I would argue that postmodernism, in this instance, is not so much an
expression of a post-secular or truly postmodern situation, but actually an
inadvertent recuperation of an older form of authority within an alienated
and alienating context. The historical connection between postmodernism
and Protestant Christianity is something that Johannes Wolfart has discussed
persuasively; namely, that the postmodernist remedy for the Enlightenment
is little more than a revaluation of familiar premodern theological judgments
(Wolfart 2000:395). Examined in this light, Walter ’s conception of postmod-
ern attitudes toward death could harbor an unexpected return of magical
behavior and premodern authority.
In contrast to traditional and postmodern attitudes toward death, modern
death, theorized by Walter as the highly rationalizing discourse of the med-
ical profession in the name of care, can be viewed as coming into conflict
with its own mandate of care which ideally respects both the universal human-
ity and the individual integrity of the subject. The more disembodied that
communicative forms of rationality become, the more distanced that expert
cultures will be from lifeworld processes. This impersonal setting, what could
be viewed of as the reification of the lifeworld, creates the context for a post-
modern response, the social tendency toward re-enchantment. However, as
Habermas shows, modernism need not be conceived only as rational manip-
ulation. The abstract and bureaucratic mechanisms of modern institutions
should not be viewed as indicative of the failure of modern thought as such,
rather, as prejudicial and unwarranted institutions of authority. Thus, I think
it is reasonable to say that it is not the secular emphasis of modernism that
has failed, since it is through a public vocabulary that political and social
institutions can be changed most efficiently, but the failure on the part of
moderns to critically evaluate their own attitudes toward death and author-
ity. In other words, in Habermas’s critical social theory modernity is inade-
quately understood when theorized as a colonizing power of technical
manipulation, since the ideals of modernity are inherent to communicative
action, thus contradicting this tendency. According to Habermas, instrumen-
tal forms of reason are parasitic, dependent upon a more original, commu-
nicative use of reason.
Although medical institutions function with a high degree of authority, in
postmodernism this authority has been gradually replaced or at least tem-
pered by an almost mystical sovereignty of the individual and the supposed
right of the individual to trump or ignore scientific expertise with mytho-
200 • Kenneth G. MacKendrick