Selected Letters From Readers

 
 

RE: Foley’s Review of Post-Modernism and the Social Sciences. An Exchange between Pauline Vaillancourt-Rosenau and Michael W. Foley.

 

Dear PMC,

 

In a post-modern frame of reference one authors a book and then sets it free to be interpreted by various readers each in his or her own way. Criticism is central to a post-modernism and its pluralism of readings. If you can’t take criticism, or if you don’t wish to defend your ideas, better not present them in the public realm. And this is the problem with Prof. Foley’s review. It isn’t about ideas. It is a series of unsubstantiated insults and mis-information.

 

Foley’s review does not present a post-modern reading of my book. Neither is he inspired by deconstruction. His review is modern in the worse sense–a singular and unexciting “reading.” It announces that my text is a “repudiation” of post-modernism, assumes his is the only interpretation possible, and implicitly denies the legitimacy of other views. Post-modernism and the Social Sciences has been well received by some post-modernists and criticized by others. It has attracted attention not only in the social sciences but in the humanities as well. It even made it to the stage recently as the Doug Elkins Dance Company (New York) incorporated readings from it into their post-modern repertoire for the International Festival of New Dance, Montreal, November 1992.

 

Prof. Foley senses my own ambivalence about post-modernism. I make no claim to be a post-modernist but I did attempt to be fair in writing about it. I made every effort to document my conclusions about post-modernism, to indicate where readers could find more information. Of course I did not shy away from criticism of it. But at the same time I had no axe to grind. Nor did I feel the need to defend post-modernism. Perhaps this is why I made no effort to “eliminate” certain post-modern currents from it or, for example, to deny Derrida’s defense of Paul deMan’s early Nazi affiliations. It is not I, but Foley, who puts Derrida in bed with Ayatollah Khomeini! (REVIEW-2.592, par. 5). In a similar fashion on a number of occasions Foley takes the questions I pose for post-modern inquiry and answers for me, only to then turn around, attribute his constructions to me, and criticize his own self-fabricated answers (paragraph 6). Some post-modernists call for the death of the author and elevate the reader but in this instance Prof. Foley’s “interpretation” diminishes his status as reader, not to mention reviewer. Is this a “post-post-modern turn” where the review re-writes the text and then reviews his own creation?

 

Foley argues that there is nothing much new offered by post-modernism. I would not disagree. Chapter 1 section 1 of my book entitled “Post-Modern Lineage: Some Intellectual Precursors” makes his case. But he missed this and even misinterpreted the section on structuralists altogether. I argue that post-modernism is a collage of many intellectual and philosophical currents. But at the same time, it constitutes a new form of challenge in that it refuses to set up a new paradigm to replace those it deconstructs.

 

I am bothered by the absence of any depth to this review–brief, one-line dismissals signal an inability to take my book seriously. Foley says I am a “positivist.” He suggests that I “play on conflicts within postmodernism without illuminating them, or ever giving an adequate account of them.” This is insulting and unfair. By their very nature these criticisms are so broad and sweeping that they cannot be contradicted. I wonder, if I agreed with Prof. Foley’s own views would my analysis be “illuminating” and “adequate,” uncorrupted by “positivism.”

 

Finally, when I discuss the feminist debate around post-modernism, Prof. Foley admonishes that I could have “equally well” referred to the “new social history or the Annales School.” At this point Foley moves beyond criticism to what I view as pure paternalism, lecturing me as to what I should have written about, whom I should have cited. I believe that feminists have raised some qualitatively different and extremely important questions for post-modernists. In fact, I do discuss both the new history and the Annales School in Chapter 4.

 

I read Prof. Foley as an angry, unhappy and disappointed man (admittedly my construct). He is angry at me, unhappy with post-modernism, disappointed with Princeton University Press. He suggests that Princeton University Press abandoned standards of judgment in publishing my book. Yes, Princeton did publish my book. Yes, the book has done very well. And yes, it was submitted to the same high standards of evaluation as every other book Princeton publishes. But by focusing on this peripheral issue Foley avoids what is essential–ideas, analysis, substance. And this is really regrettable. There is so much to say about post-modernism and the exciting intellectual issues it raises.

 

Pauline Vaillancourt-Rosenau
Political Science Dept.
University of Quebec–Montreal

 

 

---

 

Dear PMC,

 

For those who missed the evidence in the stylistic pyro-technics of Baudrillard and Derrida, Professor Vaillancourt-Rosenau’s outraged response to my review of her _Post-Modernism and the Social Sciences_ attests that there is still life in the authorial persona. But I have never doubted that, postmodernism notwithstanding. What I did dare doubt was the usefulness of Vaillancourt-Rosenau’s account. Her letter scarcely changes my mind; indeed, her multiple mis-readings of my text serve only to reinforce my doubts about her readings of others. (No, I am not angry, Prof. Vaillancourt-Rosenau, nor did I accuse you of being a positivist!)

 

I have no wish to deny Vaillancourt-Rosenau her intemperate response to my review, not to mention her favorable reviews in other quarters or, for that matter, her royalties. I find it hard to begrudge academics our modest successes. And Vaillancourt-Rosenau is, after all, right about two things: I found her book immensely disappointing, and I have serious misgivings about some of the more extravagant claims of the theorists of postmodernism. The former was not, indeed, a “substantive” complaint; it was practical and formal. It may be summarized in two points: First, in the welter of citations and snippets of proof-texts, the reader finds virtually no sustained analysis of any one figure, so that it would be difficult to tell, for example, that Foucault’s “archaeologies” of prison and asylum, not to mention his later explorations of language and power, have been seminal to the on-going reexamination in social science and philosophy of the social construction of the human world. Second, Vaillancourt- Rosenau regularly blurs the useful distinction between theorists of postmodernism and representatives of postmodern culture. With the world of postmodernism divided into “skeptics” and “affirmatives,” it was my mistake, I must confess, to find Islamic fundamentalism (a “Third World affirmative post-modernism,” p. 143) in the same bed with Derrida (a “skeptic”). Perhaps I should have chosen Foucault, except that he is labeled a “skeptic”in one place (p. 42) and an “affirmative” in another (p. 50). In the topsy-turvy postmodern world, even Prof. Rosenau’s classificatory ardor is defeated occasionally.

 

In short, for these and other reasons enumerated in the review, I found the book a less than useful guide to both postmodernism and contemporary concerns in the social sciences; in the last few paragraphs I attempted to suggest directions for further inquiry. The issues raised were substantive and worth reiterating. “Postmodernism” is no doubt a protean term, conjuring up a variety of disparate phenomena, depending on the context. Its theorists make prodigious claims, not all of them either unique or credible. In the context of the social sciences, however, postmodernist theories converge with both older and newer theoretical traditions, reinforcing recent explorations of, for example, popular culture and resistance; the dubious and shifting discursive foundations of the modern state system; metaphor, metonymy, and analogy in social scientific doctrine, historiography, and popular political and economic discourse; and the devious twists and turns of patriarchy. There are undoubtedly tensions as well, some of them touched upon by Vaillancourt-Rosenau. Certain postmodernist claims about the disappearance of the “subject” in particular, while they sit quite well with an older social scientific tradition (best represented today, ironically enough, in quantitative, “positivist” approaches), seem to clash with the return to human agents and their “subjectivities” in newer, more process-oriented research in comparative politics and international relations, with recent explorations of the “structure-agent problem,” and with the widespread adoption of “rational choice” models in political science and sociology.

 

There are thus very important issues to occupy us in the encounter of postmodernism, postmodernist theory, and the social sciences, as Vaillancourt-Rosenau insists. My complaint was and is that they have not been well raised by the book in question. Of this, of course, the interested reader must be the last judge. A reviewer should indeed engage ideas, where possible; and I have tried to do so. But I am enough of a modern to feel a similar obligation, where necessary, to offer the modest warning: Caveat emptor!

 

Michael W. Foley
Department of Politics
The Catholic University of America
Washington, D.C. 20064
foley@cua.edu