A travesty of logic

In fact there is no innate connection between postmodernism and the virtues of liberty, equality and fraternity - the vacuous boast at the heart of The War on Democracy. Sections of the left have long observed its difficulty in affirming a positive oppositional political philosophy under the rubric of Derrida's "gesture of distrust". The controversy over Derrida's support for wartime anti-Semite Paul de Man also revealed the French pseudo sage's vulnerability on political questions, and inspired an effort on the part of his accolytes to extol the values of friendship and democracy. This shift of tone is all very well, at a theoretical and strategic level. Unfortunately, most of what we know about postmodernism's behaviour within the institutions that have so far given it shelter, suggests it is at once illiberal and coercive.

To what extent should writers such as Derrida have taken responsibility for the lunacies uttered in their name? The noted Harvard philosopher Hilary Putnam has some penetrating things to say on this question: “… the fact remains that the thrust of Derrida’s work is so negative, so lacking in any sense of what we should construct, politically or otherwise, that it is difficult to exonerate him completely from responsibility for the effect of his teaching … the thrust of Derrida’s writing is that notions of ‘justification’, ‘good reason’ and ‘warrant’, and the like are primarily repressive gestures. And that view is dangerous because it provides aid and comfort for extremists …”

My critique of postmodernism is entirely consistent with mainstream opinion in Anglo-American philosophy, and for fairly uncontroversial - certainly apolitical - reasons. Most of what passes for postmodernism is bad philosophy, cliché and cant. At heart it is “anti-humanist” and “irrealist”: these labels are not applied in a polemical spirit; they are accepted elements of philosophical nomenclature.

I happen to agree with much of what Berkeley philosopher John Searle, one of the most influential figures in contemporary philosophy, says of Jacques Derrida: that he is fundamentally ignorant of many commonplaces in the philosophy of language, and that his own writings consist at worst of plain gibberish, at best of patently false (though spectacular sounding) claims based on logical errors. I am persuaded by Searle's defence of Enlightenment values - such as external realism - against Derrida's attacks on Western epistemology and what he calls “logocentrism”. As Derrida famously proclaimed: “There is nothing outside of text.”

This revival of medieval nominalism commits many postmodernists to various forms of epistemological - and even ethical - relativism. The relativist strains in postmodernism actually emasculate the practical force of truth; and truth has always been a key weapon in the fight against tyranny. Relativism is what John Howard invokes when wriggling away from the global commitment to greenhouse reduction.

The Princeton philosopher Harry Frankfurt, in his recently published essay On Truth, takes aim at postmodern relativism and fires. “As for the entitlements to deference and to respect that we ordinarily assign to fact and to truth, the postmodernists' view is that in the end the assignment of those entitlements is just up for grabs. It is simply a matter, they insist, of how you look at things ... according to the postmodernists' line of thought, the distinctions that we make between what is true and what is false are ultimately guided by nothing more indisputably objective, or more compellingly authoritative, than our own individual points of view.”

Perspectivism - the rather banal fact that we all see things differently - is in fact compatible with external realism.

Frankfurt is here writing for a general not a specialist audience; a more sophisticated and wide-ranging argument with postmodernist relativism can be sourced from Oxford ethicist Bernard Williams' Truth and Truthfulness. Williams describes postmodernists as the "deniers", and his book is a passionate defence of the value of truth against this turn in contemporary intellectual life. He argues that the democratic value of critique rests on a commitment to truth and the virtues that attend it: accuracy and sincerity.

Lucy and Mickler have delivered a master class in what happens when a school of thought jettisons the discursive goal of "getting at the truth".

I do not claim to be an “authority’ on postmodernism, though I have studied it with some enthusiasm - and a pretty high degree of competency - at graduate level. I was fortunate to have come into contact with this school of thought at a time - the early 1980s - and a place - Melbourne University - when it still seemed fresh and exciting.

I was able to study foundation structuralist and poststructuralist texts with a grounding in philosophy and classical social theory, and in a pluralistic environment: I was privileged to hear Howard Felperin lecture on Conrad and Barthes' S/Z, to attend lectures by Umberto Eco and Terry Eagleton. All this was before pomo ossified into an orthodoxy, and a bossy orthodoxy at that.

When a few years later I began to take issue with postmodernism in literary studies - I still believe it is essentially anti-literature - it was in a spirit of resistance to a dogma (a dogmatic scepticism): an attempt to foster debate, not suppress it.

Working under deadline pressure I may not have crafted every line of this response with impeccable care, and I've probably been guilty of intermittent shit-stirring. But one thing I never believed my writing on this subject would bring me is ... a promotion.