Perils of the postmodern pathway.(Philosophy & Ideas)

POSTMODERNISM as a system of thought is not what it used to be, it seems. Or perhaps it never was. Keith Windschuttle's 1994 book The Killing of History fired an early salvo or two at what had by then become the intellectual vehicle of choice for many of the denizens of modern academe, especially in the liberal arts. A growing chorus of complaint about postmodemism's purported abandonment of the concept of "objective truth" is now heard in the academic press, and in the educational sections of the broadsheet press even its op-ed pages--both in Australia and overseas. Quadrant has recently provided a platform for a fair few such complainants.

It was not always so: or was it? In the early 1980s the loose cluster of philosophical tenets and propositions which came to be collectively known (or perhaps labelled) as postmodernism seemed to offer a rich and promising pathway to new sources of knowledge and understanding of those things we contemplated and were baffled by. This was particularly so if, like me, you were working in the area of history.

Postmodernism is often accused of setting itself up against the classical historical trope; that is, causality. That is so, or has been so. Cansality in some respects failed the eager undergraduates who embraced Foucault, Baudrillard and Barthes in preferance to G.R. Elton and von Ranke. For example, my postgraduate study at Melbourne University addressed, among other things, the contemporary image of the sixteenth-century Elizabethan vagrant. I could not understand why so often, in the literature of vagabondage, the vagrant beggar was described as a hypocrite. I could have understood wastrel, thief, fraud, dole bludger (extrapolating backwards from the twentieth century, to be sure) or layabout (ditto). But I could not understand hypocrite; and I knew that I bad to in order to comprehend the essence of the Elizabethans' anxieties, indeed fears, as they confronted the image. Neither a recognition of the causes of poverty, nor of its consequences, explained the use of that curious word. But the postmodern project did, notably semiotics and discursive analysis.

Judiciously following Barthes (as I thought) on the relationship of sign and myth, and Foucault on the nature of discourse, it was possible to see that, for the Elizabethans, begging was the sign of poverty inverted. The vagrant beggar was a hypocrite because he usurped the mythological language of poverty, the condition most beloved of Christ, and perverted its effect to turn a false face to those be importuned. Poverty was a holy condition, but the sturdy vagrant was not poor, he was merely idle; he pretended to be poor in order to benefit by the aura of sacrality that attended that condition. Hence the charge of hypocrite.

This proposition in relation to the specific historical scenario in question may be fight or wrong; I am not seeking to insist on it. I am simply making the point that in some at least of its constructions postmodernism has offered a set of powerful heuristic and explanative tools that, used well, can shed considerable light on elements of the historical story for which conventional causality can give no satisfactory account. (So thanks, Roland, Michel.)

Back then, as a new and revolutionary way of approaching the past, the postmodern project (I accept that "project' implies a degree of systemisation which, it can be argued, never really existed) presented conventional historicism with a number of challenges--it threw down the gauntlet, as it were, to established ways of seeing. At the place of intersection of fact and interpretation where truth might be presumed to lie, postmodernism inserted an ambiguity. This confuses and often infuriates its critics. But the ambiguity is itself a truth.

As a student of history, I cannot know why Andreas Karlstadt joined the Reformation in Germany in the early seventeenth century; I cannot know why, out of a street in a German town full of people who shared roughly comparable experiences, a few families should have become Mennonites and sought a new religious life in Canada or Moldavia and the rest remained loyal Lutherans. For that matter, I cannot know why Genghis Khan conquered Asia Minor. I can posit, I can conjecture; but I cannot know as fact. That truth is lost; it died with the men and women for whom it was a truth. Their experience is not recoverable save in the texts that preserve it; ...