anti-postmodernism for postmodernists?

November 24, 2008 12:30 AM

anti-postmodernism for postmodernists?

Oh thinkers of AskMe, I'm looking for a series of books, papers, arguments against postmodernism.

I'm looking specifically about a rejection of postmodern theory (I apologize for the broad terminology), that looks at thinkers like Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard, Deleuze, Jameson, etc etc, that accurately comprehend their arguments, and then rejects them. That is, if postmodernist thought is broadly characterized by a general rejection of singular, grand narratives and a method of critical thought that involves a disbelief in foundations -- then I'm specifically interested in arguments that go against these characterizations and arguments.

I ask this question because I find my own thought processes aligning more and more with general postmodernist theory -- in specific Foucault and Ranciere -- and I'd like to find any solid or commendable responses against this mode of thought. It seems dangerously tempting to fall into the trap of seeing postmodern theory as a 'more intellectual' and 'proper' way of thinking, versus a general belief in transcendental universals. Help me criticize myself!

posted by suedehead to Religion & Philosophy (28 answers total)

Response by poster: *that should be -- "an adoption of a method of critical thought..."
posted by suedehead at 12:32 AM on November 24, 2008

Alex Callinicos's Against Postmodernism: A Marxist Critique helped snap me out of my postmodern haze after grad school pretty neatly.
posted by scody at 12:39 AM on November 24, 2008

Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen.
posted by phrontist at 12:49 AM on November 24, 2008 [2 favorites]

It seems dangerously tempting to fall into the trap of seeing postmodern theory as a 'more intellectual' and 'proper' way of thinking, versus a general belief in transcendental universals. Help me criticize myself!

I think in some way there you have pegged the essential (I use that word advisedly) paradox at the heart of post-modernism. Derrida is quite clear on the dangers of logocentricism and suggest that we are always sufficiently contaminated by it that falling back into its patterns of thought and speech is almost inevitable. So in some sense post-modenism contains its own crtiques (at least to some extent).

At the risk of a derail, I'm seconding Wittgenstein, though not as a critique of post modernism as he's too early really, but more just as an increasing relevant alternative to the 'mainstream' of post-modern thought, especially the Philosophical Investigations, which Staten links interestingly to Derrida...
posted by Chairboy at 2:21 AM on November 24, 2008

Martin Stone, 'Wittgenstein on Deconstruction' in Alice Cray, Rupert Read (eds) The New Wittgenstein, Routledge, 2000 (ISBN 0-415-17319-1).
posted by tallus at 2:47 AM on November 24, 2008 [1 favorite]

Terry Eagleton offers some succinct and on-target criticisms of postmodernism and poststructuralism in Literary Theory (Ch. 4 and Conclusion) and After Theory.
posted by googly at 2:53 AM on November 24, 2008 [1 favorite]

You may be interested in Satya Mohanty and Paula Moya's "post-positivist realism." I've not read much of it myself, apart from a couple of articles in the Chronicle and Inside Higher Ed, but it sounds like they're trying to do what you're talking about. Or rather, they attempt to incorporate post-(positivist, modernist, structuralist) critiques into a theoretical framework that remains realist at its core.
posted by col_pogo at 4:15 AM on November 24, 2008

Try looking for your target in discourses that depend heavily on foundationalist ideologies, like science and religion.

For an example from the mid 1990s, Alan Sokal is a physicist at NYU who achieved an amount of anti-heroic stardom when he charged that postmodern theorists recklessly borrow terminology from other fields of discourse. A few years later, he published Fashionable Nonsense, which is not so much a critique of postmodernism as it is a commentary of the lack of intellectual rigor Sokal saw in the movement.
posted by hpliferaft at 4:38 AM on November 24, 2008

be careful that when you go 'against' post-modernism you don't only look to eagletonesque marxist critique... or even worse, to fashionable Sokal (as hpliferaft pointed out) anti-poststructuralism (impt difference) that completely reifies science as objective, perfect, etc: throwing out postmodernism's baby with the bathwater.

i suggest what you're struggling here can be remedied more by a turn to anthropology (which i'm always beating in these here forums)... contemporary anthro struggles alot with the tensions in understanding, contemplating and translating the universal/objective vs the local/subjective; try a book like Friction to see what I'm talking about. i think you'll find it very rewarding. anthropology also manages to balance the material/practical considerations of life (ie eagleton) with a profound respect for alternative epistemologies that, in themselves, are all deconstructing what we experience; "post-modernism" is just the West's specific 90s instantiation of that.

you want 'value' probably, and 'happiness', but the way to find that is to explore humanity more in all its complex and beautiful configurations; not, in some eden-esque "life before postmodernism"/road to jerusalem moment - a revelation that everything is one universal transcendent constant across cultures/time/space. i doubt your mind will let you now.

and, as chairboy suggests, derrida always mentioned that even the story of babel, we read in translation. and its about the universality of language.
posted by yonation at 6:38 AM on November 24, 2008 [3 favorites]

also: foucault is not the end-all prophet of deconstructionism (to be honest, he is more a philosopher of history/science than an actual deconstructionist), he just feels that way because most cult studies programs are stuck in the 90s, when most of his work was translated to english and he became faddish. if you follow his path, you will arrive at a place where resistance/creativty/agency doesn't exist, and that people are merely functional. if you see him as eternal and 'objective' then you are falling into the same trap the deconstructionists wrote against.

understand instead that he wrote in a specific time and place; historicize him and his theories just like we historicize others and you'll see that today scholars and activists are working on wonderful and expressive and humane works that still work under the banner of deconstruction.
posted by yonation at 6:43 AM on November 24, 2008

arggg... i didnt mention that many specific works, eh? its too *(@$ early right now. mefimail me if iterested.
posted by yonation at 6:49 AM on November 24, 2008

Try reading Habermas, specifically The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. (If you haven't already done so.) I'm not convinced by his arguments, but he's undeniably intelligent and his understanding of German philosophy is unparalleled.

That said, I'd recommend not thinking of something called "postmodernism" in totalizing terms. "Postmodernism" is an umbrella that includes a wide variety of thinkers who disagree with each other on a number of fundamental levels. For instance, Badiou can be characterized as a postmodernist thinker--yet his thought is very much rooted in grand narratives. (Actually, when people talk about "skepticism towards metanarratives," they're really just lying. What they mean is "skepticism towards one particular progressivist, scientistic, Eurocentric narrative that happened to gain ascendancy in the nineteenth century.")
posted by nasreddin at 7:52 AM on November 24, 2008 [2 favorites]

"How to Deconstruct Almost Anything" by Chip Morningstar

This is the story of one computer professional's explorations in the world of postmodern literary criticism. I'm a working software engineer, not a student nor an academic nor a person with any real background in the humanities. Consequently, I've approached the whole subject with a somewhat different frame of mind than perhaps people in the field are accustomed to. Being a vulgar engineer I'm allowed to break a lot of the rules that people in the humanities usually have to play by, since nobody expects an engineer to be literate. Ha. Anyway, here is my tale.

posted by Class Goat at 8:12 AM on November 24, 2008 [1 favorite]

"How to Deconstruct Almost Anything" by Chip Morningstar

Note that this is precisely the kind of work you shouldn't be reading if your goal is to understand critiques of anti-foundationalism. I read this essay a while back, and it somehow managed to outdo Sokal (whose book is actually surprisingly good) in handwaving, blatant ignorance, and ridiculous posturing. There are certainly substantive criticisms of postmodernism to be made, and people like Habermas and Eagleton have made them--but this just clouds the issue and encourages lazy thinking.

Also, you should resist people who try to claim that Jameson's book is somehow an attack on postmodernism, because those people have obviously never read it. Jameson's project is, broadly, to preserve certain Marxist categories and lines of critique while simultaneously engaging with and taking part in the postmodern intellectual context. David Harvey's Condition of Postmodernity is more critical but also less theoretically-engaged. Both of these books, however, are now well out of date.
posted by nasreddin at 8:30 AM on November 24, 2008 [2 favorites]

Incidentally, if you want to separate pop-culture notions of what deconstruction is (like the Morningstar essay) from what Derrida used it to mean, read the "Letter to a Japanese Friend." It's been enormously helpful for me--it takes some effort to understand at first, but then a lot of the problematic issues surrounding "deconstruction" just sorta fall away.
posted by nasreddin at 8:40 AM on November 24, 2008 [1 favorite]

Literature, Theory, and Common Sense, Antoine Compagnon
posted by citron at 5:57 PM on November 24, 2008

Hermeneutics as Politics by Stanley Rosen.

Much of his criticism is in line with Leo Strauss' criticism of the fact/value distinction. Here's an excerpt from this interview:

"BAI: For me, your position is that we should both warn against some sort of exaggerated ideals of the Enlightenment, such as that by mass education, we can have some sort of Utopia, that kind of ideology, and we should also warn against nihilism or postmodernism.

ROSEN: Yes. I think that nihilism is a consequence of the substitution of science for prudence. Because science is incapable of evaluating anything, including science. People say: "Science is wonderful," but science is incapable of saying "science is wonderful." That’s rhetoric by the scientific standard, and therefore is unreasonable. So, you must not receive the impression that I am one of the reactionary opponents to the Enlightenment. That’s false. I am not that at all. I am a liberal democrat and a man of the people. I understand very, very well that in a way the modern enterprise is nobler than the ancient enterprise because the modern enterprise dares to take the chance of freeing people, and making them comfortable, whereas the Ancients say "No, it’s impossible. We have to pay this penalty. We prefer to have a few cultivated people." So, the modern position is much nobler, it may be impossible, but so what? Isn’t it a principle of the classics that the good is good even if it lasts a short time? So, if we are to destroy ourselves by our attempt to set ourselves free, maybe the period during which we’ve lived free is intrinsically so valuable that it makes up for the shortness. Would you want to live for 5,000 years like the ancient Egyptians, safe from political change but dying of hook-worm at the age of 30, to say nothing of other horrors of daily life? No. Don’t think of me as an enemy of the Enlightenment, please. Think of me as a sane man who therefore sees the dangers and weaknesses of the Enlightenment. There is no necessary connection between being reasonable and being happy. In other words, the illusion is created by a lot of people, including the Straussians, to the effect that the Greeks are all happy, and we moderns are all miserable. That’s nonsense. Plato’s view of human life is not that optimistic. In my book Hermeneutics as Politics, I argued that postmodernism is a kind of logical consequence of Enlightenment. Too much light leads to total darkness. In other words, the Enlightenment leads to the identification of reason with mathematics and physics, which means everything else is irrational, in which case there are no rules and no laws and we can say anything we want to, and that’s what the postmodernists do. Science shows us that reality is matter in motion. Then human life is an illusion, which means that subjectivity is an illusion, consciousness is an illusion, and so on and so forth. Yes, in that sense, it’s very clear that exaggerated Enlightenment ironically leads to chaos. I am not in favor of exaggerated Enlightenment. So that has to be factored into my position. It’s a complicated, nuanced position with respect to the Enlightenment. I neither approve nor disapprove of it one hundred percent. I am much too fussy to approve of anything one hundred percent. There are two exaggerations of the Enlightenment: one, the positivist, scientific exaggeration; two, postmodernism, whose representatives don’t think of themselves as Enlightenment people, but they are. It’s just that the light was so bright that they couldn’t see anything."

It isn't directly related, but you might also find this brief article on Richard Rorty and the Caduveo, interesting.
posted by BigSky at 9:27 PM on November 24, 2008 [2 favorites]

Response by poster: Thanks everybody. I've tried to 'best answer' anything that had something worth checking out. Wittgenstein is interesting, but definitely before postmodernism, so sorry guys. And hpliferaft: Yes, I'm familiar with the Sokal hoax, but don't think that it has any merit as an intellectual argument against postmodern discourse itself. And nasreddin, thanks for your Habermas recommendation.

Yes, I don't want to lump thinkers under labels like 'postmodernist' and 'poststructuralist'; what I mean is not that most thinkers do think in this fashion, but that underneath these umbrella terms, there is often, somewhat usually, a general adherence to these strains of thought.

I guess what I'm looking for, as a sort of reply to nasreddin and yonation, is the rejection of the rejection of foundations and 'truths' that postmodernist and poststructural thought tends to do. There seems to be a sort of 'certainty of uncertainty', or a 'foundational assumption of a lack of foundations' that seems to underlie most of the thinkers that I read. Where's the argument that flips this fundamental assumption and argues that there might as well be absolute truths?

Badiou sounds interesting, and I really haven't read anything of Habermas except a bit of of what he wrote on the public sphere. I'm spotty in areas when it comes to philosophy; I come to continental philosophy and literary theory not from philosophy or comparative lit, but from an entirely different angle (art history/theory), so my angle of approach seems to be skewed towards aesthetics and 'applied' structuralism/poststructuralism.

Any additional texts to read? I know you asked me to mefimail you, yonation, but I'd be delighted if you could share with everybody, too. Thanks, everybody!
posted by suedehead at 10:06 PM on November 24, 2008

Via kaiserin: Doreen Massey's Space, Place and Gender. She's more of a critic of postmodernist thinkers/culture than postmodernist theory, and contests definitions of postmodernism put forth by people such as Harvey and Soja.
posted by the_bone at 11:16 PM on November 24, 2008

(Massey's a geographer, as are Harvey and Soja, but her critiques are applicable to a number of people whose work falls under the umbrella of postmodernism.)
posted by the_bone at 11:24 PM on November 24, 2008

There's also Against Theory, though if I remember correctly its critiques are not limited to postmodernism (it's been a long while since I read it).
posted by speicus at 2:53 AM on November 25, 2008

I guess what I'm looking for, as a sort of reply to nasreddin and yonation, is the rejection of the rejection of foundations and 'truths' that postmodernist and poststructural thought tends to do. There seems to be a sort of 'certainty of uncertainty', or a 'foundational assumption of a lack of foundations' that seems to underlie most of the thinkers that I read. Where's the argument that flips this fundamental assumption and argues that there might as well be absolute truths?

I'm sure there are a lot of sources out there that argue this (try looking through some analytic philosophy journals, for example). However, the foundationalism vs. anti-foundationalism argument is a bit played out at this point, and I'm not sure how many people are still engaging in it. To caricature things a bit: the foundationalists continue on their merry way and think of postmodernists as little more than an annoying little academic gadfly; and the anti-foundationalists keep to their academic cocoons, smugly watching everyone else labor under the false consciousness of foundationalism. Whatever engagement between the two sides that does happen seems a bit tired at this point. If you're really interested in these sorts of exchanges, then the Sokal affair actually isn't a bad place to start, because it captures the tenor of these debates. See, for example, Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science.

IMHO, many of the more interesting criticisms of postmodernism do not argue from a stringently foundationalist point of view, but critique it on other grounds. Eagleton, for example, argues that postmodernism is politically nihilistic. David Harvey and Anthony Giddens argue that we are not in a postmodern age, but simply an extension of modernity: see the aforementioned Condition of Postmodernity, and Giddens' brief The Consequences of Modernity (both a bit old, but interesting nonetheless). For another take on some of these matters, check out Bruno Latour's, We Have Never Been Modern.
posted by googly at 6:27 AM on November 25, 2008

Mod note: few comments removed -- look it's winter here too and I save my crabbiness for snow shovelling, perhaps you can too? thank you
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 8:12 AM on November 25, 2008

I'd suggest "what science offers the humanities: integrating body and culture" by Edward Slingerland. There's a lot of common ground right now between cognitive science, analytic philosophy and various branches of psychology, enough so that cross-disciplinary work is getting to be pretty standard. I suggest Slingerland because his book is a readable slice of some of the results of that interdisciplinary work in cheap paperback form.

His argument: if we have reason to believe what the psychologists tell us about universal grammar, folk psychology, etc., then thought is not entirely linguistic and culture does not have absolute power to shape us from birth. Normally developing human brains are designed to structure information in ways which are typical of humans as a species.

Right, he needs a philosophy of science and can't put naive faith in psychology. As it happens he has quite a lot of common ground with the PoMo on this point; there are a lot of things wrong with objectivism from a cog sci point of view as well. I'd say it's a lightweight treatment of the issues in both analytic and continental philosophy; I'm giving him credit for trying to be simultaneously comprehensible to analytics, continentals, psychologists and normal people.

This may very well not be the book you want, but I think it's a line of argument you might want to be aware of.
posted by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow at 12:10 PM on November 25, 2008 [1 favorite]

Terry Eagleton for sure: The Illusions of Postmodernism is great.
posted by sumo at 3:42 PM on November 25, 2008

Seconding nasreddin's recommendation of Habermas and Badiou for authors who are actually invested in the debate. (Badiou's Manifesto for Philosophy, for instance.) To these I would add Sheldon Wolin in Politics and Vision.

Hannah Arendt's work, especially in Between Past and Future takes up these questions well and critically considers many of the post-structuralist objects as a part of a larger theory of the value of philosophy as such, and Derrida takes up and responds to her arguments in "Truth and Politics" in one of his later essays.... "History of the Lie," I think? It's in Without Alibi. But Arendt, like Heidegger, is pre-post-modern, or at least pre-faddish-postmodern.

Most post-postmodernism doesn't bill itself as such. Giorgio Agamben's work doesn't criticize Derrida's so much as he simply asserts an apparently a-historical logic of sovereignty and exception and then demonstrates its operation.

The latest fad, in political philosophy at least, is deliberative democratic theory, where claims to incommensurable language games are commonly treated as the starting point rather than the endpoint of discussion, and accusations of logocentrism have to be translated or else they fall on deaf ears. A lot of people have been working on the implications of folk epistemology for democratic theory and institutional design, which is a rejection of grand narratives as such but preserves truth-as-correspondance, etc.

The other strand of post-postmodern epistemology that may interest you is feminist epistemology. Taking its heading from Foucault's claim that Enlightenment theories of knowledge had served as a kind of epistemology of ignorance, deliberately covering over non-white and non-male modes of knowing and even a great deal of knowledge itself, producing this structured relation of knower/ignorant by marking most non-white, non-male subjects as themselves ignorant. So epistemologists are parsing standpoint epistemology, knowledge as know-how, rules of evidence, and structural ignorance. Again, not explicitly anti-postmodern, but not really pro-postmodern, either.

People who read Derrida and Deleuze exclusively are caught in a kind of cul-de-sac of scholarship in this way; the very jargonistic and performative work that made them famous is now making them increasingly irrelevant. Like phlogiston theory, I suspect that this movement will simply die out, its most important insights absorbed but attributed elsewhere, rather than receiving a deathblow from some great work or great thinker.
posted by anotherpanacea at 5:28 AM on November 26, 2008 [5 favorites]

I tend to agree that there is unlikely to be a clear moment of rupture between post-modernism and something that follows it, partly because many of its insights have been assimilated. I found Peter Dews' Logics of Disintegration. Post-Structuralist Thought and the Claims of Critical Theory to be useful for precisely the kind of angle you are looking for. Dews is critical, but not hostile, and doesn't seem to fundamentally misunderstand the writers he addresses (Derrida, Lyotard, Foucault, Deleuze). He looks to Adorno and some of the other Frankfurters to develop his critique. Sample:

"absolute difference - which is what Derrida's term 'différance' indicates - is ultimately indistinguishable from absolute identity; différance is no less internally unified, though historically deployed, than Heidegger's Sein or Hegel's Geist. Furthermore, Derrida's abrupt ascent to the stratospheric levels of historico-transcendental and speculative thought has deleterious effects upon his more modest aim of providing a critique of traditional philosophical conceptions of language."

I'm glad you asked this question, because I find myself in a very similar position.
posted by agfa8x at 9:54 PM on November 27, 2008 [2 favorites]

Response by poster: Thanks again, including those who answered. I decided go to back and de-best-answer everybody in the interest of eliminating any editorializing (or differentiating, ha) voice on my part, so that this page could be used as a better resource. I guess I'll start with Eagleton, and then read Habermas, Badiou, etc.

Agfa8x -- thanks for that quote. It nicely sums up certain aspects of Derrida I found questionable -- that is, the nature of Derrida's arguments of differance/trace/arche-writing/parergon/etc themselves act as an identity in of themselves; if Derrida argues that they're not ideas or concepts, then it seems that it's because he argues that they work as the precondition for such things, as a meta-identity or meta-concept of sorts. I suppose this approach is partially because that which was critique became solidified into a discourse, like what Dews says -- a minority critique becoming a (relatively) canonical majority.
posted by suedehead at 11:39 PM on November 29, 2008