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| people like Robert Venturi and Michael Graves against the modernism of Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe. It has been used to describe the rise of Pop and conceptual art after the heroic decades of the "modernism" of artists from Picasso to the Constructivists to De Stijl to Surrealism - and so really means the exploitation of certain strands of modern art, such as Dada, at the expense of others: if anything, this "post-modernism" means, paradoxically, the triumph of modernism. And it has been tagged to describe the collapse of generally agreed critical distinc-tions between high and popular culture, indeed of "privileging" of any kind, though this is disin-genuous: when you value, prefer, or recommend the "nonprivileging," you are, unhappily, still privileging. In a more general sense, however, postmod-ernism is now applied by social and political  | scholars to a turn, as they see it, away from the valuing of reason, with its dependence on uni-versals, as a moral and political principle and as an adequate means for understanding, and molding, the world and ourselves in the world. It is used to describe the contemporary attack on (universalist) reason, a preference of the parti-cular to the universal, and a resulting valorization - indeed, privileging - of the nonrational, or irra-tional. And this turn, far from being exclusively contemporary, is understood as in fact rooted in supposedly "logocentric" Western ways of thought going back to the Sophists and Pyrrho, the nominalism of Abelard, the skepticism of Hume, the radical epistemological limits set to human reason by Kant, and the further attack on reason and the thesis of the will to power of Nietzsche, supported by the dominance psy-chology of Adler and the irrationalist psycho-  | ||
