We come to the end of our journey through postmodernism. What
a long, strange trip it’s been.
We’ve seen its origins in the Structuralism of
the early 20th century, we’ve surveyed a few of the ideas of a few
of its leading proponents, and we’ve seen two of the most prominent objections
raised against it. Postmodernism was contentious from the moment it showed up,
and it remains so today.
If we return to our original question – “what is
postmodernism?” – I think we are now in a position to give a more satisfying
answer then the one we started with. Postmodernism has several meanings.
It means (1) a form of radical egalitarian skepticism
pioneered by Jacques Derrida in the late 60’s, and applied by a generation of
French and American theorists to practically every field of scholarly endeavor.
Derrida viewed language as a constellation of signs whose meaning was
arbitrarily derived from their relation to each other, not from any necessary
connection to the world, and who also saw it as determining (not expressing)
human thought. According to Derrida there is no meaning or purpose inherit in
language, texts, the psyche, or the world itself – meaning resides in language,
which does not express, but creates, all that we think and believe about
reality. Differences in perspective are legitimate and inescapable, for meaning
can never be fully articulated in words, and words always have subtlety and
variety of meaning which escapes the speaker and the listener alike. Instead of
repressing diversity of interpretation (and, indeed, of everything), we should
celebrate it. More broadly, postmodernism is (2) a cultural condition arising
from economic transformations in the industrial world, as described by
Jean-Francois Lyotard. It is characterized by the view of knowledge as a
commodity, by systematic institutional terror (“produce or die”), and by
“incredulity toward metanarratives.” On this view Derrida’s philosophy does not
create, but expresses, far-reaching changes in our cultural life.
Postmodernism (1) was hugely influential in American
scholarship until the mid-90’s. Although there are still plenty of people who
think of themselves as postmodernists, it seems to be recruiting opponents
faster than converts, and in many fields it is definitely passé. This is
partially because many people simply cannot get past its off-putting jargon or
its sweeping claims about the nature of all thought and language, it is partially
because it has been construed (in my opinion wrongly) as opposed to science,
and it is partially because of the bitter ideological struggles of our time,
which are tending to transform politics into a matter, not of mere opinion, but
of identity and moral commitment. Under these circumstances all sides feel the
need for an ideology around which to rally the base, and acknowledge, either
openly or in secret, the need to suppress dissent. Tolerance for substantive
differences in opinion is becoming increasingly unfashionable, and so too is a
philosophy which resists all ideologies, and insists on the value of such
differences. In this climate, postmodernism is subversive in all the wrong
ways. Whether or not postmodernism (2) is actually descriptive of the economic
and social context in which we find ourselves, I suppose you will have to judge
for yourselves.
I’ve resisted the temptation to express my own opinions
about postmodernism so far, on the theory that other people are more than
capable of deciding for themselves what they think of it. Now that we are at
the end, though, perhaps a few comments by way of assessment will not be out of
place.
Postmodernism is in one sense the logical culmination of the
critical project of the Enlightenment. In philosophy, as in anything else, it
is easier to destroy than to create, and in practice the most substantial
victories of the Enlightenment have been destructive. It is easy to show that
existing beliefs and institutions are inconsistent, self-interested, and abysmal
failures when measured by the impossible standard of our ideals. They have to
be in order to be realized in a world full of inconsistent, self-interested
people. For several centuries the Enlightenment has shown just this, both with
respect to its original adversaries (church, monarchy, tradition), and its own
proposed alternatives (political ideology, the state, progress.) The promise of
the Enlightenment has always been, implicitly, that some ideal system or
arrangement could be found, if only we saw into the problems of social life
deeply enough. However, the ideal system has never been found, and, it is
becoming increasingly clear, never will be. So, having destroyed every certainty,
the Enlightenment has, at the end, nothing left to criticize but itself – hence
the paradoxical attack on Reason in the name of reason, on Truth in the name of
truth, and so on. This is not, in my view, an aberration. It was implicit in
the Enlightenment from the beginning.
While all this destruction was going on, however, the
Enlightenment succeeded in making itself the focal point of a new tradition,
the adherents of which all share the same basic outlook – that Reason Discovers
Truth and Makes Mankind Free and Happy. Much blood and ink has been spilled
defining what, exactly, this means in practice, but it is in any case the
orthodoxy of our time, shared by practically all thinking people. Ironically,
this orthodoxy has tended to meet the challenge of postmodernism in the same
way that orthodoxies have always responded to insurgents – by attacking the new
idea as not just wrong, but unnatural, immoral, dangerous, heretical, and, in
short, the end of the world.
That might be right, but I would like to point out that this
is not an argument against evidence. It is an argument against argument – it is
a command, ex cathedra, to stop thinking, lest our thinking turn us along
dangerous paths. Thus, if postmodernism paradoxically uses reason to attack
reason, its critics are often involved in exactly the same contradiction, for they
tell us, in the name of reason, to stop reasoning, lest reason come to an end.
I agree that the game of reason is a dangerous, uncertain business. Once we
start, who knows where we’ll end up? But we’ve been on this path for several
centuries now, and it’s too late to turn back now. We’re either serious about
our principles and willing to go where they take us, or we’re not, and the
Enlightenment has indeed been, as the postmodernists tell us, a sham from the
beginning. In my opinion attacks on postmodernism as intrinsically immoral are
simply not serious.
This is by no means the same thing as saying that we need to
become postmodernists. There are other, better grounds for criticism. For
instance, how, exactly, do we know that language determines what can be
thought? Granted that it’s not an intrinsically absurd idea, how are we
supposed to prove it? What about the slipperiness of meaning? Granted that we
can never say just what we mean, isn’t every act of speech testimony to our
ability to say at least some of it? Who says people can, or even want to, live
without narratives? Indeed it seems to me that narratives are, as Arthur Danto
said, “the metaphysics of everyday life.” A large part of our identity, both as
individuals and as a community, is wrapped up in the story we tell ourselves
about ourselves. It might be true, as Lyotard says, that official institutions
have largely given up on narratives as a mirage – but it is by no means certain
that this is a situation that will, or can, last. Further, though I’m willing
to grant a legitimate role for difference in our social and political lives, I
think that the idea that our differences bring us together, or should be
celebrated for their own sake, is just obviously wrong. Our differences divide
us – what brings us together is what we have in common, what we can recognize
of ourselves in each other. That’s how we form communities. The different will
always be, on some level, the strange, the incomprehensible, the dangerous, the
other. There are some things we don’t choose – they’re simply handed to us at
birth, as part of the human condition. And, however irrational or
unsatisfactory, the need to identify like with like, and to keep the strange
and different at arms length, is almost certainly one of them. In my opinion
this is something that, like the irreducibility of interpretation, we ought to
make our peace with.
There’s a lot more that could be said on this topic, but I
doubt my opinions are as interesting to everyone else as they are to me.
Perhaps we can end where we began – with questions. What do you think about
postmodernism? Do you find it, or parts of it, persuasive? If so, which ones,
and why? If not, why not? Do you believe we can discover objective truths? What
does postmodernism mean to you?
Part of a Series on Postmodernism (XVI of XVII)
