From: JessEcoh-AT-cs.com
Date: Mon, 16 Feb 2004 18:40:33 EST
Subject: [postanarchism] postpositivist realism?


folks --

   this stuff looks really interesting.  i had only been dimly aware of these 
postpositivist-realist folks' work . . . i may have to give it a closer look 
now, because a lot of this sounds like what i've been clumsily trying to argue 
for the last two or three years.


   --jesse.

(for the rest, see http://eserver.org/clogic/4-2/moeller.html)

> Review
> Carol J. Moeller
>  
> Reclaiming Identity: Realist Theory and the Predicament of Postmodernism, 
> Paula M. L. Moya and Michael R. Hames-Garcia, Eds., University of California 
> Press, 2000.
> Literary Theory and the Claims of History: Postmodernism, Objectivity, 
> Multicultural Politics, Satya P. Mohanty, Cornell, 1997.
>  
> Realism and Identity: Rethinking the Categories of Our Lives
>  
>      1. Each essay in Reclaiming Identity (referred to as R.I.) uses 
> theoretical frameworks developed by postpositivist thinkers, particularly Satya 
> Mohanty, in Literary Theory and the Claims of History: Postmodernism, 
> Objectivity, Multicultural Politics (henceforth referred to as L.T.C.H.). The anthology 
> is a collaborative work building upon ongoing collective inquiry, extending 
> in part from the 1993 essay by Satya Mohanty reprinted here.
>      2. This new volume may have a difficult road ahead of it. It has the 
> audacity to question and to disagree with much of what has come to pass for 
> common sense among many left-leaning academics. Elaborating and developing the 
> frameworks of Satya P. Mohanty, Paula M.L. Moya, and others, Reclaiming 
> Identity explicates and critiques the various components of this near-consensus, 
> developing alternatives to epistemological assumptions and implications which 
> are often implicit within postmodernist views. Being implicit, these 
> assumptions and implications often go unrecognized. Other times they are celebrated as 
> advancements of postmodernism, that it has the courage to go beyond 
> Enlightenment ideas and totalizing presumptions. Yet, as postpositivist philosopher 
> Hilary Putnam writes, "Metaphysics often disguises itself as rejection of 
> metaphysics."1 The same may be said here for epistemology. Contemporary 
> skepticism is often trapped within the very assumptions it is said to reject.
>      3. Understanding this claim requires investigating a whole range of 
> views that are, in various ways, skeptical about objective knowledge of the 
> world. Certain implicit aspects of postmodernist thinking, as well as of related 
> views such as Richard Rorty's pragmatism, must be made explicit. Many of the 
> ideas under critical review are shared across a wide spectrum of contemporary 
> theorists who may or may not be considered poststructuralist or 
> postmodernist. The claims in question include a related set of ideas:
> a) that objectivity is impossible,
> b) that we cannot know the external world, 
> c) that identities are untenable, 
> d) that experience cannot yield genuine knowledge, and 
> e) that universal moral ideas are baseless.
> In addressing the socially constructed nature of reality and knowledge 
> claims, these theorists deem the very notions of objectivity and realism to be 
> without merit. Subtle analysis of these claims suggests that they are under 
> demonstrated, extending conclusions about the impossibility of Positivist 
> certainty to the impossibility of any knowledge.
>      4. I suggest that these skeptics, like many theorists, are trapped in 
> the grip of a philosophical picture that they claim to reject. In doing so, I 
> follow Hilary Putnam, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Stanley Cavell, and Cora Diamond, 
> as well as the Reclaiming Identity writers. As Wittgenstein says, "The 
> picture held us captive." In contrast to these varied forms of skepticism, 
> Reclaiming Identity and Literary Theory and the Claims of History practice what Cora 
> Diamond calls "a realistic spirit." In Diamond's terms, they reject the 
> metaphysical spirit (in which one is trapped in certain metaphysical pictures) in 
> favor of the realistic one. They regard poststructuralist skepticism and 
> relativism as unwarranted, not by denying the messiness and situatedness of our 
> knowledge processes but by embracing those features. Error, for example, 
> becomes useful for purposes of correction, not to be feared or denied but to be 
> learned from.
> The Predicament of Postmodernism?
>      5. As Paula Moya points out in the introduction to Reclaiming Identity, 
> identity has long been a major topic. Feminist, anti-colonialist, ethnic and 
> race studies, poststructuralist, psychoanalytic, queer theory, and/or 
> cultural materialist thinking have all discussed identity for decades. These 
> treatments of identity have often been less than flattering. Rather, "much of what 
> has been written about identity during this period seeks to delegitimate, and 
> in some cases eliminate, the concept itself by revealing its ontological, 
> epistemological, and political limitations." (R.I., 2)
>      6. In what sense is postmodernism a predicament? Paula Moya usefully 
> connects the various limitations of problematic essentialist tendencies as they 
> have played out in activist and academic settings. In so doing, she explores 
> how the debates around identity and multiculturalism have developed in very 
> particular contexts of history, as viable notions of group and cultural 
> identities have been sought amidst contentious fields of social change.
>      7. As Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Mohanty write:
> Postmodernist theory, in its haste to dissociate itself from all forms of 
> essentialism, has generated a series of epistemological confusions regarding 
> the interconnections between location, identity, and the construction of 
> knowledge. Thus, for instance, localized questions of experience, identity, 
> culture, and history, which enable us to understand specific processes of domination 
> and subordination, are often dismissed by postmodern theories as 
> reiterations of cultural 'essence' of unified, stable identity.2
> Such dismissals interfere with the real work required to analyze oppression 
> and resistance in the many forms they take.
>      8. Postmodernist challenges to such categories as "race," "gender," and 
> "sexuality" may be at odds with the use and development of analytic tools to 
> critique how these categories are tied to the workings of oppression. They 
> reconsider the rejection of race and other categories used by oppressed 
> groups, as well as the related notion that knowledge from experience can be vital 
> to a liberatory praxis.
>      9. Liberationist theorists have often explicitly engaged with 
> differences in social location and identities to critique oppression, in order to make 
> better sense of how the world is and how it ought to be changed. In 
> postmodernist approaches to literary and cultural studies, "difference" has often 
> been treated in a contrary fashion, ironically erasing the distinctiveness and 
> relationality of such differences as race, sex, nation, and sexuality. To 
> quote Paula Moya:
> Typically, postmodernist thinkers either internalize difference so that the 
> individual is herself seen as 'fragmented' and 'contradictory' (thus 
> disregarding the distinctions that exist between different kinds of people), or they 
> attempt to 'subvert' difference by showing that 'difference' is merely a 
> discursive illusion (thus leaving no way to contend with the fact that people 
> experience themselves as different from each other). In either case, 
> postmodernists reinscribe, albeit unintentionally, a kind of universal sameness (we are 
> all marginal now!) that their celebration of difference had tried so hard to 
> avoid. (R.I., 68)
>      10. Postmodernist theory is often taken to have refuted, displaced, or 
> deconstructed such categories as "race" and "gender," concepts such as 
> "experience," "identity," "objectivity," and "knowledge." Argues Moya:
> If, as Judith Butler and Joan Scott claim in their introduction to Feminists 
> Theorize the Political, concepts like 'experience' and 'identity' enact 'a 
> silent violence...as they have operated not merely to marginalize certain 
> groups, but to erase and exclude them from the notion of 'community' altogether,' 
> then any invocation of these 'foundational' concepts will be seen as always 
> already tainted with exclusionary and totalizing forms of power. (R.I., 68)
> Linda Martin Alcoff notes a similar effect. In "The Elimination of 
> Experience in Feminist Theory," she writes, "the rising influence of postmodernism has 
> had a noticeable debilitating effect on [the project of empowering women as 
> knowledge producers], producing a flurry of critical attacks on 
> unproblematized accounts of experience and on identity politics."3 As Moya notes, "Such 
> critical attacks have served, in conventional theoretical wisdom, to 
> delegitimize all accounts of experience and to undermine all forms of identity politics 
> -- unproblematized or not."4
>      11. In Moya's "Postmodernism, "Realism," and the Politics of Identity: 
> Cherrie Moraga and Chicano Feminism," Moya argues that postmodernist and 
> other celebrations of difference are problematic. Postmodernists have often cited 
> Moraga and other women of color, yet misreading and misappropriating them 
> from realist contexts to support postmodernist views. Moya notes that Moraga's 
> "theory in the flesh" involves a realist sort of epistemology, grounding 
> struggles for knowledge in the experiences of Latinas. In her notion of social 
> location, critical understandings of the world are made possible by the 
> positionality of Latinas. Such understandings do not come automatically. One does 
> not necessarily have a critical consciousness of oppression by virtue of being 
> Latina. Rather, such a consciousness is facilitated by cultural identity as a 
> point of access into the world, as part of a theoretical and practical 
> process of making sense of the world in light of liberatory goals. Moya conceives 
> of knowledge as produced from particular location. Thus, political alliances 
> may also be epistemic alliances, making connections across diverse 
> experiences and perspectives in order to better understand the world. Crucial to that 
> understanding is how it might be transformed.
>      12. Despite these theoretical complexities, identity remains important 
> to lived experiences in a hierarchically organized world, where patterns such 
> as white supremacy continue. As Moya puts it:
> The significance of identity depends partly on the fact that goods and 
> resources are still distributed according to identity categories. Who we are -- 
> that is, who we perceive ourselves or are perceived by others to be -- will 
> significantly affect our life chances: where we can live, whom we will marry (or 
> whether we can marry), and what kinds of educational and employment 
> opportunities are available to us. (R.I., 8)
> This statement, like many in the Reclaiming Identity volume, seems fairly 
> straightforward. It's difficult to deny, unless one challenges the very notion 
> that inequalities persist today and correlate (to some degree) along such 
> lines as race, and sex.
>      13. Yet Moya states a sort of theme that has become unfashionable in 
> certain theoretical circles. It's not so much that poststructuralist thinkers 
> deny such claims. Rather, they often operate at a different level of critique. 
> They claim to show the very notion of identity to be pernicious. Some see 
> identity as implicated in a naive postivistic metaphysics and epistemology that 
> purports that we can know the real world, unmediated by language, or that 
> fails to recognize the speciousness and instability of such categories as race.
>      14. Moya, Hames-Garcia, and their co-contributors confront these 
> critiques head-on, showing them not to be devastating. Is skepticism about all 
> knowledge warranted, or is it just a positivist conception of certainty that we 
> should surrender? Has objectivity been exposed as a myth, or only positivist 
> conceptions of objectivity? Is any conception of rationality suspect, or is it 
> only certain narrow and culturally imperialistic conceptions of rationality?
>      15. Many people are nervous about the political implications of 
> poststructuralism, but cannot quite see how to avoid them. Some set these supposedly 
> devastating critiques aside temporarily, while making identity-based claims 
> on political grounds. They popularize "strategic essentialism," using Gayatri 
> Spivak's term.
>      16. Such "strategic essentialism" is dangerous. One worry is arrogance 
> and disrespect. Supposedly theoreticians understand the emptiness of such 
> categories of race and sex, but the oppressed people who use those categories 
> and find them important are in the grip of some sort of error.
>      17. Further, those working in Black studies and women's studies and 
> other fields built in part on political struggles have wondered how the cutting 
> edge became textual criticism and why so many of the key texts are written by 
> European white males.
>      18. Other thinkers ignore poststructuralist methods and views, or 
> disparage them from the outside, without understanding any theoretical potential 
> there. Many still are overwhelmed by the difficulties in understanding the 
> poststructuralist views and methods, being intellectually disempowered in the 
> meantime by the highly technical language and the degree to which it has been 
> accepted.
> Post-Positivism?
>      19. The first section "The Realist Theory of Identity and the 
> Predicament of Postmodernism" elaborates the challenges of postmodernist critiques of 
> identity and how a postpositivist realist notion of identity avoids those 
> difficulties. Showing the limitations of frozen, static, essentialist notions of 
> identity and of postmodernist skepticism about it, they develop a realist 
> notion of identity that avoids both sets of problems. The second section 
> "Postpositivist Objectivity: Uses of Error, Values, and Identity" develops this 
> notion of objectivity as a goal for finite creatures in a theory-laden, social 
> inquiry. Such a notion is not of a "God's eye" view, transcending all. Rather, 
> it builds upon how actual human beings and communities do well or badly in 
> understanding or being mystified about facets of the world. The third section, 
> "Realist Conceptions of Agency, Experience, and Identity," explores how to 
> think of such topics as experience while doing justice to the multiple 
> interpretations available of them, without ending up radical skeptics.
>      20. Certain criticisms to Reclaiming Identity are bound to arise. Some 
> might object that Reclaiming Identity authors paint poststructuralism as a 
> "straw man," a caricature of poststructuralism that is not true of any of its 
> elements much less of poststructuralism taken as a whole. After all, what 
> single view is common to all considered poststructuralist? Or to what 
> poststructuralism is? Or to who counts as a poststructuralist? Further, aren't 
> poststructuralists refusing to play the very game that Mohanty et. al. claim to find 
> them in? How can they critique postmodernist epistemologies when 
> postmodernists reject epistemology as yet another charade of Western logocentrism?
>      21. Some might say that the very tools used by the Reclaiming Identity 
> writers are outmoded, being technical analytic methods that have been 
> superseded by deconstructionist and other postmodernist methods. Thus, some critics 
> might accuse Reclaiming Identity of rearranging the deck chairs on the 
> Titanic. They might even appropriate the words of Audre Lorde, another arguably 
> realist thinker whose views often get put to others' ends. Lorde writes, "The ma
> ster's tools can never dismantle the master's house." The very tools of 
> clarity, precise reasoning, and careful argumentation might be seen as the 
> "master's tools," indelibly marked with oppressive qualities.
>      22. Many might reject the project in total. Is it a last gasp of 
> positivist thinkers who cannot face up to the theoretical maturity of 
> postmodernism? Are they just unable to relinquish Enlightenment notions? Many critics 
> would be quick to draw such conclusions, without even opening the cover of this 
> text, without first considering it and responding.I would urge readers to 
> consider the possibilities above, that postmodernism (broadly construed) has had 
> deep effects upon what ideas are taken seriously. Reclaiming Identity demands 
> careful attention. I begin to address such concerns here. Yet they cannot be 
> resolved thoroughly here, or in the Reclaiming Identity volume alone. It is 
> in Mohanty's book that the argument for postpositivist realism is fully 
> developed and defended. Taken together, the two books forge a powerful critique of 
> postmodernism and a strong argument for a politically sophisticated 
> postpositivist realist alternative.
> 

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