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REVIEW OF _WHAT'S WRONG WITH POSTMODERNISM?_ by ROBERT C. HOLUB <rcholub@garnet.berkeley.edu>
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Department of German University of California-Berkeley _Postmodern Culture_ v.2 n.2 (January, 1992) Norris, Christopher. _What's Wrong With Postmodernism? Critical Theory and the Ends of Philosophy_. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1990. [1] From the outset two features of the title of Christopher Norris's latest book need clarification. First, it is not insignificant that, despite the possibility of an interrogatory "What," the title is not a question, but a declaration. Norris knows what's wrong with postmodernism, and he does not hesitate to impart his diagnosis to the reader. Second, the term "postmodernism" does not match exactly the material he covers. He is actually less concerned with postmodernism as a direction in literature and the arts--its more usual field of meaning--than he is with contemporary theory. The title should be understood, therefore, as an assertion about recent directions in theory, not as a query into artistic practices. And what is most interesting about Norris's survey of the critical terrain is the way in which he divides the turf. Most commentators tend to take a stand either for or against poststructuralism, defined rather generally as anything coming out of France or influenced by the French over the past two decades. By contrast Norris splits French and Francophilic theory into two halves. While he continues to advocate most prominently the work of Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man, he is highly critical of Baudrillard, certain aspects of Jean- Francois Lyotard, and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe's monograph on Heidegger. Joining these French postmodernists on Norris's roster of adversaries are American neopragmatists, in particular Stanley Fish and Richard Rorty. Making a surprising appearance on the approval list is the German philosopher of communication theory, Jurgen Habermas. Although he devotes a chapter of this book to a reproof of Habermas's remarks on Derrida--a chastisement whose root cause is Habermas's carelessness in attributing to Derrida views held by his less philosophically schooled American epigones--he approves of the broad and critical outline of recent French thought found in Habermas's _Philosophical Discourse of Modernity_ (1985). [2] Since these are anything but natural alliances, they deserve further attention. Essentially Norris validates those theorists who he feels continue a tradition of enlightenment critique. There is no difficulty in placing Habermas in this camp since he is perhaps the single strongest voice in contemporary theory to openly and directly declare his allegiance to the progressive heritage of modernity. Norris does not discuss his work in any detail, however, except to point out his errors in dealing with Derrida, and his reference to Habermas's notion of universal or formal pragmatics as "transcendental pragmatics" indicates at least a possible confusion of Habermas's current concerns with his abandoned attempt to locate "quasi-transcendental" interests in the late sixties. More difficult to locate in a tradition of enlightened reason are Derrida and de Man. The latter is incorporated into the enlightenment project largely by way of his interest in "aesthetic ideology," which includes a critique of Schiller and of all subsequent misreadings of Kant's aesthetic theory. Derrida is likewise assimilated to the enlightenment paradigm through Kant. In Chapter Five, a consideration of Irene Harvey's _Derrida and the Economy of Difference_ (1986), Norris argues with Harvey (and Rodolphe Gasche) that Derrida is best described as a rigorous Kantian, except that he is "asking what conditions of IMpossibility mark out the limits of Kantian conceptual critique" (200). Indeed, Norris claims that Derrida's is "the most authentically %Kantian% reading of Kant precisely through his willingness to problematise the grounds of reason, truth and knowledge" (199). Norris thus opposes both the facile notion of Derridean deconstruction as the authorizing strategy for "free play" as a free-for-all of meaning, a false lesson learned and propagated by inattentive America
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