There is a notion - or concern - that the postmodern position - especially the "extreme" position - is rather bleak. By opening the relativistic can-of-worms, it leads to a nihilistic view of the world: nothing matters and anything goes; there is no point in doing anything, nor in doing nothing; causing harm must be accepted as no more or less legitimate than preventing it; robbed of our ontological-epistemological ground, each of us drifts - awash in a great void of uncertainty, reduced to a state of onto-epistemological angst.

Yet I wonder about the "extremity" of this (so-called) "extreme" position... As I also note elsewhere, it seems to be a rather fundamentalist position: claiming that there is no such thing as truth or that all perspectives are equally valid is a rather unequivocal and universal statement.* This leads me to consider three possibilities:

First - as some critics argue - in making such a claim postmodernists contradict themselves and can therefore be dismissed legitimately.

Second, claiming that there is no such thing as truth is self-contradictory only if truth and non-truth are assumed to be exhaustive and mutually exclusive categories. I think this assumption is worthy of serious questioning...

Third, to claim that all perspectives are equally valid means that the postmodern position is also valid - even if it contradicts others... Such contradictions are not necessarily problematic from the postmodern perspective...

Fourth, is to question whether a claim of "no truth" or "equal validity" is, or can be, an "extreme" postmodernist claim. I suggest that it is not. While such claims are interpreted as extreme claims, I wonder if this is because they seem the most disruptive, the most outlandish, the most oppositional. By establishing an extremity in contra-position to modernist norms they are interpreted as The Extreme Postmodern Position.

Yet, surely if one is going to take an "extreme" anti-foundationalist stance one must argue from a position that may, at first, seem to be much more moderate. One must be - perhaps - uncertain, equivocal, even contradictory. One could use language that puzzles and disrupts or stories that lead to comfortable beginnings. Incorporating new ideas, questioning old conclusions, standing only on shifting terrain, one would be continually moving: arguments one day morphing into agreements the next... Rather than the solid claims erected as straw-folk to be dismantled by modernist critique, the extreme postmodern position is a will-of-the-wisp, providing little purchase for mounting opposition...