The central idea of postmodernism is that there is an element of power in the truth.
That is, in what is considered too true in a society at a given time.
It is a thought that can be taken differently:
begins in almost a matter of course and ends in bizarre exaggeration.
In the meaningful space in between, many wise analyzes have been made.
In postmodernism, however, there has been a pull to the exaggeration, to the argument that makes the reader drop his chin.
A conservative intellectual like Johan Lundberg is naturally skeptical of a line of thought that makes tradition, authority, canon suspicious, precisely what is closest to the conservative heart.
Would it just be a disguised language of power?
"When postmodernism came to Sweden" is a war paper.
It should be read with the guard up.
But the criticism Johan Lundberg directs at the postmodern complex is mainly relevant.
The book is also fun
so I definitely recommend it for reading for those who are interested in the financial world of symbolic capital.
The main part of the book is devoted to an examination of how postmodernism was established in the Swedish public.
Johan Lundberg performs this in the form of a close study of the author, critic, academy member Horace Engdahl's career - built precisely on introducing and defending the equilibristism of postmodernism in the Swedish cultural debate.
Lundberg calls it sociology of literature, but the story is about so few people that it rather takes the form of an adventure story about ambitious young men (as well as individual women) and their fates on the cultural pages.
How did it go when all this prestige was won?
So despite his intention to distance
himself from postmodernism's eternal critique of power, Johan Lundberg demonstrates how fruitful such an analysis can be.
He makes a power-critical sawing of the power critique.
The ultimate goal of Lundberg's islet walk is neither Horace Engdahl nor postmodernism, both more or less calculated now.
When the hatchet finally lands on the edge, it is the Swedish school and university bureaucracy that it gets stuck in. "Truths" - in quotation marks - and thus generally changeable.
Precisely where one would have benefited most from a clear and robust insight into the difference between fact and fiction, true and false, knowledge and ignorance, where one floats on the goal in such matters.
That, says Johan Lundberg, is bad.
I agree with.
Sure, it is partly a caricature of postmodernism he fights - it is part of the nature of polemics - but this is still an urgent and vital book.