Almost a half century ago a change took place in the humanities, and by extension in the fledgling field of religious studies. By the 1990s that change had been a sea change. By the mid-1980s the change had come to be known as “postmodernism”. Today the expression, which is just as vague and polysemic as it was forty years, is still thrown around with abandon, especially in theological studies. Ex-evangelicals, for example, promiscuously and ignorantly misuse the term “deconstruction”, introduced by the doyen of the movement Jacques Derrida, in a way that is largely meaningless and unrelated to what postmodernism was all about. This essay is intended to provide some historical and insight and clarity.
This article is published in two installments.
“Postmodernism” is a slippery and evanescent concept that has been used in a mind-boggling number of different ways ever since it gained currency in the early 1980s with the publication and translation into English of a book by French philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard entitled The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Although this article is for a reference work that focuses on the Bible, “postmodernism” as a conceptual project has had very little direct impact – if anything significant at all – on Biblical interpretation.
As Stephen Moore and Yvonne Sherwood write in their preface to a contemporary history of Biblical scholarship, even at the end of its noisy run within the academy postmodernist theory “was still widely perceived as a rather distant satellite orbiting the historical-critical core of the biblical studies discipline, and now that satellite seemed in danger of disintegrating without ever having come close enough to register on the hermeneutical horizons of most biblical scholars.”[1] But recent Biblical scholarship could not have taken the methodological twists and turns it did in recent decades without having absorbed so much of the theoretical ambience that has overshadowed the field of theology and religious studies for the past half century.
Therefore, we will have examine how the notion of the “postmodern” evolved along so many different trajectories from so many varying angles, and how it colored the contemporary Christian imaginary as a whole, which by default shaped Biblical scholarship.
In the opening paragraph of The Postmodern Condition Lyotard wrote: “the object of this study is the condition of knowledge in the most highly developed societies. I have decided to use the word postmodern to describe that condition.” Ironically, The Postmodern Condition was not intended as any kind of speculative manifesto, or precedent-busting philosophical treatise. As the subtitle suggests, it was contracted by the Council of Universities of the Provincial Government of Quebec as a rather prosaic analysis for the benefit of the educational bureaucracy on “the state of knowledge” around 1980.
In the introduction Lyotard notes that the word was already in use “among sociologists and critics,” indicating “the state of our culture following the transformations which, since the end of the nineteenth century, have altered the game rules for science, literature, and the arts.” [2] Lyotard described the situation as an unprecedented tug of war between the sciences and the humanistic disciplines, which had begotten a “crisis of narratives” or – in what is perhaps the most quoted phrase from the entire volume – “incredulity toward metanarratives.” Lyotard went on to expand on what he meant by this phrase.
This incredulity is undoubtedly a product of progress in the sciences: but that progress in turn presupposes it. To the obsolescence of the metanarrative apparatus of legitimation corresponds, most notably, the crisis of metaphysical philosophy and of the university institution which in the past relied on it. The narrative function is losing its functors, its great hero, its great dangers, its great voyages, its great goal. It is being dispersed in clouds of narrative language elements—narrative, but also denotative, prescriptive, descriptive, and so on.[3]
To this day such an account strikes us akin to what a friend of mine who worked her whole professional life in a state educational bureaucracy has referred to as “pedagese”. In truth, Lyotard admits that is exactly what he is doing. In the introduction Lyotard thanks the government of Quebec for allowing him to play in the same sandbox as civil servants. “The author of the report,” he self-effacingly quips, “is a philosopher, not an expert.”[4] But Lyotard was engaged in something much more than a technical scrutiny of how different pedagogical strategies and their pragmatic protocols for implementation function within the milieu of Francophone higher learning.
He sought for the most part to show how the discourses of contemporary French arts and letter that had come be to labelled “post-structuralist” (referencing its systemic critique of the dominant postwar methodology known as “structuralism”) profoundly informed in ways that heretofore had not be obvious the more diffuse social apparatus for the production of “knowledge”. Thus he sought to map out the new episteme, as the grey eminence of the French intellectual scene Michel Foucault had called it, for what social scientists and critics were then characterizing as the “postindustrial” age.
Foucault understood an episteme as a set assumptions and procedures in a given era for determining what is true and what is false, that is, what can be considered legitimate knowledge.[5] The function of higher education in Lyotard’s eyes was to provide institutional “legitimation” for this knowledge.
Lyotard was responding obliquely to a series of conversations on the continent that has been launched with publication of 1973 of a book by the eminent German philosopher Jürgen Habermas entitled Legitimation Crisis. In his book Habermas explored the means by which “late capitalism” had undermined historic forms of social, religious, or political legitimation. Now it is the economic system alone with its productive and distributive capacity that confers legitimacy, leading to a “legitimation crisis”.
Habermas wrote that under the new post-industrial regime of late capitalism “the arrangement of formal democratic institutions and procedures permits administrative decisions to be made largely independently of specific motives of the citizens.” [6] Although he does not say so explicitly, Lyotard throughout The Postmodern Condition implies it is the role of the university, the postindustrial “knowledge factory”, to shore up once again the kinds of normative justifications that make late capitalism politically defensible.
However, Lyotard’s narrowly circumscribed motives in giving currency to the locution “postmodern” were soon scattered to the four winds. The idea of “post-industrial” knowledge systems – what Lyotard borrowing from Ludwig Wittgenstein constantly in his monography referred to as “language games” – was too abstruse, once his “report” to the Quebec educational commission had been translated into English, for the Anglophone reader. Likewise, the term “post-structuralism” seemed even more obscure, since it implied familiarity with the “structuralist” methodology that captivated French academia but remained with a few exceptions foreign for the most part to the sensibilities of researchers in the United States and the United Kingdom.
Within a very short time after the translation of Lyotard’s monograph the locutions “postmodern” and “postmodernist” acquired a public life of their own. It came to connote not only something progressive and “alternative”, but also everything in the conservative mind that was wrong with contemporary culture from new attitudes about sex to the boom in New Age styles of spirituality. The word itself had become promiscuous in its application and diffuse in its usage. Broadly speaking, it became an all-purpose signifier for the American “cultural revolution” that began during the protests against the Vietnam War and were epitomized in the Summer of Love in the Bay Area in 1967 as well as in the hippie movement.
At the same time, it came to be pointedly associated with an intellectual fashion that was in that day taking the academic humanities by storm – what was known as “deconstruction.” As Gregory Jones-Katz notes, deconstruction and postmodernism were imported from Europe to American about the same time and were immediately conflated with each other, although Lyotard’s project diverged significantly from Derrida’s.[7]
The popular perception was that Lyotard’s and Derrida’s approaches were bound up with “a more general fracturing of society and culture” that was not haphazard but the actual output of “domestic institutions, publications, classroom experiences, conferences, pedagogical programs, and philosophical and literary – critical practices that instituted— not merely adopted— deconstruction in the United States.”[8]
Gayatri Spivak, a student of Derrida, coined the word “post-structuralism” in her introduction to Of Grammatology, what is perhaps a seminal and most influential of the latter’s early works.[9] Derrida introduced the word “deconstruction”, however, to emphasize how post-structuralism works in practice. He adapted the expression from Martin Heidegger who in his later writings had talked about the “destruction” (German=Destruktion, or Abbau) of the history of metaphysics. In his “Letter to a Japanese Friend Derrida wrote:
At that time structuralism was dominant. ‘Deconstruction’ seemed to be going in the same direction since the word signified a certain attention to structures (which themselves were neither simply ideas, nor forms, nor syntheses, nor systems). To deconstruct was also a structuralist gesture or in any case a gesture that assumed a certain need for the structuralist problematic. But it was also an anti-structuralist gesture, and its fortune rests in part on this ambiguity. Structures were to be undone, decomposed, desedimented…socio-institutional, political, cultural, and above all and from the start philosophical.[10]
“Structuralism”, of course, as a philosophical method had been all the rage in France for decades, whereas it was virtually unknown in the United States. In fact, it was at a conference at Johns Hopkins University in the fall of 1966 designed to introduce structuralism to an American academic audience that the young Derrida made his first public appearance on that side of the pond. The outcome was thoroughly unexpected. Instead of persuading his audience to take structuralism seriously, he criticized and undermined it.[11]
Yet, even though American academics were not at all conversant with the context in which Derrida employed such familiar post-structuralist idioms as “logocentrism” and the “metaphysics of presence”, they perceived in “deconstruction” a viable alternative to the regnant methodological paradigms of positivist science and the pervasive influence of Anglo-American linguistic philosophy.
Today it is difficult to conceive how what came to be known as “analytic philosophy” crowded out all other possible canons for argumentation and explanation. German and French schools of philosophical inquiry were generally regarded, except in certain quarters, as weird and muddle-headed. French structuralism, let alone post-structuralism, was viewed for the most part as the sort of dialect that might be spoken on Mars. But Americans historically have always been receptive to intellectual fads drifting across the Atlantic from Europe.
“Deconstructionism”, as it came to be called in the United States, made its landfall among American academics with the so-called Yale School of Literary Criticism, who adopted Derrida as one of their own. They included Paul de Man, J. Hillis Miller, Geoffrey Hartman, and Harold Bloom. Deconstruction brings to brings to the fore in literary theory, Bloom wrote in the preface, “the difficulty of locating meaning totally within one textual source.” In other words, one cannot simply derive what the text “means” by doing an internal analysis of its structural elements or even the original context in which was first created. One must consider the ways in which its different modes of signification have evolved over time with different reading publics, cultural sensibilities, and translations. “Each text is shown to imbed other texts
by a most cunning assimilation whose form is the subject both of psychoanalytic and of purely rhetorical criticism.”[12] Derrida’s newfound eminence within the Yale School, however, swiftly typecast him as a literary theorist, obscuring his training and stature in France as an upcoming philosopher. The American philosophical establishment, which even in modest Continental enclaves knew nothing of structuralism, or post-structuralism, refused to take him seriously, dismissing him cavalierly as merely a “critic”, or a “writer”.
II.
That all changed in 1979 when American philosopher Richard Rorty published his acclaimed treaties entitled Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, which shook analytical philosophy to the core and elicited howls of outrage. Rorty’s controversial thesis was stated in the introduction. The commitment of analytic philosophy “to the construction of a permanent, neutral framework for inquiry”, he insisted was futile. Furthermore, the search for a viable theory of reference, which correlates the word as it is with the world as we think it, “is misguided.”[13] Moreover, “there is no ‘normal” philosophical discourse which provides common commensurating ground for those who see science and edification as, respectively, ‘rational’ and ‘irrational’.”[14] It was in the context of this observation that Rorty commended Derrida and “deconstruction” for the first time within the American philosophical academy.
The endorsement made the latter persona non grata among Rorty’s cronies, but it caught the attention of some academic theologians who took it as an invitation to leap headlong into the murky waters of the new enthusiasm over “postmodernism”. In 1982 the theological companion to Deconstruction and Literature was published by Crossroad. Sporting the similar title Deconstruction and Theology, it consisted of a collection of essays by younger and upcoming scholars, most of whom did not have the name recognition at the time of the Yale School, at lesser institutions scattered around the country. Derrida himself was notably absent from the roster.
The lone single celebrity author in the compendium, however, was Thomas J. J. Altizer, who had founded the movement known as “death of God theology” in the late 1960s. The editors at Crossroad had actually insisted on inviting Altizer at the last minute because they were afraid that without him Deconstruction and Theology would not have the scholarly gravitas required to sell books. Hesitant at first, Altizer agreed, but in comparison with the other contributors, he only cited Derrida in general ways that either shored up, or embellished, his own theological project. Much of the substance of his article “History as Apocalypse” did not really address either the issues or kinds of hermeneutical puzzles Derrida had posed, striking instead highly nuanced variations on the themes of his 1980 work Total Presence.
The other articles in the Deconstructing Theology volume focused principally on Derrida’s preoccupation at the time with the reading of texts – in this case theological texts – along with various riffs on Heidegger’s criticism of “ontotheology” and his demand for the “overcoming of metaphysics”. But my own introductory essay entitled “The Deconstruction of God” sounded particular notes that would be taken up in the decade that followed as leading motifs of what came to be called “postmodern theology”, which a rising generation of religious thinkers began to pair intimately with the “death of God” initiative. “Deconstruction is the death of God put into writing,” I declared succinctly.[15]
It was Mark C. Taylor, however, who would broaden the horizons of such “deconstructionist theology” to assimilate much of the entire, writhing spectrum of “postmodernist” French thought into American theological discourse. In his essay “Text as Victim” as part of the Deconstructing Theology volume, Taylor had made tangible gestures beyond Heidegger, Derrida, and the ballooning “deconstructionist” enterprise that was now impacting so much of the humanities. “Postmodernism opens with the sense of irrevocable loss and incurable fault,” Taylor opined. “This wound is inflicted by the overwhelming awareness of death – a death that ‘begins’ with the death of God and ‘ends’ with the death of our selves. We are in a time between times and a place which is no place.
Here our reflection must ‘begin’.”[16] Postmodern religious reflection begins at what might be called the “zero point” of a culture that suffers from a profound lack of metaphysical, or even theoretical grounding. “The failure (or refusal) to come to terms with the radical implications of the death of God has made it impossible for most Western theology to approach postmodernism.”[17] The death of God is not just a problem for theology. It concerns the entire architecture of signification which all the scientific, social scientific, and humanistic disciplines conspire to hold together.
God, self, history, and book are…bound in an intricate relationship in which each mirrors the other. No single concept can be changed without altering all of the others. As a result of this thorough interdependence, the news of the death of God cannot really reach our ears until its reverberations are traced in the notions of self, history and book. The echoes of the death of God can be heard in the disappearance of the self, the end of history, and the closure of the book. We can begin to unravel this web of conceptual relations by plotting the coordinates of a new a/theological network.[18]
The aim of a postmodern theology, according to Taylor, is to “trace the border and retrace the margin” of the entirety of Western theological discourse that all somehow revolves around the hole in the donut, the metaphysical vacuum, the empty signifier that for millennia has been inscribed as “God.” Taylor coined the word “erring,” that is, “roaming through the labyrinth of this word” through which “we catch an initial glimpse of the wiles and ways ofpostmodern a/theology.”[19]
But Taylor’s “a/theology”, as articulated in Erring, was in many respects merely an expansion and embellishment of what Altizer had been saying all along, but making the case with a more sophisticated appreciation for French philosophy. Just as Altizer’s leitmotif from the very start had been the idea, first suggested by Luther and memorialized in Hegel’s declaration of the “Golgotha of Absolute Spirit”, that God had actually “died” on the Cross, so Taylor transposed this insight into a “postmodern” register with his observation that “the main contours of deconstructive a/theology begin to emerge with the realization of the necessary interrelation between the death of God and radical christology.” For Taylor, “radical christology is thoroughly incarnational- the divine ‘is’ the incarnate word”, whereas “this embodiment of the divine is the death of God.”[20]
By the late 1980s, however the word “postmodern” had “erred”, or wandered, quite far from its original range of connotations and become a swank, but frothy tag word for just about anything anybody in the Christian theological world was doing that seemed new at the moment. An anthology of essays that came out in 1989 entitled Varieties of Postmodern Theology underscores this point.[21] David Ray Griffin, the lead editor and well-known already in the field as a Whiteheadean, or process theologian, pronounced simply that postmodernism “refers to a diffuse sentiment rather than to any common set of doctrines – that humanity can and must go beyond the modern”.[22]
Griffin claimed that the mantle of postmodern theology should be borne not just by the deconstructionists, but also the well-established category of “liberation theology” and even the then fashionable conservative Catholic theology associated with the papacy of John Paul II.[23] Shortly thereafter Griffin co-authored with famed historian of religion Houston Smith under the title of Primordial Truth and Postmodern Theology, in which the latter claimed postmodernism must somehow be associated the classic religious doctrine known as “perennialism”, which contends that all religious habor a single, essential, universal truths and, as the old saying goes, “all paths lead to God.”[24]
In an article published in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion in 1990 (at the invitation of the editor at the time) I challenged the effort of Griffin and others like him to co-opt the word “postmodern” for what were essentially familiar and well-worn projects. That included also the new confusion of the concept, which Taylor had initiated, with death of God theology. In the article I argued that “a serious postmodernism has not left its stamp on religious thought”.[25] In the article I sought to explain to an audience of largely religious scholars how postmodernism indeed was rooted in literary theory and aesthetics, but I doubt it made any significant impression at the time on the field. The term continued to be deployed in even looser, preposterous, and even fanciful ways.
Just a short while thereafter a conference was held at Cambridge University in England. The conference included several select figures, the majority of whom had not previously been involved in the discussions over “postmodernism”. The proceedings of the conference were reworked into an anthology of seminal essays entitled Shadow of Spirit: Postmodernism and Religion, which set the discussion of postmodernism and religion on several new footings. This volume, which never gained much scholarly traction when it first came out, can actually be considered the watershed from which later streams of postmodern religious thinking flowed. Mark C. Taylor in the initial essay, in effect, dismissed much of what he had written in Erring, identifying Altizer and “a/theology” as only one within a miscellany of “postmodernisms”.
Locating the center of gravity for these “postmodernisms” now orbit of modernist aesthetics and performance theory (as I had done in “Fire and Roses”, Taylor zeroed in on contemporary artists such as the New York School and Andy Warhol as well as electronic communications in general in what might be described as an au courant and intellectually sophisticated update of Marshal McLuhan’s dictum that the “medium” is the message.
Alluding to then popular French philosopher Jean Baudrillard’s notion of “hyperreality”, Taylor characterized the postmodern view of the world as one in which the “thing itself is absorbed in the sign system.” The postmodernist aesthetic in many respects is simply the academic sidebar to the ubiquity of media culture. “As electronic media invade every corner of consciousness and activity, ‘reality’ becomes image.”[26] Taylor later elaborated this line of inquiry in his book Hiding, which profiled postmodernity as “the disappearance of depth”, or as the motto of the emerging digital media pioneers put it, leveraging an old folk saying, “what you see is what you get”.
However, Taylor at the same time fell back, as he was wont to do throughout his career, on a distinctive reading of the great philosopher German G.W.F. Hegel. For Hegel, and for the aesthetics of postmodernism, “surfaces harbor clues of depth that render seemingly senseless appearances surprisingly intelligible”. Discovery of this core postmodernist insight, therefore, lies with what is mistakenly labelled in the history of philosophy Hegel’s “idealism”. Taylor writes: “Consciousness and self-consciousness, Hegel argues, meet in a bone that is the Incarnation of Spirit.”[27]
Carl Raschke is Professor of Philosophy of Religion at the University of Denver and Senior Editor of the Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory. He is the author or co-author of over 20 books, including Postmodern Theology: A Biopic (Cascade Books, 2017). His book The End of Theology (originally published as The Alchemy of the Word: Language and the End of Theology) is generally considered to be the book that launched the postmodern revolution in religious studies.
[1] Stephen D. Moore and Yvonne Sherwood, The Invention of the Biblical Scholar: A Critical Manifesto (Minneapolis MN: Fortress Press, 2011), ix.
[2] See Jean–François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Language, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), xxiii.
[3] Ibid., xiv.
[4] Ibid., xxv.
[5] For Foucault, an “episteme” is an “epistemological field” which determines the “conditions” for all possible knowledge. See Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: The Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London: Tavistock/Routledge, 1970),xxii.
[6] Jürgen Habermas, Legitimation Crisis, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Oxford: Polity Press, 1988), 36.
[7] Gregory Jones-Katz, Deconstruction: An American Institution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021), 4ff.
[8] Ibid., 5.
[9] See Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Spivak (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1974).
[10] Derrida, “Letter to a Japanese Friend,” 2.
[11] See Imre Salusinsky, Criticism in Society (New York: Routledge, 1987), 9.
[12] Harold Bloom et. al., Deconstruction and Criticism (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979), xviii.
[13] Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), 6ff.
[14] Ibid., 364.
[15] Carl Raschke, “The Deconstruction of God”, in Thomas J. J. Altizer et. al., Deconstruction and Theology (New York: Crossroad, 1982), 27.
[16] Mark C. Taylor, Erring: A Postmodern A/Theology” (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 6.
[17] Ibid., 7.
[18] Ibid., 7-8.
[19] Ibid., 11.
[20] Ibid., 103.
[21] David Ray Griffin, William A. Beardless, Joe Holland (eds.), Varieties of Postmodern Theology (Albany NY: State University of New York Press, 1989).
[22] Griffin, “Series Introduction”, ibid., xii.
[23] Ibid., “Introduction”, 5.
[24] See David Ray Griffin and Huston Smith, Primordial Truth and Postmodern Theology (Albany NY: State University of New York Press, 1989).
[25] Carl Raschke, “Fire and Roses: Toward an Authentic Post-modern Religious Thinking”, Journal of the American Academy of Religion 58 (Winter 1990): 677.
[26] Mark C. Taylor, “Reframing Postmodernisms”, in Philippa Berry and Andrew Wernick (eds.), Shadow of Spirit: Postmodernism and Religion (London: Routledge, 1992), 19.
[27] Mark C. Taylor, Hiding (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 15.
