Bryson, Mary                                                                                  University of British Columbia

mary.bryson@ubc.ca

http://www.educ.ubc.ca/faculty/bryson/pomo/pomo.html

Beyond Postmodernism

Rejections of current trends in Theory usually take two main forms: 1)postmodernism remains complicit with the (capitalist) system it seeks to dismantle; 2) postmodernism legitimizes the "identity politics" of pernicious "political correctness" agendas. While poststructuralism may well represent a description rather than an escape from the logic of late capitalism, the "identity politics" it is said to have enabled seems to me in many ways contrary to the theoretical positions occupied by the three "fathers" of Theory, Derrida, Foucault, and Lacan. Some of those blaming poststructuralist Theory for the dogmatic sectarianism of political correctness advocate a return to liberal-humanist notions of individualism. Paradigmatic of this move "beyond postmodernism" is Graham Good's positive reevaluation of Northrop Frye. In Humanism Betrayed, Good wants to persuade us that the "personal voice" (5) of the individual as a moral agent remains a sort of last stance against the dogmatic claims of "group identities." However, I share the neo-Marxist anxiety that the liberal-humanist individual is a myth which Theory has irrevocably deconstructed. Instead of fighting the excesses of "political correctness" through liberal humanism, I suggest that we reinvestigate the political implications of poststructuralism. In my view, postmodernism constitutes the politicization of poststructuralism. This politicization was to some extent a response to Marxist theorists in particular who had been fond of accusing Derrida, Lacan, and even Foucault of being insufficiently historical and political. Unfortunately, the politicization of poststructuralism has mostly taken the form of an identity politics that is too often dogmatic and sectarian. Instead of pursuing the ethical implications of the radical alterity of the Other or the complex social positioning of the self, those interested in politics found it more convenient to translate the unstable subject of poststructuralism into postmodern calls for the empowerment of marginalized groups. In the case of Derrida it is particularly obvious that his deconstructive strategies target all identity theses and are meant to foreground the masked violence of all inside/outside oppositions. It is perhaps not surprising that Derrida, who grew up in French Algeria as a Jew under the fascist rule of Pýtain, is so adamantly opposed to the very identity politics for which his theories have been appropriated. How did we Theorists allow identity politics to hijack the decentered subject of Derrida, Foucault, and Lacan? Unfortunately, theorists like Good, Eagleton, Norris, and Dews have insistently read the decentered subject as the subject entirely determined by discourse. At the very least, this reading surely overlooks the counter-hegemonic moves foregrounded by Gramsci and Althusser. Isn't the "hailed" subject in a position to refuse the interpellation? I for one do not plan to aspire to the "mature individual" of Good's Frye who "respects authority that fulfills and does not diminish the individual" (95). 

Although my subjective agency is indeed constrained by the discursive systems "speaking me," these systems are not only social constructs which could be changed through social agents but they are too complex and multiple to determine any particular discourse. I do not see why the recognition of being socially constructed and implicated leads either to political resignation or compels the subject to accept a group identity.  In short, I reject the reading of the decentered subject as so determined as to deny individuals moral action and social agency. I would argue that poststructuralism offers a more accurate depiction of today's subject than the mystified liberal-humanist affirmations of the autonomous individual. If we want to move beyond the "identity politics" of postmodernism, we need to take seriously that we are social subjects participating in various overlapping and often contradictory discourses. It seems to me that the "identity thesis" underpinning dogmatic political correctness is most vulnerable to the deconstructive strategies of poststructuralism. It may ultimately be useful to remember Theodor W. Adorno's contention that the discourses that "speak" us are the historically accumulated segmentation of actions by social subjects throughout time.
 

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delany@sfu.ca

On Globalization as a Successor to Postmodernism
 
It is striking to see the apparent eclipse of "postmodernism" as a critical term, and its displacement by the concept of "globalization." No doubt this registers yet another shift of academic fashion, but there is something more substantial behind it, in that globalization and postmodernism are, in important respects, rival ways of looking at the world. In the simplest and most general terms, we could say that globalization is a theory of convergence, postmodernism a theory of divergence. The former theory proposes that we face a world where people are becoming more alike; the latter that, in Roland Robertson's words, we are coming to see "the world as a place of others."
Here are two standard definitions of postmodernism, taken from
Steven Best and Douglas Kellner's The Postmodern Turn:

Postmodernists reject unifying, totalizing, and universal schemes in favor of new emphases on difference, plurality, fragmentation, and complexity.

Postmodernists renounce closed structure, fixed meaning, and rigid order in favor of play, indeterminacy, incompleteness, uncertainty, ambiguity,contingency, and chaos.

If we assume that all these things have to happen somewhere, then
postmodernism becomes a theory of fractured or even crazed space.
Similarly, it is a theory of seriality with regard to time: that is, events
are merely juxtaposed in time without any logic of sequence or motivation - in particular, without forming a coherent narrative.
Now why there should now be a certain reaction against such
theories is a question so large that I won't even begin to offer an answer
to it. I will try only to map out some of the contrasting features of
globalization, considered as a rival to postmodernism. I'll begin with the question of space, which we can take up through Roland Robertson's definition of globalization as, "in very simple, introductory terms . . .the compression of the world into a single place." David Harvey, in The Condition of Postmodernity, introduced the term "time-space compression" for the re-organization of space by modern capitalism and communications. As capital becomes more fluid, Harvey argues, our sense of place becomes increasingly vulnerable: familiar activities may be displaced by globalization, while at the same time all local particularities may be invaded by the anonymous culture of the airport and the shopping mall. Time-space compression can therefore be blamed for the "excessive ephemerality and fragmentation in the political and private as well as in the social sphere." Yet this sense that anything may happen anywhere is
counteracted, Harvey suggests, by the paradox that "the less important the spatial barriers, the greater the sensitivity of capital to the variations of place within space, and the greater the incentive for places to be differentiated in ways attractive to capital."
 

Time-space compression thus includes contradictory tendencies,
towards either the dispersal or the centralization of strategic activities.
If postmodernism assumes a patchwork world of incommensurable cultures, globalization involves "an exacerbation of collisions between
civilizational, societal and communal narratives." I am impressed by Rene Girard's analysis of September 11th, which emphasizes how civilizations may clash because they desire the same thing and are jealous of each other, rather than standing back to cultivate their difference. Collisions occur under globalization because different forces are converging on the same space.

One way of defining these forces is to say that they represent rival identities. But identity is a Janus-faced term, which may mean that which makes us different from others, or that which makes us the same. The paradox can be resolved by asking "which others?": we have an identity through our membership in a group of people like us (our communal others), and through our non-membership in a group of people who are different from us (our negative others who define our boundaries). And the mention of boundaries is a reminder that identities, in order to be asserted or preserved, require a space in which they can be expressed-which may also mean a space to be purified of rival identities.
 

Postmodernism, then, can be thought of as the establishing of many
new territories for identity-building, and the policing of their frontiers
with the territory of others. Globalization, on the other hand, has as one of its great themes the dissolution of traditional frontiers: that is, the weakening of unitary nation-states by movements towards free trade, common currencies, and the mobility of transnational capital. The most strategic element of this international mobility, in Fredric Jameson's definition of globalization, is "the export and import of culture." In earlier epochs, trade was understood as the exchange of one commodity for another across a clearly defined boundary, to the mutual economic benefit of nation-states. Under the regime of globalization, however, culture becomes an instrument of penetration rather than exchange. In one reading of events, the very idea of mutuality between self-determining nations begins to disappear, as
a single hegemonic nation-the United States-imposes its own culture
worldwide.
 

Jameson's central example of this hegemony is the destruction of
almost all national cinema industries by the empire of Hollywood.
Everywhere in the world, people are now watching the same films, and we could say that the most dramatic instance of this idea of the world as a single place would be the innumerable cineplexes where there are global screenings of a uniform cultural product. Jameson also sees the dominance of Hollywood as a case of the "de-differentiation" of the cultural and the economic, a breaking down of categories traditionally thought to be separate. The U.S. movie industry has a material interest in globalization, since more than half of its revenues now come from the international market. But it also is selling images of the American way of life, images that produce Americanized consumers and market demands overseas. When they watch American movies, foreigners are paying for the displacement of their old national cultures, and for their own incorporation into a globalized culture that is largely an extension of the American model.
 

Globalization can be contrasted with postmodernism in terms of its
inside and its outside, its friends and its enemies. There are many
different postmodernisms, to be sure-in architecture, art, philosophy,
science, and so on-but most of the Western intellectuals who elaborated the postmodern model in recent decades did so in order to celebrate it. Positively, they believed that postmodernism had superior explanatory power in defining a contemporary "media society" or "information society." Negatively, they identified themselves as opponents of the modernist "grand narratives" of progress, enlightenment or utopia. At the same time, postmodern intellectuals had a kind of grand narrative of their own, whereby they were building a unitary model of contemporary cultural
analysis. And this construction project was particularly successful in the humanities departments of Western universities, even if in other parts of society there remained strong resistance to the alleged menace of postmodern relativism and identity politics.
In contrast to this alignment of forces, the globalization model
can be seen as modernism's-or modernization's-revenge. Anthony Giddens, for example, has argued that "modernity is inherently globalizing." This has been called the "convergence thesis": that from whatever time one dates the beginning of the globalization process, its effect is the steady reduction of cultural differences (whether it reduces economic differences is a separate question). The thesis assumes a relative decline in the power of nation-states, seen as the principal patrons of cultural difference, at least under the rubric of national identities that are defined through their opposition to other nations.
 

A paradox internal to this opposition deserves attention: the way
that nation-states have been both promoters and enemies of difference. I am referring to the centralizing and homogenizing agendas of so many historical nations. Nations were built on the ideal of creating a single political, economic and cultural space. Germany, for example, was constructed in the course of the nineteenth century out of more than a thousand customs jurisdictions, and a similar number of political sovereignties. The intensification of difference between, say, Germany and France, occurred in parallel with the reduction of difference between, say, Bavaria and Prussia. And of course there were many who saw this German nation-building as not the forging of a new, shared identity, but as the Prussian colonization of its neighbours. Another example would be the reduction of linguistic difference by national policy: in 1789, less than half of the population of France spoke French; now almost all of them do. Nation-states, in short, practiced nationalization within their boundaries in ways essentially similar to the practices of globalization that are commonly criticized today.
 

In spite of this problematic history, those who now oppose
globalization must rely on nationalism as the first line of defense against it. This is another aspect of a return to modernism and corresponding retreat from postmodernism. The anti-globalizers, however, find themselves caught in an uneasy space. Their analysis proposes that a new cultural and economic universalism is the best description of what is going on in the world; yet this dominant tendency is also that which intellectuals are called on to oppose. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's Empire epitomises this stance. As the world moves towards a single form of rule, Hardt and Negri seek to rally resistance to it; yet their concept of empire requires that it be a gigantism of power, present in every cranny of the world-system, and substantially invulnerable.

When postmodernism had its beginnings, somewhere around 1973, its supporters took for granted the defeat of the West by a postcolonial periphery. Empire now seems to restore the center with a vengeance, and to inflict castration-anxiety on every imagined margin. Zygmunt Bauman is among those who understand globalization to be a process of "progressive spatial segregation, separation and exclusion." For the new elites, we may not be seeing the 'end of history' but surely 'the end of geography.' A dematerialized financial system uses telecommunications and data networks to abolish old constraints of time and space-the so-called "death of
distance." Meanwhile, Bauman argues, "globalization for some means
localization for others. . . . the freedom to move . . . fast becomes the
main stratifying factor." The death of distance is in fact a one-sided
phenomenon. Global power and persuasion (by means of mass culture) may be deployed with unprecedented ease, but the mobility of that power has the effect of fixing many people in a condition of spatial deprivation. On the one hand, they cannot communicate at a distance with any ease or cheapness; on the other, global media ensure that "public spaces [are] removed beyond the reaches of localized life."
 

Globalization has placed many intellectuals in the humanities in
the awkward position of saying: "here is a movement that is the key to
understanding the contemporary world; but we dislike it and are casting around for some way to restrain it." Of course, it is nothing new for intellectuals to adopt a posture of disapproval; but opposing globalization in the zeroes is rather different from opposing fascism in the thirties. Then, there was a clear territorial division between the rival camps of fascism, communism and liberal democracy. Now, globalization is so pervasive that its opponents have great difficulty in finding either a psychic or a literal space where they can make their stand against it.

 

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mduke@interchange.ubc.ca

Everyday Resistance to Postmodern Theory
Published in Tamkang Review (Tamkang University, Taiwan)                 Vol. XXX, No. 3 (Spring 2000), pp. 5-48.)
 

ABSTRACT
This introductory paper outlines the main ideas and some of the
arguments of several critical studies assigned in an
interdisciplinary course entitled "Knowledge and Theory in the
Academic Humanities." The ultimate goal of the course, and this
introductory essay, is to facilitate independent thinking and a
skeptical and rational engagement with these highly problematic
theories that have become hegemonic ideologies in many areas of
comparative literature, cultural and transnational studies. Thus the
books and articles chosen offer readings resistant to the theoretical
orientations in question - Freudian and neo-Freudian psychoanalysis,
Marxism and neo-Marxism, Foucauldian discourse analysis history,
Orientalism, poststructuralism, and postmodernism.
Postmodernism, vaguely and contradictorily defined by its advocates,
is here used as an umbrella term for all of these and other
theoretical orientations operating under the illusion that the modern
era is over and a paradigm shift away from science and the values of
the European Enlightenment has occurred in recent history. In every
case, these theoretical orientations are shown to be lacking in
evidentiary support. For that reason, these theories are held in low
esteem by most academics, including scientists, historians,
philosophers, and humanists, and are quite irrelevant to social
activists working for human rights, equal justice, economic
betterment of the poor, and for environmental improvement throughout
the world.

 

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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.
 

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Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, N.Y.C.                                                                             rafrie@yahoo.com

Rethinking Psychological Agency in the Age of Postmodernism

The practice of psychotherapy is at a crossroads. Gone are the fixed concepts and universalist assumptions that informed the work of Freud and his followers. Enlightenment themes such as individuality, rationality, truth and objectivity are being questioned and revised. With the advent of postmodernism, the unity of the individual mind, the notion of an objectively knowable world, and the view of language as the carrier of truth have all been implicitly or explicitly rejected. In place of the ego, the postmodernist speaks of momentary selves to refer to the way in which the self is relationally generated and maintained. In place of objectivity, the postmodernist turns to hermeneutics, perspectivism, or social constructionism. And in place of language as truth bearing, the postmodernist asserts that meaning in language is inherently unstable and that truth is open to multiple interpretations.

The postmodern turn in psychotherapy consists of different voices and outlooks. Yet a central theme is the subordination of the individual subject to larger organizing structures that are outside of our awareness and beyond our control. The subject is seen as embedded in social, linguistic and historical contexts and as having no natural or intrinsic organization. As a result, such notions as freedom and choice, which comprise the activities of personal agency, are altogether dismantled. In contrast to the modernist emphasis on the autonomy of the individual mind, postmodernism asserts that the human subject is not only shaped, but also decentered by the contexts in which it exists. More radical versions of postmodernism deny the very existence of a subject with the capacity for reflexive thought and self-determining action. In place of the person as an active, responsible being, they herald the so-called death of the subject.

Most psychotherapists rightly welcome the postmodern themes of difference and uncertainty as refreshing changes from past adherence to sameness and universality. Postmodernism has demonstrated the degree to which we are all socially and culturally embedded. It has made us aware of the realities of ambivalence and otherness in therapeutic and communicative settings and has freed us from the strictures of a one-person psychology that views the mind in essential isolation from others. Ironically, however, psychotherapists who endorse the basic tenets of postmodernism usually continue to adhere to a modernist version of the experiencing individual. Yet it is precisely this concept of the subject that postmodernism rejects.

I will argue that the dilemma facing postmodernism is not its embrace of difference and otherness, but its denial of the subject. The problem is that the ability to organize experience and pursue a course of action is dependent upon a subject for whom that experience takes place. Once the subject is altogether subverted, the notion of personal agency is also undermined. Yet without a psychological agent who develops, changes and learns, the therapeutic process appears to lose its meaning.

An unqualified embrace of postmodernism thus gives rise to a number of important questions. If there is no subject for whom experience takes place, then who can be said to experience anything at all? How do we explain individual change, innovation, or creativity if the subject is subverted? And how do we account for the determination of meaning or the ability to choose one course of action over another without a concept of personal agency? When postmodernism collapses the subject into intersubjective, relational, and linguistic contexts, when it rejects the person as agent, it undermines the basis of human experience. In the process, postmodernism appears to endorse relativism and skepticism because there is no longer any autonomous ground on which to stand, no one perspective that can reasonably be compared to any other. Given the problems implicit in the rise of postmodernism, a re-evaluation of the nature of human experience is urgently needed. By combining insights from clinical psychology and philosophy I believe it is possible to offer new perspectives on the person as an active, ethical, embodied being. I will offer a critique of postmodern reductionism and argue that when the subject is viewed as a linguistic or social construction, some of the most central aspects of subjective life are overlooked. In contrast to the antisubjectivist attitude of postmodernism, I call for a reconsideration of the human subject. My aim is to formulate a conception of the human being that accounts for our psychological agency and individuality without succumbing to the modernist themes of essentialism, sameness, and universality.

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ggood@interchange.ubc.ca

REFLECTIONS ON POSTMODERNISM

The term "Postmodernism" is in the strictest sense an absurdity. The "modern" is by definition "the latest," the present, the now. Nothing can come after the modern, for that something would simply be part of the modern. "Modern" is derived from the Latin "modo," meaning only, merely, and hence recently, lately: something that has only just happened. So how can anything come after the modern, be "post-modern"? French theorist Jean-Francois Lyotard in his article on "What is Postmodernism?" gets around this by saying that postmodernism precedes modernism: "A work can only become modern if it is first postmodern" (Lyotard 79). The adding of the "post" prefix may have been modelled on the term "Post-Impressionism," which was current in the 1910s and reflected a sense that art had moved on from Impressionism, but no label was yet available to define that new phase (of course that new phase was eventually labelled Modernism). To use "post" is a confession of ignorance: we know what has happened, so we name the undefined present after it. Or perhaps the "post" is simply an
intensifier. "Hypermodernism" might be more accurate. "Hyper" is a prefix of choice at present: "hypermarket, " "hyperspace," or simply "hype" (a prefix with nothing following). "Hyperbole" (especially in French theory) is needed to catch the attention of intellects jaded by incessant "innovation." Completing the compound by adding "ism" is such a well established habit that it actually does need a comment: until around 1800 the only words ending in "ism" were Greek-derived words, often religious in context, like "schism," "baptism," "chrism" ("ointment," from which come "Christ"--the anointed one--and "charisma"). Were people able to think better without adding "ism" to concepts ("humanism") or proper names ("Thatcherism"), a habit now universal?

The term "modern" emerged in the fifth century to distinguish the by now officially Christian present from Rome's pagan past (Habermas 3). The term resurfaces periodically after that. Around 1500, the Scottish poet Dunbar speaks of "hodiern, modern, sempitern," meaning roughly "of today, " "of just recently," and "of eternity." "Hodiern" (from "hodie" --today) might make more sense than "postmodern"--one can easily imagine a program in "Hodiernal studies," i.e. a study of what happened today (and in fact just such a program has recently started at the Brantford campus of Wilfrid Laurier University, offering a degree in "Contemporary Studies"). "Modern" was used in the seventeenth century debate or "quarrel" between the Ancients (classical Greece and Rome) and the Moderns. The issue: had the moderns equalled or surpassed the intellectual and literary achievements of the Ancients? But for us in the early twenty-first century, the Moderns (or Modernists--the generation of Joyce, Proust, Stravinsky, Picasso) have become the new Ancients. And now the pervasive issue is: has Postmodernism surpassed or negated Modernism? These two terms dominate twentieth century literary-theoretical debate as much as Ancient versus Modern did in the seventeenth century. In the year 2000, UBC's English department had two positions in twentieth-century literature, which were advertised simply as appointments in Modernism (1900-1950) and Postmodernism (1950-2000). These hegemonic period labels simply neglect anything that does not fit: the realism of the 1910s, 1930s or 1950s, for example.

But there is another "Modernism" that "Postmodernism" also refers to. For literary critics and theorists, "Modernism" means the experimental art of the early twentieth century. But historians use "modern" and "modernity" ("modernism" is not so frequently used) to cover a much wider span of time and culture. "Modernity" refers to the period from the sixteenth century through the twentieth which saw the emergence of liberal, individualist, capitalist, democratic societies in the West, as opposed to "traditional" societies, where fixed ranks and roles left little room for individualism. For historians, the "early modern" period means the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; for literary critics, it means the early twentieth century. However, literary specialists in the "Renaissance" period are increasingly referring to it as "early modern," in line with the historians. The later part of so-called "Modernity" (the eighteenth century particularly) is also known by the term Enlightenment (from the French siecle des lumieres and the German Aufklarung). The whole trend of modernization is often called "the Enlightenment project." This is what some Postmodernist historians believe ended or went into crisis at some
point in the twentieth century, resulting in a new situation called
"postmodernity." Thus the term Postmodernism refers to two different modernisms: an artistic movement of the early twentieth-century, and a vast socio-intellectual movement spanning five centuries. This discrepancy often escapes notice because both definitions of Postmodernism converge on the same period (our own) and both have a sense of belatedness, of ending, of loss of progressive momentum.

What kind of term is Postmodernism? Does it describe an historical period? A system of beliefs? A cultural or intellectual style? A sensibility? A rhetoric? The leading exponent of the view that Postmodernism is a necessary period concept for the late twentieth century is American Marxist theorist Fredric Jameson. In his view, it is necessary because it is the cultural reflection of late capitalism, i.e. economic globalization. He discusses a number of features of Postmodernism in his classic (if one can use a term so inimical to the Postmodernist outlook) 1984 essay "Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism." I will list some of those features with my own gloss on each.


*the waning of affect (nobody feels much any more; the era of intense emotion is over)

*superficiality (depth models of the psyche or the artwork are
outmoded--what you see is all you get--appearance is reality)

*the decentering of the subject (the unified self is merely an unstable effect of outside influences or of the positions it temporarily occupies)

*the end of distinctive personal style in art (a consequence of the
decentering of the subject)

*the disunified artwork (which now displays the contraditions of the ideologies which formed it rather than the unified self of the artist)

*the replacement of time by space as dominant perceptual category (since we don't believe in any kind of progress any more, time cannot be a vehicle of meaning)

*history becomes a repertoire of aesthetic styles (lacking meaningful sequence, the past is simply a grab-bag of motifs and costumes to be revived in the present)

*disorienting hyperspace (you cannot find the entrance or exit to
postmodern buildings),

*abolition of critical distance (you cannot find a viewpoint outside
cultural hyperspace)

*positive/negative reversibility (there are no stable values so positive and negative attitudes seem random and interchangeable)

*the expansion of "culture" to being an all-inclusive term (everything anyone does is part of "culture"--there are no longer separable spheres like law, politics, art, etc.)

If we look down this list, the overall impression seems to be of postmodern culture as a kind of impersonal aestheticized space into which previously distinct entities with their own internal dynamic or principle of development (the self, the artwork, moral values, historical periods) are dissolved into patterns of relationship where they only have temporary identities as "nodes" or "sites" of transpersonal forces. Positionality and relationality triumph over instrinsic qualities of selves or texts. The "self" is reduced to a "subject position." Autonomous artworks are replaced
by textual networks. Aesthetic style is still important, but not as
individual self-expression, rather as consumer choice.

Jameson's list is not exhaustive. Many of his points are negative, showing how postmodern culture has lost emotion, depth, personality, critical distance and so on. But the list of losses and rejections could be extended. Platonic abstractions like Truth, Beauty, and the Good are swept away. Truth is seen as relative to the perceiver's interests, or as an ideological construct, or as an illusion. Instead of striving for the Good, Postmodernist culture asks if an action "feels right," if we feel "comfortable" with it. We live in a world of idols and "images" with nothing behind them. Popular "perceptions" become more important in politics than the complexities of actuality. Personal appearance and manner outweigh actual skills. Representations take on a life of their own, apart from any reality reference they may once have had. Beauty as an ideal is ridiculed, and instead we get a superficial aestheticization of reality, not just by advertising and fashion, but as a new sensibility, which asks "Does this look right?" instead of "Is this true?" Art as a category is rejected as socially and institutionally hierarchical, relegating non-art to an inferior position: to Postmodernists every cultural "product" is equally aesthetically valuable. The aesthetic is democratized and commercialized. If everything is aesthetic, Art loses its privilege. Progress is a casualty of the Postmodernist outlook as well as Platonic ideals: Grand Narratives are rejected (Lyotard's phrase is "les grands recits"), whether they are the Christian drama of Creation, Fall, Incarnation, Apocalypse, the Whig (liberal) view of history as gradual improvement of human life, or the Marxist story of class struggle and proletarian revolution.

Besides these dismissals of traditional ideas and narratives, we can see the nature of Postmodernism also in the rhetorical terms it prefers. We need a "prosaics" or Postmodernism as well as Linda Hutcheon's Poetics of Postmodernism (1988). The favoured prefixes are: trans, inter, post, de, con, multi, while the paradigm it attacks favours in-: intrinsic, interior, independent, individual (the postmodern self could be called a "dividual" a word actually used by Milton in Areopagitica). In punctuation, the forward slash (which creates a binary structure without specifying a relation between the two terms) and the scare quotes (implying that the word or phrase enclosed by them is not being used in a naive, unproblemataic way), the hyphen (used to defamiliarize a compound like "re-presentation) and parenthesis (bracketing out part of a word, as in "hidden (a)genders") are favored. In vocabulary, Postmodernism talks of the "production" of works of art rather than "creation" because it sounds more radical and Marxist, but also more capitalist and businesslike. The rhetoric contains many "both--and" sentences to express contradictions, ambivalences and counteractions. Jameson writes: "the cultural critic is now so deeply immersed in postmodernist space, so deeply suffused and infected by its new cultural categories, that the luxury of the old-fashioned ideological critique, the indignant moral denunciation of the other, becomes unavailable" (Jameson 86). So we are urged, following Marx himself, "to think this development positively and negatively all at once" (Jameson 86). In general Postmodernist rhetoric often takes on a "progressive" or Marxist coloration despite its rejection of Marxism's "grand narrative" of class struggle leading to Communist revolution. But it also borrows from capitalism's rhetoric of the "cutting edge," the new, and the latest, and even celebrates the appeal of glossy surfaces, images, and packaging. Positive and negative attitudes to consumer society flash on and off like strobe lights. Nothing is excluded except moderation, balance, and distance. Nothing is taboo except liberalism.

Ambivalence is the characteristic posture: postmodernist discourse cannot decide if it is a critique or a celebration of contemporary culture, and then makes "undecidability" a dogma. Postmodernists often scoff at the New Critics of the 1940s and 1950s for their detection of irony and ambiguity in every poems, while they themselves extend the same features to the whole of culture. To adapt Orwell, "Postmodernism does not entail doublethink: it is doublethink." Jameson says that critical distance has gone--nevertheless he attempts it himself, even though his own Marxist anti-capitalism often collapses into admiration. Postmodernism has deprived itself of the critical tools it needs to really analyse current social realities. It actually is part of (complicit with) what it describes, but this complicity is not necessary, as it falsely believes. Capitalism/Marxism becomes a collusive doublet where the attitudes and vocabulary characteristic of each continually change places. Postmodernist discourse colludes with both of these totalizing systems, moving back and forth between pro and anti, made helpless by its presupposition that there is no objectivity, no outside perspective, no independent standpoint from which to assess or evaluate or compare either. There is a frequent gesture towards "late capitalism" without any real evidence of its actual workings. It is an offstage force which can briefly be alluded to as the cause of all the stage events.

Postmodernist discourse acknowledges the absence of commitment, of making a decision, of taking a stand, but explains this absence as inevitable through its doctrine of necessary complicity. Postmodernist discourse actually sees itself as necessarily self-defeating in its attempt to critique a culture it is part of. Even Jameson's Marxism slips into adulation of capitalism's abundant productive powers, as embodied in the Bonaventura Hotel in Los Angeles. One needs to establish critical distance from what one is describing, and this Jameson admits he failed to do in the hotel. Postmodernism maintains that it is never possible: discourse is always already complicit with what it describes. Of course, complete independence is not possible: any critique is partially influenced by its position within the culture. But degrees of independence or detachment are possible.
The liberal ideal of the disinterested observer cannot be dismissed as bourgeois myth. Thought is not an absolute prisoner of its situation. But "inescapability" is a another governing concept in Postmodernist discourse, conveying that one can only articulate a system from within, not critique it from outside. There is no "outside" to the text (Derrida). "The resistance to theory is part of theory" (De Man). The phrase "always already" occurs with monotonous regularity--this from a discourse that disclaims "totalizing."

To me, Postmodernist discourse is an obstacle to thinking clearly about our present situation, even though it successfully identifies many of its features, as we saw in Jameson. It represents a kind of self-entrapment, a self-disabling of thought (what theorists call an aporia--a non-porous barrier, a dead end). In this discourse, thought, embarrassed by the idea of its own sovereignty, humbles itself in front of other forces (instinct, class interest, ideology, will to power), sees itself as subordinate to them, or at least complicit with them. Of course, there is no such thing as completely independent thought; thought is always influenced by the thinker's situation. But neither is there such a thing as completely dependent thought, for such a thing would not be thought at all. Postmodernist discourse is ultimately a revolt against distinction, division, and decision of any kind. We should see it as a symptom of our time rather than a viable analysis of it.

How can critical distance be re-established? Primarily by a work of
comparison of Postmodernism with other periods, other movements of sensibility, which can give us a perspective (no, not the absolutely independent viewpoint outside history of the Postmodernist caricature, but at least a longer view of our epoch). We have to reject or modify the view that our critique is conditioned by what it is critiquing, the view that we are inescapably trapped in the present culture. The most obvious place to begin these comparisons might seem to be with Modernism, and many articles and seminars have already been devoted to the circular problem of defining the relation of Modernism to Postmodernism (the issue is circular because it is created by the terms themselves). But to get beyond this pseudo-problem, we need to look at other terms, other periods, other belief systems, in comparison to Postmodernism, such as the Enlightenment, Romanticism, or Humanism.

Postmodernism is a successor to previous attempts at the dethronement of Reason from the position attributed to it in the Enlightenment. Or, to vary the metaphor, we could call Postmodernism the abdication of Reason. Reason in the classical tradition controls or ought to control Passion; since Freud, Nietzsche and Marx, Reason bows down to Passion (conceived as Instinct, or Power, or Class Interest). Postmodernists hold that the "Enlightenment Project" has failed, or has led to world wars, death camps, bureaucracy and a host of other evils. Reason can be held guilty of all this only if it is seen as mere rationalization or efficient organization. It is indeed ironic that France, until about the mid-twentieth century seen as the homeland of Reason, should now be seen as the centre of Postmodernist Theory, something quite different.

In some ways Postmodernism is a replay of Romanticism's reaction against Enlightenment. Jameson's belief that Postmodernism is the "Spirit of the Age" is itself reminiscent of Hazlitt's influential idea (derived from the German Zeitgeist) that all the cultural phenomena of a period are united by a common spirit, a kind of inescapable atmosphere that all must breathe. Before, the achievements of the Ancients in literature and philosophy formed a permanent yardstick against which to measure the present. Antiquity still provided the template for Modernity. Classical literary forms (epic, tragedy, lyric) were not amalgamated into a "period culture," but were seen as permanently available across time, permanently valid. In contrast, the Romantic notion of culture was not only specific to a period, but bound to language, ethnicity, nation. Each people, like each period, had its own "spirit." And each people had its own destiny, its own journey through time. The Greeks and Romans became specific periods and cultures, no longer universal paradigms. And individual artists each had their own unique "spirit," expressed in a personal style. "Genius" was born. Postmodernism of course rejects as "essentialism" many of the ideas and "narratives" which Romanticism put in the place of classical paradigms, especially ideas of creative selfhood and national identity, but retains and even intensifies the idea of distinct cultural periods.

Just as Romanticism followed the European Enlightenment, Postmodernism reacted against the liberal humanism of the post 1945. This postwar phase was an attempt to reaffirm the Enlightenment project by re-establishing a universalizing humanism (as in the United Nations Organization and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights) after the devastation caused by the racism, nationalism, and ideological fanaticism of the preceding decades. This project is continuing, but many intellectuals influenced by Postmodernism have abandoned or attacked these liberal values and goals. The need to renew these humanist ideals, as I argue in Humanism Betrayed, is one of the main motives for going "Beyond Postmodernism."

REFERENCES

Good, Graham. Humanism Betrayed: Theory, Ideology and Culture in the Contemporary University. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2001.

Habermas, Jurgen. "Modernity versus Postmodernity," New German Critique (1981), 3-14.

Jameson, Fredric. "Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism" New Left Review 146 (1984): 53-92; reprinted in Jameson, Postmodernism (London: Verso, 1991) and in Thomas Docherty, ed., Postmodernism: A Reader (New York:Columbia University Press, 1993).

Lyotard, Jean-Francois. "Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism?" in Docherty, op.cit.
 

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donghui@interchange.ubc.ca

Appropriations of Post-Colonialism in 1990s China

        Five years ago, Terry Eagleton raised the question why postmodernism, which is tied to a Western industrial culture, "is about to be imported into China and other `emergent’ societies?" Now that "post-" theories have become incorporated in cultural and literary criticism in countries such as China and Russia, it is time to examine closely the structuring of such theories in one of these foreign localities. In particular, we must ask: in their appropriation and use in an entirely different context, can postmodern theories retain either the same structure or the same meaning? Chinese forms of postmodernism can be seen as hybrids formed of a complex interaction among Chinese traditional thought, history, the political establishment, economic change, and, above all, the need for intellectuals to update themselves. To examine the assimilation of "post-" theories (houxue) in the Chinese context I concentrate on the links between post-colonial theory and nationalist discourse. I argue that like Chinese modernity before it, Chinese postmodernism is a form of self-positioning or self-packaging in relation to the "West."  Drawing my material from modern Chinese literature, pulp fiction, and literary criticism, I explore the dialectics of subversion and conformity within the post-colonial theory and its impact on the evolution of transformation of nationalisms in China.

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eran.kaplan@utoronto.ca

Post Zionism: Post Modernism, Jewish Nationalism and Jewish Identity in Israel

Post Zionism has become in the 1990s the dominant topic in the Israeli intellectual discourse. Drawing on post-Modern theories, Post Zionists attempt to challenge Zionisms accepted means of representation. They seek to undermine its self-perception as the only and necessary expression of Jewish history and culture, and allow for the development of a discourse that accepts and legitimizes the other. Politically (with regard to the Arab-Israeli conflict) the Post Zionists follow in the tradition of the anti-Zionist, radical Left, and certainly their critique of Israeli militarism could best be classified as such. However, in examining their intellectual methods and some of their cultural and social solutions, it could be argued that the Post Zionists are proposing social and cultural models that represent the more traditional, if not reactionary, elements of Israeli society those that reject Zionism as a product of the Enlightenment and its intellectual and cultural legacy and seek to return to a pre-Zionist (and pre-modern) Jewish way of life. In this paper, I will examine the post-Modern tenets of the Post Zionist critique. I will also explore the Post Zionists views on the question of Jewish identity, which draw on Derridas and Lyotards notion of the wandering Jew, and how these views place them within the Israeli intellectual and cultural arena.

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Klassen, Norman

Trinity Western University
nklassen@twu.ca

Neohumanist Manifesto

Norman Klassen and Jens Zimmermann

In many different ways, whether in secular or religious terms, people have pursued essentially the same goal of affirming what they thought it meant to be fully human. Thus our central argument for Neohumanism is that the history of both secular and religious traditions in the West in their development from modern to postmodern thought can be grasped most fully as the attempt to formulate the dignity of the human in philosophical and theological scholarship and embody it in ecclesiastical and social practices. What we need is a picture of what it means to be human that brings into focus the different primary contemporary concerns and indicates their relatedness and importance for the life of the mind. The recent years of intellectual development have increasingly emphasised the political. This development has not, as one might think, strengthened the self as agent but rather has evacuated the ethical substance which ought to inform political action. Without at least a sense of what it means to be human, politics degenerates into cynical hedging and reaction rather than offering creative, proactive engagement with reality.

Recent philosophical developments have sensed the vacuity of reactionary politics which tend to erect or be co-opted by totalitizing political visions. One obvious example of such totalizing politics has been Hitler's nationalist vision, which succeeded as a reaction to thoughtless reparation policies and occurred with the blessing and support of German intellectuals who espoused Nietzsche's maxim of God's death and the end of metaphysics. We want to encourage a picture of humans as agents in a web of relationships first and foremost; and to encourage confidence that can only come as we simultaneously accept responsibility for our actions. We can act in ways that are better than others and that means we need to talk about ethics.

It was the horrors in which Hitler's vision culminated that gave birth to the desire to put ethics first in philosophy. Unlike more narrowly political intellectual developments in the sixties, this one did not shy away from the language of metaphysics. The Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas suggested that the Bible needed to be rewritten in Greek. He meant that the biblical concepts that established human dignity needed to be articulated in the conceptual language of the Western philosophical tradition. Thinkers like him and Martin Buber, a Jewish theologian, recognized that only if there is an ethical demand prior to political action, a demand which makes the dehumanization of our fellow human beings impossible, can we avoid the conclusion that political and utilitarian considerations outweigh our dignity as human beings. Postmodern philosophers, particularly those in the philosophical movement called deconstruction, recognise the religious impulse behind the ethical imperative. Old Nietzschean affinities, however, offended by such theological grounding of the ethical, result in the attempt to circumvent the religious implications in various ways.

Neohumanism calls for a recognition of the religious as crucial, not incidental. At the very least, we feel that the onus is back on those who show no indication that they have examined their atheistic assumptions and blindly follow caricatures of the Christian traditions perpetrated by its disappointed stepchildren, whose numbers include: an apologist impelled to doubt (Descartes), a philosopher eager to escape the burning lense of Pietist self-examination and emotionalism (Kant), a frustrated son of a Lutheran Pastor (Nietzsche), a theologian capitulating to the scientific worldview of a mechanistic universe (Bultmann). Our problem is with those of their modern-day heirs who use an easily acquired, popularized atheism as an excuse to avoid the challenge posed by the current ethical turn. With its challenges and promises, the bracing contemporary intellectual environment requires a strong commitment to serious thinking in both philosophy and theology rather than reliance on caricatures. Unexamined assumptions about theology too often serve as a crutch for sceptics to ignore roughly half a century of theological scholarship. Neohumanism grows out of the recognition that we require metaphysics in order to embrace the ethical demand and recover its significance for politics and a more comprehensive sense of what it means to be human.

The challenge of dialogue with atheism aside, the time is ripe to reconfigure modern Christian consciousness. We are historically well placed to consolidate many of the crucial (sometimes alarming and often disparate) insights offered by the postmodern critique of modernity's humanisms, all of which are based on an individualistic human self - this is true for the church as well as for secular Enlightenment culture. Theologically, of course we cannot dismiss the diverging traditions in Christian thought, but in the spirit of ecumenism we wish to affirm what unites us, and find our desire to articulate neohumanism crystallising around the twin theological peaks of the Incarnation and the Trinity. In recognition of our situatedness, we acknowledge our Protestantism, but much of our encouragement comes from catholic theology. Much of what we want to affirm theologically has been undertaken recently by a loosely-knit group called Radical Orthodoxy, a group within Anglicanism that has fuller ties with Roman Catholicism and includes many Roman Catholics. We do not so much see our project as different from theirs as recognise that we have a different starting point and in the first instance probably write for a different audience, one posited by our own experience growing up and being trained in Protestant and evangelical churches and institutions.

We write for disaffected Protestants, for "post-evangelicals," for the children of parents they now see as fundamentalists, for people more comfortable with the term "believer" than even "Christian," for people interested in one catholic and apostolic church, for people who sense the reverence and the power of traditional and liturgical practices they know all too little about. We also write for those who share our interest in the human but have no background in or inclination towards the church, for those who question the simplistic atheism they have inherited, for activists willing to take the time to read something dedicated to providing theoretical points of reference, for those who question the orthodoxies of the post-Christian university world, for those looking for ways to achieve unity who see the poverty of global capitalism and "spirituality" alike.

Neohumanism is constituted by the following affirmations:

1. Reason is apophantic rather than apodictic. Apodicticity is utter and complete clarity. We don't get that, ever. What we do get is an unfolding sense of disclosure, a partial and constantly shifting clarity that helps us to understand our situation, but without the confidence that we can make totalising predictions as a result. That's apophansis. We affirm human rationality as part of God's image in us. Reason is our ability to reflect on our existence; reason, however, is not a mere intellectual activity that promises direct and pure access to absolute truth - such is the privilege of God, but we are not God. God himself is not Pure Reason; God is relational through and through. The two key doctrines of Christianity, the Trinity and the Incarnation, illustrate this description: the one celebrating the mystery of relationship in the divine; the other affirming the possibility of relationship in every sphere and between spheres.

 

Reason is primarily the means by which we know that we do not know and the means by which we enjoy our world. It includes our emotions. Reason never stands alone and is not the cool centre of our being apart from our emotions, apart from others or from the past. Rational reflection depends on personal motives and cultural and educational influences. Reason is not a set of ready-made assumptions about or interpretations of reality which
somehow float unchangingly and eternally in the heavens, just waiting to be discovered; instead reason is our reflective ability and our rational interpretations of reality as shaped by the books we read, the people we grow up with, the culture we live in and the language(s) we speak. To think rationally is already to think in dialogue with other human beings and with traditions that are older and greater than ourselves. Reason is not beholden to politics. It is potentially universal, though its apophantic character means that we never have complete clarity as individuals or collectively. Toleration is always required. And humility. They always will be.

2. Reality, for humans, is textual. Neohumanism affirms traditional humanism's interest in texts and seeks to combine it with one of the most important developments in ideas in the twentieth century, the so-called linguistic turn. With traditional humanism, we believe that texts help us develop our ability to think, enable communication with others, and contribute to the ethical life by providing moral instruction and examples (including examples of complexity and moral ambiguity). What is a text? Hundreds of years ago it would have meant a precious manuscript or a book off a newfangled printing press, or perhaps a letter. Now it can mean all of these, or a dvd, or a commercial, or a bodily gesture, or a voice: any human expression that intentionally or unintentionally carries meaning. Just as reason is situated (not the cool, detached centre of our being), so too texts similarly participate in a cultural linguistic context. In this sense, nothing is outside text.

In our current climate, the emphasis on politics encourages the healthy suspicion that texts may serve as vehicles for political power; unfortunately, some have concluded that this is all texts do. Neohumanism, by contrast, takes the view that language is both a vehicle of expression and also determines our interpretations of reality. To say that language shapes our reality may seem bizarre, yet from earliest childhood we learn language in a community setting and actually think in the concepts we acquire through our formal and informal education.

 The term Dichtung, borrowed from German literary and philosophical history, tries to encapsulate this powerful twofold effect of language. The German term can stand for both poetry and prose, two categories we sometimes use to represent a divided reality: reason versus emotion, fact versus fiction, faith versus reason, private versus public spheres of human activity and thought. Dichtung suggests that these splits are problematic, because these categories are much more interwoven than we often assume. In German thought, the term Dichtung is thus employed to label both fiction (even autobiographical life stories such as Goethe's Dichtung und Wahrheit, an example whose play on the words Fiction and Truth most clearly demonstrates the view that we inscribe our reality through language) and poetry. Neohumanism adopts Dichtung in its broadest sense as a linguistic expression of the human desire to understand that which is greater than ourselves, the ground and the beyond of our being; Dichtung in this sense gathers all such attempts at letting the word speak, including the logos of philosophy, under the umbrella of the humanities.

To apply this to politics specifically, Dichtung as an expression of human rationality and its desire for meaning-making also shows the falsity of a public-private split. Every private story or interpretation is already conditioned by the social linguistic realm and also becomes public when put into words which may shape the public linguistic domain in turn. Thus interpretive work is not restricted to the philological work or close reading of texts on which it nonetheless depends. Not merely texts but human stories, including their full philosophical import, which converge as the story of humanity, are the subject of interpretation. Neohumanism contests postmodernity's rejection of metanarratives as inhuman, because every personal or communal narrative is held with universal intent and presupposes a metanarrative. Ultimately, human identity and meaning are grounded metaphysically because of our dependence on stories for making sense of reality. In this sense, religion is of crucial importance for human existence because it provides us with stories that not merely lend meaning to life but without which we wouldn't have meaning at all. Just as the death of God or gods entails the death of the human, so too the death of the metanarrative entails the death of all narratives.

3. A human being is an agent, doing things before reflecting on them. So far we have talked about human rationality, we have developed a sense of our embeddedness in history and language. But what about individual human beings, our human selves: what do we mean when we say "I do this" or "I think that"? If we assume the word individual or self to mean that we are self-contained entities, we are gravely mistaken. If we think that we begin our contact with reality from a neutral ground to which we retreat and enter into negotiations with other human beings only when we want or need to, again: we are very wrong about our human nature. Over time, philosophy has increasingly put an emphasis on the individual. As so often, the intention behind this development was good. Philosophers tried to loosen the bonds of authority structures and rigid traditions. The self, the thinking self, promised a refuge from warring religious and political agendas. Rather than beginning from history or from any supposed revelation outside of ourselves, human consciousness became the starting point for all knowledge. It is, of course, understandable that thinkers tried to get away from the contingent, ever changing, and thus unreliable realm of history and human relations to the sphere of the mind. Linked to universal reason, the self reduced to the sphere of the thinking, reflecting self, mind holds out the promise of agreement and unity, the place of eternal verities where every conflict and difference is laid to rest.

 

While this view was in fact developed and embraced by Christian philosophers, it goes against the biblical portrayal of the human being as an agent in the world, as someone who does things. Reflection, as important as it is, is the negative aspect of the our nature as agents in relation. The Old Testament offers an experiential and relational nature of reality proffered. We are persons in community with others rather than reflective islands. To be fully human or, to use biblical language, to be righteous, is to uphold and embody the laws that foster community. Here individuals are described as whole persons (mind and body) acting in the world. Not the mind, but agency comes first. While the emphasis on the life of the mind and its abstraction from reality fosters a spirit of self-centeredness, the Jewish notions of covenant righteousness assumes the existence of other human beings and puts their interest first. Christian tradition has further developed the basic Jewish insight into the relational nature of our being in terms of the doctrine of the Trinity.

The emphasis of Western thought on the isolated thinking mind as the essence of human being is thus dehumanising. It encourages isolation and it discourages acknowledgement of our dependence on one another. Paradoxically, while the model of the reflective mind strove towards independence and freedom, it actually marooned us on the solipsistic island of the reflecting mind. All of a sudden we are required to build a bridge to other islands. We suggest that such a metaphor is mistaken, that we are not individuals but persons. To be human is not to be a reflective consciousness but a person in relation. Reflection is important and necessary but it is a secondary aspect of our actual personhood.

Neohumanism is "new" in the sense that it is a re-articulation for our times of what it means to be human. It remains a "humanism" in the classical sense in that it advocates rationality, textuality, and the importance of a coherent picture of what it means to be a human being. But while it draws on previous attempts to formulate humanism, it refuses to rest in their self-satisfaction of having arrived at a complete picture. Neohumanism takes its impulse from the most mysterious and central doctrines of Christianity - the Incarnation and the Trinity. Both attest a commitment to relationship. Traditional forms of humanism have sometimes caricatured Christianity as an intolerant system of revealed and absolute truth, a caricature often intensified in postmodernism. Viewed more charitably, the Christian tradition provides the richest resource for tolerance, difference, mystery, and an appreciation of the complexity of reality without sacrificing meaning, responsibility, and hope. The human being as created in the image of the Trinity offers the best source for the relational nature of our personhood, and the Incarnation reaffirms our humanity. Here eternity and the historical merge in an affirmation of the human - both its grandeur and its fallenness - and our relation both to God and to one another.

 

We hope it is clear that we are very much aware of the failures of Christianity in its attempts to guide or to temper or to engage other aspects of culture. As Christians trying to engage our culture and to encourage a common focus on the enigma of our shared humanity, we are neither triumphalist nor embattled. Rather, we enjoy life and we want to affirm it in its ambiguity and complexity. We also want to celebrate it in its ordinariness by taking it up into something greater than itself that validates it, which is perhaps the greatest paradox of all.

 
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Lemos Horta, Paulo

University of Toronto                                         

        phorta@chass.utoronto.ca

Globalization has succeeded modernization as a potentially all-encompassing discourse. As the term has crystallized in public discourse from the collapse of the Cold War in the early to mid-nineties, it refers both to the integration of capital markets – the international stock trade, finance, speculation in foreign currency – and to certain transformations effected by new technologies of communication and production. It is this emphasis on technology that differentiates the term from modern or pre-modern descriptions of the integration of international capital. Alongside (and perhaps even above) the analytical categories insisted upon by Marx and Weber – the economic, the political, the cultural – globalization stresses the role of technology. While Marx observed that the generation of surplus value became increasingly dependent on scientific expertise as industrial capitalism developed, Frederic Jameson notes that today all science is technologically related, and technology has come to possess a semi-autonomy in current frameworks of thought. Indeed Jameson suggests that if one separates out aspects of globalization with a view of putting them together in a decisive way – the technological, the political, the cultural, the economic, and the social – one recognizes that technology offers itself as the fundamental paradigm of globalization, at once omnipresent and inevitable. As Perry Anderson has noted, this is not to suggest that there is a consensus on the omnipresence and inevitability of the global integration of capital markets and of electronic communication. While some hold that globalization constitutes an unavoidable feature of the current economic system, others see it as an inflated and deceptive paradigm. While some champion globalization as a positive force, others oppose globalization both in the real and hypothetical cases. For this reason it is important (as Jameson admonishes) to conceive of the term globalization as a word that has crystallized certain perceptions in public discourse rather than as a concept – to realize that the categories of globalization may generate false paradoxes that should not be mistaken for conceptual analysis.

Concomitantly one must be attentive to how the privileging of the term globalization in public discourse becomes a way of (or an excuse for) not talking about other things. Within the discourse of modernization, the emphasis on the opposition between tradition and modernity could be deployed to repress discussion of the opposition between capitalism and socialism. It is likely too early to assess the potential of globalization as a contested discursive field. Globalization may indeed turn out to be an ideological battleground. Concepts generated on one end of the spectrum (for example, modernity and postmodernity) are sometimes appropriated by critics on the other end. But perhaps it is significant that Anthony Giddens and the London School of Economics would recognize globalization as the paradigm that succeeds modernization. For, as Anderson notes, the notion of modernization, unlike modernism and modernity, was never successfully wrested away from the right. Not all concepts lend themselves to ideological contestation: the early verdict (shared by Anderson and Jameson) would seem to indicate that globalization would represent a safer and blander conceptual paradigm than postmodernism, which had (following certain key critical interventions) at least acquired a radical ambiguity. Anderson stresses that the emergence of particular anti-globalization movements does not itself redress this insufficiency: for as they are currently constituted, they would still allow for the defense of ‘good’ forms of globalization.

The collapse of the Soviet Bloc, and the acceptance within public policy of capitalism as a certainty, has given the term globalization a certain persuasiveness within public discourse. Globalization champions capitalism with a disarming transparency, but a critique of this position is unexpectedly difficult. In a culture of cynical reason, Jameson notes, there is no subversive potential of unmasking class interests, for these are stated unabashedly. Older notions of the subversive and the critical therefore have fallen into crisis. For instance, globalization poses particularly difficult questions for the critical project of postmodernism. While postmodernism insists on the rejection of meta-narratives, the emergence of globalization as the meta-narrative of public discourse constitutes a new challenge. Anthropologist Fernando Coronil, for example, warns that present-day anthropologists may prove ill-equipped to challenge narratives of globalization due to their immersion in the methodologies of postmodernism and postcolonialism. For Coronil it will not suffice to question the cultural homogenization that characterizes globalization with specific examples of a cultural heterogeneity that has not been assimilated. This kind of emphasis on irreducible particularities is too specific and fragmented to provide a powerful alternative to the narrative of globalization. Alternatively, to seek to unmask globalization as a discourse specific to the West would accomplish little – it is a charge that champions of globalization in fact welcome. Globalization may provide postmodernism with a test case it cannot master.

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri make this case more bluntly in their conscious rewriting of the Communist Manifesto for an age they identify with an imperial form of sovereignty – Empire. For them postmodernism represents a dead end precisely because of its failure to recognize globalization as the contemporary object of critique. The danger, Hardt and Negri state, “is that postmodernist theories focus their attention so resolutely on the old forms of power they are running from, with their heads turned backwards, that they tumble unwittingly into the welcoming arms of the new power.” Their purpose is not to question the “egalitarian” and perhaps even “anti-capitalist” motivations that drive postmodern theories, but to test the use of these theories in the context of globalization:

When we consider the ideologies of corporate capital and the world market, it certainly appears that the postmodernist and postcolonial theorists who advocate a politics of difference, fluidity and hybridity in order to challenge the binaries and essentialism of modern sovereignty have been outflanked by the strategies of power. Power has evacuated the bastion they are attacking and has circled around to their rear to join them in the assault in the name of difference. These theorists thus find themselves pushing against an open door.

The modern paradigm of power that postmodern theorists have critiqued has been replaced by a new paradigm of power that rules precisely through the “differential hierarchies of the hybrid and fragmentary subjectivities that these theorists celebrate.” Hardt and Negri spy a “perfect correspondence” between “many of the concepts dear to postmodernists and postcolonialists” and the “current ideology of corporate capital and the world market”: “the ideology of the world market has always been the anti-foundational and anti-essentialist discourse par excellence. Circulation, mobility, diversity, and mixture are its very conditions of possibility.” The empirical evidence would suggest that “postmodern marketing” deftly recognizes each difference as an opportunity, and that the corporate culture of globalization embraces difference in the corporate workplace. In this new corporate environment, postmodern celebrations of difference are at best naïve, at worst “purely mystificatory.” Hardt and Negri identify postmodern theories not as agents of subversion but as “important effects that trace or reflect the expansion of the world market,” effects that can be fruitfully contrasted with the waves of religious fundamentalism that arose “not only at the same time but in response to the same situations.” Acknowledging the risk of great simplification, Hardt and Negri suggest that the current global tendencies “toward increased mobility, indeterminacy, and hybridity” are experienced by the winners in the process of globalization “as a kind of liberation,” but by all others as “an exacerbation of their suffering.”

Working from within fields as diverse as history, anthropology, political philosophy and literary theory, the above cited writers – Anderson, Jameson, Coronil, Negri and Hardt – agree on the inadequacy of postmodern theory to describe and critique the economic, cultural and technological processes of globalization. At best these writers would recognize postmodernism as a product (or perhaps the cultural logic) of the very phenomenon that they seek to understand and critique – the global integration of finance and technology in late capitalism. If they agree on the need to move beyond postmodernism, there is no sign of a consensus on the nature or even the viability of an account which might counter the ideology of globalization. If the fragmentation of subjectivity and the atomization of society prove to be symptoms – rather than subversions – of the expansion of global capital, it is not clear what the new critical rallying cry will be. Tucked into the last note to his article on globalization for the New Left Review – almost out of embarrassment – is Jameson’s catalog of the obstacles to be faced by any new articulation of community by the left:

Anyone who evokes the ultimate value of the community or collectivity form a left perspective must face three problems: 1) how to distinguish this position radically from communitarianism; 2) how to differentiate the collective project from fascism or nazism; 3) how to relate the social and the economic level – that is, how to use the Marxist analysis of capitalism to demonstrate the unviability of social solutions within that system. As for collective identities, in a historical moment in which individual personality has been unmasked as a decentered locus of multiple subject positions, surely it is not too much to ask that something analogous be conceptualized on the collective level. (68)

Predictably the most contentious argument advanced in Hardt and Negri’s Empire pertains precisely to their positive program. Hardt and Negri would recuperate as a meta-narrative the unfulfilled promise of the Enlightenment of Spinoza, with a gesture towards the promise of the modernity of Marx and even to the pre-socialism of the New Testament. Their philosophical project neatly encapsulates the thorny question of how an Enlightened, Marxist, or even religious counter-meta-narrative to globalization could be developed. If it is not too premature to ascertain that the problems suggested by the processes globalization lie beyond the scope of postmodernism, it is clearly too soon to gauge how Marxist a ‘post-Marxist’ critique of globalization would be.

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......."
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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?

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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.

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As a graduate student in history, I hope to contribute to the seminars on “education” and “politics/ law/ history.” I am essentially anti-postmodernist, for I am of the view that postmodern thought has devastated the practice of history. Of course, this devastation has, in the first place, come from outside the discipline. As empiricism and inductive reasoning have come to be despised in accordance with the rise of social theory, history has simply lost academic ground. For instance, in his The Killing of History: How Literary Critics and Social Theorists are Murdering Our Past (1997), Keith Windschuttle stresses that among the numerous universities founded in Australia during the 1990s, not one of them even upholds the discipline. Instead, what they have is an array of cultural, communications and media studies departments, though some make allowance for offerings “euphemistically named” historical studies.

Meanwhile, history has been devastated from within, and often by those who appear to only glimpse the consequences of what they have embraced. While full adherence to postmodern theory necessitates a complete denial of history, some historians have adopted what may be called a “soft” postmodernism. For them, the past is accessible, but in such a loose way that there can be no hierarchy of significance with regard to historical actions and agents. The result has been a proliferation of research on the most mundane topics, taking “academic” to an absurd extreme. For example, a graduate student at the University of Western Ontario has recently written an M. A. thesis on the politics of soap, entitled “Opposition to the Elimination of Synthetic Laundry Detergents in Canada, 1947-1992.” Again, and in a much more prestigious arena, the spring 2001 issue of Renaissance Quarterly features an article on the (supposed) cultural significance of facial growth: “The Renaissance Beard: Masculinity in Early Modern England.” Part of the problem lies in the postmodernist emphasis on subjectivity, for this emphasis has caused many historians to do little more than turn inwards. Indulging in the view that history cannot be anything more than the historian, they concern themselves only with those things that are local, present and congruent with their respective identities, which are almost exclusively defined in terms of race, class and gender. Thus, while many postmodernists may have aimed to open the way to new ideas, postmodernism has, in practice, legitimized a self-centered intellectual incarceration.

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English
University of British Columbia            

rseamon@interchange.ubc.ca

Postmodern as an intellectual movement is, to adapt Arthur Danto's phrase, the theoretical disenfranchisement of practically everything. Call it deconstruction, which is our scepticism. In my field of aesthetics, scepticism about the existence of art and the aesthetic has been a part of the discourse for over half a century. Wittgensteinians undermined essentialist notions in favor of mere family resemblances, and in a famous essay, "The Modern System of the Arts: A Study in the History of Aesthetics" (1950), Paul Oskar Kristeller historicized the notion of the fine arts and the discourses that it sustains. Art (now not merely fine but esoteric) meanwhile, having lost its perceptual foundations, reappeared in conceptual finery, both in practice (conceptual art) and theory (Danto's notion of art as theory). This would, if it were the whole truth, add up to the triumph of theory over practice, concepts over performances, in other words the dissolution of the real that is often lamented by postmodernists themselves. That can be cause for either celebration or dismay. In the philosophy of art the actual upshot has been, I have argued, that the conceptual has been added to the venerable triad of the mimetic, expressive, and formal, as a dimension of artistic practice, a rather modest conclusion given the clamor.

 

linda.siegel@ubc.ca

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University of Manchester, U.K.
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

1. Raymond Tallis ‘The Survival of Theory: “He never said that”’ in Theorrhoea and After (London: Macmillan, 1999).

2. 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.

3. 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).

4. 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).

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     City University of New York
       ETremper@brooklyn.cuny.edu

            Virginia Woolf, in her essay, “Professions for Women,” remembering herself as a young girl trying to write fiction, asks her audience “to imagine [...her] writing a novel in a state of trance....The image that comes to mind...is the image of a fisherman lying sunk in dreams on the verge of a deep lake with a rod held out over the water.”^[i]  Then, think of me, a girl of twenty, equally entranced, my mind sunk in dreams on the verge of a deep lake, although sitting in a classroom in Goldwyn Smith Hall in the fall of 1962, in my third year at Cornell University.  I was listening to Paul de Man, in his almost inaudible soothing voice, intoning “truth,” I thought, about Lamartine, Nerval, Baudelaire, and Mallarmé.  He droned comfortingly on, every once in a while throwing in “phenomenology,” “Husserl,” “Heidegger”–the latter, men (I assumed, of course, that they were) without Christian names and of whom I’d never heard (a naiveté and ignorance we wouldn’t countenance in our students today).  I recall, at this distance, that I didn’t much understand their relevance to the beautiful poems–a number of them with deep lakes for their subjects–about which he was lecturing.  In any case, these names and phrases were just part of my trance–an aesthetic trance which lasted, I can say with some accuracy, well into graduate school–until I got involved, as so many of us did, in anti-war activities.  Wayne C. Booth’s The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961) and its ilk were what most of my humanist professors were asking me to read.  Such criticism was useful for the papers I was writing.  It was just fine with me.

            I wrote in my summary for the Web site for this conference that the postmodernist critical positions which replaced the humanist, positivist, New Critical orientation of literary studies that held sway through the ’60s (and in many classrooms even into the present) followed from the energies of the spring of 1968, when all hell broke loose at Columbia, Parisian students were making common cause with workers, and Prague, however briefly, enjoyed its spring.  But I told my own story because I wanted to suggest that while I believe that that spring was a critical turning point for the anti-war movement and for the academy, it had been prepared for, I feel sure, by many individual experiences like mine at Cornell, which although perhaps imperfectly understood as they were happening, were, like Coleridge’s frost, performing their “secret ministry.”

            In the social ferment of the late ’60s, with uprisings in the inner cities, political assassinations, anti-war protests, and “youth culture” rampant, we felt the ground of the old world shifting beneath our feet.  If, disappointingly, in the recession of the early ’70s, with the OPEC oil embargo of 1973 thrown in to chill us further, we returned as a society to same-old, same-old, the university as an institution didn’t.  In some ways, it was better; in others, worse.  (I append here, as a note, a short version of the rise and fall of CUNY, the university with which I am most familiar, in the early ’70s.^[ii])

            The better....Ethnic and women’s study programs that had begun to flourish at CUNY in 1971 and in many other places did not end (a particularly ironic case of beginnings: women at Wesleyan University in Connecticut prevailed upon Dick Ohmann to help them create the first Women’s Studies Program; he became its first chair).  With hindsight, a photograph in The New York Times of the Columbia student takeover, showing a group of students crowded into the administrative offices and one young man with his feet up on the president’s desk (an amusing parody of the capitalist tycoon), appears to have been a moment emblematic of the ascendancy of pluralism in the academy.  As with the rise of the New Criticism in the midst of the Great Depression, postmodernism, as it developed later in the 1970s and ’80s, was a compelling, intellectual, and (we thought) necessary response to the institutions–and the men who supported them–which seemed to be responsible for the social and political morass the U.S. was in.

            And so (please pardon a certain violent collapse of historical narrative here), given the rise of “poststructuralism,” with the deconstructionists caballing and caviling at Yale (de Man  had moved to Yale from Cornell in 1970; Geoffrey Hartman and Harold Bloom were already there), and the establishment of area, ethnic, and women’s studies programs at all major universities, the consequent relativism of what was later to be identified as “postmodernism” was, perforce, more and more apparent.  Dead white men and the texts they had authored could be ignored.  The canon was booming.  Truths there were, but no truth because everything (including us) was socially constructed.  All the world had graduated from being merely a stage to a Text, or, more accurately, many Texts.  With a Ph.D. in literature, we were licensed to read everything.  However, the new readers, the people who had just gotten their degrees, were without a place to stand, even if they had the requisite levers to move the world.   Unmetaphorically, they had no jobs.

            So, now, the worse....As the student body was becoming more diverse, with Affirmative Action programs assuring access to higher education for many working-class kids, often the first in their families to go to college, the cutbacks in funding created a crisis for new Ph.D.s, who were more and more likely to drive cabs to eke out their livings as adjuncts (at more than one campus) because they couldn’t get full-time, tenure-bearing jobs.  Or they gave up and sought employment in business, government, and ngos.  By the end of the ’70s, “the floating bottom”–the phrase that had once designated permanently assistant (non-tenured) professors–was no longer appropriate.  From 1978 until 1993–with the exception of John Ashbery, who was appointed a Distinguished Professor in 1980, and Allen Ginsberg, who was hired in 1986 (Distinguished, 1990)–at Brooklyn College, we were not authorized to conduct any academic searches.  Perhaps ours was an extreme case, but we weren’t alone.

            And things did not improve.  Even though major graduate schools made draconian cuts in the size of their literature programs, not all new Ph.D.s were getting jobs.  A survey conducted by 61 doctorate-granting institutions from all over the United States, with approximately 6,000 respondents representing six fields (English being the representative field for the humanities), published in the ADE Bulletin, shows that only 58% of people who obtained their degrees in English between 1982 and 1985 (the survey population representing 57% of all degrees awarded in the U.S. in the six fields) had been tenured (53%) or were in tenure-track jobs (5%) by 1995.^[iii]   Listen to the words of Sander Gilman in his presidential address to the MLA in 1995:

  In Washington and in many state capitals a systematic attempt is under way to dismantle American higher education.  If proposed changes are implemented, more and more individuals and groups will be denied access to higher education.  Thus they will be denied not just the social mobility that higher education brings but also the experience of the objects that we advocate–books....

  The cuts in funding for American higher education have resulted in a radical reduction in the size of the professoriat.  Fewer professors are being hired; departments and programs are being reduced or eliminated.  More and more teaching is being done by underpaid, marginalized members of our profession.^[iv]

He speaks of “fear and anxiety in our ranks” (390) that young colleagues will be “remaindered” like the books he loves, the books that brought him into the profession in the first place.  Which brings me to the responses to these conditions of those young colleagues who, although not the originators of postmodernism, have kept it alive, albeit in its “terminal hip”^[v] condition.

            They have experienced fear and trembling far greater than those of us to whom Gilman refers, who were lucky enough to have gotten tenure.  What can they do to position themselves so that they might wind up in the lucky 58% who find remunerative work in the field they have prepared for?  They have had to “professionalize” themselves while still in training, by presenting papers at multiple conferences and publishing articles before they’ve finished their dissertations.  If they can’t furnish CVs with long lists of conference papers and publications, they are probably out of the running for the few jobs that are advertised in their field.  (In 1996-97, we advertised for a postcolonialist and received 144 applications.  This past year, we advertised for a medievalist; we received 101 applications.)

            But quantity of work alone won’t do the trick.  They have to be hip.  Never mind the walk; they have to talk the talk.  They must say, as I’ve heard so many of them do–shyly, as if admitting to a crush–that they’re “interested in theory,” for to be interested in “texts” is equivalent to intellectual slumming.  In the economy of scarcity, which has prevailed for higher education (apparently its steady state, despite the general boom of the 1990s), successful job seekers distinguish themselves by proving to be already in possession of a currency that few others have in their pockets.  You have heard that in business, wealth attracts more wealth.  Just so in the academy, except the valued coin is the word–but not just any word.  Those who prove themselves most linguistically adept–that is, are successful in copying the “parole” of the  designated “theorists,” as opposed to mere “critics”(finally! the lipsynchers of my title)–gain the very few tenure-bearing, relatively well-paying positions advertised in the JIL–the MLA’s Job Information List.  But this situation has created, to my mind, a woeful development both in academic language and the thought for which it fronts.

            It’s not, then, just the lipsynching of which I complain, but the loose lips trying to articulate the looser thought.^[vi]  Imprecise metaphors and abstractions, typographical markings (like the parentheses of my title), and awful puns have come to replace systematic, syllogistic thinking and clear writing.  Homi Bhabha writes: “‘If, for a while, the ruse of desire is calculable for the uses of discipline [sic] soon the repetition of guilt, justification, pseudo-scientific theories, superstition, spurious authorities and classifications can be seen as the desperate effort to normalize formally the disturbance of the discourse of splitting that violates the rational, enlightened claims of its enunciatory modality.’”^[vii]  Very few are frank enough to admit, as did Mark Crispin Miller, a professor of media studies at NYU, for the article in which this quotation appeared: “‘Most of the time I don’t know what he’s talking about.’”^[viii]   Consequently, such writing passes for coin of the realm, and the frightened graduate students manufacture and pass their counterfeit bills, or get passed over themselves.  But we are the guilty ones because we accept their “scrip(t)” (as one clever writer in PMLA called it^[ix]) as bona fide payment of their professional dues.

            However, tortuous and tortured language that passes for consequential thought is not the only harmful result of postmodernism.  Perhaps an even more troubling phenomenon, which may arise directly from the academy’s insistence on pluralism and multiculturalism,^[x] is a prevailing lack of critical and truly “argumentative” thinking among both graduate and undergraduate students.  If truth is no longer absolute but relative, then, hey! why argue against what the other guy is saying?  Michiko Kakutani, in a New York Times article on debate and dissent, suggests that the current climate of non-engagement on college campuses is owing to “the powerful effect that certain academic modes of thinking – from multiculturalism to deconstruction – have had in shaping contemporary college discourse.”  She argues that “because subjectivity enshrines ideas that are partial and fragmentary by definition, it tends to preclude searches for larger, overarching truths, thereby undermining a strong culture of contestation,”^[xi] which can’t be very good (I think we would all agree) either for democracy or for scientific research and discovery.  As James L. Battersby points out, a correlate of this lack of contestation (which certainly gives me pause) is that “where nothing is (absolutely) true, then what prevails prevails not because of its truth but because of its (persuasive) power; but when disputants can appeal to no recognized tribunal of adjudication, persuasion is merely the name the powerful give to the weapon they use to secure their preeminence.”^[xii]  The conclusions of such logic reveal a bleak landscape.  Should we say, then, that, well, because literature doesn’t matter as much as democracy or finding cures for diseases, we can go our way(s), continuing to play our relativistic mind games with a good conscience?

            But we do believe literature and ideas about literature matter.  Listen to another MLA presidential address.  Patricia Meyer Spacks said:

Of the observers outside the academy who acknowledge that we work hard, many believe that we too often devote our efforts to enterprises mattering only to ourselves....So what? Echoes loudly around us....I shall argue that what we do, what we teach, matters because our activity implies ways to assume power over ourselves and over the chaos of our world.  We offer students and by way of continuing study acquire ourselves, I believe, means of grasping reality, of holding on to the real amid the simulacra that postmodern experience supplies....Reality is a word many of us tend to put in quotation marks, to acknowledge the difficulty of knowing, or perhaps even believing in, what it designates.  The concept of reality is too large to get one’s mind around.  Most people, though, in effect kick the stone with Dr. Johnson, concurring that the natural world is real, as are buildings and furniture and cars.  Occurrences took place before we were born, and though we have difficulty knowing what they were, we firmly believe that they were and that a world existed before us....The written word preserves imaginings, reimaginings, of experience and substance.  Recording in transmuted form the experience of writers, it thus provides experience for readers.  It illuminates the real.^[xiii]

Perhaps more and more of us these days are, in effect, kicking the stone with Dr. Johnson.  Jonathan Mulrooney, a graduate student in the English Department at Boston University when he wrote “Acting Like a Graduate Student” (1999), explains an interesting “collaborative project” at BU, “a theater company called Willing Suspension Productions,” which fosters alternative sorts of contact “both among graduate students themselves and between graduate students and their senior colleagues, that professional literary study currently discourages.”  “Involvement with the company in various capacities,” he continues,

–as actors, directors and crew members–has enabled many of the graduate students in my department to imagine a more positive and productive relation to the field of literary study than that offered by the rituals of what John Guillory has recently called “preprofessionalism”….^[xiv]

I also noted with real pleasure that the medievalists, whose applications we read this year, wrote with much clarity and grace about a real world that had once existed.  They had brought it to light again, through their extensive archival researches.  And they certainly seemed to believe that it was possible to make solid claims about the culture they were studying, based on documents they had discovered–some catalogued but never examined previously–and the work of scholars who had gone before them.  

            Patricia Meyer Spacks, you may say, simply avoids the main issue of postmodernism by leaping over the troubled waters of relativistic thinking to the opposite bank on which she finds more than one kickable stone.  But I would add that while a scarcity of financial resources may have prolonged the fashionable instabilities of postmodernist discourses, money might also help us to recover from them.  Postmodernism is not the decadent spawn of “late” capitalism (does “late” mean something other than “recent”? does it imply that capitalism is about to depart? and why do economists fail to use this adjective?) but a group of theoretical approaches–all trying to prove themselves unique and worthy–that have sprung up in an economic environment of dearth.  If there were more jobs, new Ph.D.s would not have to vie for them so desperately, demonstrating their value by slavishly following the latest trend, using the same deadening metaphors lifted from architecture, finance, medicine, physics–whatever!–to prove the relation of their ideas to the real world beyond the academy and, thus, the relevance of their endeavors to government officials and taxpayers who judge and then subsidize (or not) the work of academics.^[xv] 

            Yet please don’t think me an absolute Miniver Cheevey.  We have learned much about language and its effects from deconstruction; we have recovered literature and cultural artifacts, once thought unworthy of attention, through the efforts of scholars who guessed rightly that there would be gold in the records and stories of marginalized peoples.  And we have learned to re-read well known materials in provocative new ways.

            That said, we are at a conference (handsomely subsidized by the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of British Columbia) talking about the possibility of a time beyond postmodernism.  The conference may be an exercise in wish fulfillment (but also, perhaps, proof of my point about intellectual-systems-altering economics).  However, I also take comfort from assertions (some, I grant, offered without proof) made by people outside the academy that postmodernism is losing its traction, indeed, that in the real world, it is a thing of the past.  For example, Herbert Muschamp, the architectural critic of The New York Times, in a review of the striking new Austrian Cultural Forum in Manhattan, writes: “In architecture, the history of ideas is more reliable than the history of forms.  It was almost worth suffering through postmodernism to absorb this simple lesson.”^[xvi]  Does he know something that we don’t?

            I will return closer to my home (in the humanities) for my last proof.  I like to think that the Word is still capable of producing the light–that (at least on occasion) we can eschew the metacritical, the theoretical and return to the rich and incandescent text.  Here’s one now.  The speaking voice of  “Winter Rose,” a poem about postmodernism, begins by asserting: “And then the French came and they killed us. / And then the French came, they killed us over / and over, they kissed us to red ruins.” It continues: “they kept killing us in this French manner.”  But although “we bled a blue blood read aloud / to the whole body,” and the speaker, in the last line, reconfirms “and only then were we everywhere dead,”^[xvii] I remain hopeful.  For considering the persistence of the narrative voice, which, logically, must have survived to announce the story of its own death, this parable about the devastations of postmodernism suggests that it cannot vanquish.

            Finally, I take comfort from Virginia Woolf’s closing words in “How It Strikes a Contemporary”:

To sum up, then–if indeed any conclusion is possible when everybody is talking at once and it is time to be going–it seems that it would be wise for the writers [here, substitute “theorists and critics”] of the present to renounce the hope of creating masterpieces.  Their poems, plays, biographies [read “scholarly works”] are not books but notebooks, and Time, like a good schoolmaster, will take them in his hands, point to their blots and scrawls and erasions, and tear them across; but he will not throw them into the waste-paper basket.  He will keep them because other students will find them very useful.  It is from the notebooks of the present that the masterpieces of the future are made.  Literature has lasted long, has undergone many changes, and it is only a short sight and parochial mind that will exaggerate the importance of these squalls, however they may agitate the little boats now tossing out at sea.  The storm and the drenching are on the surface; continuity and calm are in the depths.^[xviii]  

As I sit at home, writing this paper, I can’t predict the weather in Vancouver on May 16th.  I hope, of course, that the sun will be shining.

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patricia.vertinsky@ubc.ca

DISCIPLINING BODIES:  FROM NORMAL TO CYBORG AND BEYOND

“The invention of the word ‘postmodern’ has led to a little competition in which people try to define the modern era, something that began in the past and is now apparently over, posted into history.” (Hacking,1998,206). Bruno Latour has tried to disqualify the competition with We Have Never Been Modern (1993) but where the body and physical culture is concerned it is a debate requiring more rehearsal.  This paper will examine how the idea of an average or normal body (its shape, its physical abilities) is less a condition of human nature than a feature of a modernizing society. I argue that modernity bred normalcy into ways of seeing, measuring and evaluating  the athletic body that were articulated by the professions of health and physical education and the disciplines of the movement sciences through Foucault’s normalizing effects in appropriately designed modernist spaces.

          Postmodern discourses have focused upon difference, diversity and subjectivity, as well as changing notions of physical culture as something exclusively located in specialized venues. Along with new ways of looking at the body from genetics, evolutionary biology, biomedicine and its techniques, they are forging a radical revision in the very notion of corporeality. What then are these postmodern effects upon the disciplining of the body in physical culture where ‘normal’ is no longer ‘normal?’ Are these new  technologies of change allowing individuals to escape the cultural imperatives that laid the foundations of normalcy, or do we see here the logic of normalization ( of modernity) simply giving way to the logic of continual adjustment and correction? Moving beyond postmodernism thus takes us to a world of greater choices, and/ or one of deepening degrees of control. In the case of the latter, the danger of an ever narrowing diversity may not be that we have never been modern, but that we may one day become modern.

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Post-modern criticisms of objectivity have had an influence on the questioning of objectivity in journalism. The post-modern critique is part of a broad academic attack on news objectivity as hopeless, impossible, a "myth," a dangerously naive doctrine, or a doctrine used by media giants to cover over their biases. And so on.   Unfortunately, post-modernism is a very bad theory of knowledge and has a confusing, corrosive effect on journalism's impulse toward truth. It also leaves nothing to replace objectivity as an ethic of news gathering and reporting.

My book attempts to present a version of journalism objectivity that moves beyond such criticism.  

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Willinsky, John

University of British Columbia                                                                    Public Knowledge Project

    http://pkp.ubc.ca                  john.willinsky@ubc.ca

Beyond Postmodernism, Beyond Postcolonialism?
Beyond Has Always Been the Postcolonial Point

Postcolonial studies intends by studying colonialism's legacy to speed up the distancing, to advance the changes in beliefs and attitudes, that would create a greater historical distance between colonialism and what comes after. Postcolonialism is concerned with the aftermath of empire in which the spirit of colonialism is far more immediate, far more present, than would otherwise be acknowledged without the efforts of postcolonial scholars. As postcolonialism would help move us beyond the colonial, it would help us move beyond this postcolonial state. As to what that beyond might look like, I can offer but one example, namely my own, as someone who has worked for a number of years on the educational legacy of imperialism. Drawing on postcolonial lessons about epistemic orders of center and periphery, my work has moved on to exploring how the organization of knowledge, and more specifically systems of scholarly communication, can be pushed in directions that place it far more firmly beyond the colonial. My basic proposition is that those of us, whether as faculty or students, engaged in the production of knowledge have control over an intellectual resource which is contributing to current inequities in this knowledge economy that continue to reflect a colonial legacy. This resource is by no means the most valuable, critical or vital resource for the welfare of people everywhere. It is only the one resource that we, as scholars, control. And to suggest it is without considerable value on this global stage is only to call our own work into serious question, a question not outside the scope of this work. We need then to consider just how the knowledge that we control operates within the global space, how it aligns itself with the economies of running shoes and silicon chips that are shaping globalization. My belief is that we unthinkingly turn this knowledge over to a knowledge/publishing system, made up of commercial publishers and professional associations, which while excellently equipped to serve our academic careers, perpetuates the very system that we ostensibly protest against, whether on behalf of the Enlightenment project's advances of a knowledge and truth that lies beyond power and politics, or on behalf of those who continue the postcolonial attack on imperialism's aftermath. We have, then, to begin to imagine new ways of advancing a global exchange of knowledge that not only utilize new technologies but that in their very structure situate themselves, finally, beyond postcolonial concerns.

catherine.wilson@ubc.ca

Postformalist Criticism in the History of Philosophy
 

After several decades of what might be termed formalist critical commentary-- com-mentary principally concerned with entailment relations and the warrant for assertions-- in Anglo-American historiography
of philosophy, there has been a revival of substantival com-mentary on past
philosophers (whom I shall refer to subsequently as "PPs"). The statements
and theories of the PPs regarding women, slaves, animals, children, prisoners, and colonial subjects have been hunted down and scrutinized; theses and books on the body, the passions, money, and other such nontraditional subjects have appeared that express a good deal of worry and
disapproval. The methodological issues raised by substantive commentary are perplexing. The central issue is the relationship between a commentator, the commentator's audience, and the "difficult philosopher," the celebrated historical philosopher who proves to have harboured and defended ideas that are racist, sexist, jingoistic, or economically or socially oppressive or exploitative. Here are some examples of difficult texts by Locke, Kant,Rousseau, and Hegel:

1) A maný cannotýenslave himself to anyoneý[however] having by his fault forfeited his own life by some act that deserves death [e.g. by offering violent resistance to being captured in a "war"], he to whom he has forfeited it may (when he has him in his power) delay to take it, and make use of him to his own service; and he does him no injury by it.

2) All the races will be wiped out. (American (Indian)s and Blacks are incapable of governing themselves. Can function only as slaves. Only the whites excepted.

3) [M]isfortune, if such it be, is inherent in their sex, and [girls] will never escape from it, unless to endure more cruel sufferings. All their life long, they will have to submit to the strictest and most enduring restraints, those of propriety. They must be trained to bear the yoke from the first, so that they may not feel it, to master their own caprices and to submit themselves to the will of others; it is only fair that woman should bear her share of the ills she has brought upon man.

4) War is the spirit and form in which the essential moment of ethical substance is manifestly confirmed and realized. While, on the one hand, war makes the particular spheres of property and personal independence, as well as the personality of the individ-ual himself, feel the force of negation and destruction, on the other hand, this engine of negation and destruction stand out as that which preserves the whole in security. [T]he brave youth, the suppressed principle of ruin and destruction, comes now into promi nence, and is the factor of primary significance and worth.

Substantival, as opposed to formal commentary and criticism is, of course, nothing new. Authoritarian moralists and political thinkers have always found inspiration amongst the PPs. In much substantival commentary, what was appreciated was the inevitable wisdom of the elderly, their special concern with civil order and stable government, their reflections on their escape from the battleground of the passions, their sense of transcendence of the mundane. With two prominent exceptions--Marxists and Catholics who deplored respectively the rise of capitalism and secularization, substantival commentary tended to the consistently approv-ing. Worries about the methodological grounding of engaged modes of criticism have accom-panied it for a long time. The most consistent and convincing presentation of a nonformalist but at the same time disengaged approach to the history of philosophy was set out in an in-fluential essay by Quentin Skinner, "Meaning and Understand in the History of Ideas," and in subsequent publications. When Skinner wrote in 1969, he was dismayed by the historical technique of critics like Alan Bloom and Leo Strauss who treated the canonical authors as though they were our in-structors, speaking to our social and political problems and qualified to address them in virtue of their textual longevity. Skinner argued from the perspective of a theory of
meaning based in communicative intentions that what a past writer could properly be taken to have said or accomplished was what he could properly be taken to have meant or done, and the success-conditions on the latter were to be understood in terms of the field of communicative possibilities within which the writer and his contemporaries were situated.
Let us term an attribution of X-ism, where "X-ism" was not a word of the language spoken by PP or by his contemporaries, a "technically anachronistic attribution" If an attri-bution of X-ism is technically anachronistic, it might seem to be impossible for X-ism to en-ter into a PP's communicative intentions or for their reception by an audience to involve an awareness of their implicit X-ism. For example, it would be technically anachronistic to de-scribe Heraclitus as an Existentialist, or Aristotle as a sexist. My argument is that we can deal perfectly well with such attributions even though they are technically anachronistic.

One reason we technically anachronistic attributions can be legitimate is that members of a population tend to vary in their attitudes towards the things we designate as so many X-isms well avant la lettre. Just as it is manifestly untrue that "everyone" in 18th Century France was homophobic, it is manifestly untrue that "no one" in 18th Century France was homophobic. Though certain opinions may be expressed more or less frequently, their fre-quency cannot influence their ascription conditions. The right conclusion to draw is that a PP can be correctly characterized as an X-ist, where X-ism that now has a name but did not in the PP's time, provided two conditions are met. First, it has to be possible to exhibit a spec-trum of opinions on the matters with which X-ism is concerned within which the PP has cho-sen to situate himself; the spectrum, not any particular belief on it, can serve as the interpre-tive background. There is reason to call Heraclitus an Existentialist and Aristotle a sexist if and only if the former had some distinguishing views that his contemporaries are supposed to have lacked or opposed concerning free-will, authenticity, bad faith and so on, and the latter has some distinguishing views about the inferiority of women that his contemporaries lacked or disputed. Since this condition is satisfied for Aristotle but not for Heraclitus, the techni-cally anachronistic attribution can be correct in the Aristotle's case but not Heraclitus's.

There is a necessary asymmetry, Skinner argues, between the significance an observer sees in an action and the significance the agent performing it could see when it was performed. The "mythology of prolepsis" involves conflating these two, as happens when Plato or Rousseau is assigned "responsibility" for the emergence of authoritarian state. Neither could not have taken steps to prevent extreme interpretations and applications of his doctrines, so it is not clear how either could be responsible even partly for the emergence of the authoritarian state. But suppose that some modern dictator is inspired by The Republic to divide his populace into gold, silver, and bronze people, to introduce eugenic marriage, and so on. It would be difficult to avoid assigning Plato with some responsibility for the outcome. If A writes a book about how to build an atomic bomb that expresses the view that a bomb is a desirable thing to build, and B reads it and builds one, A is certainly somewhat responsible for poor outcomes, even if A did not think about them at the time of her writing her manual.In any event, what a person means by an utterance goes beyond what the words mean in her individual idiolects or the data-sets that have helped her form her concepts, without ex-tending to all possible future applications of the term. It is tempting to try to produce coun-terfactuals to establish what was meant, but in the end, these do not shed much light. If Plato were exhumed and brought back to life, what would he make of the KGB? Would Aristotle have accepted inter-racial marriage or co-education? Who knows? We cannot "find" the modern counterparts of the PPs amongst real or imagined characters, or if we claim to, this is a purely subjective exercise. Describing a PP as an X-ist maybe consistent, but is not always fully consistent, with understanding him in his own terms.

Skinner is surely right to say that criticism of the PPs for their omissions may be funda-mentally confused, and haranguing the dead does not improve their characters. But are his remarks as telling against philosophers engaged in substantival criticism as they might seem? Are not
the latter those who, properly, have refused to be instructed? For we can agree that the vector of the instructional relation cannot in any case point from the dead to the living. But for the substantival critic, our passively absorbing from the dead is not in question; rather, we living ones need to demonstrate, not that they fail to see our world as it is, but that they failed even to see their own world as it was. The rationale for criticizing the past phi-losopher is not to instruct him; we can agree that we shall neither instruct him nor be in-structed by him. Nevertheless, there is an asymmetry in the communicative possibilities; for we can speak to their world and their perception of it, as they cannot speak to ours. To say that Locke "omitted" or "failed to see" something he did not care about or was not interested in is not to say that, given his actual dispositions and interests in his milieu, there is some re-markable oddity in his not having seen it, but that his not caring about it and not being inter-ested in it were symptoms of a kind of blindness.

The discipline of philosophy appears to have an intrinsic and significant antimoral component that invites correction. This claim might seem strange: indeed the opposite is supposed to be true. What is it about philosophy that should give it intrinsically antimoral tendencies? The answer is that philosophers have historically tried to explain what they ob-served without having sufficient information to be able to give correct explanations. Ex-plaining arrangements that are unjust substitutes illusion for truth. The drive to understand and explain observed states of affairs and historical trends, easily passes over in the philosophical mind into the drive to explain and understand their necessity or suitability; the PPs appear to suffer from the "just world" illusion described by social psychologists to an exceptional degree. To explain a phenomenon when it is common, ancient, or widespread is to bring it within what might be called the ordinary course of nature, or even to regard it as divinely certified. And what happens necessarily or for reasons of higher fittingness does not seem to be an appropriate object of moral criticism. The PPs-at least the ones who are most revered-look for fundamental explanations. In this they proceed very differently than the general historian or the scientist. The former is aware how much happens by chance, for no fundamental reason. The latter is aware that the real causes of things are for the most part too small or too hidden to be appreciated by anyone without spe-cial equipment. The explanations of social phenomena produced by philosophers, as Bacon recognized, are confabulatory, coherent stories woven from a bare minimum of data. But that is one of the hallowed intellectual roles of the producers. It is their ability to confabulate, above all, their ability to systematize without microscopes, telescopes, and statistical methods that their readers admire. The PPs are, to be sure, critical of knowledge gathering procedures and they have genuinely ethical views. But when the explanatory urge takes over, their scientific caution and their ethics retreat from the scene.
 

The PPs were trying to explain the fixed or recurring patterns, amongst them, patterns of social dominance, that they saw about them without the benefit of specialized knowledge, and without appealing to contingency. They cannot be judged negatively for failing to per-form some other task, such as the task of explaining social phenomena in empirical terms, that they were not trying to perform and that no one at the time knew could be performed. But it does not follow that passages such as those quoted earlier should be left alone, uncollated, unread, uncommentated upon. Indeed Skinner's demand that reconstruction be sensitive to the PP's intended project can be satisfied by well-researched substantival commentary. We commentators can explain clearly what the PP's were trying to do in their own terms and why they considered their justificatory accounts of social oppression intellectually presentable.

So, we may, without violating reasonable constraints on anachronistic attribution and without violating reasonable methodological norms for the historiography of philosophy, write down evaluative formulas like "Aristotle was a sexist." Such remarks have principally an admonitory, not a correctional function; they are addressed to our contemporaries and our successors who might be unaware of the ideological aspects of their justificatory theories, not to Aristotle. If they seem irritating, this is perhaps because their truth is uncontroversial. What, after all, were you expecting (as Epicurus used to ask.)? Did you think that Aristotle was not a philosopher? Did you think that philosophy was not philosophy?

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rhodri@mercury.ubc.ca

Architectural Post...Modernism Architecture and especially the typologies of public cultural and commercial buildings have been customarily regarded as among the clearest evidence of a postmodern condition. In particular the reemergence of historical referencing, the play on iconic association or its supposedly ironic/parodic use, the assertion of contextual or localised relevance, and the invocation of textual and theoretical fabrics have been advanced as indication of a changed architectural cultural consciousness. However more rigorous interrogation of specific buildings and theoro-critical claims categorised as being postmodern--notably the Vancouver Public Library and several commercial buildings by Paul Merrick and Richard Henriquez in Vancouver--reveals the existence of continuities as well as reactive reconfigurations of modernist practice. Besides problems of legitimacy and genealogy of architectural ideas, is the larger question of the nature of Modern Movement architecture ( setting aside the very diverse definition of Modernism in the arts let alone in wider areas of inquiry): the diversity of its original formulation especially with reference to the promulgation of concepts of functionalism, standardisation and universality. Allied are the patterns of development around the various theoretical positions adopted by those adhering to its tenets, and the revision, repositioning and internal reflexivity (to the professional discourse). For example, an early instance of parodic or ironic iconographic referencing exists in a paradigmatic building in the British Modernist canon, namely Highpoint 2 by the internationally trained, London-based firm of TECTON. The cantilevered reinforced concrete entrance to the block of apartments was 'supported' by copies of ancient caryatid figures. By contrast the plan and public visage of the Vancouver Public Library are generally interpreted as demonstrating the architects' (Moshe Safdie with Downs Archambault) intent of imitating the Roman Colosseum. In fact the formulation of the design derives from other motives that include strategies more usually related to Modern Movement process. Additionally the structural solution extends rather than disrupts Modernist conventions as is the case with most buildings held to be postmodern. This points to an essential --if the pun be forgiven -- problem with the epistemology of post-modernity. The generative factors, from the financial to technical, have persisted to a greater degree than previously presumed. A comparable example would be the assertion of a post-industrial economy meaning in reality a geo-socially shifted economy; we still depend on manufactures but increasingly pay distant others to undertake the work and difficulties involved and expend increasing amounts less immediately industrial objects and services. Nor is it quite so evident that a fundamental break has occurred in the zeitgeist--still an aspect of the ontology summoned up in the theorising of the postmodern. Clearly very significant changes have occurred involving the validity of Modern Movement claims and practice, but more attention needs to be directed to the (mis)appropriation and discontents of Modernism, not least by the very forces of consumerist neo-liberalism with which ironically Postmodern architecture has become most associated.
 

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University of British Columbia
paul.yachnin@ubc.ca

Position Statement

         The first question is, what kind of thing is this?

Over the past 25 years, forms of literary criticism, based on a number of theorists, especially Foucault, have focused on the operations of power and have tended to fold literature into those operations as only one more social practice, mode of power, or form of discourse. The postmodern renovation of literary studies has now run its course. At this juncture, I would like to highlight how postmodern criticism has tended to flatten the affective and ethical dimension of literature, how it has treated literary writing as if it were of a piece with non-literary writing and with social practices in general, and how indeed it has failed to reveal the political operations of literature by failing to come to terms with the discursive and social specificity of literary writing. It mistakes the kind of thing that it has to deal with.

What follows? Not, to be sure, a return to the kind of idealized reading practices recommended by an eminent “ex-theoretical” critic such as Frank Lentricchia. Rather, what is needed is an excavation beneath the ramshackle structure of political criticism in search of the ethical foundations that have always served in fact to sustain our keen interest in “power.” This is not to turn away from the political dimension, but rather first to come to terms with the ethical investments of the discipline of literary studies, investments which are connected to the kind of writing literature is and the kind of affective and ethical claims it makes on its readers. First, we should take fully into account what kind of thing literature is (that the nature of literature and readerly response is embedded in history does not free us from the task); then we can ask (as one question among many), how is literature related to the operations of power?

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Zimmerman, Jens

Trinity Western University                                                          

jensz@twu.ca
 

Neohumanist Manifesto

Norman Klassen and Jens Zimmermann

In many different ways, whether in secular or religious terms, people have pursued essentially the same goal of affirming what they thought it meant to be fully human. Thus our central argument for Neohumanism is that the history of both secular and religious traditions in the West in their development from modern to postmodern thought can be grasped most fully as the attempt to formulate the dignity of the human in philosophical and theological scholarship and embody it in ecclesiastical and social practices. What we need is a picture of what it means to be human that brings into focus the different primary contemporary concerns and indicates their relatedness and importance for the life of the mind. The recent years of intellectual development have increasingly emphasised the political. This development has not, as one might think, strengthened the self as agent but rather has evacuated the ethical substance which ought to inform political action. Without at least a sense of what it means to be human, politics degenerates into cynical hedging and reaction rather than offering creative, proactive engagement with reality.

Recent philosophical developments have sensed the vacuity of reactionary politics which tend to erect or be co-opted by totalitizing political visions. One obvious example of such totalizing politics has been Hitler's nationalist vision, which succeeded as a reaction to thoughtless reparation policies and occurred with the blessing and support of German intellectuals who espoused Nietzsche's maxim of God's death and the end of metaphysics. We want to encourage a picture of humans as agents in a web of relationships first and foremost; and to encourage confidence that can only come as we simultaneously accept responsibility for our actions. We can act in ways that are better than others and that means we need to talk about ethics.

It was the horrors in which Hitler's vision culminated that gave birth to the desire to put ethics first in philosophy. Unlike more narrowly political intellectual developments in the sixties, this one did not shy away from the language of metaphysics. The Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas suggested that the Bible needed to be rewritten in Greek. He meant that the biblical concepts that established human dignity needed to be articulated in the conceptual language of the Western philosophical tradition. Thinkers like him and Martin Buber, a Jewish theologian, recognized that only if there is an ethical demand prior to political action, a demand which makes the dehumanization of our fellow human beings impossible, can we avoid the conclusion that political and utilitarian considerations outweigh our dignity as human beings. Postmodern philosophers, particularly those in the philosophical movement called deconstruction, recognise the religious impulse behind the ethical imperative. Old Nietzschean affinities, however, offended by such theological grounding of the ethical, result in the attempt to circumvent the religious implications in various ways.

Neohumanism calls for a recognition of the religious as crucial, not incidental. At the very least, we feel that the onus is back on those who show no indication that they have examined their atheistic assumptions and blindly follow caricatures of the Christian traditions perpetrated by its disappointed stepchildren, whose numbers include: an apologist impelled to doubt (Descartes), a philosopher eager to escape the burning lense of Pietist self-examination and emotionalism (Kant), a frustrated son of a Lutheran Pastor (Nietzsche), a theologian capitulating to the scientific worldview of a mechanistic universe (Bultmann). Our problem is with those of their modern-day heirs who use an easily acquired, popularized atheism as an excuse to avoid the challenge posed by the current ethical turn. With its challenges and promises, the bracing contemporary intellectual environment requires a strong commitment to serious thinking in both philosophy and theology rather than reliance on caricatures. Unexamined assumptions about theology too often serve as a crutch for sceptics to ignore roughly half a century of theological scholarship. Neohumanism grows out of the recognition that we require metaphysics in order to embrace the ethical demand and recover its significance for politics and a more comprehensive sense of what it means to be human.

The challenge of dialogue with atheism aside, the time is ripe to reconfigure modern Christian consciousness. We are historically well placed to consolidate many of the crucial (sometimes alarming and often disparate) insights offered by the postmodern critique of modernity's humanisms, all of which are based on an individualistic human self - this is true for the church as well as for secular Enlightenment culture. Theologically, of course we cannot dismiss the diverging traditions in Christian thought, but in the spirit of ecumenism we wish to affirm what unites us, and find our desire to articulate neohumanism crystallising around the twin theological peaks of the Incarnation and the Trinity. In recognition of our situatedness, we acknowledge our Protestantism, but much of our encouragement comes from catholic theology. Much of what we want to affirm theologically has been undertaken recently by a loosely-knit group called Radical Orthodoxy, a group within Anglicanism that has fuller ties with Roman Catholicism and includes many Roman Catholics. We do not so much see our project as different from theirs as recognise that we have a different starting point and in the first instance probably write for a different audience, one posited by our own experience growing up and being trained in Protestant and evangelical churches and institutions.

We write for disaffected Protestants, for "post-evangelicals," for the children of parents they now see as fundamentalists, for people more comfortable with the term "believer" than even "Christian," for people interested in one catholic and apostolic church, for people who sense the reverence and the power of traditional and liturgical practices they know all too little about. We also write for those who share our interest in the human but have no background in or inclination towards the church, for those who question the simplistic atheism they have inherited, for activists willing to take the time to read something dedicated to providing theoretical points of reference, for those who question the orthodoxies of the post-Christian university world, for those looking for ways to achieve unity who see the poverty of global capitalism and "spirituality" alike.

Neohumanism is constituted by the following affirmations:

1. Reason is apophantic rather than apodictic. Apodicticity is utter and complete clarity. We don't get that, ever. What we do get is an unfolding sense of disclosure, a partial and constantly shifting clarity that helps us to understand our situation, but without the confidence that we can make totalising predictions as a result. That's apophansis. We affirm human rationality as part of God's image in us. Reason is our ability to reflect on our existence; reason, however, is not a mere intellectual activity that promises direct and pure access to absolute truth - such is the privilege of God, but we are not God. God himself is not Pure Reason; God is relational through and through. The two key doctrines of Christianity, the Trinity and the Incarnation, illustrate this description: the one celebrating the mystery of relationship in the divine; the other affirming the possibility of relationship in every sphere and between spheres.

 

Reason is primarily the means by which we know that we do not know and the means by which we enjoy our world. It includes our emotions. Reason never stands alone and is not the cool centre of our being apart from our emotions, apart from others or from the past. Rational reflection depends on personal motives and cultural and educational influences. Reason is not a set of ready-made assumptions about or interpretations of reality which
somehow float unchangingly and eternally in the heavens, just waiting to be discovered; instead reason is our reflective ability and our rational interpretations of reality as shaped by the books we read, the people we grow up with, the culture we live in and the language(s) we speak. To think rationally is already to think in dialogue with other human beings and with traditions that are older and greater than ourselves. Reason is not beholden to politics. It is potentially universal, though its apophantic character means that we never have complete clarity as individuals or collectively. Toleration is always required. And humility. They always will be.

2. Reality, for humans, is textual. Neohumanism affirms traditional humanism's interest in texts and seeks to combine it with one of the most important developments in ideas in the twentieth century, the so-called linguistic turn. With traditional humanism, we believe that texts help us develop our ability to think, enable communication with others, and contribute to the ethical life by providing moral instruction and examples (including examples of complexity and moral ambiguity). What is a text? Hundreds of years ago it would have meant a precious manuscript or a book off a newfangled printing press, or perhaps a letter. Now it can mean all of these, or a dvd, or a commercial, or a bodily gesture, or a voice: any human expression that intentionally or unintentionally carries meaning. Just as reason is situated (not the cool, detached centre of our being), so too texts similarly participate in a cultural linguistic context. In this sense, nothing is outside text.

In our current climate, the emphasis on politics encourages the healthy suspicion that texts may serve as vehicles for political power; unfortunately, some have concluded that this is all texts do. Neohumanism, by contrast, takes the view that language is both a vehicle of expression and also determines our interpretations of reality. To say that language shapes our reality may seem bizarre, yet from earliest childhood we learn language in a community setting and actually think in the concepts we acquire through our formal and informal education.

 The term Dichtung, borrowed from German literary and philosophical history, tries to encapsulate this powerful twofold effect of language. The German term can stand for both poetry and prose, two categories we sometimes use to represent a divided reality: reason versus emotion, fact versus fiction, faith versus reason, private versus public spheres of human activity and thought. Dichtung suggests that these splits are problematic, because these categories are much more interwoven than we often assume. In German thought, the term Dichtung is thus employed to label both fiction (even autobiographical life stories such as Goethe's Dichtung und Wahrheit, an example whose play on the words Fiction and Truth most clearly demonstrates the view that we inscribe our reality through language) and poetry. Neohumanism adopts Dichtung in its broadest sense as a linguistic expression of the human desire to understand that which is greater than ourselves, the ground and the beyond of our being; Dichtung in this sense gathers all such attempts at letting the word speak, including the logos of philosophy, under the umbrella of the humanities.

To apply this to politics specifically, Dichtung as an expression of human rationality and its desire for meaning-making also shows the falsity of a public-private split. Every private story or interpretation is already conditioned by the social linguistic realm and also becomes public when put into words which may shape the public linguistic domain in turn. Thus interpretive work is not restricted to the philological work or close reading of texts on which it nonetheless depends. Not merely texts but human stories, including their full philosophical import, which converge as the story of humanity, are the subject of interpretation. Neohumanism contests postmodernity's rejection of metanarratives as inhuman, because every personal or communal narrative is held with universal intent and presupposes a metanarrative. Ultimately, human identity and meaning are grounded metaphysically because of our dependence on stories for making sense of reality. In this sense, religion is of crucial importance for human existence because it provides us with stories that not merely lend meaning to life but without which we wouldn't have meaning at all. Just as the death of God or gods entails the death of the human, so too the death of the metanarrative entails the death of all narratives.

3. A human being is an agent, doing things before reflecting on them. So far we have talked about human rationality, we have developed a sense of our embeddedness in history and language. But what about individual human beings, our human selves: what do we mean when we say "I do this" or "I think that"? If we assume the word individual or self to mean that we are self-contained entities, we are gravely mistaken. If we think that we begin our contact with reality from a neutral ground to which we retreat and enter into negotiations with other human beings only when we want or need to, again: we are very wrong about our human nature. Over time, philosophy has increasingly put an emphasis on the individual. As so often, the intention behind this development was good. Philosophers tried to loosen the bonds of authority structures and rigid traditions. The self, the thinking self, promised a refuge from warring religious and political agendas. Rather than beginning from history or from any supposed revelation outside of ourselves, human consciousness became the starting point for all knowledge. It is, of course, understandable that thinkers tried to get away from the contingent, ever changing, and thus unreliable realm of history and human relations to the sphere of the mind. Linked to universal reason, the self reduced to the sphere of the thinking, reflecting self, mind holds out the promise of agreement and unity, the place of eternal verities where every conflict and difference is laid to rest.

 

While this view was in fact developed and embraced by Christian philosophers, it goes against the biblical portrayal of the human being as an agent in the world, as someone who does things. Reflection, as important as it is, is the negative aspect of the our nature as agents in relation. The Old Testament offers an experiential and relational nature of reality proffered. We are persons in community with others rather than reflective islands. To be fully human or, to use biblical language, to be righteous, is to uphold and embody the laws that foster community. Here individuals are described as whole persons (mind and body) acting in the world. Not the mind, but agency comes first. While the emphasis on the life of the mind and its abstraction from reality fosters a spirit of self-centeredness, the Jewish notions of covenant righteousness assumes the existence of other human beings and puts their interest first. Christian tradition has further developed the basic Jewish insight into the relational nature of our being in terms of the doctrine of the Trinity.

The emphasis of Western thought on the isolated thinking mind as the essence of human being is thus dehumanising. It encourages isolation and it discourages acknowledgement of our dependence on one another. Paradoxically, while the model of the reflective mind strove towards independence and freedom, it actually marooned us on the solipsistic island of the reflecting mind. All of a sudden we are required to build a bridge to other islands. We suggest that such a metaphor is mistaken, that we are not individuals but persons. To be human is not to be a reflective consciousness but a person in relation. Reflection is important and necessary but it is a secondary aspect of our actual personhood.

Neohumanism is "new" in the sense that it is a re-articulation for our times of what it means to be human. It remains a "humanism" in the classical sense in that it advocates rationality, textuality, and the importance of a coherent picture of what it means to be a human being. But while it draws on previous attempts to formulate humanism, it refuses to rest in their self-satisfaction of having arrived at a complete picture. Neohumanism takes its impulse from the most mysterious and central doctrines of Christianity - the Incarnation and the Trinity. Both attest a commitment to relationship. Traditional forms of humanism have sometimes caricatured Christianity as an intolerant system of revealed and absolute truth, a caricature often intensified in postmodernism. Viewed more charitably, the Christian tradition provides the richest resource for tolerance, difference, mystery, and an appreciation of the complexity of reality without sacrificing meaning, responsibility, and hope. The human being as created in the image of the Trinity offers the best source for the relational nature of our personhood, and the Incarnation reaffirms our humanity. Here eternity and the historical merge in an affirmation of the human - both its grandeur and its fallenness - and our relation both to God and to one another.

 

We hope it is clear that we are very much aware of the failures of Christianity in its attempts to guide or to temper or to engage other aspects of culture. As Christians trying to engage our culture and to encourage a common focus on the enigma of our shared humanity, we are neither triumphalist nor embattled. Rather, we enjoy life and we want to affirm it in its ambiguity and complexity. We also want to celebrate it in its ordinariness by taking it up into something greater than itself that validates it, which is perhaps the greatest paradox of all.

 
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