Identity Politics: The explosion of the subjects
One of the strongest critiques to modernity has been on the realm of knowledge and the privilege of science. Michel Foucault, relying heavily on Nietzsche, devoted a broad part of his intellectual work looking at the question of science and knowledge. Although in “The Order of Things” his critique seems to be more on the epistemic grounds of science, there was one question that permeated through all his argument (without being addressed directly at that moment): the question of power. On his later works he addressed that issue directly by developing the, now famous, knowledge/power relation. When he was referring to knowledge in a beautiful conference he delivered in May 21, 1973 in Brazil he said: “we should approach it [knowledge] not like philosophers, but as politicians, we should comprehend which are the relations of power and struggle” (Foucault, p.28). For Foucault the question of science is no longer one of methodology, but one of power. Knowledge is not product of some discovery
of an objective reality that lies in the world, but an invention which responds to power strategies.
Therefore, a postmodern critique of the metanarrative of science would argue that science, like all other types of knowledge, is socially constructed by the struggle between power strategies. The privilege that science possess over all other types of knowledge is considered in this approach a political one, meaning by that there exist a relation of power in the field of knowledge in which science has achieved a legitimation over other fields of knowledge. This lead to a suspicion toward science’s reclaims of truth.
Others of the Post-Modern critiques are:
Identity Politics: The explosion of the subjects
Psychoanalysis: The implosion of the subject