A futile defence of postmodernism
Andy Lamey
National Post
Tuesday, July 23, 2002
Stanley Fish is one of the most well-known gadflies in American
academia. He once claimed that the postmodern literary theory he
subscribed to "relieves me of the obligation to be right ... and
demands
only that I be interesting." Fish later retracted that statement, but
he's remained a pugnacious advocate of postmodernism. In the
famous
Sokal Hoax, physicist Alan Sokal published a paper "liberally
salted
with nonsense" (e.g. "physical reality ... is at bottom a social and
linguistic construct") in a postmodernist academic journal. Fish,
executive director of the university press that published the
journal,
publicly blasted Sokal for his "bad joke."
Now Fish is involved in another contretemps. In the current
Harper's, he
attacks journalists who criticized postmodernism following
September 11.
Writing in The New York Times on Sept. 22, Edward Rothstein
lamented
that "postmodernists challenge assertions that truth and ethical
judgment have any objective validity." Surely the terrorist attacks
were
indisputably wrong and show the poverty of such relativism,
Rothstein
and others argued. Fish has responded with a scorching polemic,
prompting rejoinders in the Times and The New Republic.
According to Fish, postmodernists don't claim there are "no
universal
values or no truths independent of particular perspectives." On the
contrary. "When I offer a reading of a poem or pronounce on a
case in
First Amendment law," Fish writes, "I regard my reading as true --
not
provisionally true, or true for my reference group only, but true."
All
a postmodernist says is that "I may very well be unable to
persuade
others, no less educated or credentialed than I, of the truth so
perspicuous to me." Postmodernists don't deny the possibility of
objective truth, Fish argues, merely that everyone will recognize
it.
If that's true, postmodernism's problem isn't relativism, but
banality.
Who has ever claimed people always recognize the truth? By
Fish's
standard, practically everyone is a postmodernist. But his
characterization of postmodernism is wildly misleading.
Postmodernism
attracts controversy because its advocates do deny the possibility
of
truth and objectivity. When Fish's essay is read alongside what
postmodernists have actually said, his defence seems more like an
admission that postmodernism's critics have been right all along.
What bothers many critics is how postmodernism defies
elementary logic.
Consider the statement "Everything is subjective." This idea is
nonsensical, anti-postmodernist Thomas Nagel has written, "for it
would
itself have to be either subjective or objective. But it can't be
objective, since in that case it would be false if true. And it can't
be
subjective, because then it would not rule out any objective claim,
including the claim that it is objectively false."
Nagel's criticism is an example of what philosophers call the tu
quoque
argument (Latin for "you too"). According to it, subjectivism
inevitably
appeals to the thing it purports to deny -- inevitably contradicts
itself. This criticism appears frequently in debates around
postmodernism. Indeed, one way to view the history of
postmodern
arguments is as a series of attempts to evade the force of the "you
too"
objection, by devising ever more complicated ways of saying
"everything
is subjective," in the hope that some such formulation can unleash
the
genie of subjectivism in a non-contradictory way.
Postmodernist Paul de Man, for example, believed literary theory
should
uphold "a radical relativism": No interpretation of a text is better
than another, because language is inherently unstable. He
conceptualized
his approach in a sentence that used "sign" to refer to language:
"Sign
and meaning can never coincide." But de Man's theory breaks
down when
applied to his own words. They are themselves signs, used to
mean
something. To communicate his method, he has to draw on the
property of
language he denies it as having.
Similarly, Stanford professor Richard Rorty offers a version of
postmodernism which, "drops the notion of truth as
correspondence with
reality altogether." To Rorty, the idea that language captures
objective
truth represents an "impossible attempt to step outside our skins --
the
traditions, linguistic and other, within which we do our thinking
and
self-criticism." Claims about what is true are inevitably parochial
and
relative. But Rorty's statement that "it's impossible to step outside
our skins" is itself intended to correspond with reality: Rorty
offers
it as a fact about all people. But by doing so, he uses language to
capture something he takes to be true -- in order to show that
language
can never capture anything true.
Such tu quoque arguments have been invoked against
postmodernist ideas
countless times. Yet rather than rebut such criticisms, Fish
concedes
their force. He writes that anyone who disputes the idea of
objective
truth is "silly." It's as though Fish realizes nothing can rescue
postmodernism from itself, so he denies that postmodernists say
what
they say. When his defence is through, all that's left of
postmodernism
is its name. With friends like this, postmodernism needs no
enemies.
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