BOOK REVIEW OF: What’s Wrong with Postmodernism?

Robert C. Holub

Department of German
University of California-Berkeley
<rcholub@garnet.berkeley.edu>

 

Norris, Christopher. What’s Wrong With Postmodernism? Critical Theory and the Ends of Philosophy. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1990.

 

From the outset two features of the title of Christopher Norris’s latest book need clarification. First, it is not insignificant that, despite the possibility of an interrogatory “What,” the title is not a question, but a declaration. Norris knows what’s wrong with postmodernism, and he does not hesitate to impart his diagnosis to the reader. Second, the term “postmodernism” does not match exactly the material he covers. He is actually less concerned with postmodernism as a direction in literature and the arts–its more usual field of meaning–than he is with contemporary theory. The title should be understood, therefore, as an assertion about recent directions in theory, not as a query into artistic practices. And what is most interesting about Norris’s survey of the critical terrain is the way in which he divides the turf. Most commentators tend to take a stand either for or against poststructuralism, defined rather generally as anything coming out of France or influenced by the French over the past two decades. By contrast Norris splits French and Francophilic theory into two halves. While he continues to advocate most prominently the work of Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man, he is highly critical of Baudrillard, certain aspects of Jean- Francois Lyotard, and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s monograph on Heidegger. Joining these French postmodernists on Norris’s roster of adversaries are American neopragmatists, in particular Stanley Fish and Richard Rorty. Making a surprising appearance on the approval list is the German philosopher of communication theory, Jurgen Habermas. Although he devotes a chapter of this book to a reproof of Habermas’s remarks on Derrida–a chastisement whose root cause is Habermas’s carelessness in attributing to Derrida views held by his less philosophically schooled American epigones–he approves of the broad and critical outline of recent French thought found in Habermas’s Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (1985).

 

Since these are anything but natural alliances, they deserve further attention. Essentially Norris validates those theorists who he feels continue a tradition of enlightenment critique. There is no difficulty in placing Habermas in this camp since he is perhaps the single strongest voice in contemporary theory to openly and directly declare his allegiance to the progressive heritage of modernity. Norris does not discuss his work in any detail, however, except to point out his errors in dealing with Derrida, and his reference to Habermas’s notion of universal or formal pragmatics as “transcendental pragmatics” indicates at least a possible confusion of Habermas’s current concerns with his abandoned attempt to locate “quasi-transcendental” interests in the late sixties. More difficult to locate in a tradition of enlightened reason are Derrida and de Man. The latter is incorporated into the enlightenment project largely by way of his interest in “aesthetic ideology,” which includes a critique of Schiller and of all subsequent misreadings of Kant’s aesthetic theory. Derrida is likewise assimilated to the enlightenment paradigm through Kant. In Chapter Five, a consideration of Irene Harvey’s Derrida and the Economy of Difference (1986), Norris argues with Harvey (and Rodolphe Gasche) that Derrida is best described as a rigorous Kantian, except that he is “asking what conditions of IMpossibility mark out the limits of Kantian conceptual critique” (200). Indeed, Norris claims that Derrida’s is “the most authentically Kantian reading of Kant precisely through his willingness to problematise the grounds of reason, truth and knowledge” (199). Norris thus opposes both the facile notion of Derridean deconstruction as the authorizing strategy for “free play” as a free-for-all of meaning, a false lesson learned and propagated by inattentive American disciples, and the equally false understanding of Derrida’s work as a dismissal of previous philosophical problems, the tendency found in Fish, Rorty, and French postmodernists such as Baudrillard. Derrida and de Man are for Norris rigorous philosophical minds who question traditional philosophemes and point out their limits. These actions, however, are undertaken in the spirit of Kantian critique, and have nothing to do with the various illicit reductions (of truth to belief, of philosophy to rhetoric, of history to fiction, and of reality to appearance) prevalent in the neopragmatic and the poststructuralist camp.

 

This is a credible account of contemporary theory. It makes necessary distinctions between Derrida and his American reception and correctly credits de Man with a seriousness of purpose that is not always matched by poststructuralist gamesmanship. It also rightly dismisses the philosophical legitimacy of the “antitheoretical” neopragmatists, who seem to delight more in the sophistry of their own banal arguments than in the pragmatic endeavors they allegedly prefer. What is not very persuasive in Norris’s presentation, however, is the contention that the works of Derrida and de Man carry with them a profoundly ethical and political message that can assist us in combating the entrenched conservatism of the Reagan-Bush-Thatcher- Major era. Indeed, it is precisely in the realm of ethics that Derrida and de Man are most open to attack. Derrida’s very style of debate has proven a barrier to discussion of philosophical and political issues. Although it would be silly not to grant his theoretical points in the debate with Searle, the manner in which he ridicules his adversary, refusing to clarify Searle’s misunderstandings and to confront issues on which they both have something to say, leads to a closing down of discussion. His encounter with Gadamer, a more patient and open interlocutor than Searle, repeats this elusive strategy; one has the impression here as well that Derrida simply does not want to enter into candid and direct debate about his theoretical position. His sarcastic and condescending dismissal of Anne McClintock and Rob Nixon, who criticize Derrida for his analysis of the word “apartheid,” provides a more directly political illustration of an arrogance of argumentation that Derrida has come to epitomize. Finally, one could detail–as I do in a forthcoming book Crossing Borders)–the lack of candor in his response to critics of de Man; in this performance from 1989 his dogmatism about his own position, his haughtiness concerning deconstruction, and his unwillingness to counter opponents’s legitimate objections was obvious except to deconstructive true believers in what has become (unfortunately) a quasi-religious cult.

 

The afterword to Limited Inc. (1988), the book version containing his essay on Austin and his response to Searle, entitled “Toward An Ethic of Discussion,” thus has something of a hollow ring to it. Although Norris uses this afterword as a counter-illustration to the wayward practices of postmodernist thinking, a careful consideration of it would reveal seminal weaknesses in Derrida’s ethics and politics. Most blatant perhaps is Derrida’s interpretation of his use of the word “police” in his earlier rebuttal of Searle. In the final section of his lengthy response Derrida has written that “there is always a police and a tribunal ready to intervene each time that a rule . . . is invoked in a case involving signatures, events, or contexts.” He continues by hypothesizing a situation in which Searle is arrested by the Secret Service in Nixon’s White House and taken to a psychiatrist. He asserts that there is a connection “between the notion of responsibility manipulated by the psychiatric expert [the representative of law and of political-linguistic conventions, in the service of the State and its police] and the exclusion of parasitism.” He concludes by stating that the entire matter of the police must be reconsidered, “and not merely in a theoretical manner, if one does not want the police to be omnipotent” Limited Inc. 105-6). Searle’s practice, the exclusion of parasitism, is thus connected directly with the State and the police, and for good measure Derrida includes a warning about the possible omnipotence of the police.

 

For a reader in 1977, when the debate originally occurred, it would have been difficult not to identify the police and the State with repression; it seemed that Derrida was making an openly political statement. But in 1988 he denies this most obvious reading: His statements “did not aim at condemning a determinate or particularly repressive politics by pointing out the implication of the police and of the tribunal whenever a rule is invoked concerning signatures, events, or contexts. Rather, I sought to recall that in its very generality, which is to say, before all specification, this implication is irreducible” Limited Inc. 134). Derrida is of course correct when he writes in 1988 that there is no society without police and no conceptuality without delimiting (or policing) factors. But there are nonetheless two disturbing aspects of his recent self-interpretation. The first is that Derrida seeks to control or limit meaning by clarifying his intention from 1977. He tells us how the word “police” “must be understood” Limited Inc. 136). Thus he would appear here to want his intention to govern the entire scene of meaning, a possibility he attributed to Searle and argued explicitly against in 1977. Second, he seems to argue disingenuously in 1988. Although his 1988 argument makes more philosophical sense, the rhetoric of his arguments in 1977 was certainly meant to suggest a political disqualification of Searle’s position. One cannot connect the police and the State–traditional buzz words, among the left, for repressive instances—with an adversary’s stance, and not expect that connection to be understood as a political attack. That Derrida denies this dimension of his 1977 essay appears simply as dishonesty. But in that same “ethical afterword” Derrida also seals himself off from any political criticism. Deconstruction, he tells us, if it has a political dimension, “is engaged in the writing . . . of a language and of a political practice that can no longer be comprehended, judged, deciphered by these codes [the traditional Western codes of right or left]” Limited Inc. 139). We are left with the conclusion that only deconstruction can comprehend, judge, and decipher what it is doing. Those who stand outside the light of its eternal truth have no right to pass political judgment. If a self-policing notion of deconstruction is thus the upshot of Derrida’s “ethic of discussion,” then Norris might want to reconsider its political usefulness.

 

The case for de Man’s political usefulness is even weaker. It rests, in Norris’s view of things, on the notion of “aesthetic ideology.” Following de Man’s lead, Norris locates “aesthetic ideology” in post-Kantian philosophers who confound the realm of language, conceptual understanding, or linguistic representation with the phenomenal or natural world. No doubt this topos has been consistently thematized in de Man’s writings; it accounts for his placement of allegory above symbolism, his critique of romanticisms, and even his objections to literary theories such as Jauss’s aesthetics of reception. But the schema of intellectual history propagated by de Man and repeated by Norris is both undifferentiated and ahistorical. Friedrich Schiller, to whom Norris constantly refers as the first “misreader” of Kant and therefore the perpetrator of the original sin of “aesthetic ideology,” certainly differed from the author of the Critique of Judgment on matters of aesthetics. But Schiller’s relationship to Kant should not be categorized as a misreading, although Schiller undoubtedly misunderstood various aspects of Kantian thought. Rather, Schiller was trying to go beyond Kant in establishing an objective realm for aesthetic objects. He did this consciously and openly, and his purpose in doing so had to do not only with philosophy, but also with reactions to the French revolution. To wrench Schiller out of his historical moment and make the resulting abstraction responsible for a wayward tradition in aesthetic thought, which encompasses all major tendencies from the Romantics to the New Critics, is to propagate a type of black-and-white portrayal that recalls Heidegger’s totalized picture of Western philosophy since the pre-Socratics. Norris criticizes Lacoue-Labarthe for refusing to entertain socio- historical discussions of Heidegger’s work, but he himself consistently steers the reader away from a historical situating of theory that could lead to a more differentiated understanding.

 

Even if we accept the schema informing “aesthetic ideology,” however, it is difficult to see why it has to be connected with political critique. It may be true that the organic worldview of Romanticism can lend itself to various political abuses, among them nationalism and fascism. But it can also have affinities with various sorts of ecological consciousness or with a “principled and consistent” socialism that Norris defends in his introduction. Norris offers no argument for political affiliations either. Instead he contends that “collapsing ontological distinctions is an error that all too readily falls in with a mystified conception of Being, nature and truth” (268), and that “there is no great distance” (21) between the notion of an organic state and an authentic nationalism. These juxtapositions masquerading as arguments serve only to discredit anything not associated with de Manian thought, but in their undifferentiated, schematic, and ahistorical formulation they are only persuasive to those already convinced of their correctness. In short, there is no reason–and Norris supplies none–to connect de Man’s mode of operation with anything politically progressive, nor any grounds for finding his objects of criticism inherently regressive. It is probably worth noting that de Man’s own theoretical position did not move him toward any great political activity during his three decades of teaching in the United States, and that the short speeches at his funeral (found in Yale French Studies in 1985) contain no references to political inspiration he supplied. Most of the talk about “aesthetic ideology” surfaces only after his wartime journalism came to light, although Norris did develop this line of thought somewhat earlier to defend de Man against political attacks by Frank Lentricchia and Terry Eagleton. The notion that de Man enunciates a coherent and powerfully progressive political program is thus something totally absent from comments about him during his lifetime.

 

Unless we buy Norris’s line on de Man, however, his endeavor in the final chapter to save de Man while simultaneously criticizing Lacoue-Labarthe and Heidegger is an empty gesture. While the differences between Heidegger and de Man with regard to National Socialism are not trivial, we should not ignore the obvious similarities. Most notable among these is their postwar attitude of repression and prevarication. Neither man owned up publicly to his actions, and there is much evidence to suggest that de Man misled people with regard to his activities during the war. To suggest, as Norris does, that de Man’s postwar writing must be read as a determined effort to resist the effects of the very ideology that had entrapped him is simply not supported by common sense. Antifascist and political essays are not de Man’s preferred genre; he produced no body of significant statements on any directly political matter as an academician. Moreover, when political topics suggested themselves he consistently turned away from them. Norris himself points to his essay on Heidegger from 1953 in which the context of Heidegger’s interpretations of Holderlin–World War II and national destiny–are written off as a “side issue that would take us away from our topic.” The bulk of the writings we have at our disposal indicates that Norris is performing the same function for de Man as Lacoue-Labarthe does for Heidegger. Both claim that the best way to understand the phenomenon to which de Man/Heidegger succumbed is to look at de Man/Heidegger’s theory. Norris writes: “What Lacoue-Labarthe cannot for a moment entertain is the idea that Heidegger’s philosophical concerns might not, after all, have come down to him as a legacy of `Western metaphysics’ from Plato to Nietzsche, but that they might–on the contrary–be products of his own, deeply mystified and reactionary habits of mind.” If we substitute “Norris” for “Lacoue-Labarthe,” “de Man” for “Heidegger,” “aesthetic ideology” for “Western metaphysics,” and “from Schiller to Jauss” for “from Plato to Nietzsche,” we can see that the parallelism Norris seeks to escape is unwittingly retained.

 

In this most welcome and perceptive book on contemporary theory Norris thus fails to step back far enough from the critics he has discussed in the past. De Man and Derrida are powerful and interesting voices in theory, and they are certainly a cut above many who would emulate their deconstructive strategies. But their political and ethical valence remains clouded by the undecidabilities of the very practices they exhibit in their writings. There is also a theoretical dimension to their inability to offer a sustained ethical vision. The preference for viewing language as a system rather than as speech acts, for looking at semantics and semiology rather than at pragmatics, for remaining in the realm of virtual language rather than its actualization in the world–in short, for valorizing everywhere langue over parole–prevents de Man, Derrida, and Norris as well from theorizing ethics and politics. We only have to look at Derrida’s initial remarks on Austin to see why deconstruction has such difficulties in connecting theory and practice. Instead of examining Austin from the potentially radical reorientation that Austin himself offers–language as action–Derrida shifts the discussion back to the “non-semiotic,” to the level of linguistic meaning that Austin wanted to leave behind. A similar unwillingness to conceive language pragmatically, as always infused with ethical substance, is evident in Derrida’s confrontation with Gadamer. In this regard, as Gadamer points out, Derrida’s point of departure is retrograde. Norris’s attempt to make the deconstructive strategies of de Man and Derrida the basis for a political opposition is thus a questionable undertaking. In this his most overtly political volume to date he might have done better to explore more thoroughly those theories that take language-as-action as their starting point.