Date: Tue, 17 Oct 1995 14:14:50 -0500 From: H-GERMAN EDITOR Dan Rogers To: Multiple recipients of list H-GERMAN Subject: Postmodernism 1) Submitted by: William C. Schrader Having just read the latest missive from Thomas Schmitz, I have decided to indulge in some random thoughts, inasmuch as that seems to be the only possible response to the current state of the discussion on postmodernism. My first thought is this: obviously no one knows what postmodernism is, so why is there so much controversy over it? Perhaps there are as many postmodernisms as there are postmodernists. It is a rather strange name, anyway. I am reminded of the fact (or "fact") that Gothic architecture was once called "the modern style" - about the same time that we find the devotio moderna and the via moderna and the ars nova. How quickly we become dated when we try to be up to the moment. Newton said that there had to be an objective center of the universe "because God has to be somewhere." Newton was a major contributor to the development of science, but I am not so impressed with his theology. Maybe, however, there is a connection. If God is removed from consideration, is there any objective reality? Catholicism offered an absolute reality, but Protestantism introduced private interpretation so that religion became subjective. Somewhat later, science offered an absolute reality in the 19th century. Is all this flight from facts a parallel experience to Protestantism? Is the 20th century experience of two World Wars and all our lesser horrors a parallel to the wars of religion? The arguments over whether Hayden White or Peter Fritzsche is "really" a postmodernist, or whether Marx was "really" a Marxist strike me as distressingly similar to the arguments in the 16th century over whether the Pope or Luther or Menno Simons was a "true" Christian. If I can make "facts" mean pretty much what I want them to mean, why should I care whether anyone else accepts my definition of "postmodernism" or of Catholicism, or of Liberalism? I can make myself a postmodernist, or not, simply by saying that I am, or that I am not. What is the difference between postmodernism and skepticism? Both question everything, and both seem to hold that one can never arrive at an objective answer to those questions. Is it only that postmodernists are so very up to date that they are uncomfortable with the very old label "skeptic"? For a movement which supposedly emphasizes the importance of language, postmodernism seems to have done a remarkably efficient job of making it difficult to communicate in language. Nothing seems to "really" mean what it means - but then, of course, each person's "reality" is different, so there is no "real" meaning anyway. Is that perfectly clear? Postmodernism seems to be the intellectual equivalent of egalitarianism in social/political life. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all ideas are created equal. But then, there are no truths, nothing is self-evident, and the word "created" carries with it all kinds of implications. Anything carried to extremes is pathological - or do we agree with Barry Goldwater's 1964 campaign slogans? "Extremism in the pursuit of justice ..." I know that authority is simply gauche, but I will nonetheless quote from an unassailable source - THE KING AND I - "'Tis a puzzlement!" If there is no "real" past, are we all frauds? Why are we doing this? "To dig I am not able; to beg I am ashamed." So much for musings and ramblings on postmodernism. William C. Schrader 2) Submitted by: Flurin Condrau This is it. Thomas Schmitz's contribution brings us to the very point of the debate. To the question of the relationship between historical facts and our job as historians. Why? He, as a historian, deals with facts, "facts" he'd say. That's all right. But then, what kind of "facts" are in his mind? The first example is the very good "Deutsches Wesen". As if Feldman, Fritzsche and all the other more or less critical comments would have called the "Deutsches Wesen" a fact! Given: Deutsches Wesen is an interesting term which is ideally constructed for deconstruction. What better example could Thomas have used to teach us deconstruction. More traditionally oriented historians could have called "Deutsches Wesen" a piece of ideology - both in the sense of Karl Marx (Opium fuer das Volk) or say Niklas Luhmann (reduction of complexity for the individual). They - the traditionalists - would do more or less the same as Thomas did, they would have said the term is historically constructed, but they wouldn't have built a whole new theory on it. We may understand all the power and the glory of Thomas Schmitz's postmodern history as a new methodology to discover even more in those ridiculous words of "Deutsches Wesen", a methodology which we have at our fingertips - be it processed with WordPerfect or WordDerrida (that one was really good!). But we are given another example: the english garden, our protagonist and the question of the sun. Yes indeed, most people nowadays interested in the history of science share a consensus that scientific knowledge is historically constructed. The recent conference of the Deutsche Gesellschaft fuer Geschichte der Medizin, Naturwissenschaft und Technik in Bonn showed both: (a) that postmodern concepts are not as rare in German historiography as is often thought (two-thirds of all contributions stood more or less in that tradition) and (b) that scientific knowledge is the perfect play-ground for social constructivism. It's a real merit of postmodern historiography to have showed the role discourses play in establishing a new scientific paradigm where for a long time facts stood for themselves: physics, math, medicine and whatsoever. Yet, these examples - as convincing as they may be - are bloody easy to deconstruct, as science is an evident communication process, and communication, discourses so to speak, are central to postmodern concepts. Probably they are easier to deal with than the fact of several millions of jobless people in late Weimar (I think we shouldn't apply the "" - because this might suggest that we don't take them very serious!) or the fact that railways were built in mid-nineteenth century (I'd prefer to drop the Holocaust example, I hate it for the moral accusation between the lines). What the good ole "Strukturgeschichte" (I'm aging terribly fast writing this email!) was interested in (e.g. social structures) seems no longer to be important to the discourse oriented historians (that's why I wouldn't call Bourdieu a postmodernite). To conclude: that discourses are important is beyond doubt, that many historians would be well advised to think a little bit more about knowledge, power and social constructivism is a statement which I happily sign, but I wouldn't reeducate the whole scientific community just because postmodern concepts have some merits, others have theirs too! Flurin Condrau University of Munich .