CHAPTER 4

POSTMODERNITY

QUESTION 44

Now we’re moving on to post-modernity. Postmodern and poststructuralist thinkers have presented perhaps the most critical commentaries on the most basic and central assumptions of the West, from Baudrillard’s ‘simulacra’ to Derrida’s ‘deconstruction’ to Foucault’s ‘disciplines’ to Lyotard’s ‘incredulity towards metanarratives’. And yet they come from within the West. Do you find any of their work helpful? What do they retain that leaves them always too Western to be helpful to our present situation?

Misgeld It’s going to be easier to answer that, because I don’t have much expertise here. I have not really worked through post-modernism and post-structuralism enough to be able to comment very much, and that’s taken a very different direction. The position I find the best is Derrida’s, and also what comes through in Foucault’s essay “What is Enlightenment.” I find the formulation ‘incredulity toward meta-narratives’ to be dishonest. It is impossible to just practice incredulity. The meta-narratives are there. I mean, we may not like what Mr. Bush does with democracy, but the meta-narrative of democracy is all around us. You can’t just escape it by saying “I practice incredulity.” It takes a lot of work to escape that. Lyotard I don’t think has done that. I think he is the least interesting, and as a philosopher, not equal to Derrida, or to Foucault as a historian. Derrida says there’s always an ambivalence, that we have not escaped the Western tradition. Recall the metaphor of indebtedness to the metaphysical tradition, such as Heidegger. Deconstruction means to be situated in it while discovering its fissures and all these fancy words that they have that I do not use, and do not want to use. But there’s no secure ground. If there’s no secure ground then you can never put the history of metaphysics in front of you as an object and say “oh, there’s metaphysics and I’m no longer part of it.” That doesn’t work. Metaphysics of the Western tradition, or Enlightenment, whatever it is, you’re still in it. And even I think that holds for feminist critiques when the Enlightenment is seen as kind of a masculinist project. Well, wherever there is critical thinking and critique there is enlightenment. The tradition of the enlightenment is about that. So I wouldn’t say that even those kinds—let’s say radical feminist critiques—fully escape it. My former student Stella Gaon, in her wonderful thesis on Derrida and rationality says that there is

135 CHAPTER 4 need for decision with respect to meaning, because meaning is not ready made. That is, you cannot decisively say I am no longer part of the Western discussions about rationality when you are discussing rationality, no matter how critically or skeptically you are developing techniques to move out from under some of the central concepts such as reason. There’s always something that will cling to you. It’s not as if the boundaries are fixed. I think the incredulity toward meta-narratives claims that there can be something that has been very present in the history of the West, turning into something that we can clearly distance one’s self from. Same of the way Foucault speaks in his essay on Kant’s essay “What is Enlightenment.” We are still part of the Enlightenment even as we try to turn against it. So that, I think, is the real achievement of post-structuralism: to unsettle certainties equally its own. But many people, especially North Americans, have had a tendency to turn this into something too handy. I mean you can go to conferences and say “here’s a critique of the Enlightenment,” and “we stand for something new, we no longer stand for modernity.” I think postmodern is much more intricate than that. And postmodernism is a dimension of modernity. It’s not like a full-fledged alternative. In fact I don’t think we have any. The reason I don’t particularly pay attention to that is because I don’t find reading these texts to be helpful. I’ve read quite a bit of Foucault, and I’ve read some Derrida, but I find it difficult—often too repetitive. But I may not have been patient enough. I was impressed by a text by a British poststructuralist, a social and political theorist very close to Derrida who said that we now have to move toward the social sciences and social studies more than we have. I don’t recall his name; I’ve taken that turn a long time ago. I really don’t find excessive theorizing helpful with respect to what you would call our present situation. Nor very literary, very elegant complex essays on terrorism and anti-terrorism. The charge of “terrorism” is used to a hurt people, and I’m very interested in very practical ways to respond to that. I’m not interested in high theorizing. I do know who the major terrorists are, and usually they are in very powerful positions. But discourse in itself doesn’t change that. Getting a lot of people to protest doesn’t change that. I don’t think that post-modern concepts have that capacity. In fact, that’s something I dislike about post-structuralism—it’s just too verbose. People don’t seem to have any sense of the limits of words. They put long strings of complicated vocabulary together. I doubt that helps. But I’m very prejudiced there. And I do want to read things like this latest Derrida text on this, Rogues, The Democracy to Come.1 I’ve begun reading that and I gave up. He seems to use so many words to say the same thing. Actually, I stand to that, now that I have worked through the book. It is quite useless when you have an interest in the issues as one encounters them in the real world, in our present everyday political life. But again I may be too impatient. There is something I like about him. Foucault is very different. Foucault you get so much material. Let’s say, The History of Sexuality or Discipline and Punish—I find very instructive texts. I enjoyed reading those. I’ve learned something from them. With Derrida I never know—do I learn something or not? But, again, I probably need to struggle with that a little more.

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