One of the standard responses to postmodernism is to point out the self-contradictory nature of it all. Incredulity to the naive belief that truth can be ascertained through words is an incredulity that reached us all via words. And when ordinary people point this out (har, har), the response is usually an urbane and sophisticated one, pointing out that postmodernism cannot be reduced to such simplistic analysis, and, even if wrong, their arguments should be engaged on their own terms. Now there is no doubt that the pomo philosophers do have lots of nuance up there on the whiteboard, and that they can make their Ptolemaic epicycles whizz right along. They do have the mark of real philosophers who (according to Voltaire) could talk about something neither of you understand and still make it feel like it was your fault. But, to radically change the metaphor, no matter how thin you slice it, it’s still baloney. The common sense, street-level critique is exactly right on. Postmodernism cannot account for itself.
Because of this, I am not going to spend a lot of time on Grenz’ chapter on the three major postmodern theorists — Foucault, Derrida, and Rorty. I’ll just deal with each one briefly, simply to again express my amazement that anyone takes this stuff seriously.
“In California Foucault gave free reign to his homosexual impulses. In the spring of 1975 he plunged passionately into San Francisco’s gay community, attracted especially by the consensual sado-masochistic eroticism that flourished in a number of bathhouses in the Bay City at that time” (p. 125). Consensual S&M? Weenie. Piker. Slacker. Bad faither. WalMart nihilist.
Foucault was all about showing us the seamy underside of Bacon’s dictum that knowledge is power. Knowledge, Foucault tells us, is violence. “And because modern scholarship assumes that knowledge is neutral, he says, the proponents of ‘true discourse’ remain blind to the will to power that pervades their own scholarly endeavors. In this manner, modern scholarship actually masks the truth rather than reveals it” (p. 135). According to postmodernism, Enlightenment philosophers, manage to mask the truth that isn’t there to be masked. Quite a trick.
“Central to postmodernism is the attempt to unmask the falsehood — the false claim to be ‘natural’ or ontologically valid — that underlies every ‘given’ order” (p. 137). The pomos are unmasking the falsehood that there is natural validity. This, in addition to their great accomplishment of unmasking the falsehood that there is such a thing as falsehood. I saw a rubber man acrobat on television once.
“In Derrida’s attack on language, his mentor is Heidegger [the Nazi — dw] — or, to be more precise, Nietzsche as read by Heidegger” (p. 147). Yes, but there was nothing in Derrida’s attack on language, or Heidegger’s for that matter, that could not have been remedied by an editor with a firm hand, healthy convictions, and a good supply of red pens.
And Grenz quotes Rorty as saying this: “In the end, the pragmatists [Rorty’s version of pomo] tell us, what matters is our loyalty to other human beings clinging together against the dark, not our hope of getting things right” (p. 157). That’s what matters? Why? Who says? Is telling us that loyalty is “what matters” a version of “getting things right?” If not, why do it? If so, then would somebody please make these people sit down?