The intelligent postmodern contention

Foucault draws our attention to a historical fallacy. We forget when interpreting events that our concepts are a product of those events. Since our concepts didn't exist before the events, we can't legitimately draw on them to explain the events.

The intelligent postmodernist contention is that the network of concepts which form part of a social institution cannot be used to explain how the institution has come to have the form it does: the concepts are a product of these changes, and therefore can't have a causal role in the development of the system.

These concepts are part and product of the development of the system - they have their own history, their own contingency, and need explaining and evaluating as much as the system they describe. In fact, you can't describe the history of the system without paying attention to the history of the concepts in the system: earlier concepts gave birth to the system and the resulting concepts.

For example, there was a drastic change in the institution of punishment between 1750 and 1850. The change was well-known to historians of the penal system, but until Foucault came along the change was generally explained in terms of an increasing humanisation of the system, brought about by greater recognition of the rights of the criminal (or some such).

Foucault's observation in Discipline and Punish is that the increased degree of humanity exhibited in the modern penal process is a phenomenon that itself needs to be accounted for: to state that increased humanity is the reason for the new system would be to mistake an effect for a cause. The question for Foucault is - what happened which allowed the concept of prisoners' rights to take hold? What happened so that we can even think about and interpret the history of the penal system in those terms?

In his account of the reform process, Foucault describes how much of the reform debate centred not around acknowledging the criminal's rights, but replacing a system which through its uneven activity was providing a locus for opposition against the crown and inhibiting the activity of the bourgeoisie. Reform was not born of a new sensibility, but the was the product of the ruling elite's need for a regularised system of justice.

That need for regularisation produced the ideal of the system which we have today: where punishment fits the crime; where there is a system of surveillance which ensures criminal behaviour goes detected and punished; where courts are disconnected from the influences that make their judgements discontinuous; where punishment only happens after an offence has been verified; where someone is innocent until proven guilty.

This idea of justice has since come loose from its origin and taken on a life of its own, no doubt because it is a vital conceptual weapon for the average citizen looking to defend himself against an omnipotent state. Nonetheless, its existence is an historical accident, whatever its contemporary importance in framing debates around penal reform, identifying miscarriages of justice, and protecting individuals from the state.

In this account, Foucault is highlighting a historical fallacy: it doesn't follow from your ability to interpret a change in a certain way that the concepts you are using in fact explain that change - accurate interpretation is much harder to achieve than that. The fallacy is made when it is forgotten that concepts have their own history, so cannot be assumed in interpretation.

The lesson is to avoid the mistake of using current concepts to explain historical changes: the first job of the historians of cultural change is to learn which concepts were being used at the time of the change they are studying. It is only their second job is to figure out what happened that produced the systemic change they are studying: what caused the old system to break down and disappear, and what happened so that the new system has the form that it does?

For me, this is a very significant lesson in postmodernism, although it rather pulls the interpreting rug out from under your feet. You end up trying to give a history of developments in some area, using concepts which have a history, with your own concepts that have their own history. You can never get out of the system to some point where you can observe all the conceptual moves. You just swim around inside it forever.

Is this a contradiction at the heart of postmodernism, that renders inquiry itself unintelligible? Or is it a discovery about human inquiry? I think it's a discovery. I think it is possible to do historical research within these limits - better research than the penal theorists whom Foucault was criticising, certainly - so there is no loss.

It might be interesting to ask in conclusion: If what Foucault says is so damaging to inquiry and undermining of our concept of truth and ability to interpret, then why was he such a painstaking and relentlessly thorough historian? Why did he try so hard to uncover errors? He wasn't a stereotypical postmodern waffler - so what gives?

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A note on the insincerity of philosophers

Modern philosophy smacks of insincerity because it denies experience the depth which its proponents take for granted.

Postmodernism is, in part, a reaction to the metaphysical deficiencies in philosophy which we’ve been stuck with at least since Kant, and no doubt longer in one way or another. The modernist contention is we cannot know things (not even ourselves) directly – all experience is mediated by representation.

The reason I find myself more sympathetic to the posts than the moderns is the Kantian approach puts appearance and reality on a par, so we can only know the necessary preconditions of appearance, or mathematical truths, or abstract moral principles - because these are things which have no appearance, or are not based on appearance.

This makes our experience of the world highly insubstantial and elevates the most insubstantial of things (such as triangles) to the status of the most concrete knowledge. This alienates us from the world in which we live, distancing us from our lives as if we were watching ourselves on the screen in a cinema, a screen where suspended disbelief removes the barrier between fantasy and reality.

Ultimately, it locks us firmly in our heads and makes the world around us neither myth nor reality – instead of beating radical solipsism, modern philosophy has embraced and entrenched it, isolating the subject in a realm of appearance.

Personally, I feel that our engagement with the world is much deeper than a number of philosophers would have me believe. I also think that much modern philosophy, insofar as it implies solipsism, is deeply insincere: nobody acts as if their world is mere appearance, so to talk as if it is, or to build philosophical theories to get around this problem, more-or-less amounts to denying that the depth of experience is something which needs to be explained.

Whoever said self-publication discourages quality writing? Meh, this was rubbish. I can rescue a point though: as any newspaper knows, regularity of publishing is sometimes more important than quality (hence silly season instead of the journalists going on holiday along with the politicians and public).

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.