villains who are the agents of history and the “people of colour” who are their passive victims – and, in order to preserve that binary, following the segregationist one-drop rule that slots all mixed people on the coloured side. Derrida would never have stood for that! His postmodernism was all about subtlety, nuance, and above all breaking down binaries – in a way that we could really use today. Race is a dumb category; we need to deconstruct it, whether in its white nationalist or black nationalist expressions, and I miss those who put that deconstruction at the centre of their philosophies.

Foucault, too, rejected a politics based on identity: while public about his gay sexual experimentation, he did not align himself with the gay rights movement because he saw what a recent historical construction was involved in the idea of being gay, of gay identity. More generally, in speaking of power Foucault rejected the binary “model of domination” where power is a structure that one villainous agent (a race, a gender, a class, an individual) exercises over another. Instead – Saba Mahmood’s paraphrase on Politics of Piety page 18 – “power is to be understood as a strategic relation of force that permeates life and is productive of new forms of desires, objects, relations, and discourses.” That more diffuse conception of power is antithetical to standpoint theory’s rigid division between privileged and marginalized, where being marginalized makes you see better. Foucault got that power is complicated.

So, these days, we could really use a strong dose of Foucault’s and Derrida’s rejection of binaries. And that’s not the only thing I miss about postmodernism. Closely related to the rejection of binaries was their emphasis on subversion and transgression.

The 2010s and 2020s left defined itself by enforcing rules, usually in the name of safety – rules against taboo words, rules against speaking controversial ideas… and also, rules around disease prevention. Left-wing spaces prided themselves on their rigid enforcement of rules against COVID transmission; where I live, some of these rules still persist to this day. Contrast all that to Foucault, who very much practised the subversion he preached: he loved the dangerous anonymous sex provided in gay bathhouses… and as a result, came to die of AIDS.

I wouldn’t encourage anyone to follow Foucault’s example. Please try to avoid getting AIDS! Yet while Foucault’s foolhardy approach was one kind of unvirtuous excess, the 2020s have been dominated by excess in the opposite direction: an emphasis at every turn on safety. People in my world insisted on mask-wearing long after vaccines were available to everyone. My town of Somerville, one of the most left-leaning places in the country, was also one of the last to reopen schools – leading to inevitable learning loss. One Massachusetts lesbian bar still generally requires KN95 masks of its patrons even now – and just a couple weeks ago, many of those patrons howled with outrage when the bar decided to make masks optional one night a week. Foucault would have found no common cause with those lesbian patrons. He reminds us that being left-wing doesn’t have to be all about safety. It just happened to turn out that way in this passing decade.

The point is relevant to transgender issues as well. Trans people have often been inspired by the postmodern philosopher Judith Butler, who wrote influential works in the ’90s about crossing gender boundaries. Yet for Butler, part of the excitement of that crossing was the very subversion involved. That’s a different world from the world where DEI offices and HR departments punish employees for using the wrong pronoun. Foucault would have understandably hated those offices, viewing them as one more form of social control.

And on this point, I think young people are starting to come around. The student protesters of 2015, who brought the Social Justice movement mainstream, could reasonably have been described as young fogeys: in sharp contrast to the usual pattern of youth revolt, they wanted more rules, more restrictions. This is understandable when sexual harassment was among the movement’s biggest issues: I recall the protest sign that crossed out the second “boys” in “boys will be boys”, replacing it with “held accountable for their actions”. But that battle seems to me to have been mostly won: tighter constraints on sexual harassment now seem firmly in place, and more frequently enforced. And, perhaps in part in consequence, the undergrads of today are very different from the ones ten years ago.

Among undergrad-age people today there is a notable rise in risky behaviours like tanning beds and possibly even cigarette smoking. As with Foucault’s risky sex, I don’t think these are good things, and would discourage people from engaging in them. But what nevertheless feels potentially heartening to me about these phenomena is how they signify the pendulum swinging back away from the ideal of safety at all costs, which caused its own harms. Young people are starting to act like young people again: chafing against the rules imposed on them by earlier generations, perhaps even the ones just ten years older than them.

Tellingly, the post-COVID generation are also watching Seinfeld – a show that was often described as postmodern in its heyday, with its underlying philosophy of “no hugging, no learning”. Like Derrida, Seinfeld subverted the very idea of having a message. One young writer, Nicholas Harris, specifically used the term “postmodern” in discussing why his generation loves the show: “The eyeroll, the irreverence, the irony, the stasis, the self-reference — all of this made Seinfeld into the great saga of popular postmodernism.” He notes rightly that recent years have been characterized all too much by moralism, by sanctimony: an urge to fit complex reality to match simple ideals, in line with standpoint theory’s binaries. But Seinfeld, like Foucault and Derrida, rejects all such moralizing – and that makes it a breath of fresh air to the new generation that grew up knowing only restrictions and rules.

Postmodernism made everything over-complicated. Standpoint theory – and much more so the movements infused with it – makes everything oversimplified. And in this era, simple moral certainty has caused far more problems than the lack of it. (That goes for the right wing even more than the left: a right less wedded to certainty would have noticed how its leaders so dramatically undercut its own ideals.) In this environment, I welcome the return of Seinfeld. Perhaps Foucault and Derrida won’t be far behind him.