foucault – A : A

Backloading Postmodernism

Recently, The Gospel Coalition announced that it is offering a course on the poststructuralist/postmodernist philosophers Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault titled “Derrida, Foucault, and the Bible.”¹ They state that the “course will help [students] see what Derrida and Foucault are really saying, and show [students] how [they] can bring their thought into conversation with the Bible.”² Sadly, many today don’t recognize the “conversation” language as specifically postmodern because it is so prevalent in our society. The same is true for terms like “dialogue,” “community,” and “spaces.” These are, of course, common terms, but they are loaded when placed in contexts such as the above mentioned intro to a course on poststructuralist/postmodernist philosophers. The point of this blog, then, is to point out some loaded terms that Christians should be aware of when we are speaking with proponents of social justice, critical race theory, and cultural Marxism.

Such language is reflective of an underlying worldview that is at odds with the Christian faith. For instance, when a postmodernist states that we should bring x into conversation with y, this implies that neither x nor y “has all the answers” regarding the subject matter of which they speak. For the postmodernist, there is no overarching theory or story of life, no meta-narrative, and so x and y do not emerge from a more general epistemological structure against which they may be evaluated for consistency, cogency, or approximate distance from the truth. Instead, x and y have emerged from different epistemological backgrounds that may be attempting to deal with a particular question or concern of philosophy or anthropology or science or religion, etc, and they are, therefore, related to one another as different approaches to obtaining knowledge. They may be compared and contrasted, as well as heuristically combined in order to further each individual approach, but they are separated from one another at the epistemological root. Bringing a text into conversation with another, therefore, does not mean simply comparing and contrasting different texts, but doing so under the guiding assumption that neither text has “the” “T”ruth, but only articulates, because it is only capable of articulating, a partial and perspectival set of relatively important “t”ruths.

Similarly, the postmodernist privileges dialogue over and against monologue, seeing as no one text can be said to have the Truth to the exclusion of other texts. In postmodernism, monologue is regarded as a totalitarian form of communication, a means of enacting ideological and metaphysical violence in which the voices of those who do not have power are suppressed and marginalized as wrong, incorrect, untrue, or aberrant. For the postmodernist, dialogue places individuals on level ground, where they can exchange ideas with one another in an open-ended format of communication. The assumption, again, is that there is no top-to-bottom communication that gives us an absolute standard against which we may compare and contrast ideas in order to see which are better or worse, more or less conformable to the truth, and true or false.

Given that there is no single unifying narrative, delivered in the form of a monologue, that provides an objective basis for the veridical and axiological evaluation and analysis of ideas, it follows that there are no individuals who are completely isolated and sovereign Subjects capable of obtaining those ideas on his or her own. Thus, the postmodernist privileges the many over and against the one, i.e. the community over and against the individual. Everyone belongs to a community, therefore, without which he or she would be unable to be what they are; thus community is privileged over and against the individual.

Lastly, the notion of “space” in postmodernism follows the same line of reasoning. Rather than viewing social relations as really being hierarchical in nature, postmodernism views them as relative to one another on a horizontal plain. Thus, postmodernist philosophers and theorists will speak of “making space” for marginalized concepts, persons, practices, etc. This is an implicit rejection of transcendence and its necessary consequence – hierarchical arrangement. Implicit in this notion of space, then, is the assumption that the occupation of space by individuals is not due to any divinely or naturally ordained set of circumstances (e.g. fate, predestination, mechanical determinism, psychical determinism, etc), but to human agents actively negotiating the boundaries that separate them from one another.

Concluding Remarks

This short list is by no means complete, but it covers some of the more extensively used language taken directly from postmodern philosophy. Listen to a podcast and you will likely hear phrases such as the following –

“This is the conversation we need to be having in our institutions…”

“We need a dialogue, not a monologue, if we are going to make any progress…”

“Those of us within the Christian [or Gamer, or Black, or White, or Asian, or Hindu, or Technological, or – take your pic!] community…”

“Marginalized people need to know that we are making a safe space for them to be themselves…”

And you might even come across a statement like this one –

“Our community is open to having conversations about how to carve out spaces” for underrepresented communities, with an eye toward having a healthy dialogue about subject x.”

When these words show up in particularly postmodernist influenced contexts, or when they appear within a cluster of other postmodern specific terms (e.g. decentering, centering, the Other, othering, et al), be careful to actually hear where the speaker is coming from. Understand that the postmodernist is saying something very specific that only bears a superficial resemblance to what you, as a Christian, may mean.

Until next time,
Soli Deo Gloria
-h.

P.S.
If you want to read about more of these terms, check out my article at the Facebook Biblical Trinitarian page, Social Justice “Buzz Words” and Why You Should Not Use Them.

1 https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/course/derrida-foucault-bible/#course-introduction.
2 ibid. (emphasis added)

Essence, Accident, Power

Contrary to what most books on the subject will tell you, postmodern philosophers were universally in agreement regarding three important philosophical beliefs in their writings. The first belief they universally shared was antiessentialism. Anti-essentialism makes the ontological claim that no identities have essential properties, but are accidental constructs of a variety of contingent material forces. “An essential property of an object is a property that it must have while anaccidental property of an object is one that it happens to have but that it could lack.”^[1] According to antiessentialism, everything is a construct.

The second belief, following the first, is that because everything is a construct, everything may be deconstructed into its constituent parts. Typically, under the overriding assumption of evolutionism, postmodern philosophers engaged in a genealogical analysis of their chosen subjects, intending “to show that a given [subject]…was the result of contingent turns of history, not the outcome of rationally inevitable trends.”^[2]

The third belief, following from the first and second is that all ontological and epistemological relationships are reducible to power (read: politics). If everything is a construct, then nothing is necessary. If nothing is necessary, then no attempt at controlling a particular subject [say, the human body] via definition, empirical study, or the axioms of Scripture is legitimate. And if this is so, then universal rebellion (against beliefs, philosophical systems, religious systems, scientific discourse in all of its variations) is legitimate. Not only is it legitimate – it is inevitable. As one would expect, this encouraged dissent from socio-political structures of every stripe. Likewise, as one would also expect, it encouraged advocacy for marginalized members of society (e.g. non-white/non-european ethnic minorities).

Insofar as the postmodern turn helped deconstruct slanderous stereotypes and curb sinful behavior against fellow bearers of the image of God, it was not all bad. Nevertheless, because there were no essences, no absolute moral standards to judge whether political oppression or political liberation is good or bad, no absolute standard by which we could judge one philosophical system as true over and against the others which are false – the benefits of such deconstructive analyses were short lived. In postmodernism, there are no essential subjects (e.g. universal Man) but only historically contingent subjectivities (i.e. subjects that are composed of accidental properties which can change at a whim). Consequently, under postmodernism there would be no essential difference between Naziism, on the one hand, and the Civil Rights movement, on the other hand – both movements would simply be attempting to obtain and exercise power. Right and wrong, accordingly, could not be understood universally.

Metaphysical Monism: The Metaphysics of Postmodernism

Yet if everything is a construct, i.e. reducible to parts, then everything shares the property of being constructible, i.e. being put together or taken apart over the course of time. If this is the case, then what we are facing is, in fact, not at all a form of anti-essentialism but a deeply rooted belief in the essentiality of matter. The philosophical position that marks postmodernism, therefore, is a thoroughgoing materialism. I have written on this topic elsewhere,^[3] so I won’t delve too deeply into the matter here. What must be noted, however, is that the metaphysics espoused by postmodernist philosophers was not given much emphasis by many. It was perhaps Gilles Deleuze, a French postmodern metaphysician, who alone was bold enough to openly preach the metaphysics of postmodernism, declaring that pluralism is monism.^[4]

The belief that materiality is one, although materiality’s manifestations (i.e. every construction conceivable) are infinitely varied/varying, is not surprising seeing as German Romanticism and Darwinian Evolutionism, for which German Romanticism, aesthetically developing monistic trends in philosophy,^[5] apparently paved the way,^[6] formed the materialistic-monistic ground from which postmodernism eventually grew. Ironically, however, the postmodernist attempt to identify the radical multiplicity of kinds of philosophies, “valid” expressions of religious beliefs, gender, and sexual orientations as essentially identical has returned full-circle, affirming the kind of oppressive reductionism that postmodernists wanted to, in principle, eliminate from academic and popular thinking.

[Continued in Parts 2 & 3]

-h.

[1] http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/essential-accidental.

[2] http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/foucault/#4.3.

[3] See The Fundamental Axiom of Postmodernism, https://www.academia.edu/5547058/The_Fundamental_Axiom_of_Postmodernism.

[4] For a more detailed discussion on this subject see Deleuze, Gilles. “Dualism, Monism and Multiplicities (Desire-Pleasure-Jouissan),” in Contretemps 2 (May, 2001), 92-108.

[5] Greg Bahnsen gives a quite thoroughgoing history of the development of materialistic monism’s popularity in his article “On Worshiping the Creature Rather than the Creator,” in Journal of Christian Reconstruction —800/553-3938. I:1.

(Summer, 1974).<http://www.westminsterreformedchurch.org/ScienceMTS/Science.Bahnsen.c-C.htm>.

[6] See Diaz, Hiram. The Romantic System of Thought: Unearthing William Blake’s Axioms,https://www.academia.edu/5547421/The_Romantic_System_of_Thought_Unearthing_William_Blakes_Axioms; Richards, Robert J. “Darwin on Mind, Morals, and Emotions,” in The Cambridge Companion to Darwin, eds. J. Hodge and G. Radick. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 92-115; Darwinian Heresies, eds. Abigail Lustig, Robert J. Richards, Michael Ruse.