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Is Everything Maya?
Literary Theory and the Claims of History:
This important new book is mistitled. A more accurate title would be "Contemporary Cultural Studies and the Claims of History" as the book's scope is much wider than that conveyed by "Literary Theory." The current subtitle could also serve as an appropriate title. Although the term "postmodernism" occurs often in Contemporary Cultural Studies, it resists any succinct definition. Postmodernism sounds paradoxical: if modern means up-to-date, what does postmodern mean? This and related terms like "deconstruction" and "poststructuralism" subsume multiple meanings within the context of disciplines such as literary criticism, art history, architecture, sociology, philosophy, and political theory. Just how pervasive, and yet elusive, "deconstruction" has become is illustrated in an article about its principal architect, Jacques Derrida, in a recent New York Times issue (30 May 1998). Dinita Smith bases her article, "Philosopher Gamely Defends His Ideas," on a lecture by Derrida which she attended at Johns Hopkins University and her follow-up interview with him. Smith's article opens as follows: "Jacques Derrida, [is] perhaps the world's most famous philosopher - - if not the only famous philosopher.... [Nonetheless], a scholar (who considers Mr. Derrida's work deliberately obscure) warned against asking him to define deconstruction, the notoriously difficult and widely influential method of inquiry that he invented more than three decades ago. 'Make it your last question because it sends deconstructionists into paroxysms of rage.' So instead, Mr. Derrida was asked if he minded the
fact that almost no one seems to understand what he is talking about. 'Why don't you ask a physicist or a mathematician about difficulty?' he responded, a little frostily." Smith notes that "for Mr. Derrida everything is a 'text' as he puts it. Because a given word can have different meanings, any text can be read in various ways ... to take apart or deconstruct texts is to reveal their hidden meanings, values or ideologies. And what one finds are 'binary opposites' such as male or female or truth and fiction, with one term getting a 'privileged' position while the other is pushed to the 'margins.' An example might be the convention of using 'he' rather than 'she' when referring to men or women." Deconstruction's focus on the hidden hierarchies in language appealed immediately to the predilections of the burgeoning academic disciplines of feminist, ethnic, and postcolonial studies. The growth of these disciplines in the past two decades has made deconsruction fashionable in American universities. However, critics of Derrida charge deconstruction with destabilizing and neutralizing political and moral values. Such nihilistic amoralism, they say, had made it possible for Martin Heidegger to join Nazism. Since Derrida had been heavily influenced by Heidegger's work, he was asked to answer for Heidegger's amoralistic behavior. Moreover, in 1987 it was found out that Derrida's close associate, Paul de Man, a Yale professor, had written anti-Semitic newspaper articles during the Nazi occupation of Belgium. Another example of denconstruction's nihilistic stance coming under censurewas a petition by some members of the philosophy department at Cambridge University in which they attempted to forestall the award of an honorary doctorate to Derrida in 1992. They criticized him for "denying the distinctions between fact and fiction, observation and imagination, evidence and prejudice." And some of his compatriots have proclaimed that "Derrida has made contemporary French philosophy an object of ridicule."
In Literary Theory and the Claims of History, In the introductory chapter, Mohanty outlines the rise of positivist scientific methodology in the eighteenth and nineteenth century and its influence on literary, social, and political theory, and, the decline, in the twentieth century of the classical positivist scientific methodology ushered in by the insights of quantum physics, and its influence on contemporary cultural theory. One of the consequences has been the spurious growth of postmodernist constructivism, which denies the tenablility of objectivity and propagates the belief that "epistemological norms like rationality, objectivity, truth are no more than social conventions, historically variable, and hence without claim to universality." As an example, Mohanty cites Gayatri Spivak's "The Postcolonial Critics," in which she describes postmodernism's critique of objectivity as "a radical acceptance of vulnerability... what one is saying is undermined by the way one says it." This assertion, observes Mohanty, comes from Spivak's erroneous view of the "relation between knowledge and narrativity... [and her] deeper belief that nothing is ever epistemically reliable." Postmodernism, and especially deconstruction, sounds more and more like the classical Hindu saying: Everything is Maya! Mohanty regards the postmodernist response of constructivism as "intellectually inadequate or outdated" as it fails to consider a nonconstructivist alternative to positivism. Postpositivist realism, argues Mohanty, offers "sophisticated accounts of objectivity and reason," as practised in the pursuit of contemporary scientific knowledge. These accounts are often "holistic and relational in some of the ways the various hermeneutical traditions suggest knowledge" in the humanities. (Hermeneutics, the theory and practice of interpreting literary texts, has a long history in sacred as well as secular traditions. Originating with the recognition of multiple levels of textual meaning such as literal, moral, allegorical, and mythical, hermeneutics was further developed with the introduction of the concept of the hermeneutic circle-holistic and relational understanding-by Frederich Schleiermacher in the nineteenth century. In the twentieth century, Martin Heidegger extended the concept of the hermeneutic circle to include new circles of the dialogues between each individual interpreter and previous scholarly interpretions of the text.) In Literary Theory and the Claims of History, Satya Mohanty posits a hermeneutics of affirmation in contrast to Jacques Derrida's hermeneutics of negation. How well? In the first four essays, Mohanty evaluates the work of cultural theorists like Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, Gayatri Spivak, Hilary Putnam, Louis Althusser, and Frederic Jameson. And in the book's second part, three essays, he constructs a sustained argument for "moral universalism and multiculturalism [as] compatible and indeed complementary ideals.... Multiculturalism should be defined as a form of epistemic cooperation across cultures." In the first essay, "Paul de Man, Language, and the Politics of Meaning," Mohanty convincingly argues against de Man's development of the Saussarean and Derridian concepts of language as a self-referring, self-regulating system: "More than Jacques Derrida's, Paul de Man's writings reveal a desire to go beyond any kind of determinacy (and hence objectivity of interpretation) that linguistic reference might require. De Man's theologization of language as endlessly disruptive of secure interpretation is predicated in part on a dubious reading of Charles Sanders Pierce's notion of the interpretant...." In an interesting aside, Mohanty tells us that when the Modern Language Association of America commissioned Paul de Man to write an article for publication in a volume entitled "Introduction to Scholarship in Modern Languages and Literatures" on the state-of-the-art research in literary theory, de Man turned in an essay,"Resistance to Theory," which asserted that "the main theoretical interest of literary theory consists in the impossibility of its definition." De Man's article was rejected. In the second essay, "Reference and the Social Basis of Language," Mohanty draws on the works of Mikhail Bakhtin and Hilary Putnam to extend his argument against language as a self-referential, self-regulating system and to establish, instead, the location of linguistic reference in culture and history. Mohanty cites from Bakhtin's brilliant theoretical contributions: "In point of fact, the linguistic form ... exists for the speaker only in the context of specific utterances, exists consequently, only in a specific ideological context. In actuality, we never say or hear words, we say and hear what is true or false, good or bad, important or unimportant, pleasant or unpleasant, and so on. Words are always filled with content and meaning drawn from behavior or ideology. That is the way we understand words, and we can respond only to words that engage us behaviorally or ideologically." In the third essay, "The Limits of Althusser's Poststructuralist Marxism," the major weakness Mohanty observes is Louis Althusser's epistemology that restricts itself to poststructuralist theories of language, signification, and subjectivity. This limitation leads to Althusser's "general antimetaphysical and antihumanist aproach ... an impoverished account of subjectivity and unjustified (almost positivist) suspicion that all normative claims are speculative and ultimately idealist." In the fourth essay, "Jameson's Marxist Hermeneutics and the Need for an Adequate Epistemology," Mohanty evaluates Frederic Jameson's synthesis of key poststructuralist insights with marxist hermeneutics as well as his defense of interpretation as "exemplary for contemporary criticism." However, Mohanty faults Jameson (as well as Althusser) for adhering to poststructuralists' limited epistemology of linguistic reference and knowledge, an adherence that indicates "their status as transitional figures in terms of intellectual history." In a footnote, Mohanty observes: "In my opinion, if we were to attempt a sociological explanation of postmodernist epistemology, it would deal less with 'late capitalism' and more with the power of the Western academy over intellectual discourse, with its power-through its structure of recognition and rewards-to discourage critical examination of one of its most fashionable theories....it would make clear to what extent postmodernist theory ... is a creation of the marketplace, rather than a genuine intellectual development." With the oblique reference to the title of one of Jameson's best-known books and its swipe at academia, this should raise some hackles! In the fifth essay, "Political Criticism and the Challenge of Otherness," Mohanty derides the cultural and historical relativism rampant in postmodernist discourse as a concomitant of its principle of the indeterminate nature of textual meanings. Cultural relativism is "inadequate for cross-cultural understanding ... and intellectually underjustified as well as politically misguided." As an alternative to relativism, Mohanty proposes not a return to positivist notions of objectivity but a postpositivist realism that regards objectivity "as a goal of inquiry which includes the possibility of error, self-correction, and improvement. On this view, objectivity is a social achievement rather than an impossible dream of purity and transcendence; it is based on our evolving understanding of the sources and causes of various kinds of errors." Mohanty's view is remarkably consonant with the methodology of contemporary theoretical physics. In the sixth essay, "On Situating Objective Knowledge," Mohanty draws on the works of philosophers of science such as W.V.O. Quine, Thomas Kuhn, and Hans-Georg Gadamer to further clarify postpositivist realist's epistemology and approach to contemporary scientific inquiry. "This dialectical view of knowledge and the social organization of inquiry is radically antifoundational and antiidealist without being shy of justified metaphysical claims." In the final essay, "Identity, Multiculturalism, Justice," Mohanty argues that although the postpositivist realist's epistemology is antifoundational, it does not preclude all universal claims as postmodernist epistemology does. In this essay, Mohanty provides an interpretation of Toni Morrison's novel "Beloved" to show "how powerful contemporary notions of cultural politics-feminist, anticolonial, socialist-might be built out of a refigured image of objectivity ... and how many of our contemporary political writers are engaged in a theoretical project that can take us beyond the debilitating skepticism of postmodernist thought." In sum, Mohanty's book is a persuasive critical alternative
to postmodernism's cultural relativism and a refreshing rebuttal
of the willful "acommunicative strategies" of Derrida.
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