The Politics of Post-structuralism and Post-modernism

Before trying to examine these approaches in philosophical terms, we will look at the political positions with which they are associated. For theories which emphasize movement, fluidity and the paradoxical complexity of a reality which is seen as largely linguistic or symbolic, it is not surprising that they can be associated with a range of political positions.

Both positions see the Enlightenment, rationality and science as representing hierarchies and oppression. At their most simplistic there is a juxtaposition of science, knowledge, rationality, presence, identity, hierarchy, domination, white European males on the one side, and deconstruction, absence, difference, women, minorities, the former colonized peoples on the other. This is clearly highly simplistic, particularly when it is remembered that the discourses which led to the formation of national liberation movements and often the triumph of the colonized peoples as well as those that generated feminism and campaigns for racial equality were the rational discourses of the Enlightenment.

Post-structuralism, in the form of the celebration of difference, can lead on to a multiculturalism, a sort of political relativism or a position akin to that which we earlier connected to the work of Peter Winch, but which, in the last analysis, Winch managed to avoid: that we cannot judge between different cultures, but should just enjoy the difference - although whether such enjoyment extends to the culture of National Socialism in Germany or that of those societies which practice female circumcision is another matter. If there is no presence, no truth, no morality which can be argued about, it is difficult to know how we can condemn the Holocaust, or the oppression of women or ethnic minorities. If we adopt post-modernist or post-structuralist conceptions of truth or morality, then the paradoxical result seems to be that we cannot argue that the hierarchies we condemn are worse or more oppressive than the absence of hierarchies we propose: they are just different.

The arguments for celebration of difference can also be interpreted as another version of the left-liberalism which has developed in European politics since the end of Second World War - as being a rather anodyne argument for mutual tolerance - although many post-modernists might not be satisfied with this.

Finally there is a critical post-modernism which can be connected with the Frankfurt School, particularly the later works of Adorno. The constant deconstruction of claims to knowledge and truth can be seen as the critique of the positive, the critique of domination, and the rejection of meta-narratives can be seen as equivalent to Ardornos rejection of totalizing theories and their association with totalitarianism. But that is only one side of the dialectical reason of critical theory, and this leads us to the philosophical arguments about these positions.