Dr. Charles Ess
Please review:
<http://www.drury.edu/info/departments/phil-relg/Modernity/Modern.html>
In particular, be sure to follow the links to the various comments by other philosophers regarding the postmodernists' characterizations of modernity. These reiterate one of my central contentions: the postmodernists' account of "modernity" within philosophy is seriously flawed. As a consequence, a significant portion of postmodernist critiques of "modernity" and efforts to build ostensibly alternatives are suspect from the outset as resting on a straw man account of "modernity" (indeed, of the Western tradition at large).
Ess, "Introduction to Habermas's Discourse Ethics"
This is a brief introduction to Habermas, one that has the advantage over the longer (paper) one I note below of providing links to additional resources, including the German Habermas specialist Antje Gimmler's introductory comments on Habermas, additional material on other contemporary representatives of "conversational ethics" (Rorty, Putnam, Rawls), and applications of these ethical approaches to real-world cases, including the dialogue on "Religious Perspectives on Abortion".
The abortion discussion proved to be very interesting, in part because Catholic and Protestant representatives in fact came to a Habermasian sort of consensus regarding a set of values which, alongside their common endorsement by members of both faith communities, allowed for a plurality of interpretation and application which preserves the irreducible differences between these communities.
(For a capsule summary of my take on postmodernism, see "Reason, Revolution, Relativism, and Reactionaries")
Library Reserve
Ess, "Enlightenment, Democracy, and Communicative Ethics: an Introduction to the Critical Theory of Juergen Habermas"
This is part of a longer chapter originally published in George Landow, ed., Hyper/Text/Theory, 225-276, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994. I address the Habermas/Foucault debate especially on pp. 19ff.
Kelly, Michael. Critique and Power: Recasting the Foucault/Habermas Debate. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994.
Kelly brings together a number of seminal primary texts in the dialogue/debate between Foucault and Habermas, as well as several critical observations of the debate offered by others.In particular, Jana Sawicki, in her "Foucault and Feminism: A Critical Reappraisal," points to Linda Alcoff, Barbara Christian, and Nancy Hartsock as sister feminists who - like Flax (and Habermas) - see postmodernism as undermining the grounds to which feminists may appeal (including the ground of an authentic self and its experience) in the project of liberation. While she is more positive about the value of Foucault's analyses as useful resources for feminists, she develops a nuanced approach which also recognizes their limits and possible dangers to the feminist project of liberation.
Annotated/"book blurb"/ToC Bibliography
General Readers
Natoli, Joseph and Linda Hutcheon. A Postmodern Reader. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1993.
The introduction provides an example of what I take to be a central flaw in much of what calls itself "postmodern":...these terms [moment, movement, project, condition, period] are used to describe a major (and usually a disturbing) shift away from modernity's universalizing and totalizing drive - a drive that was first fueled, in the seventeenth century, by Descartes' foundational ambitions and his faith in reason. Postmodernity's assertion of the value of inclusive "both/and" thinking deliberately contests the exclusive "either/or" binary oppositions of modernity. Postmodern paradox, ambiguity, irony, indeterminacy, and contingency are seen to replace modern closure, unity, order, the absolute, and the rational. (ix)
The editors are apparently blind to the irony of this claim - i.e., that postmodernism involves a shift from dualistic thinking to non-dualistic thinking, but the relationship between their version of modernity and postmodernity looks suspiciously...dualistic!
In addition, I will argue that the characterization offered here of modernity is badly flawed: it is a characterization that can only be sustained by someone who has not actually read, with care and reflection, the texts of modernity. As such, it becomes a caracature - and thus functions as a straw man in the arguments postmodernists seek to make against "modernity."
For that, there are assembled here any number of good things to read - including excerpts from Jane Flax (who critiques postmodernism on several levels, primarily out of her feminist commitments), Fredric Jameson, and Habermas's "Modernity versus Postmodernity" (91-104).
Habermas introduces here his typology of contemporary philosophical/political movements - including, most centrally, the "Young Conservatives, who
...recapitulate the basic experience of aesthetic modernity. They claim as their own the revelations of a decentered subjectivity, emancipated from the imperatives of work and usefulness, and with this experience they step outside the modern world. On the basis of modernistic attitudes, they justify an irreconcilable anti-modernism. They remove into the sphere of the far away and the archaic the spontaneous powers of imagination, of self-experience and of emotionality. To instrumental reason, they juxtapose in manichean fashion a principle only accessible through evocation, be it the will to power or sovereignty, Being of the dionysiac force of the poetical. In France this line leads from Bataille via Foucault to Derrida. (103)As we shall see, by refering to the French postmodernists as Young Conservatives, Habermas seeks to bring to the fore the way in which their essentially Romantic rejection of modern rationality (a) involves precisely the sort of dualism (what Habermas here characterizes as manichean thought) which the Postmodernists claim to reject as characteristically modern, and (b) thereby opens the door to fascism (what Fredric Jameson more delicately calls "reactionary cultural politics," [1991, 57]).
Critics of postmodernism
Flax, Jane. Thinking Fragments: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and Postmodernism in the Contemporary West. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990.
See especially her ch. 6, "Postmodernism: Thinking in Fragments."Flax points out a number of philosophical limitations and contradictions in postmodernism. She acknowledges the contribution postmodernism has made towards the feminist project of limiting ostensibly universalizing conceptions of self which can be argued to be restricted to white, male, and Western conceptions that have excluded the voices, senses of self, etc. of women and other "others." But she accuses the postmodernists of confusing two distinct concepts of self - a "unitary" self and a "core" self. The PM critiques attack the former - but she sees the feminist project to turn on uncovering and empowering the latter, especially for women.
I very much like Flax's suggestion of the self we need:
It is possible to construct views of self in which it does not experience difference as irreconcilable or the existence of others as an a priori threat to getting what it wants. Thus it does not fall into the sense of alienation and permanent estrangement that Lacan attributes to a "decentered" or nonunitary self. Unlike the postmodernists' vision such a self would also feel no need to forswear the use of logic, rational thought, or objectivity, althought it may play with them. Neither would it lose itself and imagine the I to be merely the effect of thinking or langauge rather than also its cause. It would also know itself to be social, to be dependent for its existence on others. Yet at the same time it could experience itself as possessing an internal world that is never exactly like any other. It appreciates the fact that others also possess such a world. It could acknowledge the desire of its sexual aspect and the autonomy of desire and its objects. It would tolerate or even enjoy the tragedy and comedy of desire: the frequent failure of objects and even our own desire to conform to our wishes or "rational" plans, the strangeness and otherness of that desiring aspect and of that aspect in others. (219-220)Programmatic note:
How far different is Flax's conception of the self from Habermas's?How far different is Flax's conception of the self from Plato's?
From this perspective, the "decentered self" of PM (specifically Lacan) offers no ground for resistance to injustice, including the injustices of patriarchy against women. For Flax, the PM critique of the self is not only confused: more centrally, just at a time when women are starting to powerfully emerge from the dominance of patriarchy - in part, precisely by insisting on the legitimacy of women's shared and individual subjective experience as an alternative ground of knowledge and ethical and political claims for justice - the PM dissolution of the self will simply return the question of gender and gender relations to determination by power.
As Flax puts it:
Postmodernists intend to persuade us that we should be suspicious of any notion of self or subjectivity. any such notion may be bound up with and support dangerous and oppressive "humanist" myths. However, I am deeply suspicious of the motives of those who would counsel such a position at the same time as women have just begun to re-member their selves and to claim an agentic subjectivity available always before only to a few privileged white men. It is possible that unconsciously, rather than share such a (revised) subjectivity with the "others," the privileged would reassure us that it was "really" oppressive to them all along. As (more or less) well-trained women, we may still be too willing to abandon our own agency and ambitions. Our choice is not limited to either a "masculine," overly differentiated, and unitary self or no self at all. We should be suspicious of those who would revise history (and hence our collective memory) to construct such flawed alternatives. By retrieving or reconstructing repressed aspects of the self together - our anger, our connections with, attractions to, and fear of other women, our self-hate - women in feminism's "second wave" have begun to re-member memory - as differentiated yet collective experience (history). This "new" memory provided many women with a powerful impulse toward action (politics) and the need for more just social relations. In a respectful evaluation of these experiences, we may find alternatives to and ways to incoporporate the postmodernist metaphors and spaces of writing, aesthetics, and conversation. Without an emphasis on justice, however, these postmodernist spaces threaten to become another "iron cage."Experiences in therapy as well as in feminist consciousness raising suggest that, without access to many aspects of the self, memory in its fullness cannot emerge. Without a location and participation in collective memory and its retelling or reconstruction, a sense of "we" cannot emerge or be sustained - a we of which each I is a part and to which each I is responsible. Without a sense of an I among we's, politics as (distributive) justice is not possible. Postmodernists have not offered adequate concepts of or spaces for the practice of justice. What memories or history will our daughters have if we do not find ways to speak of and practice it? Without re-membered selves how can we act? Such questions may be foreclosed within existing postmodernist discourses, but many feminists insist upon reopening them. We cannot risk such repression (again). (220f.)
I would add that the PM critique of the self rests in good measure on a very limited understanding of modern conceptions of self and reason - and in this way, again, amounts to attacking a straw man version of modernity.
Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity. Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1989.
"There has been a sea-change in cultural as well as in political-economic practices since around 1972.This sea-change is bound up with the emergence of new dominant ways in which we experience space and time.
While simultaneity in the shifting dimensions of time and space is no proof of necessary or causal connection, strong a priori grounds can be adduced for the poposition that there is some kind of necessary relation between the rise of postmodernist cultural forms, the emergence of more flexible modes of capital accumulation, and a new round of 'time-space compression' in the organization of capitalism.
But these changes, when set against the basic rules of capitalistic accumulation, appear more as shifts in surface appearance rather than as signs of the emergence of some entirely new postcapitalist or even postindustrial society."
("The argument," vii)
Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism: or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991.
See especially ch. 2, "Ideology: Theories of the Postmodern," for an overview of the varieties of postmodernism.Jameson writes from a Marxist perspective, and argues that postmodernism - far from its own self-understanding as a creative, playful, independent, and essentially aesthetic response and reply to the world - is rather an artifact of the material conditions of late capitalism. Like Habermas, Jameson criticizes postmodernism for its apparent political incoherencies.
Alternatives to the modern/postmodern (false) dilemma
Benhabib, Seyla. Situating the Self: Gender, Community and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics. New York: Routledge, 1992
Benhabib "...articulates and defends a conception of interactive dialogical rationality and universalism that is sensitive to recent critiques by feminists, communitarians, and postmodernists. She spans Continental and Anglo-American traditions..." and discusses Habermas, Arendt, macIntyre, Lyotard, and many others. (Richard J. Bernstein, New School for Social Research)"Between the camps of modernist defenders and postmodern detractors of identity Benhabib steers the sensible course of trying to "situate the self" in the context of concrete communities, gender relations, and the interstices of modernity and postmodernity. Without abandoning modern reason and the Habemasia project of critical theory, the book reformulates this project in the direction of an "interactive universalism" which is contextually sensitive and open to 'difference' without lapsing into moral or political agnosticism. Feminists and postmodernists may not uniformly welcome the universalist premises articulated by Benhabib; but her book should prompt them to ponder (more seriously than is often the case) the costs involved in a cursory dismissal of moral autonomy and responsibility." (Fred Dallmayr, University of Notre Dame)
Bernstein, Richard J. The New Constellation: the Ethical-Political Horizons of Modernity/Postmodernity. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992.
Bernstein shares with Benhabib, Habermas, Flax, and feminist critics the sense that postmodernism has much to offer - but that its tendency towards epistemological and ethical relativisms that intentionally seek to undermine the universalizing reason of modernity at the same time (a) undermine postmodernism's theoretical coherency and (b) the suspiciously modern/Enlightenment political values - specifically, the values of democracy, equality, and liberation - endorsed by postmodernists.
Cutrofello, Andrew. Discipline and Critique: Kant, Poststructuralism, and the Problem of Resistance. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1994.
Cutrofello - parallel with Jane Flax and Habermas - sees the postructuralist/postmodernist rejection of Enlightenment/modern conceptions of reason to undermine the possibility of ethics and justice as it reduces (restores?) individual and social beliefs and relations to operations of power. Foucault is the primary figure here.Cutrofello points to the ambiguity of Foucault's own work and how it is understood by commentators: despite his label as a postmodernist, it is apparently unclear as to whether Foucault works outside of the Enlightement tradition or within it.
Out of this ambiguity, Cutrofello argues that "Foucault's entire career was a sustained attempt to formulate a nonjuridical model for Kantian critique, and that - in groping towards such a model - he was led to think with modernity against modernity." (x)
Cutrofello points to one of the central ambiguities/contradictions of postmodernism, as exemplified in Foucault:
...Foucault remained uncertain about whether he meant to put forth a general ethical theory. As some of his critics have argued, Foucault frequently seems to invoke an imperative to resist all forces of domination. Yet at the same time he suggests that any practical imperatives [i.e., including the imperative to resist all forces of domination] are themselves instruments of domination. (x)Cutrofello takes up Kant's notion of a "critical court of reason" vis-a-vis Foucault's understanding of disciplinary power - but he argues that Kant avoids Foucault's reduction of all modern conceptions of reason, ethics, justice, etc., to an expression of a will to discipline as domination, insofar as Kant distinguishes between two types of discipline:
[Kant]...recognized a discipline of domination which correlates to the Foucauldian conception of discipline, but he also called attention to the possibility of what I call a "discipline of resistance." Retrieving the Kantian ideal of a discipline of resistance I will argue can provide the basis for the kind of Foudauldian ethic which Foucault himself never formulated. However, to the extent that kant was unable to radically question his juridical model, he was unable to distinguish adequately between a discipline of resistance and a discipline of domination. My aim will be to show where Kant goes wrong, and to try to recover the resources he provides for thinking through the possibility of a discipline of resistance. My fear is that Habermas' Kantianism has further buried - rather than retrieved these resources. (xi)
Primary Sources
Derrida, Jacques. Limited Inc. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988.
Contains an early essay, "Signature Event Context" (1972) which takes up John Austin's theory of speech acts. The American philosopher John Searle savaged Derrida's acccount of Austin in a 1977 essay, summarized here. Derrida replied with ""Limited Inc a b c". Finally, the Afterword contains an extensive reply to criticisms of Derrida. Here he argues that he never intended for his views of language and deconstruction to be understood as so utterly unstable and relativistic as many of his critics (including Habermas) have taken him to mean.
Secondary sources
Jonathan Arac, ed. After Foucault: Humanistic Knowledge, Postmodern Challenges. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1988.
The chapters by Edward W. Said (summarizing Foucault's life and work), David Couzens Hoy (on the question of whether Foucault is modern or postmodern - or premodern), and by Jana Sawicki (offering a feminist appropriation of Foucault), would be of specific interest.
Norris, Christopher. Derrida. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987.
ToC: Philosophy/Literature; Derrida on Plato: Writing as Poison and Cure; Speech, Presence, Origins: from Hegel to Saussure; Rousseau: Writing as Necessary Evil; Derrida and Kant: the Enlightenment Tradition (includes material on philosophical scepticism; "against pragmatism: Derrida, rorty, Lyotard"; "politics and the principle of reason"; "Logic and rhetoric:'nuclear criticism'"); Letters Home: Derrida, Austin and the Oxford Connection; Nietzsche, Freud, Levinas: on the Ethics of Deconstruction (includes "Foucault, Descartes and the 'crisis of reason'"; "Epistemology and ethics: Husserl, Levinas")