The postmodern bogeyman. (Letters).(Letter to the Editor)

SIR: Scott Campbell (June 2001) takes aim at "relativism", invoking the by now familiar nemesis of Quadrant contributors--postmodernism--as the bogeyman himself. It is difficult to be sure exactly what the term "postmodernism" signifies when used, as it so frequently appears to be, as a convenient tag to append to views with which one disagrees. Any intellectually rigorous discussion of the merits or otherwise of the philosophical tradition known as relativism that professes to interrogate "postmodern ideas" should at the very least tell us just what those ideas are.

I assume Campbell means to denote a set of ideas broadly associated with the principally French and American developments in the so-called social sciences over the second half of the last century; represented (at least in the popular imagination) by such names as Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jonathan Culler, Paul de Man and Richard Rorty. It is difficult to see, however, how the theoretical rigour of those highly individual thinkers is to be reduced to a set of easily distinguishable propositions that can be dismissed out of hand as easily as Campbell appears to manage.

The significant contributions to the development of literary and critical theory made by, for example, Derrida in his deep readings of Rousseau and Levi Strauss (in Of Grammatology) and his analysis of the use of metaphor in language (an essay called "White Mythology") may represent aspects of the linguistic turn which has occurred within academic discourse. Language reveals itself, within this conception, as the repository of knowledge, to be interrogated both for what it holds and what it is in its own right. Campbell appears to miss a distinction present in this (crudely described) "postmodern" view. A theorist who asks what it means for something to be "true" within such an understanding of language asks a different question than the philosopher who insists on a strictly mind-independent criterion of truth that may be described as "correspondence with the facts". This is not to say that enquiry of the first species therefore insists on relativist concepts (and indeed so-called linguistic relativism reveals weaknesses rapidly under any sustained analysis), nor that it is ...