A bad reason for normative postmodernism

Some postmodernists appear to think they have discovered a way to liberate us from the straightjacket of modern thinking and lead us into a bright, new, more intellectually productive future. They haven’t – at least, not for the reason I’ll look at here.

There are some important lessons in postmodernism and hermeneutics of which (rather embarrassingly) we need to be reminded: our ideas have a history which someone else’s ideas may not share. If we are to understand one another, we had better get to grips with these histories and not interpret each others’ words as if we had said them ourselves.

This idea is more powerful than this rather trivial statement suggests, and requires a good deal of imagination to work through to its conclusion. I think Foucault did a particularly good job of this in Discipline and Punish (a book I’ve actually read, believe it or not), in his discussion of the conceptual shift in the justification of punishment over the time when power relationships in society moved from being based in confrontation to avoiding confrontation and instead exercising power through observation and norm-setting.

However, from time to time a the postmodernists go beyond the basic lesson of hermeneutics and appear to take it to legitimate a whole new methodology for intellectual endeavor. I have yet to be convinced that any such move can be justified – or is even desirable.

The big thing about postmodernism which ruffles so many feathers is its cheerful obliteration of legitimacy: because genealogy exposes claims to the necessity of different ways of thinking as a sham, it becomes monstrously difficult to justify any particular way of doing something as better than another.

The problems become especially intractable around ethics: where once we appealed to God, then Reason, then (Lord help us) Science, it soon became impossible to deny that a lot of our moral truths are the contingent products of culture. There is simply nothing out there to which we can appeal in order to justify our beliefs about what is right and wrong.

Philosophers are finally being forced to accept (it might be better to say “rediscover”) that ethical views are contingent and complicated: whatever it is that legitimates one way of thinking over another is not going to be found in some meta-narrative. It’s going to be found here on Earth among people. And the problems in ethics are between people and will be solved by people, not by absolutes in a metaphysical beyond.

In my humble opinion, rummaging for answers in the beyond is a distraction from the problems of living in the world.

A weak response to the contingency of ethics and the difficulty of legitimating one view over another is soft (“anything goes”) relativism. I don’t have much time for this position. Refusing to justify yourself is lazy, and relativism itself requires a metanarrative: “It is difficult to justify one ethical system over another; therefore we shouldn’t even try.”

As if anybody could really get anywhere with that kind of view – it’s a mindset for paralysis (or nihilism, if there’s a difference). If whoever alleges themselves to be a relativist were sincere, then they’d do nothing, or act randomly. If they don’t act randomly then they’re not engaging with the problem of legitimacy, they are ducking it - and saying nothing about the choices they justify to themselves with every day. Soft relativism is boring, insincere and foolish.

A stronger response to the problems posed by contingency, also wrong-headed but an improvement on relativism in its affirmativeness rather than nihilism, is on show in Gary Aylesworth’s interpretation of the philosophy of Jean Francois Lyotard.

Apparently, Lyotard was interested in the idea of progress in science, among other things. He was unconvinced by the idea that the human mind is a homing-missile for the truth and that the latest science is somehow legitimized by its greater proximity to the truth than preceding theories. That would be a metanarrative, and skepticism about the existence of these is what Lyotard too to define postmodernism. And so far, I’m with him, although I’m not sure what “science” means in this context.

At the same time Lyotard appears to have thought that, however badly misconceived the concept is by moderns, progress does happen in science. Not all outputs from social inquiry are equal; some outputs amount to a step forward; in general, humans are able to take the step forward. This means that some theories or explanations of what we do have greater legitimacy than others.

The problems I have with Lyotard come in when he gets prescriptive. He argues that we should dispense with our modern notions of progress and instead apply a standard of “performance” to discussions of the legitimacy of one theory over another, where “performance” means something like maximizing the flow of information within a system and minimizing the number of non-functional or static moves.

I think the prescriptive move is dud, because we go from a project of describing how inquiry is done to prescribing how inquiry should be done. I’m not sure it’s possible to make prescriptions about a social endeavor.

It’s not just the difficulty of pre-judging the “performative” qualities of a theory before adopting it (although that sounds weird enough). If we can’t do this, we’re left able to diagnose the relative quality of a theoretical shift in science, but not able to help ourselves choose which theoretical shift we could take.

It’s the idea that we can be prescriptive at all about this kind of thing, without halting the project of describing the human condition.

It might be true that we need to change what we do, but if we are trying to understand how one theory is legitimated over another, then we should look at that process rather than solve the problems by doing something differently. If you change the system you are trying to understand, it’s like fixing a bug in Windows by installing a Linux OS in its place.

I have the same kind of problem with Utilitarianism (and deontological theories, and the rest). They don’t seek to understand human ethics – they seek to substitute human ethics for something else. Maybe the world would be a better place if we were utilitarians, but we aren’t. To become utilitarian is to give up trying to understand the problem of having values.

So maybe “performative legitimation” can replace whatever goes on in legitimation right now. But Lyotard shouldn’t kid us that he’s solving the problem of legitimation rather than ducking it.

Overall, I would like to turn this whole approach to the problem on its head. Rather than argue myself into accepting that there is no such think as legitimacy, I would rather take it as cold, hard fact that some narratives have greater legitimacy than others – and ask why this is so.

What goes on behind the scenes when a narrative gains the power to legitimize certain actions and beliefs? We have rival narratives duking it out: sometimes sexy wins, sometimes parsimony, no doubt external influences are just as responsible (if not more so) than the internal qualities of the narrative for determining whether it secures legitimacy or is able to legitimize.

This puts people at the centre of the issue of legitimacy – but as creators of value, we always have been. Postmodernism is just a philosophy that recognizes this.