From Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary:
movement- an organized effort to promote or attain an end
consensus- group solidarity in sentiment and belief
imperative (noun)- an imperative judgement or proposition
imperative (adj)- of, relating to, or constituting the grammatical mood that expresses the will to influence the behavior of another
The deconstructionist movement is organized in academia basically to end the oppression it perceives from the Modernist and Humanist era. Its consensus (moral belief) is the moral imperative (moral judgement or proposition that expresses the will to influence the behavior of others) that it is wrong to oppress people (the "end" of the deconstructionist movement is basically to end oppression).
I reiterate:
Postmodernism has sought to deconstruct every social institution, every meta-narrative (every narrative for that matter), every power structure basically because they believe they oppress people.
Yet Postmodernists deny the existence of any moral absolutes whatsoever.
So how can it be "wrong" to oppress people in a Postmodernist view?
I still disagree about viewing the movement as an entity. Entities don't make decisions apart from their contributors. Viewing this on anything but an individual basis is just misleading and confusing because it's not an accurate portrayal of what's actually happening (individual action), but more a description of the labels, groupings, and boundaries that are imposed and projected onto what's actually happening (entities). I imagine that this is exactly what post modern
ists are trying to avoid and correct. With that said, criticizing a movement is useless. Criticizing the actors that make up the movement is productive. So lets analyze the actors.
Is there a contradiction at the individual level? Moral absolutism is a very particular theory. That theory says (at least, the way I've always understood it) that moral qualities are absolute and unchanging. They are properties of the objects, not of the subjects. Since they are independent of subjects, they remain absolute and look the same from any vantage point, whether yours or mine. This is, therefore, a theory about the nature of reality and things.
What does it mean to say we should strive for freedom? Does it mean that freedom is a thing that has certain qualities, good and bad? No, and it's not a problem. Moral relativity doesn't demand intellectual paralysis and a numbness to preference. There is still amusement on an individual level, which is borne out of embracing moral relativity, and it makes sense. By embracing relativity, people can come to see that there are no such divisions as good and bad, that it's all different manifestations of the same essence (call it the Universe), and that people, too, are manifestations of that essence. There's a certain cleverness and beauty to coming to fully realize this (which I have yet to reach in sobriety, heh). It (awakening) is cool. It's amazing. To the individual? To the group? All those distinctions are really useless at that point so there's no use. It's simply an event that makes you wonder. It's not good, it's not bad. No events are good or bad.
Insofar as people are DEMANDING freedom and holding it as an ideal separate from all other states of being, yeah. I'd agree with you. But making progress towards a goal does not mean you see that goal as separate from other goals. This, I think, is what Buddhists talk about when they say "right effort:" how do you shoot for a goal, when your goal is to shoot for nothing?