The Heart of Matter
While postmodernist thinkers have successfully problematized our assumptions about how we know, what we know, and who we are, telling us that language determines them all, humanity has been insistently placing its own existence, as well as that of the rest of life on Earth, in dire jeopardy—poisoning water, land, and air. Postmodernism's deconstruction of the autonomy of the individual and its breakdown of the borders of the subject are consistent with the awareness ecology brings to us that our human actions have effects far beyond our intentions and desires and that our dreams of technological control are fantasy.