Postmodernism’s Rejection of Metanarratives

        Postmodernist geography was a movement that followed the feminist interpretation of geography being constructed by masculinist forces.  Feminists had pointed out that knowledge was biased toward a male epistemology (Cresswell, 156).  As the colonizing male (especially in the West) was the catalyst of modern development, so was he the progenitor of science, technology, and all the structures that supported society, both physically and socially.  More significantly, masculine models of causation, like those seen in spatial science and Marxism, assumed there were universal laws governing human behavior.  Haraway (Creswell, 158) felt that “forms of knowledge that are recognized as context specific are more reliable than those that pretend to be universal and neutral”.  Many feminist geographers adopted this view, simultaneously dismantling the universal structures that the masculinist models had proposed and suggesting a more complex geography that involved being located in multiple ways.

            Central to postmodernist theory is the rejection of metanarratives, which are schemas we traditionally use to place order on the world (Stanford).  Most of the previous comprehensive views of geography involved metanarratives, including regionalism, quantitative geography, humanistic geography, and Marxism.  Lyotard and other postmodernist geographers rejected metanarratives because they wanted to emphasize local uniqueness, which is truer to an observer than global totality.  Reality and truth were relative because they were based on local representations, offering a unique schema to any location by ignoring the global ones.

            Metanarratives were criticized by postmodern geographers because they assumed a totalizing discourse that revolved around a center of social causation (Sayer, 332).  For example, in Marxism it is assumed that production is the main determinant of social relationships.  In spatial science, various laws like distance minimalization are assumed to control behavior.  For feminists it is the relationship between men and women, while for humanists the center is experience (Cresswell, 177).  Outside of geography, things like religion and politics are the center for those who hold firm beliefs about them.  Metanarratives like these were seen as essentialist, overly rational, and based on a flawed foundation.  They put too many constraints on associations (such as race) that postmodernists saw as mere social constructs.  Their attempts to reveal truth were undermined by the very representations they utilized, for it is inevitable that any language, map, or diagram is culturally biased and therefore transparent.

            Postmodern geographers attempted to shift the focus back on the local and particular, as regional geographers had done prior to the quantitative revolution.  But this time, they took a more theoretical approach due to the ambiguous nature of differences, which can be far broader than they appear.  (For instance, the output of gender is assumed to be either/or but could theoretically have many varieties.)  By focusing on specific localities, the full range of determinants to behavior and social order could fully blossom, based on these spectra of differences.  The result was that particular truths were only possible through deep involvement with local geography (Cresswell, 182).  Only by analyzing the local environment can one gather the truth of a location, not a global one.

Postmodern geographers were successful at showing how the truth is more accurate locally than globally.  Even if a global event triggers local variation, the result will be based on each location’s specific parameters.  It is analogous to weather prediction in that events happening far way can change the local weather seven days from now, but local variation (topography, elevation, latitude) will determine the degree of difference that occurs.  It’s important to remember this contribution to geography because the field has tremendous power to influence decisions that impact local conditions.

Cresswell, T. 2013. Geographic Thought: A Critical Introduction. West Sussex, UK: Wiley-Blackwell.

Sayer, A. 1993. Postmodern Thought in Geography: A Realist View.  Antipode 25:4, pp. 320-344 ISSN 0066 4812

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Sep. 21, 2018. “Jean Francois Lyotard.” Retrieved Nov 15, 20023 (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/lyotard/)