Deconstructive Postmodernity and the Social Sciences

Deconstructive postmodernity is usually regarded as anti-traditionalism or any form of received knowledge and ways of doing things. Zygmunt Bauman characterised the postmodern era as mainly about “the tearing off of the mask of illusions; the recognition of certain pretences as false and certain objectives as neither attainable nor, for that matter, desirable” (Bauman 1993: 3). In other words, deconstructive postmodernity reminds us to be sceptical of traditional ways of doing things and of being in the world in general. In his later work, Intimations of Postmodernity, Bauman maintained that postmodernity implies “the breakdown of self-enclosed communities and the ensuring appearance of the ‘masterless men’ – vagabonds, vagrants, shifting population nowhere at home, belonging to no specific community or corporation, at no locality subject to continuous and all-embracing surveillance – that rendered the issue of social control, and of the production of social order, problematic” (Bauman 1992: 6). One can easily deduce from the above quotation that Bauman saw postmodernism as ushering human existence into an existential situation where there are no restrictions or boundaries in the movement of people, thus endangering the very existence of the traditional social order. It is evidently clear that such an interpretation of postmodernity is deconstructive.

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However, prominent scholars in deconstructive postmodernism are Michael Foucault and Jacques Derrida. In his book, The Order of Things, Michael Foucault argued that it is human beings who impose the order on how things should be. He writes,

Order is, at one and the same time, that which is given in things as their inner law, the hidden network that determines the way they confront one another, and also that which has no existence except in the grid created by a glance, an examination, a language; and it is only the blank spaces of this grid that order manifests itself in depth as though already there, waiting in silence for the moment of its expression. …At the other extremity of thought, there are the scientific theories or the philosophical interpretations which explain why order exists in general, what universal law it obeys, what principle can account for it, and why this particular order has been established and not some other. But between these two regions, so distant from one another, lies a domain which, even though its role is mainly an intermediary one, is nonetheless fundamental: it is more confused, more obscure, and probably less easy to analyse (Foucault 1965: xix).

The compartmentalisation of knowledge into disciplines is an artifice that is created by the human need to create order. The creation of order is aimed at giving orderliness to things in a way that ultimately determines how they should work according to our own human design. Some of those laws that are usually central to scientific theories are the consequent result of philosophical interpretations aimed at enforcing universal laws whose purpose is to serve as the source of justification for the established order or status quo. What Foucault is saying is that order is not something that arises from eternal laws, but an artifice of human creation aimed at creating intelligibility to the human mind. One can also deduce that Foucault was anti-foundationalism or structuralism. This comes out more lucidly when he said that order is characterised by discontinuities in the sense that what was previously accepted as the order in the previous epoch is usually superseded by what becomes the order in the contemporary era. He argues,

Now, this archaeological inquiry has revealed two great discontinuities in the episteme of Western culture: the first inaugurate the Classical age (roughly half-way through the seventeenth century) and the second, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, marks the beginning of the modern age. The order on the basis of which we think today does not have the same mode of being as that of the Classical thinkers” (Foucault 1965: xx).

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Here it is evidently clear that Foucault was refuting the idea of eternal truths in the ordering of things. Order was thus not something permanent, enjoying unchangeability. One can say that order can only have meaning within a particular epoch, and in the passage of that particular previous epoch it becomes irrelevant to the present or contemporary epoch. A refutation or deconstruction of order was also an advocacy of antistructuralism among deconstructive postmodernists. Jacques Derrida, who was heavily indebted to the writings of Foucault was more nuanced in his critique of structuralism. In his critique of structuralism, Derrida had this to say,

It would be easy enough to show that the concept of structure and even the word ‘structure’ itself are as old as the episteme – that is to say, as old as Western science and Western philosophy – and that their roots thrust deep into the soil of ordinary language, into whose deepest recesses the episteme plunges in order to gather them up and to make them part of itself in a metaphorical displacement. Nevertheless, up to the event which I wish to make out and define, structure – or rather the structurality of structure – although it has always been at work, has always been neutralised or reduced, and this by a process of giving it a center or of referring it to a point of presence, a fixed origin. The function of this centre was not only to orient, balance, and organise the structure – one cannot, in fact, conceive of an unorganised structure – but above all to make sure that the organising principle of the structure would limit what we might call the play of structure. By orienting and organising the coherence of the system, the center of a structure permits the play of its elements inside the total form. And even today the notion of a structure lacking any centre represents the unthinkable itself (Derrida 1978: 278).

Derrida is critiquing the idea of a structure which is usually basic to our human thinking and our ordering of what constitutes reality around us. The existence of a structure is usually premised on the centre as a point of reference for that particular structure. It is the centre which enables us to conceive how the structure is organised to the extent that our human minds cannot conceive or imagine a structure which is disorganised. The idea of a structure presupposes the existence of a centre whose existence we cannot do without if the structure has to be intelligible. As he puts it, “thus it has always been thought that the centre, which is by definition unique, constituted that very thing within a structure which while governing the structure, escapes structurality. This is why classical thought concerning structure could say

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that the center is, paradoxically, within the structure and outside it” (Ibid). What Derrida is saying is that whilst the structure constitutes an existence that is relative to the center, the problem inherent in this way of thinking lies in the fact that the center has its own existence that is independent of the center. This way of thinking implies that if we succeed in undermining the existence of the center then the structure will cease to exist. Deconstructive postmodernity is also a trend of thought which is described by scholars as anti- foundationalism in the sense that it is critical towards ‘the given’ patterns of knowledge that cannot be disputed or knowledge that is usually taken for granted. All beliefs and theses are regarded as open to criticism and correction (Bernstein 1991: 326). In this regard, deconstructive post-modernists maintain that a craving for an absolute knowledge should be regarded as a misguided quest.

Finally, another version of deconstructive post-modernism presents itself as a refutation of a claim to universal knowledge. Bauman expressed the deconstructive postmodernism’s attitude towards universalism as follows:

The postulate of universality was always a demand with an address; or, somewhat more concretely, a sword with the edge aimed against a selected target. The postulate was a reflection on the modern practice of universalization – in a way similar to that of the related concepts of ‘one human nature’ or ‘human essence’, which reflected the intention to substitute the citizen (the person with only such attributes as have been assigned by the laws of the single and uncontested authority acting on behalf of the unified and sovereign state) for the motley collection of parishioners, kinsmen and other locals. The theoretical postulate squared well with the uniformizing ambitions and practices of the modern state, with the war it declared on les pouvoirs intermediaires, with its cultural crusades against local customs redefined as superstitions and condemned to death for the crime of resisting centralized management (Bauman 1993: 39).

In the light of the above quotation, it is clear that deconstructive postmodernity is against universalism which is regarded as oppressive to the idea of plurality. Instead of pursuing universality, the ideal for deconstructive postmodernists is to give special attention to the particularity of things. For example, instead of championing the existence of world culture,

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we should rather see the world as constituted by a multiplicity of cultures that differ yet one from another. Even in the realm of knowledge, there was nothing universalizable. As he puts it, “interpretation between systems of knowledge is recognised, therefore, as the task of experts armed with specialist knowledge, but also endowed, for one reason or another, with a unique capacity to lift themselves above the communication networks within which respective systems are located without losing touch with that ‘inside’ of systems where knowledge is had unproblematically and enjoys an ‘evident’ sense’’ (Bauman 1992: 22). In this way of thinking it becomes evidently clear that the deconstructive postmodernist critique of universalism can be taken as a rational justification for the understanding of knowledge in terms of a multiplicity of disciplines that exist autonomously from each other.

Universalism is also critiqued by deconstructive postmodernists on the grounds that it can breed a totalitarian and oppressive outlook towards human social existence – thus overlooking the uniqueness of everything that exists. This is the argument that one finds being advanced by David Stackhouse when he said, “there is a ‘thingness’ about life that does not easily dissolve into its relationships; there is a reality about a self – a Socrates or Jesus…that is not easily accounted for by appealing to a synthesis of a multiplicity of relata” (Stackhouse 1981: 108). In other words, if we are to see reality in terms of its relatedness we are bound to end up losing a picture of the uniqueness of things. This way of thinking can be seen as an antithesis of systems theory in the sense that it does not advocate a holistic approach to the conceptualisation of reality as espoused in systems theory. Foucault was very explicit in his abhorrence of metanarratives. In his The Archeology of Knowledge he argues:

We must question those ready-made syntheses, those groupings that we normally accept before any examination, those links whose validity is recognised from the outset; we must oust those forms and obscure forces by which we usually link the discourse of one man with that of another; they must be driven out from the darkness in which they reign. And instead of according them unqualified, spontaneous value we must accept, in the name of methodological

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rigour, that, in the first instance, they concern only a population of dispersed events (Foucault 1972: 22).

The above quotation demonstrates an abhorrence towards metanarrative approach to knowledge which is based on seeing links and continuities within its creation. In other words, there was nothing continuous in the way how knowledge is passed from one generation to the other because life events are just dispersed. When this type of thinking is taken to its logical conclusion one is led to conclude that traditions as implying experience that has been passed from one historical epoch to another does not exist. Knowledge and experience come in the form of discontinuities. The fallacy inherent in this way of thinking is that it deliberately trivialises the fact that the creation of knowledge is a mental activity that does not occur in the vacuum, rather it is a process that is based on building on the foundations which others have built. An inadequacy within a particular discipline can sometimes require the specialists within that discipline to rethink or rebuild the discipline in the light of some contemporary new insights from the contemporary historical epoch. In so doing, one is already forging some continuity between different historical epochs. But for deconstructive postmodernists, the very idea of continuity in the creation of knowledge is refuted as an epistemic impossibility. According to Foucault,

We must renounce all those themes whose function is to ensure the infinite continuity of discourse and its secret presence to itself in the interplay of a constantly recurring absence. We must be ready to receive every moment of discourse in its sudden irruption; in that punctuality in which it appears, and in that temporal dispersion that enables it to be repeated, known, forgotten, transformed, utterly erased, and hidden, far from all view, in the dust of books. Discourse must not be referred to the distant presence of the origin, but treated as and when it occurs. These pre-existing forms of continuity, all these syntheses that are accepted without question, must remain in suspense (Foucault 1969: 25).

What is implied above is that there is no continuity in the dissemination of knowledge because what transpired in the past cannot be accounted for in the present. Any discourse

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about knowledge should be understood as happening instantaneously without any indebtedness to the past. Thus terms such as ‘sudden irruption', ‘punctuality' are aimed at emphasising the instantaneous occurrence of knowledge. That which occurs in the present has to be seen as without any history and there is simply no synthesis between knowledge of the past and that of the present because the past must be subjected to suspicion and suspense. As we shall see in the following chapter, systems theory is critical against an approach to knowledge that is based on fragmentation of knowledge in favour of a holistic view. In the previous chapter, we have seen that though systems theory was critical towards mechanistic science, it did not discard mechanistic science completely but it rather advocated a holistic approach instead of a mechanistic fragmented approach. However, another problem in deconstructive postmodernity lies in the fact that such an approach to knowledge cannot deal with the complexity that arises of linkages between entities that are previously seen as engendering disparities or diversity. In this regard, there are other scholars who have advanced another version of postmodernism which is known as reconstructive postmodernism in the social sciences. These scholars argue that deconstructive postmodernism is not sustainable when subjected to its implications to real life situation on how knowledge is created and disseminated in human society.