Pynchon and postmodernism

[p-list at sardonic201.net]

I do take it as a hypothesis.  It would be hard to take it as much more than that.  I  have much respect for Derrida, unlike most of those around here who seem to have little but disdain for the man.  Derrida provided important insights, no doubt.  But these are correctives, not Law.  And as Kierkegaard said, every corrective itself needs a corrective.

The problem is that poststructuralists have a notion of objective knowledge that has long been abandoned by virtually all philosophers except for poststructuralists.  It is, I think, possible to be anti-foundationalist and also recognize objective knowledge.  The poststructuralists set up a straw man argument when it comes to knowledge.  According to the poststructuralists, objective knowledge is a matter of certainty.  Such a strong notion of objective knowledge has been abandoned by analytic and pragmatic philosophers since Sellars, Quine, and Wittgenstein.

Of course language is itself an epistemological system.  The problem is too many poststructuralists (and Derrida is himself better about this than many of his LitCrit disciples) seem to deny any possibility of reference.  Although this has a certain allure, it simply is not right.

Such a strong notion of objective knowledge demands far too much, and has little to do with the actual way humans know things.  The strong notion of objectivity, for example, cannot account for error.  A more interesting way to approach the issue of knowledge is through Peirce\'s notion of fallibilism.  Pragmatic philosophers such as Brandom, Davidson, Sellars, and, to a lesser extent, Rorty develop this weaker account of objective knowledge in some very provocative ways.  When it comes to literary theorists, I highly recommend Satya Mohanty\'s work.  Mohanty develops what he calls postpositivist realism--a exciting and coherent approach to epistemology and literature that preserves the political mission of poststructuralism while rejecting the poststructuralist attack on objectivity.

So, while poststructuralism provides important insights into the reading of literature, I do believe it fails when applied to the larger scheme of things.  Not everything is a text.  The challenge is to think about how the human realm of language interacts with the non-linguistic world.  The poststructuralist account, I think, fails to do this because it does not adequately face the nonlinguistic world.

I think Keith is right in questioning the logic of the closing sentence of your email.  Poststructuralism, and especially Derridean poststructuralism, is very successful in challenging a certain strain of epistemology, but this does not mean that poststructuralism has successfully challenged epistemology itself.  Far from it.  I am very interested in what a poststructuralist might say against an epistemological fallibilism in the mold of what Brandom puts forth in Making it Explicit.  I think this is an important question--for both literary studies and philosophy--and hope we can discuss this without falling into the namecalling that we have seen in the past few days.

best,
O.

----- Original Message -----
The Interlocutor:

> Derrida and Spivak, Foucault, Fish, Barthes, etc. all say so confidently that
> there can be no reliable epistemology.  HOW DO THEY KNOW?

Add Pynchon to that list and you\'re getting the idea. There are a couple of
things here: one is that language (the way in which we say something) is
itself an epistemic system. The puns and reflexivity and digressiveness and
modalities and general language play in both Derrida\'s and Pynchon\'s work,
for example, serve to keep that notion in constant view. Secondly, it is
through a process of elimination and/or accumulation of examples (quite
within the bounds of empirical methodology) that the various projects have
been undertaken. 

If it helps, think of it as a hypothesis. If you are certain that there is
one single reliable epistemology then it should be a simple task to supply
the refutation and the proof.

best