Deconstruction and the 'Unfinished Project of Modernity'

Christopher Norris

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000143454
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia moderna

Through a close engagement with some key thinkers, Norris argues that deconstruction is part of the "unfinished project of modernity." a project whose interest and values it upholds by continuing to question them in a spirit of enlightened self-critical inquiry.

CHAPTER 1
Deconstruction versus Postmodernism: epistemology, ethics, aesthetics

I

First I want to raise some matters of definition, since these terms -'Modernism', 'Postmodernism and 'Deconstruction' — are used with very different senses in a range of different contexts so there is a need for clarification. Many years ago, in the 1920s, Arthur Lovejoy suggested a moratorium on use of the term 'Romanticism' because this word had been applied to so many periods, genres, styles, or movements of thought that it was now causing great confusion.¹ I think there may likewise be a case for ceasing to talk about 'Postmodernism' and even, perhaps, about 'Modernism' until we can sort out the different historical, philosophical, and more broadly socio-cultural senses that get attached to those terms. So what I want to do now is introduce a few distinctions that will perhaps make it possible to discuss these matters more usefully.

Part of the problem is that we cannot begin to define 'Postmodernism' until we have some reasonably clear working notion of what 'Modernism' means, and this term is itself subject to just as many variant usages, depending on one's scope of historical perspective or range of disciplinary interests. Literary critics and theorists have a fairly good idea of what they mean by Modernism: it is a movement that began in the early twentieth century, more particularly during the years just after the First World War. It applies to certain fictional and poetic devices, modes of writing, experimental procedures, the use of spatial form, stream-of-consciousness, the predominance of metaphor, striking juxtapositions of image and style as in Ulysses or 'The Waste Land', techniques of multiple narrative consciousness, the unreliable narrator, all kinds of highly self-conscious formal and aesthetic innovation.² Music critics also have a pretty fair idea of what they mean by musical Modernism. In brief, it would include the early expressionist and the later atonal, serial or twelve-note music of Schoenberg and his Viennese disciples; middle-period (neoclassical) Stravinsky and other such gestures of revolt against nineteenth-century Romanticism; more complex or challenging techniques of development, formal structure, harmonic progression, etc.; in other words, as Ezra Pound famously said, the desire to 'make it new' at all costs and throw off the dead weight of inherited tradition.³ So, to this extent, musical and literary critics have a good working grasp of what 'Modernism' means for their particular descriptive or classificatory purposes. Much the same can be said of those movements in painting and the visual arts — from Cubism to Abstract Expressionism — which marked a very conscious and deliberate break with previous generic conventions, and to which the term 'modernist' is routinely applied by art-historians and critics.

However, if you look at how philosophers and intellectual historians use that term, you will find a very different range of meanings and associations. For some, the emergence of a 'philosophic discourse of modernity' dates back to the seventeenth century and Descartes's attempt to provide a new foundation for philosophy in his famous declaration 'cogito ergo sum' (Ί think, therefore I am'), conceived as an absolute, indubitable ground of knowledge.⁴ This was the upshot of his famous experiment in self-imposed radical doubt. Thus I might try to call everything into question by systematically doubting the existence of an external world, or of other minds, or the difference between waking and dreaming 'reality', or that between a sane (undeluded) knowledge of my own physical constitution and the mad idea that my head is made of glass. Perhaps I am the victim of an evil demiurge -Descartes' malin genie — who enjoys nothing more than fooling me in just such ways. (Present-day philosophers have updated Descartes's thought-experiment by asking how I can possibly know that I am not a brain in a vat kept alive with a constant supply of chemical nutrients and induced to believe in all the details of my 'real-world', everyday existence through a range of artificial stimuli programmed by a mad but super-intelligent computer scientist.) Yet one thing of which I can be certain — since to deny it would be plainly absurd - is that I must exist as thinker of the thought Ί think, therefore I am, And from this point — so Descartes maintained -one could proceed to rebuild the foundations of an objectively-existent (mind-independent) world whose reality could no longer be taken for granted in a straightforward, commonsense way.

Thus modernity in this sense - philosophical modernity — begins with the idea that knowledge stands in need of some grounding principle or bedrock assurance proof against the challenge of sceptical doubt. Then again, moving on a couple of centuries, one might date the emergence of 'true' philosophical modernity with Kant and his hugely ambitious attempt to provide a transcendentally justified account of the various human faculties, that is to say, cognitive understanding, practical reason, aesthetic judgement, and reason in its 'pure or speculative modes.⁵ Indeed it can be argued that a great many subsequent debates — about truth, knowledge, ethics, aesthetics, the status of the human or social vis-a-vis the natural sciences — have their origin in various readings of Kant. So Modernism, in this context, is an attempt to define the scope, the powers and the limits of the various human faculties of knowledge, reason, and judgement. For many philosophers, at least those working in the broadly continental tradition, this would be one of the defining moments of modernity, the philosophic discourse of modernity, a discourse that has continued (though some might wish to reject or deny it) right down to the present day.

One of the most resourceful defenders of that tradition is the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas who stands directly in the line of descent from Kant, Habermas continues to distinguish the various modalities of understanding, practical reason, aesthetic judgement, etc., since he thinks it very important - not least on ethico-political grounds — to avoid mixing them up in the typical 'postmodernist' fashion.'⁶ However he does not entirely endorse Kant's way of thinking about these issues but in stead seeks to give them a more pragmatic, discursive, or linguistic turn. Thus Habermas talks about the ideal speech-situation' as a kind of implicit understanding or regulative idea that is built into all our communicative acts, our social life-forms and structures of political representation.⁷ Nevertheless, in his writing there is still a strong commitment to Kantian or Enlightenment values, to what he calls 'the unfinished project of modernity'. Habermas thinks it vital to conserve that critical impulse because the only way that we can work towards a more just, equitable, truly democratic society is by keeping our sights fixed upon the possibility of achieving an enlightened consensus, in Kant's phrase a sensus communis. This is not just common sense under a fancy name, not just a kind of de facto, pragmatic agreement on certain matters of belief or value commitments. Rather, it is the idea of agreement arrived at through an enlightened, democratic, participant exchange on issues of shared concern for humanity. Whence Habermas's firmly-held belief that we can indeed communicate across cultural differences or conflicting ideas of moral, social, and political good; moreover, that despite those differences we can at least hope to achieve a broad consensus that may eventually resolve such localised disputes. This is a deeply Kantian viewpoint: enlightened, critical, progressive, aimed toward extending the 'public sphere' as far and as wide as possible.

So, to repeat: we need to keep in mind this distinction between, on the one hand, the cultural-aesthetic Modernist movement which emerged at a certain time, the early twentieth century, and was characterised by certain innovations of a chiefly formal and stylistic kind, and, on the other hand, the philosophic discourse of modernity which goes further back and which involves much larger claims.⁸ Now, I think we can draw some related distinctions between various uses of the term 'Postmodernism'. There is a sense of the term in which it figures as a broad, rather fuzzy, ill-defined cultural phenomenon. Such is Postmodernism as described by a culture-critic like Fredric Jameson who sees signs of it everywhere and who mostly - not always - likes what he sees.⁹ Jameson speaks as a Marxist, but a Marxist with distinctly postmodernist leanings. Even though these developments must be viewed as belonging to the 'cultural logic of late capitalism' - as revealing a thoroughly commodified system of cultural production/consumption — still they are the best (most representative) expressions of the stage now reached in that process. Thus, on Jameson's account, there is no point criticising, or rejecting, or deploring Postmodernism, as if one had some choice in the matter or as if one could simply opt out of it and adopt some alternative outlook. Jameson views postmodernism as a defining aspect of the way we live now: it affects our life-styles, our reading habits, our architectural surroundings, the way we listen to music, watch television, absorb the latest news of world events, respond to advertising. It is the element we inhabit, the sea we swim in, the very air we breath. It affects and pervades so many aspects of our life that it would be futile for us to declare ourselves 'against Postmodernism'. Jameson thinks that basically all we can do is say that there are some bits we like and some bits we don't like so much, or perhaps not at all. Thus, speaking for himself, he quite likes the architecture and some of the music, isn't so keen on a lot of the fiction that gets itself called 'postmodernist', but in the end thinks that these are matters of personal taste or individual predilection. After all, the whole idea of aesthetic judgement as appealing to shared (i.e., intersubjective or transindividual) criteria is just the sort of Kantian universalist argument that postmodernism has left far behind.

II

Clearly there is a measure of truth in all this. If you happen to enjoy postmodernist fiction, then I could not hope to persuade you otherwise, and indeed wouldn't want to since I disagree with Jameson in finding it (for the most part) witty, inventive, and intellectually rewarding. I might try a bit harder to change your mind if you profess to enjoy 'postmodern music, or the sorts of music that often get described that way: for instance, the music of minimalist composers such as Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Michael Nyman, and the 'holy minimalists' Arvo Part and John Tavener. Perhaps I would not really hope to dissuade you or to spoil your enjoyment by coming up with good reasons to think it bad music! On the other hand, I would want to say that the argument does not stop there. One can go beyond the stage of just saying 'I like it' or Ί don't like it', as for instance by remarking that much of this music is mind-numbingly banal and repetitive, that it offers no aural or intellectual challenge, requires no effort of structural grasp or ability to follow a complex pattern of harmonic, tonal, or rhythmic development. In other words, it does not do what music ought to do, that is, provoke and stimulate the listener by putting up resistance to facile or habitual, quasi-auto mated habits of response. Still, as I have said, Jameson has a point — though a limited point - when he adopts his take-it-or-leave-it line on the varieties of postmodern cultural taste. For eventually such arguments must have an end and give way to statements of individual preference, even if that stage comes later than Jameson thinks and allows for some worthwhile discussion along the way.

However, this is not the aspect of Postmodernism that I am chiefly concerned with here. There is another aspect, besides the broadly cultural-aesthetic, which I think is more open to criticism and which can be stated in the form of a few fairly basic propositions. This is 'philosophical' Postmodernism and it extends into ethics and politics, as well as into other areas like epistemology and philosophy of language. The position is set out by Jean-François Lyotard whose book The Postmodern Condition has been undoubtedly the single most widely read text on this topic.¹⁰ Lyotard argues that the philosophic discourse of modernity is now historically redundant since it has long been been overtaken by so many social, political, and cultural developments. Once upon a time, no doubt, it was possible to believe in all those splendid Enlightenment values: in truth, progress, universal justice, perpetual peace, the 'sensus communis', and so forth. Perhaps one could even believe, like Kant, that all the diverse human cultures were destined to transcend their parochial conflicts of interest and achieve some sort of federal world-state — the United Nations as an Idea of Reason, if you like. Such was at any rate the 'grand narrative' of Enlightenment thinking as Lyotard reads it. This narrative of course took different forms and emphasised different details of the story from one thinker to the next. There was the Kantian grand narrative of reason, democracy, the universal 'kingdom of ends as an ethical and socio-political ideal. After that came Hegel's dialectical conception of history as moving ever onward and up through stages of successive conflict and resolution to the point where Geist (Spirit or Mind) attained Absolute Knowledge and could thus write the book-to-end-all-books that was Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit.¹¹ Hegel is actually a better example than Kant of the kind of grand-narrative (or 'metanarrative') thinking that Lyotard hopes we have now left behind with the passage to our present postmodern condition. A meta-narrative is a story that wants to be more than just a story, that is to say, one which claims to have achieved an omniscient standpoint above and beyond all the other stories that people have told so far. There is also a Marxist metanarrative (or was until recently, Lyotard would say) which seeks to out-Hegel Hegel by inverting his idealist dialectic and introducing such ideas as economic determination 'in the last instance', 'forces and relations of production, the base/superstructure metaphor, and class-conflict as the driving force in history. Again, this argument is manifestly constructed on grand-narrative lines, since again it involves the assumption of an endpoint - following the short-term 'dictatorship of the proletariat' - at which time all conflicts of class-interest will somehow be transcended or resolved.

However, Lyotard says, we have to let go of these consoling illusions. We can no longer believe in the values that once characterized the Enlightenment project because, quite simply, we cannot ignore all the contrary evidence to date. That is, we have now been witness to so many wars, pogroms, bloody revolutions, counter-revolutions, post-revolutionary terrors, or resurgences of ethnic conflict that the old metanarratives (along with all their values of truth, progress, and universal justice) cannot be sustained unless through ignorance or sheer bad faith. We have seen the suppression of 'workers' democracy', of'socialism with a human face', and of every attempt to carry such principles into practice. We have seen what happened in East Germany (1953), in Hungary (1956), and in Czechoslovakia (1968); also what occurred in the Soviet Union during seven decades of (nominally) Communist rule. In other words, there are too many melancholy instances of failed revolutionary hope for us to believe any longer in those old grand narratives - whether Kantian, Hegelian, or Marxist - that placed their faith in the power of reason to extrapolate reliably from past to future events. So we should now abandon that faith, Lyotard thinks, and instead take the tolerant postmodern-pluralist view that there exist any number of'first-order natural pragmatic narratives', each of them having a right to express its own distinctive values, belief-system, or criteria for what should count as a 'truthful' or 'valid' statement. Moreover, we now have to recognize - as the one remaining principle of justice in a postmodern epoch — that these narratives are strictly incommensurable, that we should never presume to judge between them on grounds of justice or truth. For we are sure to commit an ethical wrong — an infraction of the narrative 'differend' — if we apply one set of criteria (i.e., our own) in order to criticize the practices or beliefs of others, or in order to adjudicate the issue between parties who may not (one or either of them) accept our terms of reference.¹² We have to accept the 'postmodern condition, that is, the fact (as Lyotard sees it) that we nowadays need to make sense of our lives in a context of multiple, open-ended, ever proliferating narratives and language-games. We tell many stories about ourselves, about history, philosophy, the human and the natural sciences, and of course about politics and the various lessons to be drawn from past and present political events. But the problem, Lyotard says, is that we have to respect the narrative differend and not make the error -the typical 'Enlightenment' error - of believing any one such story to possess superior truth-telling warrant.

Now, I take it that this is what 'Postmodernism' means in the more specific (philosophically articulated) sense of that term. At any rate it is useful, as a kind of preliminary ground-clearing exercise, to distinguish this from the other sense of the term which applies to such a range of otherwise disparate social and cultural phenomena that it becomes just a vague, all-purpose descriptor for 'the way we live now'. Up to a point I would agree with Jameson when he argues that one cannot reject or deplore postmodernism in this latter sense because, quite simply, there is too much of it around; it affects too many aspects of our lives. However one can, I think, mount a strong case against the kind of postmodernist thinking to be found in Lyotard and others of a similar doctrinal persuasion. One can argue that it is philosophically confused, that it carries some dubious ethical and socio-political implications, and moreover that it gives a very partial (at times a demonstrably false or distorted) account of so-called 'Enlightenment' thought.

III

Such is the case that I wish to defend in the rest of this chapter, having tried to establish some basic (albeit much-disputed) terms of reference. There are three main aspects of postmodernism, and they have to do with epistemology, ethics and aesthetics. These areas of concern were also central to Kant's critical enterprise, as likewise for the critical tradition in philosophy that has come down from Kant to present-day thinkers like Habermas and Karl-Otto Apel.¹³ Epistemology has to do with knowledge, with the scope, that is to say, the powers and the limits of humanly attainable knowledge. This is the realm of cognitive understanding - in Kant's very specific sense of that term - and its rule is that intuitions (sensuous or phenomenal intuitions) must be brought under adequate concepts. 'Intuitions without concepts are blind; concepts without intuitions are empty.'¹⁴ It is a question of what we can know or what we can legitimately claim to know. For Kant there were certain kinds of knowledge that were just unattainable: knowledge concerning such matters as freedom of will, the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Deconstruction versus Postmodernism: epistemology, ethics, aesthetics
• Chapter 2 Postmodern Ethics and the Trouble with Relativism
• Chapter 3 Deconstruction and the 'Unfinished Project of Modernity'
• Chapter 4 Deconstruction, Postmodernism and Philosophy of Science
• Chapter 5 'The Idea of the University': some interdisciplinary soundings
• Chapter 6 Ethics, Autonomy and Self-Invention: debating Foucault
• Chapter 7 'The Night in which All Cows are Black': Paul de Man, 'mere reading' and indifference to philosophy
• Chapter 8 Conflict, Compromise or Complementarity: ideas of science in modern literary theory
• Chapter 9 Sexed Equations and Vexed Physicists: the 'two cultures' revisited
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index