|
| |
Keynote Speakers
|
|
|
| |
University of Manchester, U.K.
To speak of moving 'beyond'
postmodernism may suggest that postmodernism itself constitutes an entire,
as it were, condition. How far this is so, however, is one
bone of contention in the general debate. If postmodernism really is
the culture of late capitalism - another debatable proposition - then we
could presumably move beyond it not simply by taking thought or changing our
minds, but by virtue of certain material transformations in capitalism
itself. But it may also be that postmodernism thrives on its
'metaphysical' opposite, as modernism needs to posit a certain realism to
bounce off from. And if this 'metaphysical' or foundational
infrastructure proves less and less vital to the legitimation of the current
system - a big enough 'if', to be sure the answer to which may vary from
place to place and time to time - then it may turn out that postmodern
theory finds itself deprived of a major role and dwindles away. If, on the
other hand, postmodernism was in some sense, always true, then it may be
that it will always remain so.
|
|
|
|
 |
Weizmann Institute, Israel
ftlipkin@weizmann.ac.il
What is beyond postmodernism?
I see it as rejecting
the primitive superstitions of the postmodern gurus and returning to the
real world where we have to live with what we can learn about nature. This
is not so simple because the gurus still have political clout. I am fighting
postmodernism on two fronts. On the physics front I try to understand the
reality of nature, and the gurus say that everything I do is socially
constructed and not reality. On the reading front I am trying to support a
realistic reading program that teaches children to read and am forced to
fight against the gurus who say that reading is natural and children should
not be taught. What is the difference between a guru and a scientist? A guru
already knows all the answers. A scientist searches for the right questions
that can lead from bewilderment to understanding.
The reading wars provide an excellent example of the difference. The
scientist knows that illiterate societies existed for many thousands of
years before written language was introduced and asks "why"? The guru does
not care; he knows the answer that reading is natural. Scientists like Alvin
M. Liberman ask more questions: Why is it easier to perceive speech than to
read? Why is it easier to speak a word than to spell it? Why is speech so
much easier than reading and writing? What must the would-be reader know
that mastery of speech would not have taught him? The guru does not care.
The scientists ask more questions leading to explorations and the discovery
of new knowledge at the frontiers of cognitive psychology, brain research,
psycholinguistics, molecular genetics, etc. etc. The conclusion is
inescapable. Reading and writing are different from speech.
We now move from pure science and new knowledge to the real world, where a
first grade teacher must face a class of as many as forty pupils with very
different backgrounds, abilities and levels of very rapid development. How
can the accumulated scientific knowledge be used to provide the teacher with
the tools needed to teach all the children in the class to read? The process
of Research and Development (R&D) well known in technology is highly
underdeveloped in education. All available knowledge, necessarily
incomplete, is used together with trial and error, intuition and feedback
from experience to develop a system that works. Along the way the essential
ingredients missing in the first attempts are discovered by asking the
questions "why didn't this work?", rather than throwing out the baby with
the bath water. One example of a system that works is the LITAF system for
teaching reading in Israel. "Today we know that matter is not continuous but
consists of atoms and molecules. How did we gain this knowledge? Not by
following a guru named Democritus who told us that matter is made of
atoms......."
--------------
My answer to all these discussions about "objective reality" and "socially
constructed" is that we all know that the sun rises at an expected time
every morning and build our lives around this reality. Nobody expects to be
awakened at 3AM by an unexpected sunrise. Does anyone seriously believe that
this is not reality but is socially constructed?
|
|
|
|
 |
University of Massachusetts, Amherst
daphne.patai@spanport.umass.edu
My
sense of urgency about loosening postmodernism’s grip on the academy is
impelled by two main features of postmodernism that, though general, also
have special reference to feminism and women’s studies, with which I have
had a particular concern.
First: Postmodernist rhetoric promotes a verbal habit of challenging
everything, regardless of the legitimacy of such challenges—since the very
notion of legitimacy is one of the concepts open to challenge. It’s a facile
game that anyone can play, once one learns the basic terms. Would it, for
example, have been acceptable, absent postmodernism, for a colleague on a
search committee to attempt to undermine a good scholar and promote her own
political-activist candidate by asking “Who’s to say what ‘scholarship’
is?” Or, to take another example, isn’t it the trickle-down effect of
postmodernist rhetoric that allowed a colleague on a panel on literary
translation to respond to my criticisms of one translation vis-à-vis
another, with the exclamation “But that’s hierarchical!”? (I replied: “You
bet!”)
In
addition, postmodernist rhetoric—with its submersion of individual into
group identity--encourages an illusory political activism to be claimed for
whatever intellectual activity one is engaged in, as long as it relates to
the Race-Class-Gender axis or some other oppressive “social formation.”
Postmodernism’s reliance on an aggressive vocabulary of subversion,
demystification, transgression, violence, fissures, contestation,,
decentered subjects, fragmentation, and so on, promotes a delusion of
revolutionary upheaval (though in the name of what is notoriously unclear).
It’s hard to see how this contributes to the solution of real political
struggles in the world. But, let me be clear that I am not interested in
berating postmodernism for not being political enough (or political at
all). I think that, for example, Martha Nussbaum’s astute critique of
Judith Butler (in the New Republic, 1999) is marred by her effort to
make the main point at issue Butler’s “hip defeatism” or “quietism.” Such
a criticism presupposes that “we” – the critic and like-minded readers – are
more truly and marvelously political in all the right senses, and from that
lofty height criticize other intellectuals who are less so. In other words,
I wouldn’t like Butler any better if she had added an activist fillip to her
writing. It would still be obfuscatory, pretentious, illogical, often
incoherent and as often banal.
What
postmodernist rhetoric unmistakably does do is subvert (and here the word is
appropriate) what should be a protected intellectual space -- the
university -- in which ideas can be explored and tried out with an
extraordinary measure of freedom and safety. Such an environment—for the
few short years that it is available to young people -- ought to be
cultivated and cherished, rather than turned into an arena for waging ersatz
politics. So, from my own observations of the academic scene, the
vocabulary of postmodernism has led to a fraudulence and emptiness at the
core of our intellectual endeavors, accompanied by posturing and lack of
seriousness. As Thorstein Veblen might have said, vocabulary is the
intellectual’s form of conspicuous consumption..
My
second criticism is aimed at the content of postmodernism. By making its
anti-Western, anti-logocentric, anti-Enlightenment prejudices the
underpinnings of academic life (at least in the humanities and some of the
social sciences), postmodernism underwrites (to use that by-now weary term)
incoherence, lack of logic and consistency, and irresponsibility in whatever
one claims. “Fragmentation,” “complexity,” and endlessly solipsistic
“positioning” become standards of right thinking, as postmodernist
shibboleths themselves are exempted from “interrogation.” Examples of this
abound in contemporary feminism. Free speech? A fraud, so bring on the
campus speech codes. Logic? It’s masculinist. Truth? There’s no such thing
(unless it’s feminist truth). Biology? Mere ideology. Epistemology?
Entirely perspectival.
Many
critics have noted the ensuing state of chaos– evident in the so-called
science wars in the confusion between the context and the content of
justification in science, or in the humanities’ muddled identification of
naming with creating. But I don’t think this confusion results from genuine
misunderstanding. Rather, it serves a basic strategy: It clears the field
for challenging any claim, regardless of the validity of that claim’s
foundations (who dares to be “foundational” after all?). A notorious recent
example is the feminist assertion that sexual dimorphism itself is socially
constructed (Anne Fausto-Sterling). Similarly, lesbian feminists have
become authorities on the “compulsory” nature of heterosexuality (Adrienne
Rich) and on its “performativity” (Butler). This, in turn, has led still
other feminists to the discovery of “the harms of consensual heterosex”
(Robin West). Heterosexual relations are reinterpreted as the “Societal
Stockholm Syndrome” by feminists not just in the academic world where pretty
much anything goes, but in the real world of policy-making: The feminist
psychology professor (Dee Graham) who argued that all women suffer from the
Stockholm Syndrome was hired as a consultant to the Cincinnati police
department. Or, to take another example, sexual harassment regulations
promoted by feminists (Catharine MacKinnon et al.) routinely elide the
difference between words and deeds and make short shrift of the rights of
the accused.
In
women’s studies circles postmodernist fashions have made a variety of sorry
intellectual approaches acceptable and widely used. And this is the case
even among feminist critics of postmodernism, who typically deplore its
alienating, pretentious vocabulary, and its distance from everyday political
struggles, but nonetheless adopt its practices whenever convenient.
Postmodernism’s indiscriminate rejection of significant distinctions, its
obsession with power and taste for dogmatic assertion have enabled feminist
academics to claim that all education is equally biased, equally
ideological, equally political—and thus justify some grossly manipulative
teaching practices as corrective “feminist pedagogy” (for numerous examples,
see the Women’s Studies E-Mail List, with 4,500 subscribers, mostly
academics in North America).
Logic
is dismissed as so much logocentric eurotrash and emotion is cultivated, as
if there were no frightening historical examples of what actually happens
when a whole society acts on its passions. Identity politics is assumed to
tell us most of what we need to know for adjudicating among competing
views. (How can this happen within the context of a postmodernism that has
challenged the very notion of identity? No problem once logic and coherence
are disdained.) Cultural relativism is appealed to when that serves some
immediate purpose, and denied when it doesn’t. “Local knowledges” (some of
which are more like local ignorances) are welcomed in relation to
third-world Others, but rigidly resisted when it comes to disapproved-of
views within Western culture. Distinctions fall by the wayside: Ear
piercing and breast implants are equivalent to clitoridectomy. Double
standards are freely manifest: “Social constructionism” is used to explain
whatever we disapprove of in women, while “essentialism” accounts for all
that we dislike in men. The “authority of experience,” so praised by
feminists in their struggle to have women’s voices be heard (logocentrism
notwithstanding), is subjected to cynical deconstruction when the proclaimed
experience is not one that suits the feminist orthodoxy of the moment.
What
all this translates into in practice is a massive opportunism at the heart
of feminist discourse today—evident in the extraordinary indifference to
logic and consistency, those hobgoblins of small minds. After all,
“fragmentation” and “complexity” sound more knowing, and certainly provide
far more wriggle room. I believe, however, that the bankruptcy of this
opportunistic approach is becoming more and more evident. While orthodox
feminists still call such criticism “backlash,” I think it is an appropriate
and long overdue assessment of and response to feminism’s own incoherencies
and extremism.
Scholars such as Susan Haack, Alan Sokal, Meera Nanda, and John Searle (and
some of those present at this workshop) are, it seems to me, having an
effect. But their work also makes it clear how sad a situation we’re in.
They have to go back to basics, to making arguments about such terms as
facts and beliefs, evidence and truth, knowledge and opinion. We have
churned out a generation and more of young people suspicious of these
concepts and not knowing what to put in their place except perhaps that
sneering attitude that has been called “the Higher Dismissiveness.” This
they do learn. Or that a text can mean anything, and there’s no way to
choose among diverse readings. Or that all knowledge is ideology or
rhetoric, each instance of it as unreliable as any other. To teach such
students today it is necessary first to help them Unlearn Postmodernism.
“True voyage is return” says Ursula LeGuin in her
intriguing novel The Dispossessed. The way Beyond Postmodernism can
only be through--gasp!—a coming home to reason, logic, and a respect for
truth.
|
|
|
|
 |
University of
Manchester
pessex@fs1.ho.man.ac.uk
Truth, the Self and
the Human Agent after Postmodernism
Background
Many years ago, Lionel Trilling noted a tendency among
academics to assent to propositions they did not actually believe. The
state-sponsored scepticism taught by tenured academics to generations of
students over the last thirty or more years under the general heading of
postmodernism (and its post-structuralist tributaries) is an extraordinary
case in point. Millions were instructed to reject foundationalism,
essentialism and realism and regurgitated these instructions in their
examination papers. Postmodern doctrines had innumerable consequences,
most notably: the critique of the notion of objective truth; the
deconstruction of the subject and the identification of the self as
(variously) a theological or bourgeois myth; and the downgrading of the
human agent as merely a node in one or several systems of signification.
Because they are counter-intuitive and their assertion is
often pragmatically self-refuting, these doctrines have also, when
challenged tended to be denied or reinterpreted in such a way as to make the
attention, indeed excitement, they originally attracted seem difficult to
explain.1 To get beyond postmodernism,
therefore, it is necessary to note its fancy footwork, the alternating
assertion and retractions of radically counter-productive positions and
(more interestingly) to exhume those philosophical topics it has
buried under the muddle of its proliferating and repetitive discourses.
The paper will therefore introduce three such topics for discussion: truth;
selfhood; and agency. The greater part of the talk will be devoted to
the idea of truth, with only brief introductions to the other two topics.
Truth2
Truth will be approached through the analysis of the
concept of a fact. A fact is neither entirely intra- nor extra-
linguistic. Factual truth inheres in the identity between the sense of
an assertion and the sense of actual states of affairs to which assertions
refer. This account of truth resurrects the correspondence theory in a
version that does not fall foul of those regressions that led ultimately to
the blind alley of theories, such as Tarski’s Semantic Theory, which all but
empty the notion of truth. It will also show how it may be possible to
reconcile the status of facts as (human) artefacts – they exist only insofar
as they are expressed by humans – with their truth not being internal to
language or a mere matter of coherence between statements. While
linguistic expression is the existence condition of facts, but the
truth conditions of factual assertions are to be found in the
existence of (largely) extra-linguistic states of affairs.
The
Self3
The notion of the enduring,
self-conscious subject has been attacked by thinkers who emphasise various
forms of the unconscious supposedly lying at the opaque heart of ordinary
consciousness; for example, the historical, social, psycho-analytical and
linguistic unconscious. Leaving aside the fact that the theories
arguing for these supposed modes of unconscious are deeply flawed, the
postmodern critique of the enduring subject overlooks the sense of self that
accompanies each instant of human life and underpins its actual coherence
over time. This existed identity – the incorrigible sense that
‘I am this...’ - marks the difference between humans and all other
living creatures and underlies the object awareness, objective knowledge and
propositional consciousness that is unique to human subjects.
The deconstruction of the human subject denies something that is central to
the difference between humanity and animality, as well as dismissing the
hope of progress through the deliberate activity of human beings.
Agency4
The postmodern emphasis on
the individual as the plaything of systems – derived from a mixture of
influences including post-Saussurean theory - has placed in question
the notion of the human agent as an independent point of departure, an
originator of actions. Paradoxically, even (or especially) when we are
expressing ourselves most consciously and deliberately, as when we say
something we intend to say, we are, according to post-structuralist thought,
most completely in the grip of systems of signification. This belief
is expressed in the notion that we do not speak language; that, on the
contrary, language speaks us. One of the most potent arguments for
this specifically post-structuralist contribution to postmodern
thought is an elementary confusion between the system of language (langue),
which belongs to, is fully known by, and is used by, no-one and the
deliberate use of language on particular occasions by individuals (parole).
This effectively merges token and type. Examination of virtually any
speech act, even one as stereotyped as saying ‘Hello’, shows that it is
influenced by local considerations, and individual decisions, that lie
outside anything that could be conceivably described as a system. It
is rooted in the particularity of the individual.
The individual is a genuine point
of origin or his/her actions through the unique self-consciousness that
makes even automated actions ‘mine’. At the root of this autonomy is
the Existential Identity – ‘That I am this ........’. This
creates a starting point in the material world and so breaks the
stranglehold of physical determinism. The sense that ‘I am
(this..)’ is a fundamental human intuition that lies at the origin of
the progressive divorce between humanity and animality, the progressive
development of human culture in the natural world, and the emergence of the
individual human agent acting in a specifically human world. It drives
the elaboration of a self that constitutes the ‘outside’ from which it is
uniquely possible for humans to use the laws of nature to manipulate the
material world and shape nature itself.
The individual self is also a
point of origin from the psychosocial standpoint, and not merely an inlet of
the collective. The fact that we are nailed to our individuality
through our individual body, its individual world and its individual history
, expropriated through the intuition ‘That I am this....’, means that we
cannot be dissolved into the collective. Psycho-social determinism (of
which the postmodern emphasis on the ‘the system’ is but an example)
overlooks the fact that where I am that which is caused, so-called
external influences cannot be seen as determining or constraining my
actions, as if from outside of me. The ‘am’ that plants the flag of
‘here-now’ in the boundless cultural world and material universe is the
guarantor of my freedom.
Conclusion
The brief treatment of the
concepts of truth, of selfhood and of agency are self evidently inadequate.
They do indicate however, the kind of work that may be done once they
are removed from the clutches of postmodernism.
References
-
Raymond Tallis ‘The Survival of
Theory: “He never said that”’ in Theorrhoea and After (London:
Macmillan, 1999).
-
Preliminary treatments of the
ideas set out here are in Raymond Tallis, ‘Explicitness and Truth (and
Falsehood) and ‘(That) I am this (thing): Reflections on Deixis,
Explicitness, and the Tautology of the Self’ in ‘One the Edge of
Certainty: Philosophical Explanations (London: Macmillan, 1999) and
Raymond Tallis A Conversation with Martin Heidegger (London:
Palgrave, 2002). A much more extensive and rigorous treatment will
be available in The Mystery of Knowledge and Am: the Knot at the
Heart of the Human World, submitted for publication.
-
See Raymond Tallis, references
ibid. A brilliant summary of current philosophical thinking on he
nature of the self and its relation to its world in Quassim Cassan Self
and World (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997). See also Raymond Tallis,
Enemies of Hope: A Critique of Contemporary Pessimism (London:
Macmillan, second edition 1999).
-
These themes are also addressed
in Raymond Tallis , Enemies of Hope and The Mystery of Knowledge
and Am: the Knot at the Heart of the Human World, submitted for
publication. The anti-postmodernist case affirming individuality and
the role of free human agency in shaping human affairs is well summarised
in Mark Lilla New French Thought: Political Philosophy (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1994).
|
|
