Postmodernity II: Pluto and the Third Umpire

Yesterday I began a nutshell description of what I mean by postmodernism in the hope of addressing and refuting the suspicion in evangelical circles that postmodernity essentially stands opposed to any meaningful configuration of Christian belief.

I attempted this description by means of a baseball analogy involving three hypothetical umpires discussing their role in calling strikes or balls. "There are balls and there are strikes," states the first, "and I call 'em as they are." "There are balls and there are strikes," states the second, "and I call 'em like I see 'em." "There are balls and there are strikes," says the third, "but they ain't nothing until I call 'em."

I suggested that the first umpire corresponds roughly to a foundationalist view of Truth and Reality, where an objective Real exists in a way that can be perceived, investigated, and communicated more or less accurately by human beings. I should note that this foundationalist view underlies not only most forms of evangelicalism (where the objective Real is of course God) but also many of the more popular conceptions of post-Enlightenment science.

Attacks on postmodernism emerge from both of these foundationalisms (either separately or jointly), and much of the time (though by no means universally) such attacks characterize postmodernism as some version of the second umpire, who apparently relies on personal feeling or subjective opinion in place of an as-is re-presentation of the facts. This mischaracterization imagines postmoderns as dangerous fools who take juvenile ruminations too far ("Dude, how do you know that everything you think is 'real' is not just some super-real hallucination?"). Reality gets replaced by personal whim, and any opinion about life or morals is as good as any other. Thus propped up, this straw man provides endless fun for secular and religious foundationalist critique.

I prefer, however, to think of postmodernism in terms of the third umpire's view, a view I would characterize not as subjective but as discursive. I take this latter term from the work of Michel Foucault, a French philosopher and historian whose name appears both in libraries of respected post-structuralists and in worldview evangelism's hit-lists of postmodern villains. In his work (The Archeology of Knowledge for instance), Foucault offers the idea of discourse.

It's not that unusual a term, to be honest. When teaching about postmodernism, I often ask my undergraduates what a discourse is. "A conversation, a debate," they answer, and they're right. I ask them to imagine discourse as a grand, ongoing conversation among, within, and between groups of people in societies, a conversation that takes place not just in speech but in writing, in images, in actions--really in any kind of communicative medium. For Foucault, however, this special kind of society-wide conversation, however, effectively creates the things (the topics, the objects, the subjects) it deals with. Foucault writes about the discourses that create/define madness, punishment, and sexuality differently in successive historical eras.

Closer to our time, though, I like to explain discouse via reference to the example of Pluto, the little planet that was-but-is-no-longer. Insofar as astronomy (or more specifically planet-ology) functions as a discourse--an ongoing conversation among people who practice astronomy--then the Pluto Affair demonstrates the extent to which the objects of astronomical discourse (e.g., planets) aren't so much described neutrally by astronomers as they are defined or even created by astronomers. Is Pluto a planet? Yes (in 1930). Then no (in 2006).

It's as if the umpires changed the rules for what counts as a ball or a strike mid-game, rescinding a previous call based on the new definition. All of this is to demonstrate that balls and strikes as such don't have any independent existence outside of the context of a particular game. Absent the game's rules, the distinction between a ball and a strike--and indeed, the whole scenario of someone in an odd costume swinging an oddly shaped stick in the hopes of smacking an oddly constructed ball--become nonsensical. Umpires' roles in calling balls or strikes highlights that baseball is a game whose conditions are determined at least in part by the definitions and calls of umpires. (To add a another wrinkle: umpires are themselves artifacts of the game and its rules. No baseball game? No umpires.)

It seems dismissive to call something like astronomy (or medicine, or science, or ethics, or politics, or theology) a game, but to a certain extent any discipline operates by virtue of discipline-bound, context-bound rules and definitions that define what it is to do said discipline.

None of this is to say, of course, that there isn't really a ball of rock and ice orbiting (usually) beyond Neptune out there. That heavenly body didn't suddenly shrink in size after being downgraded from planet to "dwarf planet" any more than it suddenly winked into existence after being first identified in 1930. In that sense, almost no one would argue that there isn't something "real" or "objectively there" that we now call Pluto the dwarf planet. The actions or calls of astronomical umpires don't literally create or destroy that body, just as the umpires' calls don't literally manufacture objects and players out of thin air.

At the same time, though, the redefinition--the umpire's "call"-- does have undeniable effects; the line between "planet" and "dwarf planet" isn't just semantics. Seventy years' worth of astronomy texts, posters of the solar system, educational curricula--all of those documents are now suddenly outmoded. Children have to memorize eight planets instead of nine. Mnemonic devices have to change. A spacecraft, New Horizons, got funding to travel to and take pictures of Pluto back in 2003 (it will reach Pluto in 2015). I remember hearing the scientists in charge of the New Horizons mission saying that, had the redefinition occurred prior to 2003, they would likely not have gotten funding for the project. These consequences aren't minor, and they certainly aren't the product of some individual person's whim.

The point?

To say that postmodernity doesn't believe in capital-T truth is only half right. Very few postmodern philosophers (maaaaaybe Jean Baudrillard in some of his weirder writings) would seriously suggest that there isn't some kind of brute reality in which humans live and move. But acknowledging that a brute reality exists doesn't necessarily equip humans to perceive, communicate about, and move through that reality in exactly the same way. Humans have to filter reality through senses, cognition, and expression (i.e., language), and these filters distort and/or mediate brute reality, limiting it to the sensible, the thinkable, and the expressible. Moreover, the filters and their processes get re-made and re-invented constantly. The way that the ancient Chinese imagined cosmology was vastly different than how Ptolemy imagined it, which was again different than post-Gallileo's cosmology, etc., etc.

In other words, postmodernity doesn't deny that an objective reality exists, but it takes the focus away from that objective reality per se (away from questions like What is really, eternally true?) and puts it squarely on a specific, local representation of that reality (What is "the true" as configured in X time/place?). Note the difference here between a purely subjective, straw-man postmodernity and a discursive postmodernity. The former suggests that truth and reality are whatever you individually want or think it to be. The latter suggest that ideas of truth and reality change radically over long timescales but often seem quite solid and powerful in any one time-place. A discursive formation is not a personal opinion, but neither is it The Way Things Really Are.

More tomorrow,

JF