THE POSTMODERN CRITIQUE OF IDEOLOGY

Postmodernism is a complex cultural phenomenon which is characterised, among other things, by its distrust of totalising discourses, of reason and of universal truth. It propounds indeterminacy, the primacy of difference and the incommensurability between discourses, which are supposed to have their own regimes of truth. This is why postmodernism is suspicious about the critical concept of ideology, because according to its tenets it is impossible to pass judgement on a discourse from the perspective of another discourse. Hence the critical concept of ideology must be abandoned. However, an examination of Foucault's, Baudrillard's and Lyotard's work shows that they unwittingly end up re-introducing the concept through the back door thus contradicting themselves. While they doubt the validity of total discourses and of their ideological critique, they must assume the validity of their own critique of total discourses.