Hugh Mercer Curtler and Denis Dutton in particular have come out strongly against the core concepts governing the Postmodernist thrust. Curtler's book Rediscovering Values: Coming to Terms with Postmodernism (1997) delineates the ways in which Postmodernism is wrong-headed:
1 It is anti-rational - attacking the very foundations of any attempt to establish truth through the process of claim, counter-argument & production of evidence; indeed, truth itself becomes a meaningless proposition since anti-rationalism cuts the ground from under any attempt at establishing the validity of the perspectives taken by Postmodernists as well.
2 It is anti-values - leading to the untenable situation where every
response is as valuable as any other (consigning to impotence the
Deconstructionist perspective itself). Discernment in aesthetics
becomes a lost art (a situation that might perhaps help produce
an efflorescence of bad art which, under normal circumstances,
would have been edited out). To quote from Curtler:
Today we find ourselves surrounded by
intellectuals who cannot distinguish sentiment
from sentimentality, truth from opinion, or fact
from fiction... (Curtler, p.23)
3 It sees knowledge as subjective and thus dependent soley on one's
perspective not realising that
we can agree ... that knowledge is perspectival - without
accepting the view that reality is a construct made up of
individual perspectives. (Curtler, p. 39)
4 It is reductionist in its approach to language seeing in it 'nothing
else than relationships of power and control' not recognizing that its
power is delimited by the fact that meaning is determined in part
by reference to our shared world.
Denis Dutton in a review entitled 'Debunking Deconstruction'
(http://www.denisdutton.com) indicates, perhaps tongue-in-cheek,
that the reasons for Deconstruction's wide appeal is that it has
1 The '... odd sort of prestige that attaches to philosophy' (p. 4) -
especially among humanists. In other words, critics are under the
impression that they are raising profound issues re. 'the very foundations
of thought, meaning, value...'.
2 The simplistic ease with which opponents' arguments are dismissed;
there is no attempt to engage them on the level of complex & serious
argument. In confronting the opposition,
the deconstructionist does not move in the realm of claim and
counter-argument. This fact is implicitly recognized in the way
that, in the popular vocabulary of deconstruction, theories are
said not to be refuted but to be displaced by other positions:
the language (borrowed here from Freud, but it might as well be
Thrasymachus) is not that of argument and evidence, but of
hogging space, getting attention, repressing or getting even with
the enemy. It's all power and desire. (p.5)
It must be admitted that the strategy is in line with its anti-rationalist
stance; the deconstructionist disables the opposition by pulling out
the plug rather than arguing the case in court...
Both Curtler and Dutton have shown acute insight into the rather
chilling implications of the rise of Postmodernism vis-a-vis scholarship
in the humanities and it would do well for academia to come to terms
with the observations they have articulated with so much cogency and
passion. Fortunately, the past decade has thrown up a number of
ripostes to poststructuralism, the most formidable of which is -
undoubtedly - Beyond Poststructuralism: the Speculations of
Theory and the Experience of Reading (1996) ed. by Wendell Harris.
The book is a collection of essays which focus on various aspects of the
"disabling confusions" which are seen as characterizing poststructuralist
thinking. The interest in theory itself as opposed to the experience of the
text, the disappearance of the author, the problem of intentionalism,
the attack on artistic unity, canonicity and multiculturalism, feminist
criticism, the place of history in interpretation... all these and a host
of related considerations provide us with a substantial arsenal for
confronting the remaining bulwarks of extant poststructuralism...
