“‘Watchmen’ over the flux of thought”: Michel Foucault and the historical development of postmodernist philosophy

“‘Watchmen’ over the flux of thought”: Michel Foucault and the historical development of postmodernist philosophy D. J. B. Trim Of all man’s problems Here’s the crux: We need some constants In this world of flux. Adlai Esteb Firewood (1952)1 What is “postmodernism”? Appropriately, perhaps, there is not one answer to this question, but multiple perspectives. “Postmodern” as a term seems to have first been used of trends in literature, architecture, and visual art, reflecting the fact that “modernist” had been a term applied to styles or schools among early twentieth–century poets and novelists, architects, and painters and sculptors.2 “Postmodern” as a concept, or as a term to describe a particular intellectual and cultural phenomenon in industrial or post-industrial societies was popularized by the French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard. However, the phenomenon he described undoubtedly predates his use of the term in the title of his book La condition postmoderne (The Postmodern Condition), first published in 1979, though not in English until 1984.3 In the latter year Michel Foucault, a French historian, philosopher and cultural critic, suggested the existence of “an enigmatic and troubling ‘postmodernity.’”4 Seven years later, when Frederic Jameson, the noted Marxist literary critic who had helped to draw Lyotard’s work to the attention of an English readership, used the term in the 2 title of his book, Postmodernism, or, The cultural logic of late capitalism, postmodernism (in 5 Lyotard’s sense) not only clearly existed in Western societies—it was a cliché. The most obvious characteristic of the term “postmodern” is that it claims to be “after” or to be a successor or challenger to the modern. In other words, the term itself problematizes, or even outright attacks Modernism or Modernity. So what is meant thereby? “Modernism” as already noted was a term used to describe a movement in the arts in the early twentieth century, but the modern condition, to which postmodernity claims to be posterior, is much more than that. “Modernity” was based on (or perhaps was) a set of presumptions, based on Enlightenment assumptions, about the existence of truth, value and progress. Empirical investigations would reveal the objective value, or properties, of nature, and based on this human reason would be able to conclude the “facts”, or “reality” of the world in which we lived. Based on the ascertaining of objective truth, human society would progress. Modernity thus was not just an intellectual methodology; as one historian of ideas writes, it “was febrile and heroic—a promise of change”— of progress.6 The state of postmodernity, then, is one in which we either actually disbelieve the assumptions and claims of modernity, or at least doubt seriously whether anything can be achieved on the basis of them. Postmodernism is the term used both for the worldview which expresses that doubt, and for the system of thought that undermined modernity. However, postmodernism is more than that. In its wider manifestations, it represented deepseated skepticism about what had been perceived as the fundamental values of Western civilization. One academic philosopher wrote in 1998 that the effect of “postmodernism’s attempt to relativize facts and values indiscriminately” has been to inculcate Western society with a spirit “of universal cynicism”.7 This is the negative side. Yet there is also a positive side in its valorization of tolerance and respect. Nevertheless, we must not kid ourselves about its 3 implications for believers in a faith that makes absolute truth claims. In the societies of Western Europe, North America, Australasia and Japan, as well as, increasingly, those of Eastern Europe, South America and Southeast Asia, people are quite happy to respect other people’s beliefs, but they do not want to be asked to believe them. Surveys conducted in Europe in the mid-1990s indicated that seventy per cent of people born since the 1960s believe “that absolute truth does not exist, that all truth is relative and personal.”8 So, we might say, from postmodernism’s doubts about modernity, much else flowed. I will say more about this in a moment. Postmodernism was felt in intellectual circles most notably in the disciplines of literature, linguistics, history, sociology and cultural studies. But it transcended the academy and, as I will be suggesting, in inchoate form it actually predated and existed alongside the intellectual forms which, however, at the same time gave expression, shape and power to the pre-existing and unformed socio-cultural movement that did rejected the claims of modernity and everything associated with it including science and post-Enlightenment Christian Churches. Now, postmodernism as a philosophy, and as a school of literary and cultural criticism, has largely fallen out of favor with academics, but not before being embraced by a very significant section of academe globally; and its influence has been profound. We are still living with it.9 What it means, though, is often misunderstood. A former colleague of mine, a history teacher at college level who recognized that the students taking one of his classes lacked his certitude in Christian beliefs, expressed his frustration with them by observing: “They’re all Universalists!” But they weren’t, for a Universalist is one who believes all humans will be saved by God. Many of my colleague’s students, albeit accepting that there might well be a God, would not have accepted that there was any need for salvation; and others felt (though not always able to express it clearly) that the need only existed if one accepted the claims of the God and system of religious belief in 4 question. Salvation was only necessary if you thought it was! My colleague had misdiagnosed the problem, putting it in terms of his more traditional worldview, but thereby substantially failing to do justice to the situation confronting him. This is, I think, not uncommon among Adventist Christians, or indeed evangelical Christians more generally. One of the key misunderstandings and misperceptions is the belief that postmodernism is simply a missiological problem—that is, that it is a problem confronting “the church” as we attempt to communicate to “the world”. This was particularly prevalent in the wave of articles on mission and postmodernism that appeared in Ministry magazine in the early 2000s.10 Yet the truth is, in Western countries, we in the church, including the Seventh-day Adventist Church, are already postmodern, to some extent at least. Postmodernism has affected Christianity to such an extent that some theologians seek to downgrade the significance of Christ (despite the logical implications this should have for anyone calling themselves ‘Christian’!), on the ground that a Christocentric emphasis is offensive to members of other religions. Others take for granted the inability of divine truth to be communicated meaningfully to human minds or in human languages. And these currents are not something from which we are immune.11 In this respect, I agree with Clifford Goldstein when he writes that, “despite the over-arching Seventh-day Adventist great controversy theme . . . the moral fuzziness so prevalent in postmodernism has subtly filtered into our own thinking.”12 The colleague I mentioned saw it in his Seventh-day Adventist students. We see it more generally in the tendency of Adventists living in countries with postmodern societies to “church hop”, that is, to decline to commit to one church, but instead to go wherever there is a preacher with a good reputation, or an attractive musical group, and so on—so many Seventh-day Adventists are consumers of religion, rather than participants in and contributors to a community of believers. In the countries most affected by postmodernism, there is not nearly the same commitment to personal 5 witnessing and outreach; this partly reflects the formidable practical difficulties facing those trying to convert to absolute truth others who accept only relative and situational truth-claims; but it also reflects, I suggest, the fact that many Adventists are inclined to think the potential converts may not really need to hear our “truths”. This has been an over-long introduction, but it is an attempt to establish the parameters of my paper and also to set out why the subject matter really matters. In this essay I argue that it is essential, if the campaign to communicate Christian belief to those affected by secular unbelief is to be successful, that it have an intellectual front. In much Adventist literature on reaching postmodern and secular people, there is, it seems to me, a tendency to say that all that matters is providing a sense of community—of loving the people and making them feel welcome; and that then they’ll be happy and persuading them about our doctrines can follow later. I don’t doubt that this will be a successful strategy in the case of many people and may be a necessary precursor for others—but I know from experience that this strategy won’t work at all, or won’t work alone, for many others. Now, to be sure, the majority of the population of western society is not actually postmodernist, in the sense of being consciously aware of postmodern philosophy and accepting large parts of it; but most western people have, I suggest, been influenced by postmodernism— perhaps even more than they themselves realize. There is, moreover, a core of people who are well acquainted with the essential ideas of post-modern theory, who have read, even if not in depth, Foucault, Derrida, Barthes, Baudrillard, Bourdieu and others—and such people expect to be engaged with intellectually. Simply being “their friends” will not suffice to win them to the gospel, because they have fundamental intellectual doubts about belief—indeed, about the very possibility of belief—which they both need and expect to be addressed and engaged with, not left to one side or effectively sublimated. The numbers of such people probably are small, but they have 6 considerable potential to influence others. In the friendship networks that have to a certain extent replaced traditional communities in post-industrial societies it takes only one well-read postmodernist to undermine any Christian influence by his or her observations and critiques. Furthermore, some of these people secretly are hoping that Christians can persuade them that they are wrong about Biblical truth. Finally, because many people express the ideas of postmodernist philosophy, even if without realizing it, there need to be counterarguments. Thus, on many fronts, one of my arguments is that we need to engage with postmodernist thinking. We need to find ways to show that there is a basis for belief—that there are rational grounds for faith. Seventh-day Adventist scholars need to engage with, rather than ignore, the arguments of the chief postmodernist thinkers, and those of their partisans. It is true that these are not the sum of postmodernism. Indeed, I will be suggesting that their works were so influential, starting in the late 1960s and early 1970s, precisely because what I term the postmodern condition was already accepted or becoming acceptable. So it is important to note that I draw a distinction between postmodernist philosophy and the postmodern condition of post-industrial societies, especially, but not only, “Western” societies. Also, however, I think we can distinguish between two different chronological strands of postmodernism: an immediate post-war strand slightly overlapped with, but basically was succeeded by, a second wave that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s.13 It is this latter which is the postmodernist paradigm today. These two different sets of two overlapping postmodernisms are my focus. I sketch out the historical development of postmodernism, because I believe it offers important insights into the intellectual challenge that it poses. 7 The first strand first emerged in the twenty years after World War II. Nineteenth-century notions of human progress upwards out of barbarism towards civilization and (perhaps) ultimately perfect society had already been undermined by the horrors of the First World War. The events of the Second World War demonstrated the emptiness of the claims of the great political ideologies that promised a kind of earthly salvation: Fascism-Nazism and Leninist-Stalinist Marxism. In addition, the more general Modernist notions of progress, on which those ideologies drew, but which also informed society more widely, were undermined still further by the Shoah (Holocaust) and by the wider war–time slaughter, in Asia as well as Europe, during the late 1930s and early 1940s. Such events simply could not be encompassed within the modernist worldview. Building on the Existentialist philosophical ideas of Martin Heidegger and Jean–Paul Sartre, the concept of progress was abandoned, at least by European thinkers, as patently false. So too was the concept of absolute truth, because it was to this that the ideologies which produced mass slaughter had appealed. The response of the advocates of the first strand or wave of post-war postmodernism was cynicism. They held that history was all continuity and no change. In other words, there was no “progress”. Yet at the same time there was a competing discourse, held more widely in North America, of great optimism, based on the post-war economic boom, the creation of the United Nations, and the dominance of the United States, which seemed to offer the possibility of a general advance in democracy and of human rights. The zeitgeist of the sixties was all about personal freedom and fulfillment (summed up in the supposedly self–actualizing trinity of “peace, love, dope!”), and progress created by (and defined by) individuals at the expense of traditional sources of authority. This surely owed much both to early postmodernism and to the rival post-war optimism. The same 8 is true, I suggest, of the second wave of postmodernism, which is the fruit of the dashing of hopes arising from the discourse of idealism and optimism. Even in the early 1960s it was starting to become apparent that the material prosperity on which improvement in standards of living depended was founded on processes that were poisoning the air, water and soil.14 Politically, the utopian idealism of the sixties ultimately led, for Americans, to the military and political maelstrom of Vietnam—the extent to which the post-war generation was disillusioned is difficult to overstate. In Europe, meanwhile, the failure to make society radically better meant that there, too, there was increasing uncertainty (and unhappiness) about where society was heading. This was manifested in left–wing student violence in Paris in 1968; but the same year, in Prague, Soviet tanks demonstrated anew that Communism was even more oppressive than the rampant capitalism that students in Paris were protesting. Conservative politicians still avowed the discourse of optimism, but the selfishness that many perceived as lying at its heart fuelled cynicism. The shift from idealism to disenchantment that occurred in the late 1960s and early 1970s is associated in popular culture with the enormous rock festival at Woodstock in the summer of 1969, often nostalgically seen as “the end of the sixties” and as a key turning–point; but of course the causes of this very real skeptical turn were much deeper than any change in the music industry. Indeed, the counterpart to Woodstock in Europe was arguable the 1968 protests by young people—risings generated by passionate belief in the possibility of progress, but which ultimately changed nothing.15 On top of everything else, two decades of post-war prosperity ended in in the seventies in sustained economic malaise, which further undermined optimism.16 Then, in the United States, the corruption of the Nixon presidency definitively undermined faith in traditional institutions and left Americans inclined to trust nobody and nothing. As a character in Network (an unrivaled artistic 9 expression of ferocious cynicism) observes: “The American people are sullen. They’ve been clobbered on all sides by Vietnam, Watergate, the inflation, the depression. They’ve turned off, shot up, and . . . nothing helps.”17 With hindsight, it is clear that the decade after the 1968s risings and Woodstock a sense of disenchantment became prevalent in the decade in the Western world. It was felt across culture generally, but a particular consequence was a dramatic undermining of confidence in organized religion. The social, intellectual, religious crisis of the 1960s was specific to no one particular religious tradition… it was not even a specifically religious crisis, it was rather one of the total culture, affecting many secular institutions in a way comparable to its effect on the churches. It was a crisis of the relevance (or capacity for sheer survival) of long–standing patterns of thought and institutions of all sorts. . . .18 Nevertheless, religion was perhaps particularly susceptible because it had come, in Western countries at least, to be associated with the establishment; this was true even in countries, such as the United States and France, which did not have a state church. With hindsight we can also see that the seventies’ sense of disillusionment decreased the willingness of people in Western countries to trust institutions, ideologies, or other sources of authority. It made them more inclined to listen to an ethos that would reinforce their existing predisposition to distrust any claims to absolute truth (since this lends itself to absolute authoritarianism and abuse of power). We can term this the postmodern condition. If it does not predate, certainly it existed in parallel to and independently of the postmodernist thinking, which I will address in a moment. But one aspect of it was that it predisposed people to any worldview that was self-fashioned, rather than derived from external sources of authority (which seemed increasingly appropriate in a knowledge–saturated, better–educated society) and that could provide 10 an intellectual justification for the cynicism and disillusionment which arguably were characteristic of the postmodern condition. Such a worldview was provided by the thinkers who are today most associated with postmodernism, for it was in the late 1960s that they emerged. They developed the thinking of the first strand of postmodernism, in the sense of a set of intellectual ideas or philosophy, as opposed to the broader underlying postmodern condition. But these postmodernists were also consciously reacting to the perceived defeat of the ideals of the 1960s by conservative political forces motivated by the rival capitalist–optimistic discourse. (While most postmodernists were Marxist leaning, many “modernist” Marxist cultural critics were often appalled by their ideas.) I suggest that disillusionment underpins postmodernism—it is not for nothing that the chief postmodern virtue is irony (and thus one often hears people of my age and younger apologizing for a potentially offensive comment or action, “But I was just being ironic”!). The response to deep–seated disenchantment was to fall into a pose of detachment and irony, for if one did not laugh, one would have to weep at the shattering of illusions. Irony and postmodernist philosophy were, one might say, a coping mechanism for idealists who had hoped for more out of society. And one can see this at work in the careers of the most notable prophets of postmodernity. In what follows, I survey some of the notable apologists for postmodernist philosophy (as distinct from the emerging and evolving postmodern condition); I particularly focus on the work of the historian, literary critic and cultural theorist, Michel Foucault (1926–84). Many analysts would give pride of place in the development of postmodernist thought and writing to the work of the 11 literary critic and philosopher, Jacques Derrida. However, I argue that Foucault’s work was literally fundamental to the emergence of postmodernist thinking, for it laid what seemed like a rigorous analytical foundation, and it provided much ammunition for others, not least Derrida, to use for their own arguments. Foucault’s analysis was to prove immensely influential not only in his discipline, but also among sociologists, literary theorists, and other academics whose disciplines have some concern with the past. His work was so significant not least because it highlighted the extent to which “progress” and “emancipation” during the nineteenth century were built on surveillance and repression by the state. Foucault’s History of madness is a cultural history of attitudes to madness in European society from the Renaissance down to the nineteenth century.19 Insanity is represented as having been not only (indeed sometimes not even) primarily an illness, but also (sometimes chiefly) a category of “social and moral exclusion”.20 The historian of ideas, Ernst Breisach, observes that, for Foucault, “madness [was] not to be understood simply as mental illness” and he “tried to show that what appeared to be a ‘natural’ separation between sane and insane was actually a deliberate construction enforced by society.”21 Indeed, in this history, “madness [is] considered as a cultural, legal, political, philosophical and then medical construct”,22 not an empirically defined clinical condition. Those whom society, often “for its own interests, constructed” as insane were separated “from society in clinics that derived their legitimacy from what was perceived of as ameliorative schemes. These were seen as part of progress and society was called emancipatory for it.”23 But madness was what medical and political elites declared it to be, and thus its diagnosis and treatment was an exercise of power—sometimes a beneficial one, but sometimes, modern science suggests, a detrimental one for those who were committed to asylums when they might have been treated less 12 punitively. Key points are that what we take as self-evident or heuristically established categories are often socio-cultural constructs and that exclusion frequently underlies apparent emancipation. In Discipline and punish, Foucault surveys the history of prison reform, which had been regarded as an example of human improvement—of progress. Instead, he convincingly argued that it arose from a desire to control the lower orders.24 What was “criminal” was constructed by society and so was contingent. Crime and punishment were ways to marginalize and exclude certain types of behavior or groups of people. And while a shift away from physically brutal punishments might be laudable in some ways, as Breisach summarizes, in Foucault’s eyes: “The diminution of crude corporeal punishment was paid for by new types of tighter and more forceful coercion that cast their net of disciplinary practices wider and wider.”25 The implications went beyond punishment of crime. “Foucault demonstrated the often paradoxical working of power. Changes perceived as humanitarian improvements actually widened the possibilities for control and oppression.” In effect, “innovations hailed as emancipatory too often [were] simply extensions of the reach of state power into new areas of human life.”26 Foucault identified a similar dynamic not only in the treatment of criminals and the insane, but also in other apparently benign state activities, such as provision of housing and welfare. He argued that when “care for individual life [became] a duty for the state” it made individual lives subject to state power; and this, he held, could not be seen as progressive or emancipatory, for while the state’s self–defined “tasks” might have positive as well as negative effects, all tasks were enforced by the state’s police power. Thus, even acts that might have positive, even emancipatory, implications for particular individuals decreased net individual autonomy, for they were a matter of the exercise of power.27 13 In other work, Foucault stressed the ambivalent nature of medical progress, asserting the emergence of “a new form of power: biopower. Progress in medical knowledge appeared as the power to keep everyone healthy. Yet exclusions and inclusions of people . . . were needed to accomplish the task.”28 As Foucault put it, late in life, because “Western society” institutionalized its engagement with “madness and psychiatry, crime and punishment,” it was “indirectly constituted . . . through the exclusion of . . . criminals, mad people, and so on.”29 By this reading, exclusion of those on the margins was literally constituent of Western society! But to Foucault, marginal status, even for those in apparently obvious categories such as the sick or the mad, was socially or culturally constructed. His identification of exclusion as central in medical “progress” is grimly supported by the eugenic policies that obtained not only in Nazi Germany but also in the United States and in social-democratic Sweden and Denmark and several other European countries, as late as the 1970s, when he was writing.30 As a practicing homosexual, and author of a threevolume History of sexuality,31 Foucault was keenly aware of the power of state–sanctioned and supported medical practitioners to condemn certain practices or behavior patterns not merely as immoral, which “modern” society was little interested in, but as racially or medically toxic, destructive, deviant, or harmful. The physician’s “scientific” verdict of deviant behaviors has been no less a form of social ordering and no less an exercise of power than the medieval Catholic Church’s condemnation of deviant beliefs.32 As Breisach observes: “In this as in other cases, the discursive power exerted by the modern state was pervasive in all ordering activities. Power was at work at every ‘site of life,’ not just in politics.”33 Biopower, too, could be oppressive.34 The claims of medicine to liberate mankind might be true of microbes but not of men. So, one of Foucault’s major arguments—initially implicit in books that were works of history and typically well researched, such as Discipline and punish but later expressed explicitly 14 in works that were increasingly theoretical or literary–critical rather than historical35—was this: claims to absolute truth and/or rights have frequently (perhaps even generally) been made in order to exercise power. In his analysis, all exercises of power were seen as fundamentally equivalent, regardless of their nominal purpose; and they were equivalent because in spite of what might be claimed for them, they were beyond ethical evaluation; all had an amoral equivalence. Claims to “truth” and “right” were merely examples of the closet exercise of power, a rhetorical strategy to assert dominance.36 Now, as critics of Foucault point out, such claims predate postmodernism, inasmuch as Plato, for example, makes his character Thrasymachus claim, in book 1 of The Republic, that all regimes exercise power in their own interest.37 However, Foucault developed the evidential basis for his assertions, his analysis is more sustained, and he has been the more influential among postmodern people. Foucault also undermined what had been taken to be permanent truths about human nature and society, showing that our assumptions today about what is natural or even inevitable have often varied throughout history, in different times and places. As a result, he reached different conclusions to the thinkers of the first strand of postmodernism. Rather than history being all continuity and no change—no progress—history is, instead, “all change and no continuity”. 38 Here we come to one of his most interesting and in some ways idiosyncratic concerns: that with “flux”, from which I draw the title of this paper. I will give two examples. First, in an article entitled “What is enlightenment?”, Foucault took aim at traditional ideas of the possibility of Enlightenment and thus of advance in the human condition. He begins with an article from 1784 by the German philosopher, Immanuel Kant, before ranging forward to the nineteenth century and the French poet, essayist and art critic, Charles Baudelaire (1821–67), widely thought to have coined the term “modernity” (modernité).39 It is 15 precisely Baudelaire’s “consciousness of modernity”, which Foucault calls “one of the most acute in the nineteenth century”, that that interests him. Foucault himself characterizes “Modernity . . . in terms of consciousness of the discontinuity of time: [as] a break with tradition, a feeling of novelty, of vertigo in the face of the passing moment.” He praises Baudelaire precisely because of the latter’s definition of “modernity as ‘the ephemeral, the fleeting, the contingent.’”40 Yet, Foucault continues, for Baudelaire, “being modern does not lie in recognizing and accepting this perpetual movement; on the contrary, it lies in adopting a certain attitude with respect to this movement; and this deliberate, difficult attitude consists in recapturing something eternal that is not beyond the present instant, nor behind it, but within it.”41 However, Foucault observes, Baudelaire’s attitude “is ironical, needless to say.”42 We see here the privileging of the ironic. But we also come to flux. For, Foucault asserts, the reality of modernity is that it is an attempt to reject reality; it is a refusal “to accept oneself as one is in the flux of the passing moments”. Instead, one is forced, as he puts it, somewhat opaquely, “to take oneself as object of a complex and difficult elaboration”. In fact, modernity “compels [a man] to face the task of producing himself.” Despite its claims, modernity “does not ‘liberate man in his own being’”; it represents not emancipation but enslavement and subordination to impersonal forces, which are, Foucault’s other writings tell us, subject to control by those in power. The argument in this essay is complex and expressed in difficult language, which is typical of postmodernists, but at its heart lies the concept of “the flux of the passing moments” and a sense of it being the fundamental reality of humanity.43 In another essay, Foucault examines “the development of the hermeneutics of the self” (by which he means, more or less, “the different ways . . . that humans develop knowledge about themselves”), through the lens of “(1) Greco-Roman philosophy in the first two centuries A.D. of the early Roman Empire and (2) Christian spirituality and the monastic principles developed in the 16 fourth and fifth centuries of the late Roman Empire.”44 He praises the ancient Greek philosopher Epictetus, and uses him to assert the importance of individual autonomy: the need for any thinking man to regard all thought systems with suspicion. Foucault writes: There are two metaphors important from his point of view: the night watchman, who doesn’t admit anyone into town if that person can’t prove who he is . . . and the money changer, who verifies the authenticity of currency, looks at it, weighs and verifies it. We have to be money changers of our own representations of our thoughts, vigilantly testing them, verifying them, their metal, weight, effigy. And, Foucault writes, in a memorable bon mot, each of us “must be ‘watchman’ over the flux of thought”.45 Here fluidity is not necessarily positive but is accepted as inevitable. Furthermore, it is again fundamental—for if our thoughts shape the way we understand the world, then for all intents and purposes, they shape the world itself. Thus, if thought itself is in flux, how can the world be anything other than constantly in flux? Continuity is a myth or a misperception. Thus it was that “Foucault strove to define a fluid world from which all closure (continuity) [would be] banned. In this fluid world, truth [would be] ceaseless truth-construction, which legitimized no authority and hence could sponsor no oppression. The new fluid truth would affirm nothing consistently except ceaseless and aimless change.” Complete emancipation of the marginalized “had been the promise of progressive historians and utopians” (including Christ and His followers). “Therefore,” as Breisach elegantly summarizes, for Foucault, “to search for truth involved the necessary opposition to whatever was established at a given time as truth. Change was truth, continuity untruth.”46 Foucault would have been happy at criticism and denunciation of his own work, for if it became an orthodoxy it would, to his mind, become oppressive. He wrote in a revised edition of History of madness of his aspiration that it would “recopy, fragment, repeat, simulate and replicate itself, and finally disappear without the person who happened to produce it ever being able to claim the right to be its master, and impose what he wished to say, or say what 17 he wanted it to be.”47 He hoped to see a new type of history “in which temporary discursive configurations”, his own included, “appeared and dissolved in quick succession in the infinite flux of life”. His personal preference was for a “totally fluid world.”48 And this was the concept that his scholarship advanced, at first implicitly, but later, increasingly, explicitly. From Foucault’s work as a whole, three conclusions can be drawn that are particularly important for postmodernism. First, that history is in a state of flux; second, that many apparently humane and liberal Enlightenment ideals were really at best manipulative, at worst coercive and destructive; and third that there are no absolute truths or rights, only rhetoric used by the powerful to manipulate the powerless. We will come back to the importance of “flux” again, but the net effect of Foucault’s work was to question some of the key cultural and philosophical assumptions of Western society. This questioning was reinforced by several other French scholars, typically labeled “poststructuralists”; their work blurs the traditional boundaries between academic discipline, but all engaged with literary texts and with language. I will survey the key thinkers and writers, rather more briefly than in my analysis of Foucault, and (also concisely) identify important areas of their thought. Key roles were played by the literary critics and linguistic theorists Jacques Derrida (1930– 2004) and Roland Barthes (1915–80), and by the psychologist and philosopher Jacques Lacan (1901–81). Of these, the last was perhaps the least important, and so will be dealt with first. Drawing on the work of the linguistic theorist Ferdinand de Saussure, as well as on Freudian psychoanalysis, Lacan claimed that the unconscious has structures and rules similar to those of 18 language. His conclusions are dense; his notorious attempt to work out mathematical formulae about how the unconscious was formed was a personal oddity, and is not typical of postmodernist thinking. But he was influential in the postmodernist context because of his arguments that applying psychoanalytic methods and theories to linguistics would radically revise traditional philosophical views of language, reason, and authority. So Lacan, too, questioned key cultural and philosophical assumptions of Western society and his methods, as well as his conclusions, provided ammunition for those who did likewise. Derrida and Barthes were more influential. Derrida is cited by scholars of literature, history, philosophy, cultural studies, sociology, anthropology, linguistics, religious studies and art criticism. Barthes worked primarily in literature and semiotics, but also is cited widely outside by scholars from outside his key disciplinary areas. Derrida, however, was able to transcend the world of academe and became a public figure not only in France but also in North America. From the work of Derrida, in particular, but also that of Barthes and semioticians, comes one of the key postmodernist insights: that language is an unstable shifting chain of signifiers. At first sight this may seem a point of purely academic interest, but in fact it is revolutionary in its potential significance: especially for a belief system based on belief in inspired texts! Truth–claims cannot be stabilized by reference to “reality” (or, for that matter, to divine inspiration), because such claims can only be made by and through an imperfect means—language—and hence are themselves bound to be imperfect, inaccurate and thus not wholly true—i.e., they are untrue. Based on this, Derrida developed Deconstructionist theory, which assumes that no text has a single fixed meaning, and that every text contains within it the seeds of its own dissolution: first, because of the inadequacy of language to express the author’s original intention; second, because a reader’s understanding of the text is culturally conditioned—that is, influenced by the culture in 19 which the reader lives. This latter position owes much, of course, to Foucault: to his insight that claims to absolutes have historically tended to be exercises of power and culturally constructed; and to his view of the fluidity of history. The Foucaultian approach to history, however, was itself reinforced by Deconstructionist readings of some of the central texts of Western philosophy, which bring to light the conflicting forces that shaped each text and highlight the devices the text uses to claim legitimacy and truth for itself, many of which may lie beyond the intention of its author. Deconstructionism thus holds that texts have many possible legitimate interpretations brought about by the “play” of language. The plurality of interpretations is what Barthes meant when in 1968 he famously declared “the death of the author”—not that there were no authors; but that whatever a writer might intend when writing, he or she loses control when their work is read by anyone else. There neither is nor can be just one legitimate interpretation of a text and any attempt to use authorship to privilege one interpretation is misguided.49 There are obvious implications for a worldview that is based on key texts out of which one, absolute truth is to be drawn. Foucault, Derrida and Barthes were mutually reinforcing. For example, Barthes’ depiction of a text as a “space where . . . all identity is lost” presents texts as in flux!50 A year later, Foucault addressed the question of “What is an author?” and while his answers are not identical to those of Barthes, Foucault’s conclusion that “the author does not precede the works; he is a certain functional principle by which, in our culture, one limits, excludes, and chooses”, both plays on familiar themes from his œuvre and is consonant with Barthes.51 To take another example, Derrida’s shift away from Saussure’s “theory of language . . . as a stable, indeed static system . . . to a view of language compatible with absolute flux”, resulting in a concept of “a fully fluid linguistic world”, both owed something to, yet also positively reinforced, Foucault’s own historically (rather than linguistically) derived “concept of the world as being in chaotic flux”.52 20 Derrida’s insights into the interplay of texts surely owe something to the “Foucaultian exaltation of free play against the omnipresence of power”.53 The poststructuralists’ conclusions about culture and contingency were to be strengthened by an increasing emphasis in academia on the study of culture, which was, however, partly evoked by Foucault and Derrida’s arguments. Associated with them were the philosopher Jean–François Lyotard (1924–98), whose term “the postmodern condition” is where we began, and the philosopher, sociologist and cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007). They shared the interest in semiotics of Derrida and Barthes, and shared, too, with them and with Foucault, a commitment to left–wing politics. Baudrillard’s concept of “hyperreality”, so applicable to the internet age, is an independent concept, but its emphasis on the “blurring of distinctions” (which leads to a change in the way we perceive reality),54 surely reveals the influence of Foucault’s ideas about flux. Also important was the work of the cultural sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002): in the words of his obituary in the British newspaper The Guardian, “as important to the second half of the 20th century as Sartre had been to the generation before”. 55 Bourdieu would not necessarily have considered himself a postmodernist, but his work, and that of his followers, was clearly influenced by Foucault, Derrida and Barthes. Scholars of the new discipline of cultural studies, pioneered in Britain by the Marxist theorist Stuart Hall, and represented in France, though not under that title, by Bourdieu, emphasized the instability of culture, the extent to which powerful organizations attempt to modify it to suit their purposes, and what is natural in one context is far from natural in another. The net effect is to indicate that truth is more relative than it is absolute. 21 What, then, can we say of postmodernism as a whole? First, it must be stressed that it was not (at least originally) a conscious “movement”. While most of the thinkers referred to in this summary quote and cite each other approvingly at times, any grouping of them and those associated with them, as a movement is to a great extent a subsequent verdict rather than a contemporary intent. It is not uncommon to find something written by one which is difficult to reconcile with what is written by another, or even what they wrote elsewhere in their own œuvre—such inconsistencies just bring out the state of flux and uncertainty, and the “play of language”, which they see as characteristic of humanity (and especially of written texts). Even to categorize the leading protagonists and their writings is very difficult. They broke down boundaries between traditional academic disciplines and, in the world of post-postmodern scholarship, history, literature, linguistics, semiotics, sociology, anthropology and psychology all bleed into each other, while cultural studies is really a disciplinary offspring of postmodernism. Then there is the difficult nature of postmodernist texts. One of the major criticisms of the postmodernists is that they write inaccessibly, in an overly complex and obfuscatory style, dominated by jargon.56 This is not wholly justified. There is a tendency to dense writing, but most works by Foucault or Barthes, while they require intellectual effort, can be understood readily by anyone who has had (and by many who are going through) a tertiary education. Lyotard, Lacan and others have a denser and more jargon-ridden style. However, the style of postmodernists is “often intentional and reflect[s] specific postmodern claims about the nature of language and meaning.”57 When emphasizing complexity, ambiguity and ambivalence, why not employ complex language, and utilize ambiguous and ambivalent terminology? Furthermore, Derrida, in particular, with his emphasis on the “playfulness” of language, enjoys playing with readers, especially since he knows many academics lack both sense of humor and of proportion when writing critically. Then, too, all 22 the chief postmodernists wrote in French but they are usually read and quoted in English translations (including here!). The scope for confusion is great since dense and subtle works are the most difficult to translate. All that said, however, much work by postmodernist writers is difficult and is not always consistent. But none of this changes the fact that postmodernism is a very powerful thought-system, and scoring cheap debating points about the style in which it is often written, or about occasional contradictions between writers, are superficial and inadequate responses to the complexity and power of their thinking. With due cautions about generalizations, we can nevertheless say some things collectively about all these thinkers and theorists, and their adherents or associates. Certainly their work undermined the Modernist paradigm by denying the Enlightenment– inspired concept of the autonomy of reason: both because reason is culturally constructed and thus not constant; and because it could in any case only be expressed through language. This also potentially undermines the Seventh-day Adventist approach to Biblical understanding, for, ironically, our approach is rooted in Enlightenment suppositions.58 Modernity had no answer to human problems: promises of progress and stability, which increasingly seemed dubious in any case, were “undesirable controls on the flux of human progress”.59 In shattering the assumptions associated with Modernity, however, what was left? The flux, which postmodernism sees in history, language and culture, meant “that the world and the people in it had no inherent order or meaning”. Any truth-claim became inherently dubious. In part this was because of the inherent inaccuracy and, indeed, instability of its linguistic mode of expression. But it was also because “truth–claims as such” were exposed as being in general “the expression of hidden power mechanisms. What we get instead of universal truth is a multitude of 60 perspectives, or ‘narratives’.” Powerful belief systems—science, religion, political ideologies— 23 delegitimized some narratives, while others were privileged and woven together, but the result in the latter case is merely a “metanarrative”, not actually (or not necessarily) “truth”. This is why Lyotard defined postmodernism “as incredulity toward metanarratives”.61 This is, I think, the best definition of postmodernism, both the intellectual–philosophical school of thought and the wider socio-cultural condition or phenomenon. The arguments of Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard and their followers and fellow–travellers have considerable intellectual power, which makes them impossible to ignore. Some Seventh-day Adventists, brought up with modernist certainties (an irony, given the extent to which modernity’s emphasis on human capacity undermined religious faith throughout the Western world) may feel it is easy to dismiss them. But if one starts to think about their arguments their subtlety quickly becomes apparent. The problem is that these subtle, powerful arguments undermine, or appear to undermine, not only the modernist metanarrative of progress based on objective truths, but also the Christian metanarrative of creation and redemption, and the Seventh-day Adventist metanarrative of the Great Controversy. Some aspects of postmodernist thinking can be reconciled with Christian faith. But taken as a whole, as a system of thought, postmodernism is toxic to faith. Now, the academic apostles of postmodernism are not widely known. But their arguments are far more widely known. And they provide the ultimate rationale and justification for many other people’s resistance to claims to absolute truth, such as those that we make as Seventh-day Adventists. Even those people who have never heard of Derrida can be found rehashing his arguments about language and texts. In short, even though postmodernism is far more than a collection of complex, philosophical–historical–literary–linguistic works by often obscure (and mostly French) academics, it is a mistake to think that Seventh-day Adventist Christians, attempting to fulfill Christ’s last command, can overlook them. They may merely have expressed, 24 in a more impressive intellectual way, the beliefs to which the mass of Western people were already inclined; but they expressed the zeitgeist so well that they are no longer merely expressions of it—they shaped it in their image. The “postmodern condition” now to some extent reflects the avowedly anti-religious ideology of postmodernist philosophers—and to an even greater extent, its concerns, when expressed, are articulated using their terminology. In considering the Christian response to the postmodern condition, then, we have to face up to the necessity of engaging with its intellectual expression and justification. To do this, we need to contemplate the reality of flux and discontinuity in late twentieth– and early twenty-first–century industrial and post-industrial countries. Flux is a problem; it requires a solution. And that is not just the case in Western countries. Although it was a series of crises in North America and Europe that engendered disillusionment and a skeptical turn, events in the 1960s and 1970s were liable to spawn cynicism elsewhere, too. The 1960s were the years in which colonies emerged as free nations, but across Africa and in some parts of Asia, the heroes of independence struggles quickly showed themselves to be as corrupt and autocratic as colonialists. In Latin America, existing traditions of dictatorial rule were perpetuated, while the Cold War struggle provided oppressive regimes with newer and improved technologies for killing. When satellite television and the movie and music industries took the values of Western culture across the globe, they resonated with audiences who had endured different crises in the 1960s and 1970s, but whose experiences made them all to ready to believe that everything can be reduced to the exercise of power, and that the only freedom is in the way individuals interpret “texts”, whether on the page, on tape or in digital form. To be sure, the postmodern condition seems to be a malady of societies in which more than basic needs are met and in which there is an excess of commodities, allowing for a consumer culture.62 Thus, its presence in Africa is limited; but it is already manifest in parts of East and 25 Southeast Asia, Central Asia, Central and South America, and the Caribbean. Postmodernist thinking is likewise likely to receive a sympathetic hearing. Thus, whether in the “Global North” where postmodernist thinking emerged, or the “Global South”, Seventh-day Adventist Christians have to find ways to re-establish continuity and meaning. Human beings do, in the words of Adlai Esteb, “need some constants in a world of flux” and Christ is the ultimate constant. In order to communicate that, however, we also need to find arguments for rational belief in God—a God who makes absolute truth claims and ultimately demands of us absolute allegiance. This may seem paradoxical, in light of the fact that much poststructuralist writing overtly problematizes the autonomy of reason—so is a rational engagement the right approach? However, postmodernism is—it even delights in being—paradoxical. For consistency is characteristic of stability, paradox of fluidity. And it is there is no question but that postmodernist writers generally present highly rational arguments for their positions, something they at times highlight. Lyotard, for example, introduces his “report on knowledge” by expressing his satisfaction, as a philosopher, that his “formal and pragmatic analysis of certain philosophical and ethico-political discourses” is “see[ing] the light of day.”63 Postmodernists generally do not (contrary to modern mythology) deny the existence of truth, but rather suggest that truth (like the meaning of texts) rarely has just one meaning and that it may vary from “reader” to “reader”. (This is still difficult for Christians, but there is more common ground than many evangelical Christians imagine.) Foucault, for example, while asserting that truth–claims were exercises of power, did not deny that truth existed. His concern for “detaching the power of truth from the forms of hegemony, social, economic and cultural, within which it operates” arguably speaks to his beliefs that truth (or truths) do indeed exist and that each person needs to consider truth–claims carefully—to be, in fact, a watchman over the flux of thought.64 Finally, even though Deconstructionists emphasize that 26 texts may have multiple meanings, they patently do not think that all “readings”—all “narratives”—are equal, for they clearly believe that, in at least some cases, their own readings are superior to those of alternative worldviews. In sum, the need to engage with postmodern and deconstructionist thinking by rational argument is not diminished by the (apparent) rejection of rational discourse, which is actually an illusion—both for the thinkers themselves, in practice; and for those who express deconstructionist ideas, all the while hoping, at some level, to be persuaded that belief in the Bible and in a Savior are alike intellectually possible. There is much more that could be said. However, I will close with the thought that we ought, in truth, to be watchmen over the flux of thought—but not in the way Foucault intended. There is a need, I believe, of guardians of thought systems, and of defenders of Christianity in particular. Rather than relativizing and trivializing our own beliefs by assuming there are no counter– arguments to postmodernism, we should honor the God who said “Come, let us reason together”— the God who is indescribable, inexpressible and ineffable, and who is deep and profound beyond imagining—by explaining why divine truth can be communicated to human minds, if not perfectly then sufficiently, why truth matters, and why ultimately in acknowledging the sovereignty of God we can find emancipation. In all this, humility in how we interpret texts, willingness to respect those with whom we disagree, and preparedness to imagine that we may be wrong—these are all not only acceptable, they are vital. In the end, however, it is in submitting ourselves to the will of God that we will find ultimate happiness, fulfillment and true freedom. Like postmodernist thinking, these are not easy concepts to communicate! But it is what we are called to do. 27 1 Esteb was a Seventh-day Adventist poet who came to denominational prominence in 1947 with Driftwood and other poems (Mountain View, Calif.: Pacific Press, 1947); see Gary Land, Historical dictionary of the Seventh–day Adventists (Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 2005), p. 174 (s.v. “Literature”). 2 See Jean-François Lyotard, The postmodern condition: A report on knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), p. 85 n.1; Perry Anderson, “Modernity and revolution”, in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (eds.), Marxism and the interpretation of culture (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988), pp. 322-23, 325-26; Ernst Breisach, On the future of history: The postmodernist challenge and its aftermath (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), pp. 15, 23. 3 Jean-François Lyotard, La condition postmoderne: rapport sur le savoir (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1979)—there have been several English editions, the first being that cited in n.2. It was based on a 1979 report for the Conseil des universités of Quebec, in Canada: Les problèmes du savoir dans les sociétés industrielles plus développées, Collection Dossiers (Québec: Gouvernement du Québec, Conseil des universités, 1980). His other writings on postmodernism include Moralités postmodernes (Paris: Galilée, 1993) and Toward the postmodern, ed. Robert Harvey and Mark S. Roberts (Atlantic Highlands, N.J. & London: Humanities Press, 1993). 4 Michel Foucault, “What is enlightenment?” in Paul Rabinow (ed.), The Foucault Reader (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), p. 39. Most chapters in The Foucault Reader are extracts from the author’s books, but this essay was previously unpublished. 5 Postmodernism, or, The cultural logic of late capitalism (London: Verso, 1991). Jameson provided a Foreword to the first English translation of Lyotard’s work (1984). See also Jameson’s The cultural turn: Selected writings on the postmodern 1983–1998 (London: Verso, 1998). 6 John H. Arnold, “Postmodern intellectual fireworks”, Times Higher Education Supplement, 23 Jan. 2004, p. 29. Cf. e.g. Anderson, “Modernity and revolution”, pp. 324-26; Breisach, On the future of history, pp. 1114. 7 Ben Jackson, “Morality for the me generation”, Times Higher Education Supplement, 25 Dec. 1998, p. 21 8 Peter Roennfeldt, “The secular person as a target for mission,” in Erich W. Baumgartner (ed.), Revisioning Adventist mission in Europe (Berrien Springs, Mich.: Andrews University Press, 1998), p. 63. 9 Graham Ward, “Theology and postmodernism: Is it all over?”, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 80 (June 2012): 466-84. 10 Samir Selmanovic, “Pastoring on the postmodern frontline”, Ministry, 74, no. 7 (July 2001): 10-13, and no. 9 (Sept. 2001): 18-21; idem, “Two-way evangelism: Needed, humility and humanity’, Ministry, 77/5 (May 2005): 20-23; Barry Oliver, “Serious about secular society? Christian witness in the secularized West”, Ministry, 74/11 (Nov. 2001): 8-9, 11; Jeremy Arnall, “Being friends with postmoderns”, Ministry, vol. 74 [sic], no. 12 (Dec. 2002): 8-9, 23; Gerhard van Wyk and Rolf Meyer, “Preaching beyond 28 Modernism: Problems with mass communication and proclamation in a modernist framework”, Ministry, 76, no. 7 (July 2004): 12-15 and no. 9 (Sept. 2004): 12-14, 29; Sandy Wyman-Johnson, “No, you can’t pray for me”, Ministry, 77/5 (May 2005): 24-25; Reinder Bruinsma, “Modern versus Postmodern Adventism: The ultimate divide?”, Ministry, 77/6 (June 2005): 16-17, 19-21. Also relevant is Peter Roennfeldt, “Reaching the unchurched”, Ministry, 74/6 (June 2001): 18- 21. 11 This was evident, I suggest, in the tone of some presentations at the conference at which the papers in this volume were originally presented. 12 Clifford Goldstein, “Prayer and pedophilia: The separationist dilemma,” Ministry, 71/12 (Dec. 1998): 16. 13 This follows the categorization/periodization of Breisach, On the future of history. 14 The key text was Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1962). 15 Suggestively, Foucault (analyzed below) identifies 1968 as the point at which he began to realize that his own scholarship was chiefly concerned with power: “Truth and power” (an interview with Foucault) in Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected interviews and other writings, 1972-1977, ed. and trans. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), p. 116; repr. in The Foucault Reader, p. 60. Anderson, “Modernity and revolution”, p. 329, also sees 1968 as a watershed. 16 Some cultural critics (including Jameson, Postmodernism) see the postmodern “phenomenon” as connected to the “new forms of capitalism [that] emerged as [a] response to” or an “effect of” the economic trends “in the mid-1970s”: see Ward, “Theology and postmodernism”, p. 470. 17 Network, director Sidney Lumet, screenplay Paddy Chayefsky (Metro–Goldwyn–Mayer/United Artists, 1976). 18 Derek Wilson, The people’s Bible (Oxford: Lion, 2010), p. 169, citing Adrian Hastings, A history of English Christianity, 1920–85 (London, 1986), pp. 580-81. 19 Michel Foucault, Folie et déraison: Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique (Paris: Librairie Plon, [1961]); condensed ed. (Paris: Union Générale d’Éditions, 1964); new ed., with additional appendixes, as Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1972). English ed., from condensed French ed. (1964), as Madness and civilization: a history of insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Pantheon Books, 1965); rev. ed., with additional chapter (New York: Vintage Books, 1988); first full English ed. (from the 1972 Gallimard ed.) as History of madness, ed. Jean Khalfa, trans. Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa (London & New York: Routledge, 2006). 20 Foucault, History of madness, p. 8. 21 Breisach, On the future of history, pp. 98–99 (citing the 1988 Vintage Books ed. of Madness and civilization). 22 Jean Khalfa, “Introduction”, to History of madness (2006), p. xiv. 23 Breisach, On the future of history, p. 99. 24 Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1975); as Discipline and punish: the birth of the prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Allen Lane, 1977). 29 25 Breisach, On the future of history, p. 129. 26 Ibid., p. 100. 27 Michel Foucault, “The political technology of individuals”, in Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman and Patrick H. Hutton (eds.), Technologies of the self: A seminar with Michel Foucault (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), pp. 145–62, esp. 146-48, 152-60 (quotations at 147, 160). 28 Breisach, On the future of history, p. 100. 29 Foucault, “Political technology of individuals”, p. 146. 30 For a succinct summary see Richard J. Evans, The Third Reich in power, 1933–1939 (New York: Penguin, 2005), p. 514. 31 Michel Foucault, Histoire de la sexualité (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1976-84); as The history of sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978-86). How Foucault’s sexual preference and practices influenced his thought is considered from an overtly Christian perspective by Michael Ovey, “Beyond scrutiny? Minorities, majorities and post-modern tyranny”, Cambridge Papers, vol. 13, no. 2 (June 2004). 32 See Evans, Third Reich in power, pp. 6, 263, 297, 302, 316-19, 444-46, 484, 501, 506-8, for the pseudoscientific concept of “racial hygiene”, which was accepted by many medical professionals in the early twentieth century and, under the Nazis, became a basis for proscribing and stigmatizing a wide range of behaviors and conditions, and ultimately for policies of exclusion and extermination (including of homosexuals). 33 Breisach, On the future of history, p. 100. 34 A concise introduction to Foucault’s views on sexuality and medicine are four chapters (three of them extracts from The History of Sexuality) in Rabinow, The Foucault Reader, pp.257-329 35 Foucault himself subsequently recognized that, in hindsight “I ask myself what else [was it] that I was talking about, in Madness and Civilization . . . but power? Yet I’m perfectly aware that I scarcely ever used the word”. Only later (he suggests after 1968) did he recognize that his own concern was with “The way power was exercised”: Foucault, “Truth and power”, p. 115. 36 See Michel Foucault, Power, ed. James D. Faubion, trans. Robert Hurley et al. (London: Allen Lane, 2000); cf. “Truth and power”, pp. 109-33 (repr. in Rabinow, The Foucault Reader, pp. 51-75). 37 Ovey, “Beyond Scrutiny”, 1. 38 Arnold, “Postmodern intellectual fireworks”, p. 29. 39 http://www.thefashionhistorian.com/2012/08/james-tissot-charles-baudelaire-and.html, citing The Painter of Modern Life (1863); also in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Baudelaire. 40 Foucault, “What is enlightenment?”, p. 39. 41 Ibid. 42 Ibid., p. 40. 30 43 Ibid., pp. 41-42. 44 Michel Foucault, “Technologies of the self”, in Martin, Gutman and Hutton (eds.), Technologies of the self, pp. 16-49 (quotations 17-19). 45 Ibid., 37-38. 46 Breisach, On the future of history, pp. 100-1. 47 From the preface to the 1972 ed. of Histoire de la folie, quoted in Khalfa, “Introduction”, p. xiii. 48 Breisach, On the future of history, pp. 128, 101. 49 Barthes, “The death of the author” [1967], in Image–Music–Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill & Wang, 1977), pp. 142-48. 50 Ibid., p. 142. 51 Michel Foucault, “What is an author?”, in Rabinow, The Foucault Reader, pp. 101-20 (quotation at 119). 52 Breisach, On the future of history, pp. 101-2. 53 Fred Pfeil, “Postmodernism as a ‘structure of feeling’,” in Nelson and Grossberg (eds.), Marxism and the interpretation of culture, p. 387. Cf. Breisach, On the future of history, p. 70: “The works of Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida created the outlines of poststructuralist views of the world”. 54 Steven Best and Douglas Kellner, Postmodern theory: Critical interrogations (New York: Guilford Press, 1991), p. 119. 55 Obituary, The Guardian, 28 Jan. 2002. 56 Most notoriously, Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, Fashionable nonsense: Postmodern intellectuals’ abuse of science (New York: Picador, 1998). 57 Microsoft® Encarta® Online Encyclopedia 2004 <http://encarta.msn.com> (©1997-2004 Microsoft Corporation), s.v. “Philosophy, Western”. 58 See Van Wyk and Meyer, “Preaching beyond Modernism”, esp. p. 12; cf. Ryan J. Bell, “The shape of the emerging Church: A pastor’s view”, Ministry, 76/9 (Sept. 2004): 21-22. 59 Arnold, “Postmodern intellectual fireworks”, p. 29. 60 Slavoj Žižek, “Against an ideology of human rights”, Oxford Amnesty Lectures 2004, no. 1, 28 Jan. 2004. 61 Lyotard, Postmodern condition, p. xxiv. 62 Cf. Ward, “Theology and postmodernism”, pp. 468, 470. ADD Pfeil, “Postmodernism”, p. 383. 63 Lyotard, Postmodern condition, p. xxv. 64 Foucault, “Truth and power”, p. 133.