First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis

The Postmodern Problem

There are few intellectual propositions that inspire such passionate reactions as the notion of postmodernism. Humanism is sometimes identified as an advocate, or an outcome, of a postmodern view, and at other times presented as the enemy and exact opposite of everything postmodernism stands for. As Shaun Saxon suggests in the reading, it is an inflammatory term, and one about which there is little consensus as to its exact meaning. It is easily parodied, as the interview a few moments ago demonstrates. Yet if we can get beneath the academic egos and linguistic game-playing, there are a handful of ideas offered by postmodern thinking that we as literate people and thoughtful humanists may find provocative, and perhaps even useful.

There are two five-dollar words associated with the philosophical position of postmodernism that will be helpful to wrap our minds around at the beginning. The first is epistemology, and the second is hermeneutics. These are both words that seminary students are called upon to conjure with, and usually by the time we graduate, we are not intimidated by them any more, for they both refer to rather simple concepts, even though we may not use them every day. Epistemology is just the process of looking at how we know whatever it is we think we know; what do we take as our authority for accepting a fact, or an idea, as true? Whenever we say, "Because the Bible tells me so" is not a satisfactory reason for believing something, what we are doing, whether we know it or not, is epistemology. Because postmodernism seeks to challenge some of the unreflective ways in which we absorb ideas, and call them knowledge, it takes issue with how we know what we know, and thus it raises epistemological issues. No reason to be scared; it’s really not that complicated. The second term, hermeneutics, has some of the same implications; a hermeneutic is basically a way of reading a story, an attitude or approach that we bring to a particular text. To use the bible as an example again, clearly the way that you or I read the stories of the New Testament, is different from the way in which an orthodox Christian reads them. The way in which a lawyer reads a document is almost certainly different from the way in which a lover reads a poem from his or her beloved. We come to various different materials with various different feelings, expectations, and agendas. When we attempt to be conscious of what we bring with us to our reading of a document or a story, we are examining our hermeneutic. That’s all it means.

To the postmodernist, everything that comprises our social world is a kind of text, and we are always engaged in encountering, or reading, those texts. All human artifacts can be ‘read’ – that is, examined for their meanings and implications, both intended and unintended -- in this way. Written documents are obvious texts, whether they are literature or science or popular publications. Books, obviously, and newspapers and magazines, billboards and advertisements; all of these are texts that we encounter, that offer information not only about what they intend to tells us, but also about what they embody, illustrate, and demonstrate about the world we live in, and how we as a society construct that world. Consider for a moment a special edition of a book, published as a collector’s item, bound in rare leather, with gilded pages and hand-painted illustrations, and a jeweled cover. If the text of this book was a condemnation of extravagance and vanity, in which the author encouraged restraint and simplicity of life, would there not be an odd discordance between the message of the book, and the way in which it was presented? Wouldn’t the message of the book as an object be in opposition to the intended message of its contents? A postmodern position would urge us not to choose one side or the other as the "real" message of the book, and claim that the other somehow doesn’t count, but rather to notice, and contemplate the very disjunction of messages that the book itself represents. In other words, you can’t just say, "Never mind the binding; pay attention to what the author had to say," nor can you simply dismiss the content by saying, "Look how extravagant this volume is; nothing the author says can be taken seriously." To come down on either of these alternatives is to miss the most significant thing about this artifact in its entirety, which is the paradox that it constitutes as a whole.

Thus postmodernism also invites us to look with equal care at texts beyond mere written materials. Our buildings are texts; our governments, our highway systems, our media; all these can be read for what they tell us about who we collectively are. A building that is designed to be energy self-sufficient is making a kind of statement, over and above what is meant to go on there by its occupants. A community service headquarters with a locked security fence is sending an inherently ambiguous message about what it is, and what it is for. And television, of course, is replete with texts, that we can read if we care to pay attention. In fact, a text may be far richer in its implications than in its intended content. No one in his or her right mind would attempt to have a serious conversation about whether "I Dream of Jeannie", for instance, was a ‘true’ story. But there might be a great deal of very interesting discussion about what that show had to say implicitly about the cultural tensions around the shift in women’s power, in attitudes toward sexuality and gender relationships, and even the scientific paradigm of space exploration. Many times, the most interesting aspects of a given ‘text’ may have little to do the author’s intentions.

And this question of intentionality is the second essential principle of postmodernism; the suggestion that we never have conscious access to the full complexity of our motivations for anything that we write, or create, or do. That realization was begun with Darwin, whose theory of natural selection implies that our behavior may be driven by genetic impulses embedded in us by many generations of reproductive success; impulses that may be entirely opposed to our moral theories or relational beliefs. Yet we find ourselves following those urgings anyway, often seeking to explain or justify them in retrospect according to the values we say we espouse, never realizing that we are merely obeying patterns that have no part in our reasoned intentions. Sigmund Freud would later demonstrate that we are moved by the internal logic of the unconscious mind to create situations and behave in ways that often frustrate our most intelligent conscious intentions. He proposed that it was by bringing those inner dynamics into the light of awareness that we achieve health and maturity, and the ability to carry out our rational desires effectively, and yet, it is unlikely that any of us ever achieves that emotional transparency completely. There is always stuff going on below the surface of our ego awareness that affects what we do, and that is not available to our conscious reflection. Karl Marx extended this notion beyond the individual psyche, to postulate that each of us is a product of our historical and social circumstances in ways that we cannot escape. The economic class into which I am born determines how I understand the world, and what I believe that reality is, so that I will take on certain roles in the unfolding of public events because that is my conditioning and identity. I may think that my political affiliations and opinions are the result of reasoned consideration, but at some level, I will merely be playing out my inherited location in the cultural system, whether I realize it or not. Nietzche, too, found that human beings are always drawn toward the exercise of power over others, and seek to exert their own wills, no matter what they may say about their commitments to peace, humility, or obedience. Each of these thinkers challenged the progressive Enlightenment assumption that individuals arrive at their opinions and choose their actions from a position of reasoned objective clarity. On the contrary, we begin everything we think and do out of a morass of impulses and tendencies hidden even from our most reflective selves. We never have conscious access to all of our own motivations, and therefore what an author meant to say is not necessarily to be regarded as the definitive meaning of any text, written or otherwise.

This emphasis on text as an elemental category of experience shows post modernism’s origins in the discipline of philosophy, which in modernism was very concerned with the nature and accurate use of language. However, to refer to the accurate, or inaccurate, use of language, implies that there is a reality outside of language that language is attempting to reflect, either successfully or unsuccessfully. Central to the understanding of postmodernism is the idea that language does not reflect; rather, it creates the reality that we experience. This happens in many ways, one of the most powerful of which is through what have been called grand narratives. These grand narratives are the over-arching stories of human existence in which each of us is seen to have a role, and in which the entire sweep of history becomes coherent and meaningful. You are probably familiar with at least a few of these stories. One, of course, is the story of the achievement of God’s purpose for his creation, including the fall of human sin, the redemptive work of Jesus, and the eventual triumph of the divine will in the salvation of some or all souls into a kingdom of everlasting righteousness. Another would be the adventures of the covenant people of Israel with their god, Yahweh; their liberation from bondage in Egypt, their emergence as a kingdom, their exile and oppression under various conquering powers, their fidelity or otherwise to the covenant and the commandments, and the arrival of their expected Messiah to re-gather and restore the nation. These two are easy for us to recognize as a sort of literary construct; without evaluating them as false or true, we can see how they conform to the conventions of story-telling, and how the logic of the story subsumes historical incidents into itself. Now you and I may find ourselves more personally invested in the western narrative of progressive human enlightenment, with its triumph of reason over superstition, and growing scientific understanding of the world leading to the eradication of various kinds of suffering, and a gradually spreading commitment to equality and freedom for all people, motivated by the vision of a harmonious global society characterized by justice, compassion, democracy, abundance, and peace. Many of us here might wish to argue that this is a true story; this one really happened, and is happening. Postmodernism, while not necessarily denying that it is a true story, would nevertheless advocate our seeing the narrative quality of it, and how its logic as a story creates our vision of reality, and shapes the way in which we interpret the events of history. In postmodern thought, each grand narrative becomes one more text, to be read in search of an understanding of what it may tell us about the various forces by which it was created, both consciously and unconsciously.

This is where hermeneutics becomes a significant word. How are we to read these texts, including the grand narratives? Let me offer you a few examples. I first learned the word hermeneutics in the context of feminism. A feminist hermeneutic is one which asks about any text, what does this story, or object, or document, tell about the role and power and meaning of women? A story, for instance, in which no woman appears, is making a statement about the nature of women; they are non-actors, insignificant to what matters in that particular world. A document in which all women are referred to as Mrs. David Jones says that women’s identities are functions of their husbands. A building, such as my seminary, constructed with a men’s and ladies’ room on the public floor, but only a men’s room three stories up, on the floor where the faculty offices were located, says something about the possibility of women ever being faculty members. Now recognize that none of these was likely to have been a consciously intentional statement. The text says what the hermeneutic finds in it, regardless of what the author would agree to having meant.

Another example may be illustrated by the hermeneutic of recollection. When we come to a text to remind ourselves of an experience we once had, or to participate vicariously in an experience recalled by others that we seek to own, we bring a hermeneutic of recollection. When you open your high school year book, unless you are trying to bring to mind a name that you can no longer recall, chances are that you are not looking for information. You know what is in there; you know how the stories come out in the end. You are expecting to have your memories triggered, to recall events of the past. When I visited the Holocaust Memorial in Washington D.C., I already knew most of the facts about that history, but I was seeking to be reminded of what I knew, and to participate in those events through an imagined presence. What was powerful were the objects that actually came from those times and places; the twisted railroad ties from improvised cremation pyres, the pile of victims’ shoes. I was not there as an intellectual historian; I brought to the text of that exhibit a hermeneutic of recollection. This is what one brings to the reading of the Haggadah at a Seder celebration as well; the text is familiar, it is not a study, but a remembrance that makes the events live again, and invites the present to participate in the past.

As a third example, the approach that has often been associated with postmodernism is called a hermeneutic of suspicion. This brings us to an object or a narrative with the ancient skeptic’s question, qui bono? Who benefits from what this text is telling us, both explicitly and implicitly? To understand the hermeneutic of suspicion, just think of how you tried, or are trying, to teach your children to listen to commercials. What is it that someone is trying to sell you? Actually, the bible became for me a much more fascinating document when I began to read it from a hermeneutic of suspicion; asking whose position is being advocated, whose argument is being strengthened in this passage, by telling this story? When you learn to understand the argument about god and human nature that is going on underneath the poetry and the genealogies and the competing historical accounts, it all makes so much more sense. And of course the bible is not the only text that can and perhaps should be read this way. It is possible, for instance, to read American history from a hermeneutic of recollection; this is what we often do on Thanksgiving, when we recall the arrival of the English pilgrims in Massachussetts, and tell the story of the first Thanksgiving as it has come down to us. However, our understanding grows and changes when we examine that same story from a hermeneutic of suspicion, as from the Native American perspective, for example. How do the descendants of the European colonists benefit from reciting the story this way? How are the Native American participants silenced, reduced to ‘otherness’, their concerns discounted? Who else might be excluded from this telling? Once again, the object is not to find the story that is somehow ‘true’, while others are ‘not true’, but rather to observe how the narrative function itself works to create the very way we understand historical reality.

This interest in the impact of narrative and various hermeneutic approaches has given rise to the objection that postmodernism dismisses the possibility of truth, or considers all stories and texts equally true. Some postmodern academics have seemed to endorse this view, I suspect mostly for its shock value. I highly doubt that any of them considers that all possible texts of their bank statement would have equal validity. Yet the theory of postmodernism does invite us to bracket truth claims temporarily, for the purpose of examining the ways in which we tell stories, especially the ones we participate in, and the grand narratives that seek to explain humanity, the universe and everything. Since none of us can ever know all the subtle motivations that cause us to give our assent and loyalty to the particular understandings of the world that we have accepted, it is a useful discipline to be able to suspend our own epistemological convictions – there’s that other word I promised you, about how we believe that we know things – and enter momentarily into someone else’s way of telling the story. To say that human beings have the capacity to employ a variety of perspectives is not to say that there is no choosing among them; indeed, I would argue that we must and do choose, and change and refine our choices, constantly. We bring the hermeneutic of recollection at times, the hermeneutic of suspicion at times, and any number of others, to the texts that form and inform our common world.

The postmodern hypothesis at its most useful asks us to recognize what it calls the ‘textuality’ of our cultural reality; that all created objects can be ‘read’ as carrying the implications, both intended and unintended, of their origins. Each of us always brings to that reading our own agenda, and it is useful to know, to the extent you are able, what hermeneutic you are employing. In the same way that we bring our skepticism to the texts offered by Madison Avenue, we can try reading even the grand narrative of our enlightenment heritage, asking whose voices are not heard, and whose power is reinforced, what is being sold, by the way that story is traditionally told. We can acknowledge that even at our most logical and reasoned, we are still impelled by forces at work unseen in human nature, and the only way to compensate partially for those inaccessible motivations in ourselves is to make the effort to enter into the narratives offered by others with a hermeneutic of sympathy. This is not because our own stories are wrong, or because there are no meaningful choices to be made among them, but because knowledge is an inherently social enterprise, created in the matrix between individual effort and cultural process.

Postmodernism has assuredly produced its share of silliness, academic arrogance, and pretentious nonsense, as well as attracting great hostility and resistance. Yet it seems to me that when it is sorted down to its simplest elements, there is nothing that needs to be all that intimidating about it. As humanists, we should find no strangeness in holding our preconceptions lightly, and being willing to examine them, or in acknowledging the diversity of viewpoints and experience among people. In this respect, humanism and postmodernism share important perspectives, and some would say that in fact the challenge to grand narratives opens the door to humanism for those who move away from the perception of a divine plan. At the same time, a thorough-going relativism, claiming that all narratives are equally valid, stands opposed to the humanist confidence in the power of reason to discover at least truths with a small ‘t’, intersubjective facts upon which we can found a shared understanding. I would argue that reason actually constitutes a hermeneutic of its own, which for certain purposes is indispensable.

In the end, I think it serves us to have the conversation that postmodernism provokes; to learn to recognize our hermeneutic choices, and the limits of our access to our own motivations; to cultivate an appreciation for narrative alternatives even as we maintain our own historical and intellectual identities. The plentiful ironies and paradoxes of the emerging global culture in which we have no choice but to function lend themselves to appreciation from a postmodern perspective; it is well for us not to take ourselves or our world with too much morbidly serious intensity. A philosophic position that encourages skepticism and epistemological modesty, deeply grasps human diversity, and recognizes the extent to which we construct a collective cultural reality through the texts of both language and artifact is one that humanists can appreciate. We need not endorse its excesses in order to be informed by its insights, and liberated by its questions. The postmodern ‘problem’ is only a re-statement of the eternal challenge of the human condition, to know ourselves well enough to recognize our own limitations, and to value the ways in which others are different from ourselves, at the same time that we are mutually necessary to one another’s survival. The postmodern perspective recognizes that the stories we tell, and the way we hear them, go a long way toward shaping the world we share. Seems to me that’s part of what humanists have been saying all along.