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Two Types of Postmodernism: Deconstruction and Process
By John B. Cobb

"I will put the distinction between the two forms of postmodernism crudely. Deconstructive postmodernism expresses the consequences of an idealism that has taken the linguistic turn and then has seen through the language. Whiteheadian postmodernism expresses the consequences of a realism that is reconstructed in terms of the priority of events over things or substances. It is quite consistent that deconstructive postmodernism peels the onion. It is equally consistent that Whiteheadian postmodernism seeks insights into the inexhaustible reality of the plenum of events, wherever those insights can be found. "

THERE IS widespread recognition that Western culture is in deep transition. The environmental crises have forced recognition that past policies no longer work, so that a practical change is required. But the cultural transition long antedated the public one and has a life of its own. The ideals that moved previous generations no longer move us. Whereas not long ago only a few visionaries and seers questioned that Western culture of recent centuries represents a major advance in comparison with all else that has transpired and is transpiring on the globe, now many are profoundly skeptical of its claims to superiority. The rhetoric of "science," "medicine," "education," "democracy," and "human rights" rings hollow in our ears, even when we have nothing better with which to replace it.

I

Perhaps this change of sensibility can be summed up best in the changed resonance of the word "modern." Not long ago, it was a positive term for most of us. There might be nostalgia for the values swept away by modernity, but to be modern was to be au courant, "with it." When

John B. Cobb is Professor of Theology at the School of Theology, Claremont, California and Director of the Center for Process Studies. Born in Japan, he took his doctorate at the University of Chicago Divinity School. He is an ordained United Methodist minister and the author of numerous books, the most recent being Process Theology as Political Theology (1982), Beyond Dialogue: Toward a Mutual Transformation of Christianity and Buddhism (1982), and For the Common Good (with Herman Daly, 1989).

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we spoke of "modern" medicine or "modern" art, we meant the most advanced techniques of healing and the cutting edge of art. Of course, what was "modern" in one generation was already out-of-date in the next, but the word "modern" shifted easily to designate the products of the new advances. Its application was determined by currency more than by specific content or commitments.

Now that has changed. "Modern" refers to an epoch that is felt to be past or at least passing. It is no longer equivalent to "contemporary." It refers to an era from which more and more people feel detached, if not alienated.

Of course, even those who no longer feel at home in the "modern" world know that modernity still reigns in public life, Politicians still appeal to modern (if not premodern) values. The universities are all modern or striving to become so. The struggle in the church is between the modern and the premodern. The economy functions more and more on modern principles. The modernization of agriculture around the world accelerates. The point is not that modernity has lost control of major institutions. It is rather that increasing numbers of people no longer find the principles of modernity convincing.

Critiques of modernity vary greatly. This is partly because the word ,'modern" has had diverse histories of use in science and in the arts. In the latter, "modern" often designates a particular, quite recent style. Because our interest here is philosophical and theological, I take ,'modern" to refer to a period beginning in the seventeenth century. Descartes is the father of modern philosophy and Newton played a crucial role in the development and triumph of modern science. Since the eighteenth century, many religious leaders have tried to come to terms with the Cartesian and Newtonian worldviews and thought forms. I think of this as modern theology.

There has been rich development within modernity. In particular, philosophy was profoundly changed by Hume, Kant, and Hegel. The earlier confidence that the human mind could grasp the objective structures of reality gave way. The connection between philosophy and the content of the sciences was broken. For major streams of thought, the structure of thought became primary in relation to the structure of what is thought about, and the structure of thought has been seen as culturally and historically conditioned. Marx showed that the structure of thought is relative to class interest, and today we are forced to acknowledge relativity to race and gender as well.

The full implications of these developments in the second great phase of modernity have only gradually penetrated the cultural psyche and come to full expression. Their net effect is radically to undercut the modes of understanding and the expectations of reason that dominated the first period of modernity. The results can be called "postmodern." Indeed, the most common use of the term "postmodern" today refers to the consistent deconstructing of the entire program of early modernism, a program that has persisted in many ways despite the increasingly

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relativistic and historicistic implications of much of the leading thought of late modernism.

Deconstruction as carried forward by the leading French thinkers, Derrida and Foucault, problematizes everything that the modern world has taken for granted. It undercuts every quest for certainty. It does not seek to replace what is torn down with a new edifice, showing instead the problematic character of the aim to construct any edifice at all. In these ways it stimulates the alienation from modernity that is already widespread and intensifies it.

Those who are struggling for liberation often find this deconstructive program profoundly helpful. Feminists, especially, show how deeply male dominance pervades our total heritage and how drastic are the changes in thought and sensibility involved in uprooting it. But deconstruction is a dangerous weapon. For all its liberative power, it finally undercuts even the passion for liberation. It leads at one and the same time to a recognition that we are inextricably formed by language and that the language that forms us is not deserving of our acceptance.

In America, much of the most enthusiastic reception of French deconstruction has been within theology and religious studies. In addition to liberationists, for whom it is an instrument that can be used against the oppression so deeply built into our culture, it has appealed to the heirs of the radical theology of the sixties. They see in deconstruction a further expression of the self-destruction of the Western mind, a self-destruction that must be welcomed as the paradoxical advent of salvation.

Much of what deconstructive postmodernism undercuts in the modern worldview is the same as what has been rejected by process thinkers. Further, the deconstructive methods have a power and authenticity that goes beyond anything that has been accomplished in the past. Deconstructive postmodernism subsumes and carries forward the hermeneutics of suspicion derived from Marx and Freud, but radicalizes this, so that it denies also to Marxism and Freudianism a positive position. A process thinker must stand in admiration.

Nevertheless, process thought is a profoundly different way of breaking with modernity. It has learned from Whitehead not to identify reason with modernity but in many respects with what modernity rejected. Modernity has been a long series of critiques of reason, at least of the full-orbed reason of medieval thinkers. Deconstruction carries this critique to its logical conclusion. It uses the methods of modernity to undercut all the positive content of modernity.

The term "postmodern" is a natural one for process thinkers to use. Whitehead wrote a book entitled Science and the Modern World. Although Whitehead does not explicitly state that the modern world is at an end, this is the impression left with the reader. Whitehead viewed his time as one of new beginnings. He even identified William James as playing an initiatory role in philosophy in the twentieth century analogous to that of Descartes in the seventeenth century. The new

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directions for science, religion, and philosophy, sketched in Science and the Modern World, are developed rigorously and in some detail in subsequent writings, especially Process and Reality.

Three decades elapsed between the publication of that book in the late twenties and the emergence of a small community that understood it well enough to grasp its broader implications. When I studied at Chicago in the late forties, my teacher, Charles Hartshorne, who was deeply appreciative of Whitehead for his contributions to metaphysics and philosophy of religion, nevertheless skipped much of Process and Reality as unintelligible. But by the sixties that situation had changed. Several studies had been published that unpacked the texts we had found so difficult. A good many of us understood the implications of Whitehead's thought sufficiently to sense its resonance with the ecological and feminist movements as well as the other movements of liberation. There seemed to be a kairos for a new beginning.

We used the term "postmodern" only occasionally in those days, but more recently, when David Griffin established an organization in Santa Barbara, he called it the Center for a Postmodern World. He is now editing a series of volumes on constructive postmodern thought published by SUNY Press. The term functions as an umbrella covering a variety of new ventures in thought and institutional practice. Most of these ventures arose out of the turmoil of the sixties and reflect its more constructive impetus. What is rejected of modernity are its individualism, its materialistic atomism, its anthropocentrism, its idealism, its fragmentation of knowledge into academic disciplines, its nationalism, its Eurocentrism, its androcentrism, its tendency toward nihilism. What is retained are its self-criticism, its concern for the personal, and its commitment to human freedom generally, and freedom of inquiry in particular. In the new vision, many inherited dualisms are overcome, not only those of matter and mind and of body and spirit, but also those of nature and history, science and religion, individual and society. Most feminists share major elements of this vision, and much of the energy for its development in theory, and for its embodiment in practice, comes from them.

II

The Center for a Postmodern World, together with the publication series mentioned, are Whiteheadian in that Whitehead provides the most fully-developed conceptuality for undergirding themes of the sort indicated as they are pursued today in many areas. But the term "postmodern" opens the door to participation by many who are following conceptualities developed independently of Whitehead or, more often, congenial intuitions and imaginative insights rather than conceptually articulated speculations.

The aim is to develop an alternative vision of nature and society, of the way the world is and human life could be, that can be convincingly juxtaposed to the inherited physical sciences, economics, politics, legal

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system, educational system, psychotherapy, and religious teaching and practice. There is a major deconstructive moment in this process, because our whole heritage must be seen as problematic before there can be openness to radically different proposals. But the aim is constructive.

It is this constructive aim that leads to the dismissal of this project by most postmodernists of the other school. The effort to construct a world in either theory or practice appears to them to express just the kind of confidence in the human mind or human language that their program sets out to demolish. Just as from the Whiteheadian perspective the deconstructionists often appear as radical modernists rather than as true postmodernists, so from the perspective of deconstructionists, Whiteheadian postmodernism appears as reversion to pre-Kantian forms of modernity. Hence, in spite of a shared interest in overcoming many features of our heritage, the two forms of postmodernity diverge considerably in spirit.

Of course, "postmodern" could suggest a recovery of the premodern. There are elements of that involved. In Whiteheadian postmodernism, there is an awareness of renewing earlier, more organic, traditions that were obscured and ridiculed by victorious modernism. But the mood is not so much to recover and renew earlier stages of Western thought as to search globally for insights and wisdom and for points of contact with new speculations arising from contemporary sciences. The opportunity to draw from Native American and African cosmologies and from South and East Asian religious philosophies as well as from the European tradition seems genuinely new, even though we can find anticipations in earlier epochs.

Much of the leadership of Whiteheadian postmodernism has come from Christian theologians. Almost by definition, and certainly by conviction, theologians put a special emphasis on Israel as we survey human cultures for sources of hope and new beginnings. There are features of Israel's life and thought that we have learned to see as unusable today-not merely or primarily its pre-scientific cosmology and ethnocentricity, but rather especially its patriarchal character. Nevertheless, it is in Israel's life with God, as we see this through Jesus Christ, that we find our central clues for a postmodern faith in a postmodern world.

Both forms of post-modernism seek radical changes. The deconstructive model is something like peeling an onion. As one sees through the meanings by which we have been conditioned to live at one level, one finds another, and another, level of meaning. But if one could see through them all, peel them all away, there would be nothing left. Some hold that "nothing" to be salvation, somewhat as Buddhists do, although this Western "nothing" is not identical with that of the Buddhists.

Whiteheadian postmodernism draws its model of change from Whitehead's account of creativity: the many become one and are increased by one. We are constituted for good and ill by the many ideas, practices, and movements of the past. What we become in every moment is largely

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a result of the way they enforce themselves upon us or within us. Yet we are not merely the product of this past. We are vouchsafed also a vision of what can be made of that past as it is integrated with new possibilities derived from God. We are called to become what it is thereby made possible for us to become. How we respond to that call is our decision.

In general we are called to appropriate as broadly, as inclusively, as possible from the past. The freshness and originality of our present being correlates positively with this inclusiveness. The task is to take elements that seem in themselves mutually opposed and mutually exclusive and to transform them into a novel contrast that gains richness and intensity through inclusion of the best of both. Since this account is quite abstract, I will try to show what it means more concretely with an example.

III

One way of relating to the past is to treat it in linear fashion as a single history of ideas or of reflections on a problem. The scholar studies this history of a problem or a discussion and then takes the next step. Of course, no one supposes that the topic in question, shall we say the historical Jesus, can be treated in total abstraction from other topics or from the wider context within which it is being considered, or from issues of historical and theological method. Also no one supposes that all discussion of this topic falls into a neat linear pattern. Nevertheless, it is possible to subordinate the complexities to the pattern and recount a single story of the discussion to date as a basis for writing a new chapter. The new chapter grows out of critical examination of earlier positions. It may defend some earlier position against more recent ones. The overall impression is one of the cumulative advance of scholarship, the increasing accuracy of the grasp of the datum.

But this whole story can be viewed quite differently. We can ask who have been interested in the historical Jesus and why. What is the social location of these people? What imagery do they employ and what does it reveal about their motivations? What are the socioeconomic conditions of the time when they write, and how does the focus on this discussion as such, as well as the particular positions adopted, relate to these conditions? The net effect of this line of questioning is to shift attention from the historical Jesus to the writers about him, and from the issues they explicitly address to questions of the social role their writings fill.

A third approach is to locate Jesus and the understanding of Jesus in the widest practicable horizon. The history of religions is a likely candidate. Jesus and the reception and interpretation of Jesus are then seen in their similarities and differences to other religious leaders and the ways they have been received and interpreted. Ideally this history is set in the total history of humanity including political and economic aspects rather than religion alone, insofar as religion is viewed as one aspect of life alongside others.

A Whiteheadian model would affirm all three of these approaches, as well as others. Within the multiplicity of the many that are becoming

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one, there are linear strands that are of particular importance. Our personal lives constitute such linear strands, and there are approximations to these in historical movements and scholarly traditions. Nevertheless, the latter are only approximations, and treating them in this way can be justified only pragmatically. It is important that the writer not forget the degree of abstraction involved. Also it is important that conclusions of such inquiry be recognized as based on a highly restricted range of evidence.

The second approach with its focus of attention on those who are developing ideas about the historical Jesus is also appropriate. These writers are products of their time, place, and social location. Their ideas on this subject are influenced by their ideas on all other subjects, and all their ideas are influenced by the political, economic, and cultural situation, as well as their personal biographies. To highlight these is illuminating. But there is a danger that the influence of beliefs about Jesus on all the other beliefs of the scholars be neglected. There is also a danger of obscuring the real importance of the historical Jesus, of his actual influence, and of understanding him rightly today.

The attempt to place Jesus in the widest possible context is especially appropriate to the Whiteheadian model. It expresses quite directly the openness to the many and to allowing them to interact in the constitution of the new understanding. No narrower horizon suffices. Nevertheless, there are dangers here too. Locating Jesus in the context of the history of religions may accord to categories developed by the academic discipline of that name too great a weight. Jesus may be subsumed into a type defined through comparative analysis rather than allowed to be who he was in his full uniqueness. Furthermore, if, in the name of breadth, what is learned from the other two approaches is lost, this will be a shallow breadth.

Whiteheadian postmodernism is pluralistic in many ways. It does not encourage replacing one method by another, but rather taking the diverse approaches and transforming their oppositions into contrasts. These methods include deconstruction and unmasking, but they concentrate on what can be positively learned from the many and can be fruitfully brought into contrast rather than on seeing through and peeling away.

Of course, even such a statement of juxtaposition can be heard as primarily an exclusion. I am juxtaposing Whiteheadian postmodernism with deconstructive postmodernism, and in the process I have certainly displayed my judgment of the limitations of the deconstructive type. However, I hope I have made clear that I do not regard deconstructive postmodernism as simply wrong. I have no question but that what it sees through and peels away needs to be exposed and rendered problematic. Through that act it increases the scope of human freedom and thereby performs a valuable service. From the Whiteheadian perspective, however, this unmasking can be only one element in an adequate response to the past. The Whiteheadian polemic here-as elsewhere-is

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against treating the partial and one-sided as if it were the adequate whole. This almost universal tendency to neglect the degree of abstractness in our thought and work, Whitehead named the Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness. It is closely related to the theological notion of idolatry.

The point is not that there is an adequate method or approach. Precisely the contrary. Every method is particular. To whatever extent it opens the eyes to what is there to be seen, it is to be affirmed. But to whatever extent it forgets that it is one method among others, it is to be criticized. We need another level of method for integration, but here, too, there is not one right method. And in any case, the data attained by any and all methods remain always partial and incomplete. We never arrive at final truth--only at the provisional integration of some insights into the indescribably complex reality in which we are immersed.

IV

These comments reflect another difference between the two postmodernisms. The deconstructive type locates "reality" in the language that is to be deconstructed. It objects to any notion that there is a non-linguistic reality to which language in any sense corresponds or fails to correspond. My account of the many methods yielding diverse insights into reality assumes a very different vision. For the Whiteheadian there is a vast and incomprehensibly rich field of events in which human events constitute a very small part. Language enables human beings to orient themselves in this larger field far more creatively than can creatures who do not speak. On the other hand, language also simplifies and even falsifies the context of events in ways that can be disastrous.

Language mediates much human relationship to the surrounding matrix of human and nonhuman events. But there is a pre-linguistic element in human experience as well. An aching tooth is felt prior to and independently of language, although its identification as tooth, just how it is felt, and how one responds to it are all very much affected by language. Physical experience of events affects language, and language affects physical experience. Once language arises, these are inextricable. But physical feeling remains prior and primary. It is not constituted by language, and it remains as an ultimate judge of the adequacy and appropriateness of language.

This is not a call for a referential theory of language in the usual sense. The primary emphasis is, rather, pragmatic. A system of language that inhibits the acquisition of sufficient food is ordinarily to be judged negatively. A system of language that encourages loving human relationships is ordinarily to be judged positively.

Still there is a referential element. Language that orients us well to the environment of events will ordinarily be relatively accurate. That is, it will elicit expectations that are physically fulfilled. Furthermore, language of this sort can be increasingly refined, enriched, and expanded so as to elicit more and more detailed expectations still capable of physical fulfillment.

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Strictly speaking, of course, it is the expectations elicited by language, rather than the language as such, that conform or fail to conform to the physical experience. Hence it is misleading to focus on words or phrases separated from these expectations and to ask whether they represent events accurately. But in a healthy linguistic community there is a close relationship between the words and phrases used and the expectations aroused, so that it is not seriously misleading to correlate language with events in a quasi-referential fashion.

The danger of affirming the referential element in language is that it can too easily encourage the move to the question of the truth or falsity of a sentence. This question is not to be rejected altogether, but it belongs at the periphery rather than the center of thought. The matrix of events is inconceivably complex. Language, performing its proper pragmatic functions, vastly simplifies this reality while remaining vague and ambiguous. Even the simplest verbal sentence is capable of numerous subtly different interpretations of which some are more accurate than others. In many cases, the great majority of these suggest the same human actions, so that the differences are not practically important. But when the discussion is shifted to the question of truth and falsity, and when this is understood in terms of correspondence between the meanings of the sentence and the events in question, the issue becomes enormously complex and can be clarified only through the construction of an entire worldview.

To avoid such immense and usually unneeded complexity, it is better to speak of insight and understanding than of truth. An insight need not be absolutely and unambiguously true in order to direct thought and action into new and effective channels. Understanding is a matter of degree, and again, it does not entail the ability to give an unambiguous and exact account. I have some understanding of why I think as I do about Jesus. Reading a book on social psychology may give me an insight that changes, deepens, and enriches that understanding. But the actual reasons are always far more complex. They involve my whole life history as a white, middle-class, Anglo-Saxon, North American, Protestant male in the context of the church and the university and much else besides. The question is not some final truth or falsity of my understanding of myself on this point. I assume there is always a mixture of the two that I can never fully sort out. The question is whether my understanding here is free from gross self-deception and defensiveness, open to new evidence, and welcoming of new insights. If so, it is likely to be relatively accurate, that is, to correspond fairly well to major aspects of the vast causal matrix that has shaped the way I think about Jesus. New insights will open up awareness of other aspects of that causal matrix without basically invalidating my previous understanding. The challenge will be to understand myself better through creative integration of the new insight and the old understanding. The result will be likely to correspond better with a wider segment of the causal matrix, but it will remain extremely partial in relationship to that totality.

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V

I will put the distinction between the two forms of postmodernism crudely. Deconstructive postmodernism expresses the consequences of an idealism that has taken the linguistic turn and then has seen through the language. Whiteheadian postmodernism expresses the consequences of a realism that is reconstructed in terms of the priority of events over things or substances. It is quite consistent that deconstructive postmodernism peels the onion. It is equally consistent that Whiteheadian postmodernism seeks insights into the inexhaustible reality of the plenum of events, wherever those insights can be found.

Constructive postmodern theology receives little encouragement in either the academy or the church. In the academy, its effort to think inclusively about the world in realistic terms cuts against the academic disciplines in general and the deconstructive mood in particular. The current focus is on richly detailed consideration of very particular material rather than on worldview and philosophical speculation. Christian theology is either rejected in toto or seen as having a role as one specialized discipline alongside others. It is not expected to throw light from a Christian point of view on the whole array of problems and concerns faced by humanity today.

Meanwhile the mainline churches have turned away from the effort to attain clarity of thought about their faith in relation to the problems that preoccupy either the intellectual or the academic world. This effort seemed in the past to foster specialized inquiries that were hardly accessible to lay people or pastors, inquiries more geared to advancing academic disciplines than responding to urgent issues of faith and the service of Christ. The issues confronting the church are now conceived either in social ethical terms or in practical and institutional ones. Insofar as interest in theology survives, it is more in finding a way of undergirding denominational and pastoral concerns than of gaining an understanding of the totality of life in the postmodern context. Whereas in the academy the constructive Christian interests of process theologians are an obstacle to acceptance, in the church the necessary deconstructive moment is regarded as an unacceptable threat. The need is experienced as recovery of the ways of thinking of the past, especially of the premodern founders, so that the enthusiasm and commitment that once characterized these churches can be renewed.

Nevertheless, there remains a religious hunger in the nation that is poorly satisfied by the increasingly conservative churches. There is also a loss of belief in the convictions of modernity and a recognition of the need for truly new ways of viewing the world and for new policies and actions shaped by those ways. Today most deal with this hunger and loss of conviction by ignoring them. But the time may come when probing questions directed toward a positive vision will once again surface and shape public discourse. In anticipation of such a day, it is worthwhile to keep process theology alive.