Jean-François Lyotard defined postmodernism as "incredulity toward metanarratives" — a sentence that is, structurally, a metanarrative about the nature of knowledge. This has been noted. It has been noted so many times, by so many people with such different agendas, that the frequency of the observation has itself become suspicious. When Jordan Peterson, Richard Dawkins, and the editorial board of Creation.com all arrive at the same logical formulation — its absolute truth is that there is no absolute truth — you are either looking at an unusually obvious flaw or at something that has been mistaken for a flaw. The postmodernists have had forty years to notice this problem. They are not stupid. The contradiction is not a bug. It is the mechanism.
Consider what you get if you build a philosophy that cannot be falsified, need not be consistent, and has reserved for itself a position of critical neutrality that its own framework denies is available to anyone. Arguing with someone who subscribes to postmodern thought is like fighting someone who has nothing to lose — you cannot refute a position held by someone who denies having one. This is not a weakness in a framework deployed primarily for institutional combat. It is a superpower. The tenured humanities faculty who wield it did not build a philosophy and then discover to their embarrassment that it was unfalsifiable. They built an unfalsifiable philosophy and then deployed it in an environment where unfalsifiability is the closest thing to an enduring advantage.
The asymmetry has a specific shape, and the shape is legible. Postmodern academics stand back and deconstruct everyone else's discourses as if they occupy an Archimedean point — a god's-eye critical neutrality that their own philosophy categorically denies is possible for anyone. The knowledge claims of Enlightenment science, Western liberalism, and religious tradition are rigorously situated, historicized, and shown to serve the interests of the powerful. The knowledge claims derived from marginalized identity and lived experience are not similarly situated — they are granted the unmediated access to truth that the framework was supposedly designed to deny everyone. The hierarchy has not been dismantled. It has been inverted and the inversion declared liberation.
The defenders have a point, which should be stated honestly before dismantling it. Modernity's confidence in reason and progress did produce catastrophes. The Enlightenment universalism that underwrote colonialism was not a coincidence — it was a load-bearing premise. Postmodernism emerged as a response to civilizational trauma, a philosophical flinch from the discovery that grand narratives about human progress could end in industrialized murder. This is a genuine insight, seriously arrived at. The genealogical method — asking not "is this true?" but "who benefits from this being believed?" — is useful and was underused before Foucault made it available to undergraduates. The problem is not the tool. The problem is the selective application of the tool, combined with the exemption of the tool-user from the tool's own logic.
Scholars cataloguing postmodernism's internal contradictions note that "its anti-theoretical position is essentially a theoretical stand" and that "instruments of reason are freely employed to advance its perspective." These are not devastating criticisms so much as accurate descriptions of how the framework actually operates — not as a coherent epistemology but as a rotating collection of moves available to the practitioner when needed and invisible when inconvenient. Peterson observes that postmodernism leaves its practitioners without an ethic, and that an ethic "has to be at least allowed in through the back door" — and that this contradiction appears to bother no one. He is right about the observation. He is also, predictably, deploying it in service of his own metanarrative, which is that Western civilization and its hierarchies are basically correct and the people attacking them are resentful. The correct diagnosis of a pathology does not sanctify the diagnostician.
This is the part that critics of postmodernism most reliably miss, or elide, because acknowledging it would complicate their own positions. The self-refutation is real. The people pointing to the self-refutation are not, for the most part, doing so in the interests of rigorous epistemology. The Sokal affair demonstrated that postmodern peer review could not distinguish genuine scholarship from deliberate parody — this is damning. It is also true that Sokal and his successors were not primarily interested in improving the peer review process. The exposure was a weapon in a culture war, and it landed, and the culture war continued exactly as before, because that is what culture wars do when you hand them evidence.
The useful question is not whether postmodernism is self-refuting. It is. The useful question is what the persistence of a self-refuting framework, in institutions staffed by intelligent people, tells you about how intellectual frameworks actually function. They are not primarily truth-seeking systems. They are, in Goffman's sense, performances — presentations of self, of affiliation, of which team you are on and which enemies you have licensed yourself to deconstruct. Postmodernism made this explicit and then declined to apply the insight to itself, because applying it to itself would dissolve the institutional authority that depends on the exemption.
A philosophy that tells everyone else there is no view from nowhere, while building its house on the assumption that it has one, is not making a philosophical error. It is making a political move while dressed as philosophy. The correct response is not to defend the view from nowhere. It is to notice who is being told to vacate it, and who keeps the keys.