Michel Foucault 



I am being driven, by the contents of some of my university classes, to try to take on post-modernism once again. I have little use for it, as I have said in this space before. So I'll share some further thoughts. 

I have no use for post-modernism mainly because it seems very clear to me that it offers no usable tools to its adherents in their struggles against political, economic, and philosophical extremism. What use is post-modernist thinking if it tells us there really is no way to sort out social chaos - when it comes, as periodically it does - except by someone's stepping in and exerting physical power? How do we sort out disputes if all ideas of right and wrong are merely relative to the culture that we are immersed in at the time? 

The answer is, of course, that there is no way but violence. All else, that is all other ideas of right and wrong, reason and madness, justice and injustice, and so on, are irrecoverably biased, the pomo's say, by the various discourses that we are agreeing to participate in by even talking about right and wrong in any given cultural setting. In short, in post-modernism's view, we are always stuck inside a culture, its language always contains some terms that can be used to discuss such a subject, and these are always constructed in such a way that they doom the debate from the start to come to the conclusion that is the accepted view of the power elites of that culture. Go somewhere else and the debate will be framed in different terms and will reach different conclusions, often radically different ones. This is the post-modernist line. 

White men have long defined the terms and set up the debates - the argument goes - so that they and their way of life will prove the most reasonable, even the most sane, against all comers - if we even begin to talk their talk with its Euro-centered and patriarchal styles of "reason" and "sanity".

It seems very clear to me that there are good things that have come out of post-modernism and deconstructionism, like the way it has taught us to see that there can be many "takes on" or "readings of" a given work of art or event in history, etc. I am an older, white, heterosexual male. Sometimes, I have been taught some profound lessons by fine works of literature or film that showed me the world from a female, gay, or non-white perspective. That is a valuable thing. We all need to strive to understand one another and get along. I believe in democratic pluralism, as anyone who has read this blog for any length of time would know. 

But this position is miles from saying that there are no such things at all as "right" and "wrong". Let me repeat: if we accept that premise, then we commit ourselves for all time to a world in which there is no way to resolve disputes except by violence. 

That I won't accept. 

And I don't have to. I have a solid philosophical base on which to defend democratic pluralism. It can easily be browsed through by anyone who goes back over the posts on this page for the last year or so. 

My thoughts today, however, are tending toward dismantling postmodernism for good. How? By showing up the fundamental flaw in its reasoning. 



                                                              Jacques Derrida 


Foucault and Derrida and their followers are very fond of pointing out that all "texts" contain internal assumptions in the terms that they use, the meanings they implicitly give to these terms, and the kinds of evidence for their arguments that they consider valid. Thus, all texts can be deconstructed, their vested interests exposed, and the evil that they perpetuate disarmed. Or so the pomo's say. 

This technique can be a good thing if it is applied fairly, in a limited way, to all writers, filmmakers, and other creators of texts. But that includes the postmodernists and their work as well, or at least in fairness, it should. 

And in the giant picture, postmodernist reasoning is flawed - fatally. 

In the first place, terms like "power", "hegemony", "binaries", and so on - some of the pomo's most frequently employed terms - had meanings long before the ideas of postmodernism were even a gleam in anyone's eye. In other words, and to get to the point in short order, postmodernism, in order to communicate its points at all, must always rely on deeper levels of meaning that readers/viewers are already familiar with. If we were to further deconstruct these deeper terms, we would be beginning a regress that could only terminate by placing electrodes on the exposed neurons of two people's brains and bypassing language altogether as they exchanged thoughts in milliamp-bursts directly. The problem then, however, would be that what my brain actually does at that level is utterly unique to me. To your brain, it would be painful gibberish: milliamps of neuro-noise. 

So we're back to the problems of language, and while it may be interesting and even enlightening to hear another person's take or read on an idea or novel or film, deconstruction does not offer us any way to tell whose take is more just or reasonable if it denies that there are such things as justice and reason or human rights or any other concepts that aren't fatally tainted by our many cultural biases. We're back to nattering sarcasm or ...eventually, history seems to aver ...guns and bombs. 

Bitching with a big vocabulary is still just bitching and it isn't even very hard for the Nazis to silence. Their methods are well known, and I eschew going into them here.

To drive this point about the incoherence of the whole postmodern worldview and method home, let me offer one more insight. 

Consider translation. Derrida and Foucault wrote in French. Most of their adherents around the world must read them in translation. And some translations are better than others. Everyone accepts that. 

But such an opinion is again incoherent unless we assume that there was a meaning all along that the writer was trying to get across and that is caught much more effectively in some translations than it is in some others. 

The underlying reason for the madness that postmodernism and deconstructionism arrive at, a moral landscape on which those with the most fanatic will to power rule and deserve to rule, is due to their fundamentally flawed epistemology. Discourse that is meaningful cannot be a series of thousands of lexical dogs chasing each other in circles and ovals, ellipses and epicycles. 

I may not always get what you mean, but that only means ...MEANS ...that we both are going to have to work harder at our communication, sending and receiving. That I'm willing to do. But consigning the world over to the bullies with a shrug? Not a chance, MF. Not a chance, JD. You go back and start again. I'm confident I can go on.    

In the shadow of the mushroom cloud, nevertheless, have a nice day. 


                                                                      Paul de Man