523 - Postmodernism: Intellectual Velcro Dragged Across Culture?

Postmodernism: Intellectual Velcro Dragged Across Culture?
By Tyron Inbody

" Postmodern" is a nearly empty tag. Every time I use the word in one of my classes, I feel like Warren G. Harding. His speeches were described by William Gibbs McAdoo as "an army of pompous phrases moving across the landscape in search of an idea." Perhaps it would be more academically respectable to compare the word to the term "hermeneutics." "Hermeneutics, by and large," says Hans Frei, "is a word that is forever chasing a meaning.” ¹

The label is so adhesive that it can be used to pick up assorted pieces of lint in our culture-intellectual velcro. ² It can be used to characterize almost anything one approves or disapproves. Exhibiting signs of dissatisfaction with modern culture and foreshadowing a yet unnameable epoch of fundamental change, the epithet conveys the conviction that modernity as a world view is less than the final truth; it may even be an aberration. Many perceive that modernity has not ended with what it promised in the beginning.

Postmodern is a term that originated in art (specifically architecture) and literature. It refers to "the overall character and direction of experimental tendencies in Western arts, architecture, etc., since the 1940s or 1950s." ³ In architecture, postmodern buildings reintroduce decoration,

Tyron Inbody is Professor of Theology at United Theological Seminary in Dayton, Ohio and author of Postliberal Empirical Realism: The Constructive Theology of Bernard Meland (1994).

¹ Hans Frei, Types of Christian Theology (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), p. 16.
² The image is borrowed from James Kirkpatrick. Of the "new age," he says: "A sort of intellectual Velcro dragged across history, it has picked up odd bits of philosophical lint from unlikely and often contradictory sources." Chicago Sun-Times, Sunday, July 22, 1990 (E), p. 17.
³ The Harper Dictionary of Modern Thought (New York: Harper and Row, 1988), p. 671. See, also, Steven Conner, Postmodern Culture: An Introduction to Theories of the Contemporary (Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, 1989), Part II; and David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodemity (Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, 1989), Part 1, "The Passage from Modernity to Postmodernity in Contemporary Culture."

524 - Postmodernism: Intellectual Velcro Dragged Across Culture?

sometimes in unexpected and even comic ways, in contrast to the sleek efficiency of twentieth-century modern architecture; in literature, it playfully reminds us that the story is fiction and fragmentary. ⁴ As a Cultural phenomenon, it is a body of directions and developments marked by "eclecticism, pluri-culturalism, and often a post-industrial, hi-tech frame of reference coupled with a skeptical view of technical progress. " ⁵

Although the term "postmodern" is amorphous and nearly vacant of meaning, the idea of "modern," against which it is set, is somewhat more specifiable. One might begin by distinguishing between modernity and modernism. The latter is a narrower term, referring to specific movements in modern culture, such as a period within Western art, ⁶ or a period within Roman Catholic ⁷ or Protestant ⁸ theology. Modernity is a much broader concept. It refers to the period in the West that stretches from the European Renaissance in the sixteenth century to the present. Modernity, more specifically, is the guiding assumptions and primary projects of the cultural leaders of the Western world from the midseventeenth through the mid-twentieth centuries. The latter period is my point of reference in this paper.

Modern, of course, can mean merely recent or the present, in which case every era is modern. At the beginning of "the Modern era," however, it was used as a flattering term to refer to the party of "Moderns" in eighteenth-century Europe, who thought of themselves in distinction from the "Ancients" and "Medievals" as doing something historically new, hence inaugurating a new era of thought (for example, Voltaire). ⁹ Renaissance humanists and the Protestant Reformers did not think of themselves as moderns but were, at core, restorationists, seeking to revive and even rival ancient modes of thought and civilization. This was not true of the Moderns who looked to the present and future for their hope. In the strict sense, then, postmodern is a term used to describe the current situation by those who understand this modern period of Western culture to be past or coming to a close.

Most fundamentally, modernity, embodied foremost in the disciples of the Enlightenment, is a worldview, a body of attitudes and ideas. ¹⁰ Its key feature was its reconception of knowledge. Knowledge is achieved through

⁴ "Postmodern Theology," A New Handbook of Christian Theology (Nashville: Abingdon, 1992), p. 373.
⁵ The Harper Dictionary of Modern Thought, p. 672.
⁶ Michel Wood, Bruce Cole, and Adelheid Gealt, Ali of the Western World: From Ancient Greece to Post-Modernism, (Summit Books, 1989), chapter 17.
⁷ See "Modernism," The Westminster Dictionary of Christian Theology (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1983), pp. 376-378; see, also, Roger Aubert, "Modernism," in Sacramentum Mundi, (New York: Herder and Herder, 1969), Vol. 4, pp. 99-104.
⁸ See Bernard Meland, "Liberalism, theological," Encyclopedia Britannica, 14th Edition (1968), Vol. 13, pp. 1020-1022.
⁹ Franklin Baumer, Modern European Thought: Continuity and Change in Ideas, 1600-1950 (New York: Macmillan, 1977), pp. 27-28.
¹⁰ For a brilliant socio-historical account of the rise and character of modernity, see Stephen Toulmin, Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity (New York: Free Press,1990).

525 - Postmodernism: Intellectual Velcro Dragged Across Culture?

critical reason, conceived by rationalists as a deductive and by empiricists as an inductive or experimental power of the mind. ¹¹ This concept of knowledge underwrote the Enlightenment quest for certainty, for literal and objectifying thought, for direct representation of reality in language, for comprehensiveness, and for certain imperatives for practical action, most notably the quest for individual human freedom and the demand to create history.

Enlightenment thinkers held a mechanistic view of nature, and they sought the rational control of data, single meanings, universal claims for truth, objective interpretation, and a sensationalist doctrine of perception. They were devoted to the development of science and technology, to secularization, and to the belief that individuals and society should move toward such goals. Human nature is not fixed but is malleable.

"In its extreme form, it has been described as a 'supercalifragilisticexpialodoxic totalizing negation of modernism, breathlessly presented as a rejection of everything from Plato onward. ' "

Socially, Enlightenment modernity involved individualism, dualism, anthropocentrism, substantialism, Eurocentrism, unilinear progress, centralization, and the domination of nature. Meaning, value, and confidence finally were located in human subjectivity, the autonomous, self-consciously knowing and acting human "subject." In addition to the hard sciences, modernity developed new historical methods that led to an historical consciousness that tried to recognize change, novelty, and the differences between periods and cultures.

The term "postmodern" announces the suspicion, and for many the hope and promise, that the late twentieth-century situation in art, architecture, literature, science, philosophy, theology, media, and general culture and society has changed so much that it deserves to be seen as a new epoch. In it's extreme form, it has been described as a "supercalifragilisticexpialodoxic totalizing negation of modernism, breathlessly presented as a rejection of everything from Plato onward." ¹² In the words of one of its advocates, the term refers to "a condition that inhabits every form of modernism … the condition in which the realization of presence in all of its forms is acknowledged to be impossible." ¹³ The tag declares the conviction that the present intellectual and cultural situation, especially in advanced capitalist and industrialized societies, is discontinuous with modernity and is at the edge of a new stage beyond it.

¹¹ Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (Boston: Beacon Press, 1951), chapter 1.
¹² Robert Neville, The Highroad Around Modernism (New York: SUNY, 1992), p. xi.
¹³ Mark Taylor, letter to Leonard Sweet, April 17, 1990.

526 - Postmodernism: Intellectual Velcro Dragged Across Culture?

There are many competing schools of thought filing for a patent on the term postmodern. In my effort to indicate how the term might be investigated, I will distinguish four dimensions of meaning as the notion becomes a new concept in our contemporary lexicon. I will follow Hans Küng's procedure of using the term "postmodern" not as an idea that explains everything or as polemical Velcro but as a heuristic device. ¹⁴ The reason I undertake such an ambitious, even outrageous, effort, is not that I have a definitive concept to offer. Rather, we use this word so often and freely that we need a concept to criticize, even if it is a wholly mistaken one. I do not offer this paper, then, as a stipulative definition of the term postmodern, but rather as a description of how the term is used in some contemporary discussion. I will name and describe cultural postmodernism, liberationist postmodernism, deconstructive postmodernism, and late modernity.

CULTURAL POSTMODERNISM

Postmodern refers to the perception of a radical sociocultural upheaval within modern culture, a "socioquake," an unsettling shift in the massive geological plates undergirding liberal Western culture and society. The term refers to a cultural mood, a perception about the spirit or the tendency of our culture. It points to a sense of dis-ease or promise, a feeling of transition to something new in our culture. Harvey locates the moment of transition to the postmodernist sensibility in the countercultural and anti-modernity movements of the late 1960s. Speaking of Chicago, Paris, Prague, Mexico City, Seoul, Tokyo, and Berlin in 1968, he says, "It is almost as if the universal pretensions of modernity had, when combined with liberal capitalism and imperialism, succeeded so well as to provide a material and political foundation for a cosmopolitan, transnational, and hence global movement of resistance to the hegemony of high modem culture. "¹⁵

Whether these intuitions are anomalies or portents will be apparent only in retrospect to historians. But many are aware of the fact that some of the fundamental concepts we used to take for granted, as obvious, as unquestioned, have shifted to another set of suppositions. There seems to be a rearrangement of the values and norms that determined the modern worldview. Furthermore, if Reinhold Niebuhr is correct about the dynamic transition from one cultural period to another, the brief flurry of ecstasy over secularization in the mid-1960s may have been the zenith (or nadir, depending on one's point of view) of modernity. "In every civilization its most impressive period seems to precede death by only a moment. Like the woods of autumn, life defies death in a glorious pageantry of

¹⁴ Hans Kung, Theology for the Third Millennium (New York: Anchor Books, 1988), pp.1-5.
¹⁵ Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, p. 38.

527 - Postmodernism: Intellectual Velcro Dragged Across Culture?

color. But the riot of this color has been distilled by an alchemy in which life has already been touched by death. " ¹⁶

What I offer here is a description of this cultural mood conveyed in the intuitions of several scholars. They do not offer a definition of postmodernity or a photograph of it but, rather, an impressionistic painting, a set of brush strokes that paint a different picture of the world than most of us over forty or fifty took as obvious and superior throughout most of our academic life until the last decade or two.

Sallie McFague paints a picture of "the postmodern sensibilities" and "the second watershed," a different set of assumptions that distinguish the modern world from the contemporary era. Her brush strokes expressing the massive shift of reconfigured plates undergirding our culture include:

… a greater appreciation of nature, linked with chastened admiration for technology; the recognition of the importance of language (and hence interpretation and construction) in human existence; the acceptance of the challenge that other religious options present to the Judeo-Christian tradition; a sense of displacement of the white, Western male and the rise of those dispossessed because of gender, race, or class; an apocalyptic sensibility, fueled in part by the awareness that we exist between two holocausts, the Jewish and the nuclear, and perhaps most significant, a growing appreciation of the thoroughgoing, radical interdependence of life at all levels and in every imaginable way. ¹⁷

Langdon Gilkey names these geological plates undergirding the Enlightenment as four: ¹⁸ the discovery and development of correct methods of knowing (science), the practical application of this new knowledge through technology and industrialization, the eradication of superstition and unexamined authority by rational structures, and historical progress. These are shifting or even being replaced by a sense of the ambiguity of scientific consciousness, the destructiveness of technology, the widening disparity in the distribution of goods and the enmity that creates, and the threat to the ecosystem.

In attempting to move from these impressionistic brushstrokes toward a usable concept of postmodernity as a sociocultural development, we may say that "postmodern" refers to "an ending of the Enlightenment" or "the beginning of the decline" of the Enlightenment, those sensibilities, ideas, hopes, and social structures formulated in seventeenth and eighteenth century Europe and North America and undergirding modern Western culture.

LIBERATIONIST POSTMODERNISM

Postmodern refers to the liberation from the political power structures of modernity, the shift from European and North American political and

¹⁶ Reinhold Niebuhr, Beyond Tragedy (New York: Scribners, 1937), p. 41.
¹⁷ Sallie McFague, Models of God (Fortress, 1987), p. x.
¹⁸ Langdon Gilkey, "The New Watershed in Theology," Society and the Sacred (Crossroad, 1981), chapter 1.

528 - Postmodernism: Intellectual Velcro Dragged Across Culture?

economic power and social paradigms to new paradigms and new centers of power that are emerging on other continents as well as within these two. Some forms of postmodernism "have provided trenchant criticisms of social injustices." ¹⁹ In this sense, postmodern refers to a political movement or shift.

Specifically, with the waning of socialism and the chaos within capitalism, the center of focus in political and economic power is beginning to move inexorably from the First and Second worlds to the Third and Fourth worlds, and from Northern to Southern hemisphere, or at least toward more diversity. Women, ethnic minorities, and other groups long ignored by the keepers of the Enlightenment in North America and Europe have begun to raise their own voices expressing a different experience and perception of the world.

As Sallie McFague suggests, the late twentieth-century West has been profoundly traumatized by twentieth-century history. The vast scale, speed, and technological efficiency of "man-made mass death" (Edith Wyschogrod) in our century, beginning with World War I and continuing through Soviet concentration camps, the Holocaust, World War II, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the continuing threat of nuclear and

"The various liberation theologies, however, have a postmodern agenda in that they are concerned with the practical reformation of the communal subject and the tradition through the transformation of modern consciousness. "

ecological destruction has created a new world context. Many have come to see these mass death events as outcomes of characteristically modern developments in science and technology, political, sexual, social and economic organization, and forms of "progress" that have had devastating global consequences. They signal the end of modernity, for the continuation of modernity appears to threaten the very survival of life on the planet.

The various liberation movements are a form of postmodernism as the liberation theologies are a form of postmodern theology. Although liberation theologies have their continuities with modernity, especially the liberal social gospel movements, they are genuinely postmodern. Postmodern theology means, in part, liberation from modernity. Griffin says, "Liberation theology in the United States should take the form of a postmodern theology, a theology aimed at liberating America and other

¹⁹ Neville, The Highroad Around Modernism, p. xi.

529 - Postmodernism: Intellectual Velcro Dragged Across Culture?

first-world nations from modernity…. Liberation from modernity is a precondition for liberation of third-world peoples and life in general." ²⁰

Rebecca Chopp argues that the self-contradictions at the heart of modernity have caused "a paradigm shift" from modern to postmodern theology. ²¹ Modern theology was interested in the individual subject of experience, thinking, and willing. It was devoted to the problem of how to mediate theoretically between the subject and the tradition, that is, how to understand individual consciousness and to achieve personal freedom by shrugging off the tradition. The various liberation theologies, however, have a postmodern agenda in that they are concerned with the practical re-formation of the communal subject and the tradition through the transformation of modern consciousness. Freedom is thought of more as the freedom of the suffering community than as individual autonomy. Knowledge means practical knowledge in the concrete historical situation for human flourishing more than theoretical understanding. "Understanding gives way to rupture; interpretation gives way to revolution; the point of theology is formation, transformation, conversion, change." ²²

Both modern and postmodern theologians agree that Christianity must be joined to the project of freedom and that the tradition must be reinterpreted. But postmodern theology is much more aware of our inevitable contextualization and pluralism. Knowledge is inherently local, provisional, and confessional. Whereas liberal theologians were interested primarily in understanding and interpreting the consciousness of the modern individual in its free relation to the tradition, liberation theologians are more interested in the rupture of the modern consciousness and change in the suffering of those outside the modern context.

A similar understanding of a postmodern context shaped by political interpretation is offered by Jon Sobrino. He distinguishes between European (progressive) and Latin American (liberation) theologies, which are "two distinct types" of theology. ²³ Like Chopp, he claims similarities and continuities exist between modern and postmodern agendas. Whereas Chopp claims they are alike in that liberation theology is as anthropocentric as liberal theology, Sobrino claims that liberation theology is one of "two distinct phases of the Enlightenment" (Kantian and Marxist). The first phase of modernity was interested in the liberation of reason from all authority, the freedom of individuals from every form of dogmatism, from all authoritarianism, from historical error, from myth, from obscure meaning. The second phase is concerned with liberation "from the wretched conditions of the real world." Although both liberation and

²⁰ David Griffin, "Postmodern Theology as First-World Liberation Theology," Religion and the Postmodern Vision (Department of Religious Studies, University of Missouri Columbia, 1991), p. 6.
²¹ Rebecca Chopp, The Praxis of Suffering: An Interpretation of Liberation and Political Theologies (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1986).
²² Ibid., p. 45.
²³ Jon Sobrino, "Theological Understanding in European and Latin American Theology," The True Church and the Poor (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1984), pp, 7-38

530 - Postmodernism: Intellectual Velcro Dragged Across Culture?

liberal theology share modern goals, namely freedom, the agenda of liberation theology differs enough from the agenda of the liberal theology of the modern period to call it a form of postmodern theology.

These two ways of doing theology, modern and postmodern, distinguish between concern for rationality and concern for transformation. In the former, the question for theology is more the truth of revelation at the bar of natural and historical reason and concern for the meaning of faith in a situation in which this truth has become obscured. The latter discerns a new kind of problem, the problem of the meaning of the real situation, the problem of transforming a reality so that it may take on meaning and the lost or threatened meaning of the faith may thereby also be recovered.

Sobrino claims that modern and postmodern thinkers have different approaches to reality. Modern thought approaches reality through mediations of thought, through dialogue; postmodern thought approaches reality not as an object of thought but as it can be transformed. Each has a different crisis: the lack of existential meaning in the subject (the believer as believer) verses the crisis in reality itself (meaningless wretchedness). "The first perspective leads to an effort to reconcile faith with the meaningless reality within the subject. The second believes a reconciliation to be possible only if an attempt is made to solve the objective crisis…. The enemy of theology has been less the atheist than the inhuman." ²⁴

DECONSTRUCTIVE POSTMODERNISM

Postmodernism refers to an intellectual maneuver among many in the contemporary academy. The term refers to a movement of literary and philosophical deconstruction of the modern metanarrative of scientific and philosophical understanding.

A third meaning of postmodernism, then, is the deconstruction of the Cartesian-Newtonian metanarrative of modernity. ²⁵ Literary and philosophical postmodernism, which might be called deconstructive postmodernism (and includes forms of Marxism, psychological criticism, feminism,

²⁴ Ibid., p. 37.
²⁵ "The two principle narratives to which science has recourse are political and philosophical. The one, associated with the Enlightenment and embodied in the ideals of the French Revolution, is the narrative of the gradual emancipation of humanity from slavery and class oppression. Science is supposed to play a central part in this process as the representation of the knowledge which, once it has been made viable to all, will assist in the attainment of this absolute freedom. This political 'narrative of emancipation' intersects with a philosophical narrative initiated and actualized in the work of Hegel, but massive in its general influence, in which knowledge is a prime part of the gradual evolution through history of self-conscious mind out of the ignorant unselfconsciousness of matter. Where earlier narratives had centered around the idea of rediscovering or being returned to original truth, both of these narratives, emancipatory and speculative, are teleological, that is. depend upon the idea of an itinerary towards some final goal. Both narratives are also 'metanarratives,' which is to say, narratives which subordinate, organize and account for other narratives; so that every other local narrative, whether it be the narrative of a discovery in science, or the narrative of an individual's growth and education, is given meaning by the way it echoes and confirms the grand narratives of the emancipation of humanity or the achievement of pure self-conscious spirit." Conner, Postmodernist Culture, p. 30.

531 - Postmodernism: Intellectual Velcro Dragged Across Culture?

radical empiricism, and the new historicism), is post-Cartesian in that it looks upon the subject as decentered, as inseparably involved with the unconscious and the irrational, and as shaped essentially through particular social relations, language, and culture. Belief in historical and cultural variability, fallibility, the impossibility of getting beyond language to "reality," the fragmentary and particular nature of all understanding, the pervasive corruption of knowledge by power and domination, the futility of the search for sure foundations, and the need for a pragmatic approach to the whole matter characterizes postmodernism as an intellectual movement in the academy.

Whereas liberation postmodernists have a view of reality as wretched but capable of transformation, deconstructive postmodernists believe the concept of reality itself is strictly a fiction, a construction of the imagination. The logocentric tradition from Plato to positivism of the correspondence between language and reality has been overturned. Thomas Altizer speaks of this loss as an apocalypse, which is "both a consummation of the Christian era and a fulfillment of Western history and culture, thereby it is our apocalypse, and an apocalypse which is both a realization of an original Christian apocalypticism and a final negation and transcendence of our consciousness and society." ²⁶ It entails the death of God, the displacement of the sovereignty of subjectivity, the dismantling of Cartesian construction under the sovereignty of the subject, the disappearance of the self, the end of history, and the closure of the book.

Underlying this phase of postmodernity is "the linguistic turn," which sees human identity as an interplay of various systems of signs and symbols. The great "masters of suspicion" (for example, Freud, Marx, Nietzsche) challenged as mythical and even illusory the modern model of the enlightened rational thinker. This person was neither as autonomous nor as critical as his pronouncements suggested but was living out a myth whose destructive innocence has damaged our recent history and obscured our actual situation of radical limitation and need for social and individual liberation. These illusions are indeed responsible for the oppressive horrors of the twentieth century. Postmodern deconstructive movements have provided a demystifying critique of modernity's basic assumptions about knowledge and action.

William Dean, an American empiricist in the tradition of William James, speaks of radical empiricism as an American form of deconstruction taking a "postmodern standpoint. " ²⁷ For him, postmodernity has to do primarily with a new view of the nature of the interpretive process. Modernity intended to replace the premodern givenness; of interpretation from the hands of institutional authorities with various notions of the autonomy of interpretation. Autonomous interpretations were based on

²⁶ Letter to Leonard Sweet, April 10, 1990.
²⁷ Williarn Dean, American Religious Empiricism (New York: SUNY Press, 1986) and History Making History: The New Historicism in American Religious Thought (New York: SUNY Press, 1988).

532 - Postmodernism: Intellectual Velcro Dragged Across Culture?

the data of the senses (empiricism), or coherent and speculative thought (rationalism), or special qualities of consciousness (romanticism); authority for the moderns lay in science or logic or experience or feelings. Postmodernism, on the other hand, throws off all givenness of interpretation, claiming that all interpretation arises in a historical process, namely, in the interplay between the object that interprets us and we who interpret the object. Reality is interpretation "all the way down." It is a "chain of signs" like the chain of safety pins Ofred's mother pinned to her pillow or chair back so she wouldn't lose them. ²⁸ Ideas of meaning and truth are constructed by interpretation, and interpretation interprets nothing but earlier interpretations.

The dominant agenda of the deconstructionists, neo-pragmatists, linguistic theorists, and historicists is "antifoundationalism." Bent on undercutting the foundations for any clear and certain knowledge by some correlation of the mind with objective reality (logos), these thinkers have emphasized the power of the imagination to construct a world linguistically. Indeed, in all of these thinkers, the main theme is that reality is linguistic "all the way down." There is no other reality than the reality the mind constructs through language.

"…deconstructive postmodernists believe the concept of reality itself is strictly a fiction, a construction of the imagination. "

This theme undergirds not only anti-religious relativists. It is also the grounds for several different types of postmodern theological thought, from the radical death of God theologians (such as Altizer, Taylor, and Raschke) ²⁹ to the theology of imaginative construction (such as Kaufman) ³⁰ to the more conservative cultural-linguistic theology of the Yale School (such as Lindbeck). ³¹

LATE MODERNITY

These three forms of postmodernism are by no means identical. Some will argue that the first two are not postmodern at all; the term should be used to refer only to the latter movement. Yet, there are common characteristics that hold these three different movements together as postmodern in contrast to modern. First, they all share, in one form or

²⁸ Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale (New York: Fawcett, 1985), p. 263.
²⁹ See, for example, Carl Raschke, "The End of Theology," Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 66 (1978), pp. 159-180.
³⁰ The Theological Imagination: Constructing the Concept of God (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1981) and An Essay on Theological Method (Missoula: Scholars Press, 1975).
³¹ See William Placher, "Postliberal Theology," in The Modern Theologians: An Introduction to Christian Theology in the Twentieth Century, edited by David Ford (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1989), II, pp. 115-128.

533 - Postmodernism: Intellectual Velcro Dragged Across Culture?

another, a "hermeneutic of suspicion" in their interpretation of the Enlightenment and modernity. Second, they all share new controlling images that stand in significant ways in sharp contrast to the images that dominated the Enlightenment.

How sail we interpret and evaluate these three movements that hint at a new epoch that we can yet only describe as postmodern? Is the term postmodernism an announcement of a death, like the announcement from Nietzsche's madman about the death of God, to be acknowledged, feared, and celebrated simultaneously, or is it a movement of purgation and reconstruction within modernity itself? There are, I think, different ways to interpret this elan in our culture. One can understand postmodernism as hypermodermity, or as a new epoch emerging out of the, dust heap of modernity, or as the late stage of modernity. I offer these three observations for discussion:

(1) One form of postmodernism, deconstructive postmodemism, can be interpreted as modernism driven to its irrevocable conclusion, to ultramodernism or hypermodernism. This form of postmodernism is hypermodern as an "extrapolation of modern commitments to the point of producing nihilism." ³² It takes certain modern ideas, such as historicity, contextuality, and relativity (which originated as a major intellectual problem in the modern West at least as early as Herder in the eighteenth century and dominated the liberal agenda in theology in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century) and drives it to the limits of its boundaries, namely, to the point of relativism, skepticism, cynicism, or even nihilism. ³³

In its extreme, deconstructive postmodernism leads to a relativism that makes knowledge, moral judgment, and aesthetic theory impossible. David Griffin and Huston Smith, for example, point out that postmodernism in its deconstructive forms eliminates the possibility or desirability for any worldview whatsoever. ³⁴ By undercutting the possibility of usable concepts as God, self, purpose, meaning, a real world, and truth as correspondence, some deconstructive postmodernism ends in an extreme form of relativism, even nihilism.

Postmodernism as hypermodernism is, I think, finally indefensible. Although deconstructionism as an intellectual theory is perhaps irrefutable in a period of cultural transition, it offers no basis on which to construct cultural and political life and, so, is perhaps falsifiable on

³² Ted Peters, God--the World's Future (Fortress, 1992), p. 18.
³³ For a critique of deconstructionism as ethical/political nihilism and quietism, see Joseph Prabhu, "Blessing the Bathwater," Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 54 (1986), pp. 534-543. Taylor attempts to answer the criticism in the same issue, granting that "there is an undeniably nihilistic side to deconstruction," but arguing that it is closer to the nihilism of Christian selflessness, Jewish exile, and Buddhist emptiness than to "any simple libertinism or antinomianism." p. 554.
³⁴ David Griffin, God & Religion in the postmodern World: Essays in Postmodern Theology (New York: SUNY Press, 1989), preface and chapter 1; Huston Smith, "Postmodernism's Impact on the Study of Religion," Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 58 (Winter, 1990), pp. 653-670.

534 - Postmodernism: Intellectual Velcro Dragged Across Culture?

pragmatic grounds. ³⁵ Few persons for very long, and no group for any time, can or will live with thoroughgoing relativism and its threat of nihilism. The individual and the group either will despair if they cannot construct a compelling alternative to nihilism, or, as Reinhold Niebuhr argued, more likely will opt for a repressive form of traditionalism or nationalism or tribalism or new sovereignty. ³⁶ Such reactions likely will be the antithesis to such values as the critical spirit, freedom, autonomy, equality, justice, and common humanity that modernity envisioned. ³⁷

(2) Cultural and liberationist postmodernism can, I think, be interpreted as a revisionary modernism. An ambivalent and ambiguous relationship exists between most modern and the postmodern thinking. While the postmodern advance challenges many of the assumptions and exposes many of the consequences of modernity, it also utilizes many of the fundamental assumptions, values, and strategies of modernity in order to challenge it. For example, the temporalizing of the great chain of being, the critical spirit, personal autonomy, individual rights, political equality, and a range of other modern notions provide not only the presuppositions and values but also the driving engines of postmodern thought.

In the forms of postmodernism that acknowledge the positive significance of modernity for the contemporary context, postmodernism functions as an internal critique of the dark side of modernity. The major function of postmodernism so far in all of its three forms has been to demystify, to expose the self-contradictions, the illusions, the failures, the repressions, and the ideological character of much of the modern agenda, especially in practice but also in theory. Although justice, equality, and freedom were promoted as common values for all humanity, the fact is that one half of humanity was excluded, and groups outside the purveyors of this worldview were ignored or even exploited. This exclusion of many outside and inside, however, resulted not only from a failure of practice and a failure of nerve. Modernity frequently functioned as an ideology instead of an ideal, as repression instead of liberation. For the dominant group, it served as an ideology to justify the exclusions. Postmodernism as

³⁵ An example of this is offered by deconstructionists themselves. When Paul de Man's fascism was exposed, "suddenly, there again were knowable facts in the world" as defendants scrambled to deny his fascism. "Now in the de Man affair it turned out that deconstructionists actually did trust language, just like everyone else…. In order to defend de Man, a deconstructionist like Derrida 'must sacrifice all of the positions that he labored two decades to establish.' " Peter Shaw, "The Rise and Fall of Deconstruction," Commentary, 92 (December, 1991), p. 51. See, also, his article in Chronicle of Higher Education, 37, 3 (November 28, 1990).
³⁶ Shelby Steele, "The New Sovereignty," Harpers, July, 1992, pp. 47-54.
³⁷ Neville has argued, for example, "ironically, postmodernism thinks of itself as liberating and freeing up cultural impulses that had been stifled by modernism. Yet in philosophy, postmodernism functions quite strictly to shut down all forms of philosophy except those consisting in criticism…." As Marxism, a great nineteenth-century proto-modernist and very modern progressive philosophy, proved to be a failure in the twentieth century in its attempt to lead to a more just world, many academic Marxists switched from left-wing actual politics to right-wing intellectual politics … by extending the structuralists' point about the Other." Neville, The Highroad Around Modernity, pp. 2 and 9.

535 - Postmodernism: Intellectual Velcro Dragged Across Culture?

a critique of modernity serves as a chastening, a refinement, an extension, and a refashioning of some of the most characteristic themes and values of modernity.

Postmodernism, then, in its revisionary form can become "reconstructionism" in the form of a postmodern worldview. Griffin's and John Cobb's "constructive postmodern thought" attempts to be a revisionary postmodernism by constructing a new worldview that retains the strengths of modern thought and practice. For them, postmodernism refers to a vision of the world that refines and enriches the positive contributions of the modern view of the world but is more in accord with emerging paradigms, which see the world more as rich, open, subtle, complex, complementary, and interrelated than the truncated views of modernity. Their "constructive postmodernism" is a communalist, nondualist, biocentric, theocentric, processive, and global way of thinking that gives up the quest for certainty and modifies the literal objectifying styles of thought that usually accompany it. ³⁸

"My own judgment is that we understand ourselves better as living in the late stages of modernity rather than in a postmodern epoch. "

(3)My own judgment is that we understand ourselves better as living in the late stages of modernity rather than in a postmodern epoch. We live in an era when modernity is being revised and extended beyond its truncated and distorted forms throughout much of the modern period. Most postmodern thinkers, suggests Neville, are "late modern thinkers building upon and correcting the modern tradition in exactly the modes of critical and experimental argument at the heart of modernity…. Postmodern means whatever happens in Western culture when modernity is over; there is no clue now as to when that sail be or in what it sail consist. Postmodern is surely a dialectical twist on 'modernism' within modernity…. A modest posture is to admit, all of us, to being 'late moderns' " ³⁹ Similarly, Ted Peters holds that "postmodernity as an independent mode of consciousness is not here yet, if it is ever to come to

³⁸ For a dismissal of this form of constructive postmodernism as leaning toward premodern gnosticism, see Carl Raschke, who speaks of Griffin's proposal as "little more than process thought-a modernist metaphysics-leavened with the politics and eco-mysticism of the aging Sixties counterculture…. [P]ostmodernism becomes nothing more than a buzzword for the sort of 'New Age' utopianism spun from the cerebra of many California dreamers of the Sixties-a folio of themes and notions that are almost a generation outdated now," "Fire and Roses: Toward Authentic Post-Modern Religious Thinking," Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 58 (1990), pp. 676,680.
³⁹ Neville, The Highroad Around Modernism, p. 6.

536 - Postmodernism: Intellectual Velcro Dragged Across Culture?

full term at all. It is at present a babe struggling to emerge from the womb of modernity, and as it does so its first cries are protest." ⁴⁰

Some forms of modernity are desperately in need of a revisionary postmodernism, both on intellectual and pragmatic grounds. Modernity is a paradigm that has grown old and must be revised and reconstituted. Stated bluntly, many of the most fundamental values of modernity must be extended to include all groups and applied in ways that are appropriate to the late stages of modernity. That is, many of the values and goals of modernity must now be made postmodern in the cultural and political forms described above. I do not find the designation "postmodern" a particularly helpful code word for describing the transition toward a new paradigm for modernity.

We continue to struggle, even tear each other apart, because of the tenacious liabilities of modernity, such as difficulty in extending cultural, economic, and political freedom to the dispossessed. But the challenge at the end of the century is not to retreat from this project; it is to enrich the vision and revitalize its capacity to include larger communities and more complex values. That transformation will be a genuinely new epoch in the history of the planet, an era that might have an even more interesting name than the empty term postmodern. But it will not be a negation of the modern project. Each form of postmodern theology (deconstructive postmodernism-Taylor, Winquist; constructive postmodernism-Griffin, Neville; mystical postmodernism-Huston Smith ; ⁴¹ eschatological postmodernism-Peters; and even reactionary postmodernism-Thomas Oden) is an effort at transforming modernity. Predictions better describe the predictor's desires (or fears) more than prescience. Postmodernism, I think, will be modernity in a self-critical mode and in a pluralistic, global context. The (post) modern era will include a richer, more comprehensive and complementary vision of human being and the world than it has during the last three centuries. But we must resist global antimodernity, the programmatic Counter-Enlightenment one sees in some thinkers today, such as various forms of fundamentalism and deconstructionism. Most important, we must preserve the critical spirit of modernity and apply it to modernity itself, repudiating the reductionism and repression of modernism. Its accomplishments and values must be transcended or sublated into a new paradigm, whatever it is called, in which repressed and stunted promises of modernity are reborn into new, liberating, including, and enriching effects.

A pop end-of-modernity fad does not constitute a postmodern epoch, and not every intellectual fashion or every ideological trend constitutes a new age. Periods of cultural history accumulate; they are not replaced. They are stages along the way. "One of the curious things about history is that it seldom really leaves anything behind. It accumulates. The premod-

⁴⁰ Peters, God-the World's Future, p. 14.
⁴¹ Huston Smith, Beyond the Postmodern Mind (New York: Crossroad, 1988), and "Post-modernism's Impact on the Study of Religion."

537 - Postmodernism: Intellectual Velcro Dragged Across Culture?

ern way of thinking has not been totally abandoned. It is still with us and continues to exist side by side with the modern recent innovations." ⁴² Much that is half-baked and contradictory marks every period of transition, but every period is marked by transition, by a "perpetual perishing" in which the past lives only as it is reconstituted as something new in its succeeding era. Postmodernism as an "enlightenment of the Enlightenment" points to how thoroughly chastened modernity has become at the end of our century. A judgment of how deep are the continuities and discontinuities between the modern era and its new embodiments will depend on hindsight.

⁴² Peters. God--the World's Future, p. 19.