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Postmodern Disseminations and Cognitive Constraints
Religion (1997) 27, 129–138
Postmodern Disseminations and Cognitive Constraints G B* Prouver que j’ai raison serait accorder que je puis avoir tort. Es-tu mon serviteur ou non? Beaumarchais, La folle journée ou le Mariage de Figaro, I,i
Dissemination, floating signifiers, mise en abîme, rejection of master narratives, transgression, power, absence: if one were to take seriously the slogans that constitute the vocabulary of postmodernism—a contemporary academic ‘discourse’ which despite its professed anti-totalizing aims is as relentlessly totalitarian as those it seeks to undermine—one could not possibly talk of cognitive constraints, for any mention of fixed boundaries would be guilty of seeking to resurrect a discredited ‘master narrative’ apparently responsible as much for the syllogism as for the Gulag. Having developed an esoteric vocabulary which, like the one employed by theologians, has a built-in mechanism that allows its users to claim that those seeking to refute it have not, and indeed cannot, understand its potentially infinite nuances or its self-correcting nature, this discourse and those who wrap themselves in it can appear as inexpugnable. Nevertheless, despite or because of this alleged inexpugnability, it may not be entirely useless to examine from a cognitive perspective some of the claims made or implied by postmodernists. To that effect, I will make use of three books authored or edited by Pascal Boyer—Tradition as Truth and Communication, Cognitive Aspects of Religious Symbolism, and The Naturalness of Religious Ideas—along with a few other studies. To be sure, it would be unwise to expect that those who have embraced the postmodern dispensation will accept the relevance of findings which, indebted as they are to certain epistemological premises, cannot but be seen as yet more examples of biological reductionism and, worse, of naive humanism. In any event, in order to enter into these debates it will not be necessary to start from zero. Given the affinities between the postmodern rejection of foundations1 and other forms of relativism, one would expect that the controversies about rationality and relativism that have taken place during the last three decades would shed light on this latest anti-Enlightenment ideology.2 That is indeed the case, and the availability of a number of studies, mostly by British authors,3 relieves one of the need to go into details. At the most elementary logical level, that is, in terms of the self-refuting character of relativistic systems, Habermas has demonstrated, for example, that an attempt such as Foucault’s *P B, Tradition as Truth and Communication: a Cognitive Description of Traditional Discourse. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1990, x + 140 pp., $49.95 ISBN 0 521 37417 0. P B, The Naturalness of Religious Ideas: a Cognitive Theory of Religion. Berkeley, University of California Press, 1994, 15 + 324 pp., $35.00 ISBN 0 520 07559 5. P B (), Cognitive Aspects of Religious Symbolism. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1993, ix + 246 pp., $44.95 ISBN 0 521 43288 X. 0048–721X/97/020129 + 00 $25.00/0/rl970072
? 1997 Academic Press Limited
130 G. Benavides ‘genealogical’ approach to history suffers from the same ‘präsentistische, relativistische und kryptonormative Scheinwissenschaft’ that it condemns. Along similar lines, Dews shows what is in any case obvious: that by claiming that he can detach his genealogy from power, Foucault refutes his own extravagant claims about the universality of power.4 At an equally elementary performative level, Sperber reminds us that ‘the best evidence against relativism is, ultimately, the activity of anthropologists’.5 We encounter an instance of self-refutation even in terms of the terminology favored by postmodernists, as the very use of the prefix ‘post’ perhaps reveals not just the touching anxiety of those who want to be au courant but also the eschatological, even messianic nature of the new movement.6 Indeed, if, like the postmodernists, one were prone to make momentous claims about the peculiarities of the ‘West’7, one could say that the very presence of that prefix places postmodernism squarely in the obsessive Western concern with progress and even with forward—as opposed to cyclical—temporality. In order to come to terms with developments such as postmodern philosophy, one should approach them not only from a sociological or anthropological angle but also from a cognitive one. This approach requires that in studying ideological formations, one pay attention not just to the social needs underlying them but also to the cognitive constraints which lead to ideological formations acquiring certain shapes—society as an organism, for instance—and not others.8 One way in which one could approach this study would be by considering the interaction between metaphors and traditions. From a cognitive angle we can say that instead of freely crossing intertextual space, metaphors tend to anchor abstraction in a materiality ruled by a kind of naive Physics (see Johnson; Boyer 1994a, p. 104) and by representations of agency, in such a way that this gravitation toward materiality and agency leads to the generation of bodily metaphors. This process can be seen at work in the tendency toward anthropomorphization of divine figures found in all religious traditions (see Benavides 1995a), a tendency which reformist religious movements manage to overcome with the greatest difficulty, and usually for only a short time. At the same time, in The Invention of Tradition, Hobsbawm, Ranger and their collaborators have studied from a historical and sociological perspective how, instead of having been present from time immemorial, practices considered as traditional are in fact invented. Finally, in a remarkable series of studies Boyer has shown from a cognitive perspective how traditions are neither the unproblematic presences that most of us assume nor the result of a process of free generation, analogous to the free punning favored by deconstructionists. He demonstrates that traditions are generated, perceived and remembered according to certain rules which are related to the acquisition of ‘salient memories, which are then used as guidelines, together with knowledge, in the evaluation of subsequent situations’ (Boyer 1990, p. 37). Boyer maintains that instead of theories or worldviews, it is salient events and surface properties that are transmitted and stored, the cause of traditional repetition being ‘people’s conservatism about the surface properties of interaction’ (Boyer, 1990, p. 143; cf. p. 17). But is it possible to do justice both to the process of invention and to that of generation—to the fact that traditions are manufactured in order to validate a group’s claims and to the fact that these processes take place within the limits set by our cognitive mechanisms? In order to understand this intersection not of freedom and necessity but of two kinds of necessity, it is necessary to remember that in order for a species to be able to function in any world its members must elaborate categories and systems of classification which correspond to the realities of that world. This cross-culturally stable process is already at work among children, who, according to some researchers, have the capacity to organize causal percepts at twenty-seven
Postmodern Disseminations 131 weeks. Other experiments indicate that the spatio-temporal conditions that must be identified in order to think in causal terms can be singled out by infants of four and a half months. Children’s conceptual equipment includes a number of spontaneously evolving constraints which allow them to distinguish among the properties to be expected in different ontological domains and which are closely related to the emergence of causal thinking. One of the frequently undesirable results of the unavoidable interplay between ideology and these spontaneous cognitive constraints is our propensity to extend to social differences assumptions that have proved successful in dealing with the natural world. This process, which corresponds to what Topitsch has labelled biomorphism, will become less pronounced in societies whose members no longer interact with organisms other than other humans or pets. It must be kept in mind, however, that despite the generally pernicious ideological effects of biomorphism, complete disregard of the experiences formed when dealing with living things will have grave consequences for the survival of groups or individuals. 9 It is at this point that the confluence of ideological and cognitive approaches proves to be fruitful. For if it is necessary to pay attention to the ideological uses to which these cognitive mechanisms can be put—the most insidious among them being the tendency to view society in organic terms, as well as the proclivity to represent, and by the same token validate, authority by generating divine anthropomorphic figures—it is also imperative to realize that the effectiveness of these ideological constructs depends upon the ease with which we can conjure up imaginary bodies and no less imaginary actions, and the facility with which those representations are transmitted.10 It can be said in effect that it is because of the naturalness with which organismic conceptions of reality impose themselves that looking at reality through them satisfies a utopian longing for that which is spontaneous. But by the same token, that very naturalness can be manipulated for ideological ends: in this sense utopia’s dreams are ideology’s ground. These issues are not unrelated to the postmodern uneasy relation to ideology and utopia. If, in their eagerness to return to a prelapsarian state, the current denouncers of modernity must reject the ideological and cognitive formations that seem to be the embodiments of all of modernity’s evils, they must at the same time continue to depend upon the same ideological and cognitive mechanisms to establish themselves and their theories as utopian alternatives. To return to a world which is not ruled by identity and presence, they must reject the tyranny of the signified11 and that of the state—not just the modern nation state, whose emergence parallels the Enlightenment, but any association that involves solidified difference, that is, difference which, seen as nonarbitrary, as identical with itself, appears as ruled by the principle of identity. At the same time, postmodern must repudiate the very possibility of the existence of the cognitive mechanisms that generate those differences, since, as the product of evolution, these mechanisms would also have to be regarded as nonarbitrary and therefore as ruled by identity. Claiming utterly to reject the totalitarian rule of a self-identity that reigns through sacralized differences,12 postmodern utopians postulate a rule of pure difference and gratuitous transgression, one which, however, being undifferentiated and grounded only upon itself, is even more subject to the rule of identity. Like most transgressions, postmodern ones, particularly when enacted under the auspices of academic institutions, prove to be little more than ritualized, riskless mirror-like inversions of the established order.13 In any event, postmodern utopians’ protests against reason are less protests against a message against which nothing can be done—for any action against the message would require making use of it—than protests against the messenger: protests
132 G. Benavides not against a reason which is after all unassailable but against reason’s messenger, modernity. But, mystical antinomianism aside, it is the case not just that our experience as species sets limits to the kind of ludic dissemination favored by postmodernists but also that in order to be perceivable, the disseminations themselves must make use of the species’ cognitive mechanisms; therefore, even if the so-called master discourse of the Enlightenment were to be utterly abandoned, there would be an underlying cognitive master discourse which the species could transcend only at the cost of extinction. The problem for postmodern masters is that while the peculiar logic of their system and the expectations of their devotees force them to make momentous declarations about the end of signification or about end of ‘man,’ such claims require a degree of comprehensibility as well as the existence of those who do the comprehending. Consider, for example, the wager that Foucault makes in suave apocalyptic tones at the conclusion of Les mots et les choses: ‘l’homme s’effacerait, comme à la limite de la mer un visage de sable’ (Foucault 1966, p. 398). Since (except for some radical environmentalist groups) it would be exceedingly difficult to find a philosophy that openly proclaims the need to act in a way that would necessarily lead to the disappearance of actual human beings, or that presupposes their nonexistence, it will be imperative that, like most philosophical concepts, this key postmodern theologoumenon be understood in a semi-propositional rather than in a propositional manner.14 That is one of the reasons postmodern utterances are frequently referred to not as arguments but as ‘gestures’; as owing their being less to reasoning than to the agency of the theorist; not as true or false but as the frequently contradictory but nonetheless memorable episode15 in the fragmented unfolding of an author’s career. If one approaches from this perspective the appeal of the postmodern prophets of extremity, it becomes clear that despite the emphasis on anonymous discourses and on the death of the author, it is precisely the sovereign gesture of the master thinker, the groundless decision of the Author, that has to be obeyed.16 Boyer identifies as characterizing ‘charismatic proclivity’ (Boyer 1994, pp. 167–9) and ‘traditional discourse’ many aspects of both postmodern philosophers and postmodern philosophy aspects ranging from the causal connection between the truth of the utterance—or, actually, the power of the gesture—and the status of the speaker (Boyer 1990, pp. 99, 100) to the fact that ‘traditional utterances’ are remembered in an episodic rather than in a semantic manner (Boyer 1990, p. 43). Instead of the alleged postmodern conceptual space—variously conceived as a pleroma inhabited or rather constituted by power; or, in a negative theology fashion, as a vertiginous self-cancelling ruled by difference/deferral; or as infinitely, and gratuitously, fractured—we seem to find a pre-modern conceptual space in which texts are accepted, remembered and employed by virtue of their having been produced not by mere shamans who, after an initiatic journey, are able to wrestle game or a diseased soul away from a powerful divinity but by a theoretical caudillo who can wrestle his genealogy from Power itself. My aim, however, is not so much to show that a body of high-sounding claims is incoherent or wrong: in the present academic climate, claims based upon experimental research will be dismissed out of hand as ‘positivism’ or, devastatingly, as merely boring. Rather, concerned as I am with studying both the ideological and the cognitive reasons for the appeal of ideologies, I seek to demonstrate that a cognitive approach can explain the reasons for the formal appeal of certain postmodern claims. It is true that this attempt may in fact appear as redundant, since there is no dearth of studies which put postmodernism in its place. To mention but one particularly lucid example, in The Condition of Postmodernity David Harvey places postmodernism in its proper social and
Postmodern Disseminations 133 above all economic location as the counterpart of a capitalism that ‘is becoming ever more tightly organized through dispersal, geographical mobility, and flexible responses to labour markets, labour processes, and consumer markets’ (Harvey, p. 159). From this angle, focusing on the carriers of this discourse, one can regard the riskless, indeed institutionalized, verbal antinomianism in which postmodern academics engage as the cri de coeur of those who, after the almost disappearance of public intellectuals, are condemned to irrelevance (Benavides 1995b). Less charitably, we can understand their vehement denunciation of any grand récit, and of any notion of causality, as the denial of their own parasitic position in relation to the master discourse of capitalism. But, even while granting that Harvey’s and similar explanations are correct, it is still necessary to investigate why some varieties of postmodernism have become more fashionable than others, and why the peculiar inversions found in Derridean deconstruction and in Foucaultian cratology have assumed the shapes that have made them so popular among academics.17 For this reason, and given the limited space available, rather than attempting a close reading of the foundational postmodern écrits, it may be better simply to refer to what can be called the postmodern vulgata—that is, the set of semi-propositions that constitute the master discourse. One of them is the notion of écriture. Despite Derrida’s disclaimers about the metaphorical character of the primacy of écriture, the very absurdity of the extreme version of the claim cannot but command one’s attention18 (the fact that this claim will appeal to those in the writing professions is also worth keeping in mind). The same is true of the perverse reversal of the relationship between the ‘signifier’ and the ‘signified’, the two components of the Saussurean sign made in De la grammatologie. Here the utopian talk about ‘floating signifiers’ transforms them into signifiers of themselves, which means in effect that in a coincidentia oppositorum kind of way ‘signifiers’ are both ‘signifiers’ and ‘signifieds’, and therefore the process of signification has ceased. More insidious than the disappearance of the signified is the fact that this play of mirrors manages to conceal once and for all the most important component of the process of signification, namely, the referent. Deconstruction therefore turns out to be but another instance of idealism. In Foucault’s case, the replacement of a power that represses by one that brings into being performs the same functions as the Derridean play with signification: the reversal of one’s expectations and the consequent ‘salience’ (in Boyer’s sense) of the new understanding of power functions in a way that seems to exemplify Shklowsky’s concept of ‘defamiliarization’ (ostranenie)—except that in this case, the foregrounded object of our gaze (to use a modish term) is less power as a concept than the theoretical daring of the auteur. In Foucault’s case, theoretical bravado reaches its climax not with mere reversal but with the transformation of power into a cosmic principle, for at its most inflated, power functions as the fons et origo, nay, as the very substance of all that is. Such exorbitation renders power worthless for any analytical purposes. Yet the very emptiness of the notion proves that the attempts to conceptualize a space freely traversed and constituted by a power that is grounded upon itself leads back to the irrefutable self-identity of tautology. In political terms, power’s self-validation leads not only to the quaint anarchism of wellplaced academics but also back to the decisionism of the 1920s and 30s, an issue that cannot be explored here. In terms of cognitive constraints, Derrida’s and Foucault’s first principles prove that, however far one may want to go, one’s conceptual space is limited by paradoxes on one hand and by tautologies on the other. This is not the place to engage in an exercise in comparative mysticism. Indeed, considering that Foucault’s speculations are most likely of no more than passing interest,
134 G. Benavides one may not want to spend any time exploring the parallels between his tautological universalization of power and Nicholas of Cusa’s last attempts to conceptualize the ground of everything, a ground that is also the ground of itself: the supreme tautologies built around power—possest, posse fieri, posse ipsum—which together with the nonaliud—the tautology built around identity and difference—occupied the Cardinal’s last years, superseding the earlier paradoxical formulation of the coincidentia oppositorum. Still, if such research were to be undertaken, and especially if it were clear that Foucault had not read and appropriated Cusanus’ ideas, one would have to come to the conclusion that the more extreme a philosophical speculation and the more it seeks to escape from constraints, the more it will be shaped by logical forms. A key difference between the two is that, unlike Foucault, Nicholas did not attempt to base a political philosophy on a tautology.19 Having employed the terms ‘mystical’ and ‘mysticism’ in this discussion of postmodern discourse, it is necessary to say that this use is not derogatory. Quite the contrary. Any exploration of the formal features of extreme forms of discourse will inevitably lead to those utterances which, even more than the predictable postmodern ones, seem to push the process of signification in their own predictable way to its logical limits. But here as well, one would have to investigate the logical structure and (possibly making use of some of Bloch’s and Boyer’s insights, who, however, do not explore this issue and employ the term ‘mysticism’ in the sense of ‘supernatural’, as most British anthropologists do) the cognitive salience of mystical texts, utterances and actions. At the same time, it is necessary to explore the ideological functions of those mystical texts, paying attention to the already mentioned interplay between the utopian/mystical and the ideological. One must consider interaction, for example, between the desire to transcend the limitations of grammar or hierarchy or gender (or of desire itself) and the historical and social location of this yearning (as done by Kolakowski and Certeau). In this context, the parallels among some of the postmodern masters’ rejection of presence and master narratives, Adorno’s tortured negative dialectic, and some of the utterances usually labelled as ‘mystical’ (particularly those of the negative theology type) are not surprising at all—even though, when talking about the Frankfurt school and French post-structuralism, one is tempted to say, paraphrasing Marx, that what made its first appearance as tragedy has reappeared as vaudeville. Likewise, the negative-theology approach to Derrida favored in some Catholic circles is not simply one more example of the traditional theological ability to enlist anybody and anything in its reenchantment enterprise. Such annexation seems rather to parallel the process undergone by Adorno’s collaborator, Horkheimer, when his own negative philosophy transfigured itself into a mystical search for the wholly other.20 As in all cases of cognitively deviant systems of signification, whether we are dealing with postmodern texts with speculation about the non-identical, or with the pseudoDionysius’ shining darkness, it is the unexpected, counterintuitive character of the text, utterance or theory that constitutes its appeal.21 At the same time, we should keep in mind Boyer’s remarks to the effect that religious representations could not be represented ‘if their ontological assumptions did not confirm an important background of intuitive principles’, which means that ‘one must strike a balance between the requirements of imagination and learnability’.22 Following Boyer, one can say that a philosophical system that comprises only counterintuitive claims will fail, while, conversely, one that confirms only intuitive ontologies will have little attentiondemanding power (see Boyer 1994a, p. 122). In terms of deconstructionist and postmodern ideologies in general, this means that if it is true that for a number of
Postmodern Disseminations 135 reasons, including the appeal of the counterintuitive character of postmodern claims, a number of academics will cling to the new philosophy (until a new one comes along), it is also true that because this philosophy does not confirm most people’s intuitive principles, it will be rejected by them. To be sure, this rejection will trouble neither theorists nor academics. On the contrary, since the doctrine’s lack of appeal will be understood in a self-validating manner as having been caused by the tyranny of one of the many Western ‘-centrisms’, the rejection itself will increase the counterintuitive appeal of the teachings. (A similar process is at the heart of Adorno’s notion of the non-identical and in mystical discourse and practice.) In all these cases, however, it is the formal characteristics—the cognitively constrained postmodern disseminations—of the system which, acting as magnetic surfaces, attract (or repel) those who will remember (or forget) them and who, if a conversion of sorts occurs, will see the world through the lenses it provides. In this sense, but only in this sense, it can be said that being what they are by virtue of their formal characteristics, all philosophical and religious discourses are, like aesthetic creations, reducible only to themselves. Still, one has to ask whether these irreducible surfaces would have acquired their salient forms, their shapes, if mechanisms other than cognitive ones had not been at work bringing those surfaces into being.23
Notes 1 As Hans Albert’s Critical Rationalism demonstrates, the rejection of foundationalism does not entail the rejection of serious thinking (Albert). 2 On rationality and relativism see Wilson, Hollis and Lukes, and Horton. One uses the expression ‘shed light’ not without trepidation, given the current lack of popularity of oculocentrism. 3 British (and Canadian) authors are generally less credulous in matters continental than their American counterparts: see Callinicos 1989; Connor; Dews; Harvey; Palmer. See also Habermas and Merquior. 4 On Foucault see Habermas, p. 324 (italics in the original), and Dews, p. 193. For an overall critique of Foucault it would be difficult to surpass Merquior 1985. On universals see Brown. 5 See Sperber 1982, p. 180; cf. Gellner, p. 185. 6 The parallels between postmodern and Ma¯dhyamika Buddhism defenses against accusations of self-refutation have been noticed more than once; what is not sufficiently emphasized is that the instability of soteriologies based upon paradoxicality necessarily leads both to the elaboration of philosophies built around tautologies—philosophies which, however, cling to their soteriological conceit (see Benavides). 7 Particularly inept are Derrida’s (and his admirers’) Orientalist phantasies about the presumably unique ‘Western’ character of phonocentrism and logocentrism (Derrida 1967). Anyone in the least familiar with Indian philosophy knows that nothing in Western philosophy and mysticism reaches the intensity of the Indian concern with language as sound (which goes back to the days of the Rg Veda and continues to this day). At the risk of stating the obvious, it may be necessary to remind Derrideans that the devana¯garı¯ alphabet is syllabic, not ideographic, it being necessary to use a special sign, vira¯ma, to cancel the vocalic sound in order to represent, instead of the usual syllable, say /ta/, the consonant /t/. This last detail is relevant insofar as it reminds one of the extent to which this alphabet ‘always already’ conveys vowels along with consonants. As for logocentrism, a perusal of any competent book on Indian or Buddhist philosophy will disabuse one of platitudes about the supralogical Oriental mind (there is no need to say anything about phalocentrism: a look at a Linga should suffice). 8 This approach is indebted to a number of publications by Maurice Bloch and Dan Sperber; see Bloch 1985, p. 31ff.; 1991; Sperber 1985, 1987. See, more recently, Boyer 1992, pp. 28, 41; 1993, p. 33ff.; 1994a, pp. 14–28, 59, 84–8, 265; 1994b, p. 391; Lawson, p. 191. 9 On child development see Bloch 1985, p. 27ff.; Boyer 1992, p. 43–5; 1993, pp. 35, 129; 1994a, p. 110ff.; on cross-cultural stability see Boyer 1994a, p. 291; on causal thinking see Boyer 1994a, pp. 137–8, 152; on domain specificity and intuitive ontologies see Atran, p. 57ff.; Boyer 1994a,
136 G. Benavides
10 11 12 13 14 15 16
17 18 19
20 21 22 23
p. 100ff., 154; 1994b, p. 394ff.; on the evolutionary reasons for making these assumptions see Boyer 1990, p. 105. Since I have been asked to discuss postmodernism from a specific angle, making use only of a couple of recent books, I will limit the number of references to a minimum. On the epidemiology of representations see Sperber 1985; 1990; 1994. The tyranny of the signified rather than that of the referent, the latter being the truly unmentionable presence. This indeed seems to be the way in which religion functions: see Benavides 1989 for preliminary remarks on religion as the sacralization of difference. On whether transgressions transgress see Benavides 1995b. On propositional and semi-propositional representations see Sperber 1982; 1985; 1990. An application of these concepts and further references can be found in Benavides 1995a. On aletheia as ‘no-forgetting’, ‘not forgettable’, ‘attention-demanding’ see Boyer 1990, p. 49. It can be argued, of course, that this deification of the intellectual agent applies not just to postmodern maı¯tres à penser or to their totemic father, Nietzsche, but to any important intellectual figure. This is no doubt true, and probably has to do with our proclivity to think in anthropomorphic terms; nevertheless, anyone who has had to endure a sycophantic ‘as Nietzsche says’ or ‘as Foucault says’ will have noticed a breathless urgency that would be unimaginable in a reference to, say, Habermas (not to mention Hans Albert or Perry Anderson). Some may simply want to argue that the reasons for the popularity of certain authors in US universities has to do with the availability of translations. For despite their clamor for a multitude of clashing discourses, postmodern devotees tend to want to have theirs in English. Gellner has consistently emphasized the need to investigate the role played by absurdity qua absurdity in behavior and discourse: see Gellner, pp. 34, 39, 43 (also in 1970, pp. 36, 42, 46). The works in which Nicholas of Cusa (1401–64) explores power as the foundation of all that is are De principio (1459), Trialogus de possest (1460) and De apice theoriae (1464); speculation on the non-other can be found in De genesi (1447) and De non-aliud (1462); all of them can be found in the second volume of his works (1966). On Nicholas’ journey from paradox to tautology see Benavides 1983, which is devoted to a comparison between two systems built around tautologies—Cusanus’ and Na¯ga¯rjuna’s. While the soteriologies of the deconstructionists and the ma¯dhyamikas revolve around the issue of identity and difference, as does Cusanus’ speculation about the non-other, Cusanus’ speculation about power carries to its logical conclusion what Foucault in a exhibitionistic manner tried to grapple with five hundred years later in front of an expectant audience. The parallels between mystical discourse and Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s critical theory are explored in Benavides 1990. See Sperber 1994, p. 55; Boyer 1992, pp. 51–2; 1994a, pp. 48, 59, 112; 1994b, pp. 394, 404–5. See Boyer 1992, pp. 45, 52; 1994a; p. 121, cf. p. 287; 1994b, p. 406. I intend to address this issue in a forthcoming essay tentatively entitled ‘Aesthetics, Ideology and the Irreducibility of Religious Surfaces’.
Bibliography
Albert, Hans, Traktat u¨ber kritische Vernunft, Tübingen, J.C.B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck) 19804 [1968]. Atran, ‘Wither ‘ethnoscience’? in Pascal Boyer (ed.) 1993, pp. 48–70. Benavides, Gustavo, ‘Die absolute Voraussetzung von Sein und Nichts bei Na¯ga¯rjuna und Nicolaus Cusanus’, in Walter Strolz (ed.), Sein und Nichts in der abendländischen Mystik, Freiburg-Basel-Wien, Herder 1983, pp. 59–71. Benavides, Gustavo, ‘Religious articulations of power’, in G. Benavides and M. W. Daly (eds), Religion and Political Power, Albany, State University of New York Press 1989, pp. 1–12, 197–202. Benavides, Gustavo, ‘The Identical, the non-Identical and the Mystical’, paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion, New Orleans, 18 November 1990. Benavides, Gustavo, ‘Cognitive and Ideological Aspects of Divine Anthropomorphism’, Religion 25 (1995a), pp. 9–22. Benavides, Gustavo, ‘On Ranters, Fools and Antinomians; or When does Transgression transgress?’, paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion, Philadelphia, 20 November 1995b.
Postmodern Disseminations 137 Bloch, Maurice, ‘From Cognition to Anthropology’, in Richard Fardon (ed.), Power and Knowledge: Anthropological and Sociological Perspectives, Edinburgh, Scottish Academic Press 1985, pp. 21–48. Bloch, Maurice, ‘Language, Anthropology and Cognitive Science’, Man 26 (1991), pp. 183–98. Boyer, Pascal, Tradition and Truth as Communication: a Cognitive Discription of Traditional Discourse, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press 1990. Boyer, Pascal, ‘Explaining Religious Ideas: Elements of a Cognitive Approach’, Numen 39 (1992), pp. 27–57. Boyer, Pascal (ed.), Cognitive Aspects of Religious Symbolism, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press 1993. Boyer, Pascal, ‘Cognitive Aspects of Religious Symbolism’, in Boyer (ed.), 1993, pp. 1–47. Boyer, Pascal, ‘Pseudo-natural Kinds’, in Boyer (ed.), 1993, pp. 121–41. Boyer, Pascal, The Naturalness of Religious Ideas: a Cognitive Theory of Religion, Berkeley, University of California Press 1994a. Boyer, Pascal, ‘Cognitive Constraints on Cultural Representations: Natural Ontologies and Religious Ideas’, in Hirschfeld and Gelman (eds) 1994, pp. 391–411. Brown, Donald E., Human Universals, Philadelphia, Temple University Press 1991. Callinicos, Alex, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist Critique, London, Polity Press 1989. Callinicos, Alex, Theories and Narratives: Reflections on the Philosophy of History, Durham, Duke University Press 1995. Connor, Steven, Postmodernist Culture: An Introduction to Theories of the Contemporary, Oxford, Blackwell 1989. Derrida, Jacques, De la grammatologie, Paris, Minuit 1967. Derrida, Jacques, Positions, Paris, Minuit 1972. Dews, Peter, Logics of Disintegration: Post-Structuralist Thought and the Claims of Critical Theory, London-New York, Verso 1987. Foucault, Michel, Les mots et les choses: Une archéologie des sciences humaines, Paris, Gallimard 1966. Foucault, Michel, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, New York, Pantheon 1980. Gellner, Ernest, ‘Concepts and Society’, in Gellner, Cause and Meaning in the Social Sciences, London, Routledge 1973, pp. 18–46; also in Wilson (ed.) 1970, pp. 18–49. Habermas, Jürgen, Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne, Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp 1985. Harvey, David, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change, Oxford, Blackwell 1989. Hirschfeld, Lawrence A., and Susan A. Gelman (eds), Mapping the Mind: Domain Specificity in Cognition and Culture, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press 1994. Hobsbawm, Eric, and Terence Ranger (eds), The Invention of Tradition, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press 1983. Hollis, Martin, and Steven Lukes (eds), Rationality and Relativism, Oxford, Blackwell; Cambridge, MA, MIT 1982. Horton, Robin, Patterns of Thought in Africa and the West: Essays on Magic, Religion and Science, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press 1993. Johnson, Mark, The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason, Chicago, University of Chicago Press 1987. Lawson, E. Thomas, ‘Cognitive Categories, Cultural Forms and Ritual Structures’, in Boyer (ed.) 1993, pp. 188–206. Merquior, J. G., Foucault, Berkeley, University of California Press 1985. Merquior, J. G., From Prague to Paris: A Critique of Structuralist aud Post-structuralist Thought, London and New York, Verso 1986. Nikolaus von Kues, Philosophisch-theologische Schriften, II, Leo Gabriel (ed.), trans. Dietlind Dupré and Wilhelm Dupré, Wien, Herder, 1966. Palmer, Bryan D., The Descent into Discourse: The Reification of Language and the Writing of Social History, Philadelphia, Temple University Press 1990. Sperber, Dan, ‘Apparently Irrational Beliefs’, in Hollis and Lukes (eds) 1982, pp. 149–80. Sperber, Dan, ‘Anthropology and Psychology: towards an epidemiology of representations’, Man 20 (1985), pp. 73–89. Sperber, Dan, ‘Les sciences cognitives, les sciences sociales et le matérialisme’, Le Débat 47 (1987), pp. 105–15.
138 G. Benavides Sperber, Dan, ‘The Epidemiology of Beliefs’, in Colin Fraser and George Gaskell (eds), The Social Psychological Study of Widespread Beliefs, Oxford, Clarendon Press 1990, pp. 25–44. Sperber, Dan, ‘The Modularity of Thought and the Epidemiology of Representations’, in Hirschfeld and Gelman (eds), 1994, pp. 39–67. Wilson, Bryan R. (ed.), Rationality, Oxford, Blackwell 1970.
GUSTAVO BENAVIDES is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Villanova University. His most recent publications are essays in Religion and in Curators of the Buddha: The Study of Buddhism under Colonialism (University of Chicago Press, 1995). Department of Theology and Religious Studies, Villanova University, PA 19085, U.S.A.
Postmodern Disseminations and Cognitive Constraints G B* Prouver que j’ai raison serait accorder que je puis avoir tort. Es-tu mon serviteur ou non? Beaumarchais, La folle journée ou le Mariage de Figaro, I,i
Dissemination, floating signifiers, mise en abîme, rejection of master narratives, transgression, power, absence: if one were to take seriously the slogans that constitute the vocabulary of postmodernism—a contemporary academic ‘discourse’ which despite its professed anti-totalizing aims is as relentlessly totalitarian as those it seeks to undermine—one could not possibly talk of cognitive constraints, for any mention of fixed boundaries would be guilty of seeking to resurrect a discredited ‘master narrative’ apparently responsible as much for the syllogism as for the Gulag. Having developed an esoteric vocabulary which, like the one employed by theologians, has a built-in mechanism that allows its users to claim that those seeking to refute it have not, and indeed cannot, understand its potentially infinite nuances or its self-correcting nature, this discourse and those who wrap themselves in it can appear as inexpugnable. Nevertheless, despite or because of this alleged inexpugnability, it may not be entirely useless to examine from a cognitive perspective some of the claims made or implied by postmodernists. To that effect, I will make use of three books authored or edited by Pascal Boyer—Tradition as Truth and Communication, Cognitive Aspects of Religious Symbolism, and The Naturalness of Religious Ideas—along with a few other studies. To be sure, it would be unwise to expect that those who have embraced the postmodern dispensation will accept the relevance of findings which, indebted as they are to certain epistemological premises, cannot but be seen as yet more examples of biological reductionism and, worse, of naive humanism. In any event, in order to enter into these debates it will not be necessary to start from zero. Given the affinities between the postmodern rejection of foundations1 and other forms of relativism, one would expect that the controversies about rationality and relativism that have taken place during the last three decades would shed light on this latest anti-Enlightenment ideology.2 That is indeed the case, and the availability of a number of studies, mostly by British authors,3 relieves one of the need to go into details. At the most elementary logical level, that is, in terms of the self-refuting character of relativistic systems, Habermas has demonstrated, for example, that an attempt such as Foucault’s *P B, Tradition as Truth and Communication: a Cognitive Description of Traditional Discourse. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1990, x + 140 pp., $49.95 ISBN 0 521 37417 0. P B, The Naturalness of Religious Ideas: a Cognitive Theory of Religion. Berkeley, University of California Press, 1994, 15 + 324 pp., $35.00 ISBN 0 520 07559 5. P B (), Cognitive Aspects of Religious Symbolism. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1993, ix + 246 pp., $44.95 ISBN 0 521 43288 X. 0048–721X/97/020129 + 00 $25.00/0/rl970072
? 1997 Academic Press Limited
130 G. Benavides ‘genealogical’ approach to history suffers from the same ‘präsentistische, relativistische und kryptonormative Scheinwissenschaft’ that it condemns. Along similar lines, Dews shows what is in any case obvious: that by claiming that he can detach his genealogy from power, Foucault refutes his own extravagant claims about the universality of power.4 At an equally elementary performative level, Sperber reminds us that ‘the best evidence against relativism is, ultimately, the activity of anthropologists’.5 We encounter an instance of self-refutation even in terms of the terminology favored by postmodernists, as the very use of the prefix ‘post’ perhaps reveals not just the touching anxiety of those who want to be au courant but also the eschatological, even messianic nature of the new movement.6 Indeed, if, like the postmodernists, one were prone to make momentous claims about the peculiarities of the ‘West’7, one could say that the very presence of that prefix places postmodernism squarely in the obsessive Western concern with progress and even with forward—as opposed to cyclical—temporality. In order to come to terms with developments such as postmodern philosophy, one should approach them not only from a sociological or anthropological angle but also from a cognitive one. This approach requires that in studying ideological formations, one pay attention not just to the social needs underlying them but also to the cognitive constraints which lead to ideological formations acquiring certain shapes—society as an organism, for instance—and not others.8 One way in which one could approach this study would be by considering the interaction between metaphors and traditions. From a cognitive angle we can say that instead of freely crossing intertextual space, metaphors tend to anchor abstraction in a materiality ruled by a kind of naive Physics (see Johnson; Boyer 1994a, p. 104) and by representations of agency, in such a way that this gravitation toward materiality and agency leads to the generation of bodily metaphors. This process can be seen at work in the tendency toward anthropomorphization of divine figures found in all religious traditions (see Benavides 1995a), a tendency which reformist religious movements manage to overcome with the greatest difficulty, and usually for only a short time. At the same time, in The Invention of Tradition, Hobsbawm, Ranger and their collaborators have studied from a historical and sociological perspective how, instead of having been present from time immemorial, practices considered as traditional are in fact invented. Finally, in a remarkable series of studies Boyer has shown from a cognitive perspective how traditions are neither the unproblematic presences that most of us assume nor the result of a process of free generation, analogous to the free punning favored by deconstructionists. He demonstrates that traditions are generated, perceived and remembered according to certain rules which are related to the acquisition of ‘salient memories, which are then used as guidelines, together with knowledge, in the evaluation of subsequent situations’ (Boyer 1990, p. 37). Boyer maintains that instead of theories or worldviews, it is salient events and surface properties that are transmitted and stored, the cause of traditional repetition being ‘people’s conservatism about the surface properties of interaction’ (Boyer, 1990, p. 143; cf. p. 17). But is it possible to do justice both to the process of invention and to that of generation—to the fact that traditions are manufactured in order to validate a group’s claims and to the fact that these processes take place within the limits set by our cognitive mechanisms? In order to understand this intersection not of freedom and necessity but of two kinds of necessity, it is necessary to remember that in order for a species to be able to function in any world its members must elaborate categories and systems of classification which correspond to the realities of that world. This cross-culturally stable process is already at work among children, who, according to some researchers, have the capacity to organize causal percepts at twenty-seven
Postmodern Disseminations 131 weeks. Other experiments indicate that the spatio-temporal conditions that must be identified in order to think in causal terms can be singled out by infants of four and a half months. Children’s conceptual equipment includes a number of spontaneously evolving constraints which allow them to distinguish among the properties to be expected in different ontological domains and which are closely related to the emergence of causal thinking. One of the frequently undesirable results of the unavoidable interplay between ideology and these spontaneous cognitive constraints is our propensity to extend to social differences assumptions that have proved successful in dealing with the natural world. This process, which corresponds to what Topitsch has labelled biomorphism, will become less pronounced in societies whose members no longer interact with organisms other than other humans or pets. It must be kept in mind, however, that despite the generally pernicious ideological effects of biomorphism, complete disregard of the experiences formed when dealing with living things will have grave consequences for the survival of groups or individuals. 9 It is at this point that the confluence of ideological and cognitive approaches proves to be fruitful. For if it is necessary to pay attention to the ideological uses to which these cognitive mechanisms can be put—the most insidious among them being the tendency to view society in organic terms, as well as the proclivity to represent, and by the same token validate, authority by generating divine anthropomorphic figures—it is also imperative to realize that the effectiveness of these ideological constructs depends upon the ease with which we can conjure up imaginary bodies and no less imaginary actions, and the facility with which those representations are transmitted.10 It can be said in effect that it is because of the naturalness with which organismic conceptions of reality impose themselves that looking at reality through them satisfies a utopian longing for that which is spontaneous. But by the same token, that very naturalness can be manipulated for ideological ends: in this sense utopia’s dreams are ideology’s ground. These issues are not unrelated to the postmodern uneasy relation to ideology and utopia. If, in their eagerness to return to a prelapsarian state, the current denouncers of modernity must reject the ideological and cognitive formations that seem to be the embodiments of all of modernity’s evils, they must at the same time continue to depend upon the same ideological and cognitive mechanisms to establish themselves and their theories as utopian alternatives. To return to a world which is not ruled by identity and presence, they must reject the tyranny of the signified11 and that of the state—not just the modern nation state, whose emergence parallels the Enlightenment, but any association that involves solidified difference, that is, difference which, seen as nonarbitrary, as identical with itself, appears as ruled by the principle of identity. At the same time, postmodern must repudiate the very possibility of the existence of the cognitive mechanisms that generate those differences, since, as the product of evolution, these mechanisms would also have to be regarded as nonarbitrary and therefore as ruled by identity. Claiming utterly to reject the totalitarian rule of a self-identity that reigns through sacralized differences,12 postmodern utopians postulate a rule of pure difference and gratuitous transgression, one which, however, being undifferentiated and grounded only upon itself, is even more subject to the rule of identity. Like most transgressions, postmodern ones, particularly when enacted under the auspices of academic institutions, prove to be little more than ritualized, riskless mirror-like inversions of the established order.13 In any event, postmodern utopians’ protests against reason are less protests against a message against which nothing can be done—for any action against the message would require making use of it—than protests against the messenger: protests
132 G. Benavides not against a reason which is after all unassailable but against reason’s messenger, modernity. But, mystical antinomianism aside, it is the case not just that our experience as species sets limits to the kind of ludic dissemination favored by postmodernists but also that in order to be perceivable, the disseminations themselves must make use of the species’ cognitive mechanisms; therefore, even if the so-called master discourse of the Enlightenment were to be utterly abandoned, there would be an underlying cognitive master discourse which the species could transcend only at the cost of extinction. The problem for postmodern masters is that while the peculiar logic of their system and the expectations of their devotees force them to make momentous declarations about the end of signification or about end of ‘man,’ such claims require a degree of comprehensibility as well as the existence of those who do the comprehending. Consider, for example, the wager that Foucault makes in suave apocalyptic tones at the conclusion of Les mots et les choses: ‘l’homme s’effacerait, comme à la limite de la mer un visage de sable’ (Foucault 1966, p. 398). Since (except for some radical environmentalist groups) it would be exceedingly difficult to find a philosophy that openly proclaims the need to act in a way that would necessarily lead to the disappearance of actual human beings, or that presupposes their nonexistence, it will be imperative that, like most philosophical concepts, this key postmodern theologoumenon be understood in a semi-propositional rather than in a propositional manner.14 That is one of the reasons postmodern utterances are frequently referred to not as arguments but as ‘gestures’; as owing their being less to reasoning than to the agency of the theorist; not as true or false but as the frequently contradictory but nonetheless memorable episode15 in the fragmented unfolding of an author’s career. If one approaches from this perspective the appeal of the postmodern prophets of extremity, it becomes clear that despite the emphasis on anonymous discourses and on the death of the author, it is precisely the sovereign gesture of the master thinker, the groundless decision of the Author, that has to be obeyed.16 Boyer identifies as characterizing ‘charismatic proclivity’ (Boyer 1994, pp. 167–9) and ‘traditional discourse’ many aspects of both postmodern philosophers and postmodern philosophy aspects ranging from the causal connection between the truth of the utterance—or, actually, the power of the gesture—and the status of the speaker (Boyer 1990, pp. 99, 100) to the fact that ‘traditional utterances’ are remembered in an episodic rather than in a semantic manner (Boyer 1990, p. 43). Instead of the alleged postmodern conceptual space—variously conceived as a pleroma inhabited or rather constituted by power; or, in a negative theology fashion, as a vertiginous self-cancelling ruled by difference/deferral; or as infinitely, and gratuitously, fractured—we seem to find a pre-modern conceptual space in which texts are accepted, remembered and employed by virtue of their having been produced not by mere shamans who, after an initiatic journey, are able to wrestle game or a diseased soul away from a powerful divinity but by a theoretical caudillo who can wrestle his genealogy from Power itself. My aim, however, is not so much to show that a body of high-sounding claims is incoherent or wrong: in the present academic climate, claims based upon experimental research will be dismissed out of hand as ‘positivism’ or, devastatingly, as merely boring. Rather, concerned as I am with studying both the ideological and the cognitive reasons for the appeal of ideologies, I seek to demonstrate that a cognitive approach can explain the reasons for the formal appeal of certain postmodern claims. It is true that this attempt may in fact appear as redundant, since there is no dearth of studies which put postmodernism in its place. To mention but one particularly lucid example, in The Condition of Postmodernity David Harvey places postmodernism in its proper social and
Postmodern Disseminations 133 above all economic location as the counterpart of a capitalism that ‘is becoming ever more tightly organized through dispersal, geographical mobility, and flexible responses to labour markets, labour processes, and consumer markets’ (Harvey, p. 159). From this angle, focusing on the carriers of this discourse, one can regard the riskless, indeed institutionalized, verbal antinomianism in which postmodern academics engage as the cri de coeur of those who, after the almost disappearance of public intellectuals, are condemned to irrelevance (Benavides 1995b). Less charitably, we can understand their vehement denunciation of any grand récit, and of any notion of causality, as the denial of their own parasitic position in relation to the master discourse of capitalism. But, even while granting that Harvey’s and similar explanations are correct, it is still necessary to investigate why some varieties of postmodernism have become more fashionable than others, and why the peculiar inversions found in Derridean deconstruction and in Foucaultian cratology have assumed the shapes that have made them so popular among academics.17 For this reason, and given the limited space available, rather than attempting a close reading of the foundational postmodern écrits, it may be better simply to refer to what can be called the postmodern vulgata—that is, the set of semi-propositions that constitute the master discourse. One of them is the notion of écriture. Despite Derrida’s disclaimers about the metaphorical character of the primacy of écriture, the very absurdity of the extreme version of the claim cannot but command one’s attention18 (the fact that this claim will appeal to those in the writing professions is also worth keeping in mind). The same is true of the perverse reversal of the relationship between the ‘signifier’ and the ‘signified’, the two components of the Saussurean sign made in De la grammatologie. Here the utopian talk about ‘floating signifiers’ transforms them into signifiers of themselves, which means in effect that in a coincidentia oppositorum kind of way ‘signifiers’ are both ‘signifiers’ and ‘signifieds’, and therefore the process of signification has ceased. More insidious than the disappearance of the signified is the fact that this play of mirrors manages to conceal once and for all the most important component of the process of signification, namely, the referent. Deconstruction therefore turns out to be but another instance of idealism. In Foucault’s case, the replacement of a power that represses by one that brings into being performs the same functions as the Derridean play with signification: the reversal of one’s expectations and the consequent ‘salience’ (in Boyer’s sense) of the new understanding of power functions in a way that seems to exemplify Shklowsky’s concept of ‘defamiliarization’ (ostranenie)—except that in this case, the foregrounded object of our gaze (to use a modish term) is less power as a concept than the theoretical daring of the auteur. In Foucault’s case, theoretical bravado reaches its climax not with mere reversal but with the transformation of power into a cosmic principle, for at its most inflated, power functions as the fons et origo, nay, as the very substance of all that is. Such exorbitation renders power worthless for any analytical purposes. Yet the very emptiness of the notion proves that the attempts to conceptualize a space freely traversed and constituted by a power that is grounded upon itself leads back to the irrefutable self-identity of tautology. In political terms, power’s self-validation leads not only to the quaint anarchism of wellplaced academics but also back to the decisionism of the 1920s and 30s, an issue that cannot be explored here. In terms of cognitive constraints, Derrida’s and Foucault’s first principles prove that, however far one may want to go, one’s conceptual space is limited by paradoxes on one hand and by tautologies on the other. This is not the place to engage in an exercise in comparative mysticism. Indeed, considering that Foucault’s speculations are most likely of no more than passing interest,
134 G. Benavides one may not want to spend any time exploring the parallels between his tautological universalization of power and Nicholas of Cusa’s last attempts to conceptualize the ground of everything, a ground that is also the ground of itself: the supreme tautologies built around power—possest, posse fieri, posse ipsum—which together with the nonaliud—the tautology built around identity and difference—occupied the Cardinal’s last years, superseding the earlier paradoxical formulation of the coincidentia oppositorum. Still, if such research were to be undertaken, and especially if it were clear that Foucault had not read and appropriated Cusanus’ ideas, one would have to come to the conclusion that the more extreme a philosophical speculation and the more it seeks to escape from constraints, the more it will be shaped by logical forms. A key difference between the two is that, unlike Foucault, Nicholas did not attempt to base a political philosophy on a tautology.19 Having employed the terms ‘mystical’ and ‘mysticism’ in this discussion of postmodern discourse, it is necessary to say that this use is not derogatory. Quite the contrary. Any exploration of the formal features of extreme forms of discourse will inevitably lead to those utterances which, even more than the predictable postmodern ones, seem to push the process of signification in their own predictable way to its logical limits. But here as well, one would have to investigate the logical structure and (possibly making use of some of Bloch’s and Boyer’s insights, who, however, do not explore this issue and employ the term ‘mysticism’ in the sense of ‘supernatural’, as most British anthropologists do) the cognitive salience of mystical texts, utterances and actions. At the same time, it is necessary to explore the ideological functions of those mystical texts, paying attention to the already mentioned interplay between the utopian/mystical and the ideological. One must consider interaction, for example, between the desire to transcend the limitations of grammar or hierarchy or gender (or of desire itself) and the historical and social location of this yearning (as done by Kolakowski and Certeau). In this context, the parallels among some of the postmodern masters’ rejection of presence and master narratives, Adorno’s tortured negative dialectic, and some of the utterances usually labelled as ‘mystical’ (particularly those of the negative theology type) are not surprising at all—even though, when talking about the Frankfurt school and French post-structuralism, one is tempted to say, paraphrasing Marx, that what made its first appearance as tragedy has reappeared as vaudeville. Likewise, the negative-theology approach to Derrida favored in some Catholic circles is not simply one more example of the traditional theological ability to enlist anybody and anything in its reenchantment enterprise. Such annexation seems rather to parallel the process undergone by Adorno’s collaborator, Horkheimer, when his own negative philosophy transfigured itself into a mystical search for the wholly other.20 As in all cases of cognitively deviant systems of signification, whether we are dealing with postmodern texts with speculation about the non-identical, or with the pseudoDionysius’ shining darkness, it is the unexpected, counterintuitive character of the text, utterance or theory that constitutes its appeal.21 At the same time, we should keep in mind Boyer’s remarks to the effect that religious representations could not be represented ‘if their ontological assumptions did not confirm an important background of intuitive principles’, which means that ‘one must strike a balance between the requirements of imagination and learnability’.22 Following Boyer, one can say that a philosophical system that comprises only counterintuitive claims will fail, while, conversely, one that confirms only intuitive ontologies will have little attentiondemanding power (see Boyer 1994a, p. 122). In terms of deconstructionist and postmodern ideologies in general, this means that if it is true that for a number of
Postmodern Disseminations 135 reasons, including the appeal of the counterintuitive character of postmodern claims, a number of academics will cling to the new philosophy (until a new one comes along), it is also true that because this philosophy does not confirm most people’s intuitive principles, it will be rejected by them. To be sure, this rejection will trouble neither theorists nor academics. On the contrary, since the doctrine’s lack of appeal will be understood in a self-validating manner as having been caused by the tyranny of one of the many Western ‘-centrisms’, the rejection itself will increase the counterintuitive appeal of the teachings. (A similar process is at the heart of Adorno’s notion of the non-identical and in mystical discourse and practice.) In all these cases, however, it is the formal characteristics—the cognitively constrained postmodern disseminations—of the system which, acting as magnetic surfaces, attract (or repel) those who will remember (or forget) them and who, if a conversion of sorts occurs, will see the world through the lenses it provides. In this sense, but only in this sense, it can be said that being what they are by virtue of their formal characteristics, all philosophical and religious discourses are, like aesthetic creations, reducible only to themselves. Still, one has to ask whether these irreducible surfaces would have acquired their salient forms, their shapes, if mechanisms other than cognitive ones had not been at work bringing those surfaces into being.23
Notes 1 As Hans Albert’s Critical Rationalism demonstrates, the rejection of foundationalism does not entail the rejection of serious thinking (Albert). 2 On rationality and relativism see Wilson, Hollis and Lukes, and Horton. One uses the expression ‘shed light’ not without trepidation, given the current lack of popularity of oculocentrism. 3 British (and Canadian) authors are generally less credulous in matters continental than their American counterparts: see Callinicos 1989; Connor; Dews; Harvey; Palmer. See also Habermas and Merquior. 4 On Foucault see Habermas, p. 324 (italics in the original), and Dews, p. 193. For an overall critique of Foucault it would be difficult to surpass Merquior 1985. On universals see Brown. 5 See Sperber 1982, p. 180; cf. Gellner, p. 185. 6 The parallels between postmodern and Ma¯dhyamika Buddhism defenses against accusations of self-refutation have been noticed more than once; what is not sufficiently emphasized is that the instability of soteriologies based upon paradoxicality necessarily leads both to the elaboration of philosophies built around tautologies—philosophies which, however, cling to their soteriological conceit (see Benavides). 7 Particularly inept are Derrida’s (and his admirers’) Orientalist phantasies about the presumably unique ‘Western’ character of phonocentrism and logocentrism (Derrida 1967). Anyone in the least familiar with Indian philosophy knows that nothing in Western philosophy and mysticism reaches the intensity of the Indian concern with language as sound (which goes back to the days of the Rg Veda and continues to this day). At the risk of stating the obvious, it may be necessary to remind Derrideans that the devana¯garı¯ alphabet is syllabic, not ideographic, it being necessary to use a special sign, vira¯ma, to cancel the vocalic sound in order to represent, instead of the usual syllable, say /ta/, the consonant /t/. This last detail is relevant insofar as it reminds one of the extent to which this alphabet ‘always already’ conveys vowels along with consonants. As for logocentrism, a perusal of any competent book on Indian or Buddhist philosophy will disabuse one of platitudes about the supralogical Oriental mind (there is no need to say anything about phalocentrism: a look at a Linga should suffice). 8 This approach is indebted to a number of publications by Maurice Bloch and Dan Sperber; see Bloch 1985, p. 31ff.; 1991; Sperber 1985, 1987. See, more recently, Boyer 1992, pp. 28, 41; 1993, p. 33ff.; 1994a, pp. 14–28, 59, 84–8, 265; 1994b, p. 391; Lawson, p. 191. 9 On child development see Bloch 1985, p. 27ff.; Boyer 1992, p. 43–5; 1993, pp. 35, 129; 1994a, p. 110ff.; on cross-cultural stability see Boyer 1994a, p. 291; on causal thinking see Boyer 1994a, pp. 137–8, 152; on domain specificity and intuitive ontologies see Atran, p. 57ff.; Boyer 1994a,
136 G. Benavides
10 11 12 13 14 15 16
17 18 19
20 21 22 23
p. 100ff., 154; 1994b, p. 394ff.; on the evolutionary reasons for making these assumptions see Boyer 1990, p. 105. Since I have been asked to discuss postmodernism from a specific angle, making use only of a couple of recent books, I will limit the number of references to a minimum. On the epidemiology of representations see Sperber 1985; 1990; 1994. The tyranny of the signified rather than that of the referent, the latter being the truly unmentionable presence. This indeed seems to be the way in which religion functions: see Benavides 1989 for preliminary remarks on religion as the sacralization of difference. On whether transgressions transgress see Benavides 1995b. On propositional and semi-propositional representations see Sperber 1982; 1985; 1990. An application of these concepts and further references can be found in Benavides 1995a. On aletheia as ‘no-forgetting’, ‘not forgettable’, ‘attention-demanding’ see Boyer 1990, p. 49. It can be argued, of course, that this deification of the intellectual agent applies not just to postmodern maı¯tres à penser or to their totemic father, Nietzsche, but to any important intellectual figure. This is no doubt true, and probably has to do with our proclivity to think in anthropomorphic terms; nevertheless, anyone who has had to endure a sycophantic ‘as Nietzsche says’ or ‘as Foucault says’ will have noticed a breathless urgency that would be unimaginable in a reference to, say, Habermas (not to mention Hans Albert or Perry Anderson). Some may simply want to argue that the reasons for the popularity of certain authors in US universities has to do with the availability of translations. For despite their clamor for a multitude of clashing discourses, postmodern devotees tend to want to have theirs in English. Gellner has consistently emphasized the need to investigate the role played by absurdity qua absurdity in behavior and discourse: see Gellner, pp. 34, 39, 43 (also in 1970, pp. 36, 42, 46). The works in which Nicholas of Cusa (1401–64) explores power as the foundation of all that is are De principio (1459), Trialogus de possest (1460) and De apice theoriae (1464); speculation on the non-other can be found in De genesi (1447) and De non-aliud (1462); all of them can be found in the second volume of his works (1966). On Nicholas’ journey from paradox to tautology see Benavides 1983, which is devoted to a comparison between two systems built around tautologies—Cusanus’ and Na¯ga¯rjuna’s. While the soteriologies of the deconstructionists and the ma¯dhyamikas revolve around the issue of identity and difference, as does Cusanus’ speculation about the non-other, Cusanus’ speculation about power carries to its logical conclusion what Foucault in a exhibitionistic manner tried to grapple with five hundred years later in front of an expectant audience. The parallels between mystical discourse and Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s critical theory are explored in Benavides 1990. See Sperber 1994, p. 55; Boyer 1992, pp. 51–2; 1994a, pp. 48, 59, 112; 1994b, pp. 394, 404–5. See Boyer 1992, pp. 45, 52; 1994a; p. 121, cf. p. 287; 1994b, p. 406. I intend to address this issue in a forthcoming essay tentatively entitled ‘Aesthetics, Ideology and the Irreducibility of Religious Surfaces’.
Bibliography
Albert, Hans, Traktat u¨ber kritische Vernunft, Tübingen, J.C.B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck) 19804 [1968]. Atran, ‘Wither ‘ethnoscience’? in Pascal Boyer (ed.) 1993, pp. 48–70. Benavides, Gustavo, ‘Die absolute Voraussetzung von Sein und Nichts bei Na¯ga¯rjuna und Nicolaus Cusanus’, in Walter Strolz (ed.), Sein und Nichts in der abendländischen Mystik, Freiburg-Basel-Wien, Herder 1983, pp. 59–71. Benavides, Gustavo, ‘Religious articulations of power’, in G. Benavides and M. W. Daly (eds), Religion and Political Power, Albany, State University of New York Press 1989, pp. 1–12, 197–202. Benavides, Gustavo, ‘The Identical, the non-Identical and the Mystical’, paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion, New Orleans, 18 November 1990. Benavides, Gustavo, ‘Cognitive and Ideological Aspects of Divine Anthropomorphism’, Religion 25 (1995a), pp. 9–22. Benavides, Gustavo, ‘On Ranters, Fools and Antinomians; or When does Transgression transgress?’, paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion, Philadelphia, 20 November 1995b.
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GUSTAVO BENAVIDES is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Villanova University. His most recent publications are essays in Religion and in Curators of the Buddha: The Study of Buddhism under Colonialism (University of Chicago Press, 1995). Department of Theology and Religious Studies, Villanova University, PA 19085, U.S.A.