Clivedurdle

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Light_of_Other_Days

Solo

Actually, that's what Wolfe says, finding the affinity between fundamentalism and post-modernism a telling tale of the decline of the American academia. The title of Wolfe's essay is a sarcastic paraphrase of Allan Bloom's famous 1980's indictment of the higher education in the US, The Closing of the American Mind (or via: amazon.co.uk)

Jiri

Clivedurdle

Are not fundamentalism and post modernism best thought of as children of modernism, but with different fathers?

DCHindley

Here's what I came up with when I looked into this phenomenon a while back:

It is best to distinguish between Postmodernism and Poststructuralism.

Modernism is a world view that developed to its height in the 19th century as advances in scientific method and logical thinking created a feeling among progressive minded folks that we could figure out just about everything and explain it in more or less objective terms. This became very common POV right around the turn of the 20th century. In the latter half of the 19th century this confidence also spilled over into the historical investigation, with the development of the historical critical method.

However, in the early 20th century there were developments in linguistics that sought to define the nature of human communication. This was brought into focus in the first decades of the 20th century by Ferdinand Saussere, and his POV about the symbolic nature of verbal communication came to be known as "Structuralism." Like most trends, there were folks who applied to to its logical end, and these researchers realized that objectivity is a kind of illusion. This came to be known as "Poststructuralism."

This questioning of what constitutes objective reality finally affected the optimism of scientific Modernism, and this application of poststructuralist literary criticism to science and history became known as Postmodernism. Just a note: Postmodernism does not necessarily reject Modernism, but simply recognizes that there are limitations to what we can "really" know as absolute facts.

Structuralism - A movement which for the most part derives from the lectures of Ferdinand de Saussure, published posthumously in France in 1916. Moore describes the movement as consisting of explanatory principals derived from linguistics. In literature, proponents "attempt to elaborate general narrative 'grammars,' to specify the rules, codes, and conventions that govern the production of individual narratives." "[C]haracteristically interested in moving from the particular to the general, from the individual instance to the underlying laws, from 'surface structures' to 'deep structures.' (Stephen D Moore, Poststructuralism and the New Testament (or via: amazon.co.uk), 1994, pg. 69). According to Munslow, "In practice ... social meaning is generated according to the contrast between inherent binary opposites operationalized at the deep level of human consciousness and revealed in the real world in the structure of grammar, myths, sexual relationships, etc. For history, this means its data is primarily understood through our linguistic mental structures rather than found in the external data. Inevitably, this casts doubt on notion[s] of evolutionary change [in ideas], scientific objectivity, the disinterested search for truth, and referentiality." (Munslow, pg. 189). Munslow notes that because Structuralists conceive of the "text as a self-sufficient sealed system [this] means that structuralist-inspired literary critics do not comprehend their sources - [which are in essence] fictional texts - by studying them in their context of real life. The structuralist literary critic tries to understand them by isolating text from context ..." (Munslow, pg. 29).

Post-Structuralism - Due to the arbitrary nature of signs, a preoccupation central to Structuralism, "language is unable to make any kind of natural, original or genuine sense of the world (including structuralism!)". As a result, "structuralism gives way to post-structuralism". The latter "acknowledges its limitations as a means of understanding. Accepting the elusive nature of the text as full of gaps, silences, and uncertainties of meaning - unfixed and flowing signifiers - it suggests that historical interpretation of the texts, like literary criticism, must be indeterminate and that all its readings are more or less inadequate. This does not, of course, mean that any interpretation is as good as another; it simply means that there are no definitive interpretations." (Munslow, pg. 29).

Deconstructionism - A subset of Post-Structuralism. The term describes Jacques Derrida's (late 1960's) name for his "ambitious attempt to disturb some of the most familiar habits of thought in Western culture, notably our reliance on hierarchical oppositions (presence/absence, primary/secondary, central/marginal, etc.)." It is "especially interested in the exclusions, omissions, and blind spots that enable texts - and societies - to function." (Moore, pg. 129) It "suggests that understanding texts is not solely or exclusively dependent upon reference to the external reality of empiricism, God, reason, morality, objectivity or author intentionality ... This logocentric notion of an originating source of absolute meaning is disputed in favor of the assumption that meaning is arbitrary and figuratively produced." (Munslow, pg. 180). As found in the works of Paul de Man, Deconstructionism is "a form of rhetorical analysis, an attempt to show that literary, critical, and philosophical arguments are invariably destabilized by the figures and tropes they necessarily employ." (Moore, pg. 129). These concepts were expanded by Michael Foucault to emphasize and interpret power relationships. He sought to "formulate a theory of power utterly purged of metaphysical postulates." (Moore, pg. 92). The theory was never fully formed, although "his analysis of the workings of power in given historical periods were robust and concrete ..." (Moore, pg. 93).

So, how does this relate to "historical deconstruction?" Here is a nutshell description of the three basic historical approaches used in modern times:

Historical Reconstructionism - Firmly rooted in the Modernist belief that truthful meaning can be directly inferred from the primary sources. The central methodology is empiricism, meaning that knowledge is gained through the use of the senses as we observe and experience life, or through statements or arguments demonstrated to be true. The more carefully it is done, with the practitioners working as experienced craftspersons, then the more accurate we become and the closer we get to knowing history as it actually happened. Historical narrative serves as a framework within which to explain series of individual events. Extremists reject any method that might taint the investigation or narration of history with ideology, bias or the historian's own ideology. However, most reconstructionists accept that the historian cannot avoid interjecting a certain amount of historical relativism into the explanation. (Alun Munslow, Deconstructing History (or via: amazon.co.uk), 1997, pp. 20-22).

Historical Constructionism - A sub-species of reconstructionism engendered by Post-modern questioning of the empiricist claim that it is possible to build high order and well-justified historical explanations upon observable and singular evidence alone. While sharing the Modernist belief in the separate existence of factual knowledge derived from observable evidence, practitioners go beyond narrative single-event history and insist that history can only explain the past when the evidence is placed within a pre-existing explanatory framework (known as "covering laws") that allows for the calculation of general rules of human action. These general rules are revealed as patterns of behavior (which provide the basis for the historian to deduce covering laws from discreet pieces of evidence), and singular events are seen as part of a discernable pattern. Early advocates for such "covering laws" were Karl Marx, Auguste Compte and Herbert Spencer. They argue that these explanatory frameworks created by historians must to some greater or lesser extant be culturally provided. Presently, history is more and more constructed and written as a form of political commitment to marginalized groups (racial or ethnocultural, gendered, class, colonial, sexual and regional). (Munslow, pp. 22-25).

Historical Deconstruction - In the latter part of the 20th century, some historians have embraced the Structuralist emphasis on language as the conduit through which knowledge passes. To them, the written historical narrative is the formal *re-representation* of historical content. Since language constitutes and represents, rather than transparently corresponds to, reality, then there is no ultimate knowable historical truth, and our knowledge of the past is social and perspectival, and written history exists within culturally determined power structures. A historical narrative is a possible history, not "the" past. These historians maintains that evidence only signposts possible realities and possible interpretations because all contexts are inevitably textualized or narrativized or texts within texts. (Munslow, pp. 25-26). Deconstructionist history "accepts that language constitutes history's content as well as the concepts and categories deployed to order and explain historical evidence through our linguistic power of figuration." (Munslow, pg. 181).

Just to clarify. Historical deconstructionalists do not reject that actual events occurred, or that some information about these events can be recovered and verified as facts. They do emphasize that the historian explains the significance of the facts using figurative language from his own age, which colors the interpretation of those facts.

DCH (on lunch break boss)

ApostateAbe

Yes, you are right. It took me awhile to finish that article, but it was worth reading. I did not greatly expect that the faculty of evangelical universities who believe in the Bible authoritatively would have such an affinity for postmodernism, but that is what Wolfe claims of Fuller University. They seem to prefer postmodernism in order to undercut the unbiblical certainties and prejudices of the secular academic establishment and make way for the Biblicist paradigm.