The Nature of Political Theory

264 The Nature of Political Theory

Derrida is not alone in this problem. The milder sceptics of course have their own
way out of this postmodern normative dilemma. They utilize rigorous conventional
argumentation up to a point, then stop and appeal to a culture or ethos. The argument
does not claim any ontological status, but simply views itself as afait accompli, that is,
thisis where we are. The strong scepticism and rigorous perspectivism of Nietzsche,
the younger Foucault and Derrida, and older Lyotard, do not have the luxury of
appealing to any dedivinized or desacralized ethos, culture, or teleology. They disrupt
everything. Nothing holds us. Nothing actually matters. We swim in a chaotic sea of
conventional signs, acknowledging irresolvable difference. Milder-mannered, more
optimistic American postmodernism finds this all too much. Rorty, for example,
views this latter idea as ‘a reductio ad absurdum of the philosophy of subjectivity’
(Rorty 1989: 62).^41 In Rorty, postmodernism almost becomes a benign modern
epicureanism. Strongly sceptical postmoderns, however, carry the deconstructive
effort against foundationalism to the point of perpetually deconstructing themselves
andpermanentlypostponing any meaning. The total critique still, however, leaves
something present—a spectral presence—but with no content, no world to confer
standards, no ontotheology, no logocentrism, only the total ever-present possibility
to create or will their own standards—a will to power. This is pristine absolute self-
creation. The upshot of this for political theory is to undermine any foundations.
Minimally that means subsisting strategically and ironically with an ethos or culture,
maximally it entails unending critique.

Notes

1. Poststructuralismandpostmodernismarenotidentical. Poststructuralismhasamoreovert
   methodological and philosophical focus. Postmodernism and postmodernity are more
   inclusive (one might say promiscuous) terms, involving much broader cultural critiques
   and range of referents. However, there is still a definite overlap and community of concerns
   between these terms. In this chapter postmodernism is taken as the core idea, of which
   poststructuralism is a methodological component. Postmodernism is viewed as a critical
   reaction to both structuralism and to the very broad phenomenon of modernity and an
   attempt at dissolution of the forms that are associated with modernity. It is a movement that
   crystallized in the early 1970s. It developed initially in the area of literary criticism, partly
   because of the deep emphasis on language in much postmodern thinking. By the 1980s,
   debates became more deeply involved in Derrida’s deconstruction ideas and Foucault
   genealogical critiques. However, a large grouping of theorists including Frederick Jameson,
   Jean Baudrillard, and Jean Francois Lyotard, amongst many others, have also developed
   postmodern ideas in their own distinctive ways.


2. ‘One ought not to make “cause” and “effect”into material things, as natural scientists do
   (and those who, like them, naturalize in their thinking), in accordance with the prevailing
   mechanistic stupidity which has the cause press and push until it “produces an effect”; one
   ought to employ “cause” and “effect” only as pureconcepts, that is to say as conventional
   fictions for the purpose of designation, mutual understanding,notexplanation. In the
   end, “in itself” there is nothing of “causal connection”, of “necessity”, of “psychological
   unfreedom”; there “the effect”does not“follow the cause”, there is no “law” rules. It iswe