Devil's Advocating Postmodernism

I've just poured a load of thought-work into a huge administrative project, so I'm suffering from some brain-fry right now. Wugga.

Be that as it may, I wanted to address some common criticisms raised against the postmodern (i.e., antifoundational) view I've been outlining for the past couple of days. The big criticism--the one central to my interests in this blog--of course deals with how I can take a skeptical/agnostic stance toward capital-T truth and/or toward humans' ability to perceive it on the one hand and yet consider myself a practicing Christian on the other. That objection I'll build to addressing in a later post.

For now--I turn to some hard questions about postmodern stances that don't directly deal with faith and which aren't nearly as riddled with straw-man misrepresentations. The first devil's advocate question asks about the truth conditions of antifoundationalism's own claims about Truth. As I've defined it, postmodernist thought considers most of the truths that we as humans deal with as contingent truths, social facts that, while compelling and controlling locally, prove unstable and in flux when considered over epic time-spans. To be sure, some of these facts present themselves simply as facts of existence (e.g., death, eating, breathing). Antifoundationalist theory, however, denies that even these "brute" facts a primacy of place. They may exist, but they aren't capable by themselves of serving as a solid, stable ground of certainty on which any and all humans may build identities or societies.

Why? Because, as I argued yesterday, even the most brutal fact has an undeniably social dimension. Language, for example, is a social fact. Words and their meanings shift over time. Yet words--or, more accurately, signs (which may be spoken words, written texts, body language, images, etc.)--are all we have at our disposal for thinking about, wrapping our minds around, and communicating brute facts like death, eating, or respiration. Certainly we experience moments of trauma, times of extreme intensity (like a car wreck, a sudden shock, or a surpassing joy) in which we freeze in wordless agony (or ecstasy).

But once we start to communicate that trauma--even if only to put the experience into words for ourselves--we're caught in a web of language, of symbols, that never quite captures what it is we've just experienced. Indeed, performance theorist Peggy Phelan argues that all attempts at representation both fall short of expressing exactly what we intend and get received differently than what we intend. Think, for example, of times when you've awaken from a particularly vivid dream, one that you know was immensely complicated and/or incredibly important. Yet the first time you try to sort out exactly what happened in the dream (to tell a partner, to write it down, to remember it exactly), you just know that your words--even if only the words you tell yourself--are betraying the original experience that was the dream. The dream happened, yes. But the only way we have to conceive of that dream in our waking minds is to use words, and language always changes that which it seeks to represent.

So it is with brute facts, elements of existence we generally think of as "real," universally and homogeneously experienced by all humans. Our only way of thinking about such facts occurs through language, and language exerts a distorting effect on our perceptions of reality. We can perceive, for instance, that what goes up must come down (and I'll grant that there's not been any time in recorded history where this is not so without some logical explanation, e.g., space rockets). But the way that different cultures conceive of this fact of life may differ wildly. We in the present know that things fall to the earth due to gravity. Another time and place, though, might think of the earth as a kind of giant organism, constantly inhaling so as to keep objects and creatures sucked down. Or perhaps falling gets imagined as the result of a kind of invisible force pressing down from above rather than a force pulling down from below.

Now, we in the here and now might laugh at these latter two (admittedly hypothetical) views. We know thanks to science that gravity is "right" in a way that the invisible suck-monster is not. I'm betting, though, that not many of us could explain exactly how gravity operates. Theoretical physicists (and here I draw on my extremely limited, pop-science understanding) are themselves still searching for the hows and whys of gravity (e.g., why is gravity so weak relative to other universal forces? does gravity consist of quanta , like gravitons? is what we experience as gravity residue from other dimensions/branes?). It's likely, in fact, that future models of physics (a Theory of Everything, for instance, that blends general relativity with quantum theory) will present us with whole new ways of seeing even such a basic, brute fact as our falling to the ground when not otherwise stopped. Gravity as we know it now seems like the best explanation we have to go on, judging of course by our present-day culture's standards for what qualifies as a "best explanation" (just as other societies past and future have or will judge other explanations by other standards).

And that's the point: to a certain extent, we as humans are caught within our own culture's sign systems. We have only those lenses available to us with which to view "real" things. Other lenses seem foreign to us, either hopelessly naive/primitive (the suck monster theory of gravity) or science-fictionish (brane cosmology, for example). It's not that we're forever stuck or that we can't ever grow or learn new things, but to really swallow one of these other explanations may very well entail our giving up one lens (could we say, one worldview) for another.

Here, finally, is the question: If all truths as we experience them derive at least in part from our position within a particular culture, a particular (and ultimately transient) system of signs--does the same not go for the truths that postmodernism espouses? In other words, to what extent does postmodern incredulity toward eternal truths apply to its own beliefs? Doesn't antifoundationalism, at the end of the day, itself rest upon a set of foundational beliefs about the lack of foundations?

This line of questioning, I submit, is the more nuanced cousin of the worldview evangelists' simplistic ace-in-the-hole reply to postmodernism: "Don't you believe in the truth that there isn't any truth?"

I'll address it more fully tomorrow,

JF