Friday Review: Who's Afraid of Postmodernism?

In preparation for James Smith's visit to campus, a number of faculty and student reading groups read through his little book, Who's Afraid of Postmodernism? The book has five chapters: 1) an introduction to postmodernism, 2) a chapter on Jacques Derrida, 3) a chapter on Jean-François Lyotard, 4) a chapter on Michel Foucault, and 5) a concluding chapter making his pitch for radical orthodoxy.

1. Each chapter begins with a long summary of some movie. For example, the first chapter, "Is the Devil from Paris?," begins with Matrix. Neo is emerging from one construction of reality to another, from modernity to postmodernity (17). Not really the best analogy. Postmodernism would be for Neo to recognize that he lives in a matrix from which he can never emerge.

And herein is probably my central critique, not just of Smith's book, but of postmodernism itself. We can push back on modernist certainty to be sure, but the dualistic "myth" of subject over and against object has served truth very well these few hundred years. Postmodernism is a footnote on this distinction. It is a big footnote, but life doesn't work if we treat the footnote as the central thing and the "world as other" as the footnote.

Postmodernism is the eternal reminder that almost every meaning machine breaks down at some point. But it would be stupid just to sit on the machine while it was still actually working. The Enlightenment enterprise has worked very well, even when it has worked to make nuclear bombs. It has worked in the sense that we have learned to manipulate our reality to where we can go to the moon or speak to people across the globe while walking in the park using a small hand held device.

I'm getting off track. In the introduction Smith introduces the three thinkers he will be discussing and suggests that we need to recover some of the pre-modern that we have lost. The final goal of the book is to "issue in a thickly confessional church that draws on the very particular (yet catholic) and ancient practices of the church's worship and discipleship"--a radical orthodoxy (25).

2. The second chapter deals with Derrida, focusing on his famous statement that "there is nothing outside the text." Smith cleverly suggests that we as Christians can consider that text to be Scripture, giving all new meaning to the phrase "sola scriptura."

What Derrida means is along the lines of Nietzsche earlier, "There are no facts, only interpretations." By saying that there is nothing but the text, Derrida suggests that there is no part of the world that we know by any means other than by interpretation. To this degree, I agree with Derrida.

Derrida also wishes to claim, however, that there is no stable meaning in these texts. In my opinion, Smith sugar coats Derrida just a little too much--at times I could hardly distinguish how he was describing Derrida from how I view things. Then again, Smith is ultimately a little more post-modern than I am...

However, I agree with Smith's critique of D. A. Carson's critique of Derrida (assuming that he has accurately described Carson). There is a vast difference between saying what I just did above--that all our conscious knowledge of the world involves interpretation and that no human being is objective--and saying that a person does not believe in truth.

To me, the "truth" I gain from Derrida is that any text can be interpreted differently from the way its creator might have intended and, indeed, from the way other people understand it. Texts--mirroring their human creators--are prone to internal inconsistencies on some level.

But this is a footnote. It's a very important footnote, a very true footnote. Yet Derrida spent practically his entire career on a footnote! To make his point, he went to ridiculous lengths to find alternative readings of texts whose meaning otherwise seemed pretty clear.

Thanks, Jacques. I got the point back in '67.

Smith then goes radically orthodox on us. If the world is ultimately all text, then, hey, let's make the Bible be that text--sola scriptura. There is nothing outside the scriptural text.

Pure genius. I suspect it basically translates into getting scripture into our imaginary. It's a beautiful poetic image... But it doesn't really tell us anything about interpreting specific biblical texts. :-)

3. The third chapter deals with Lyotard, who as much as anyone gave us the terms "pre-modern," "modern," and "postmodern." Lyotard defines postmodernism as "incredulity toward metanarratives" or in French "big stories."

By "big stories," Smith doesn't think Lyotard has in mind the kinds of narratives that in fact have been the very stuff of postmodernism. In fact, I found it a little hard at first to understand Lyotard, for I have always associated postmodernism with the idea that you can't step outside the story to give some God's eye interpretation of it. I've always associated propositional interpretations to be the modernist and staying in the "stories" they try to interpret as the postmodernist.

... which is why "grand stories" is a bad translation in English of what Lyotard is saying. A metanarrative for Lyotard is an overarching rational supertheory that is meant to stand alongside reality to explain it objectively. Smith does not think that, when properly understood, Lyotard contradicts the idea of understanding the world through the eyes of the Christian story.

I largely agree with Lyotard, at least as I understand him. We would do well to think of the systems by which we describe the world as expressions of the world rather than literal explanations of it. This approach requires the revaluation of metaphor and a realization of the value of myth. As I've said before, we do well to think of scientific theories as very useful myths, expressions of reality that accommodate massive numbers of "characters" in the expression. These myths allow us to predict and manipulate reality. But they are not strictly statements of that reality. They are metaphors for things-in-themselves to which we do not have access.

With this last comment, of course, I distinguish myself from Smith, who with other postmodernists has tried to abandon Cartesian and Kantian dualisms. For me, these dualisms are also myths. But they are extremely functional ones.

4. The fourth chapter deals with the third of the three postmodern giants (why does Smith not treat the pragmatist Rorty, I wonder): Michel Foucault. I found Smith's movie clip here the most useful so far--One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

Foucault's famous saying is "power is knowledge" reverses Frances Bacon's old dictum, "knowledge is power." Foucault's basic claim is that what we consider true is not a matter of what is simply fact but that what is considered true is a function of lines of power.

Let me say with Foucault as with Derrida that there is an incredible amount of truth to what Foucault is saying here. What is considered true is as much and usually more about who has the power to convince others of their ideas as it is about some blunt truth out there. Foucault's case studies are far more valuable than Derrida's, describing how our conceptualizations of things like punishment, medicine, and sexuality have changed over the centuries.

Smith suggests that with the givenness of power, we would do well as a church to use the inevitable systems of power at our disposal to form others Christianly.

5. In the final and longest chapter, Smith furthers his agenda of a radical orthodoxy for the emerging church. So when it comes to dogma, we unapologetically affirm it without concern over the Cartesian drive to correlate it to the facts. This is the Christian "take away" from Derrida.

The Christian take away from Lyotard is a re-embrace of the Christian story and Christian traditions. This is the ancient-future trend that we see, for example, in the late Robert Webber's book on worship. We reaffirm the value of ritual and symbol, the role of the tactile in worship rather than just the cognitive.

Smith perhaps best sums up his overall take away in this way: "the best way to be postmodern is to be premodern; to be emergent, one must be catholic" (135). We develop a sacramental imagination rather than, as modernism has, a "gnostic" or dualistic one.