Postmodernism, Etc.: An Interview with Ihab Hassan - Interview

Tell the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that science is just another "narrative." A man (Einstein, presumably) writes on a blackboard: e = [mc.sup.2] and two cities go up in flames. Narrative?

Yes, relativism offers the illusion of both innocence and freedom. And have you noticed that relativism is usually invoked by someone about to lose an argument?

How do you think, though, that "relativism" became yoked with "postmodern"? Do you think there is some logical connective between the kind of art you identified as postmodern and a radically relativist position?

IH: Play, parody, pastiche, pluralism--the staples of a Postmodern style or sensibility--tend to relativism, as does openness or indeterminacy. Non-foundational or pragmatic philosophies also tend to relativism. And hybrid, heterogeneous, conflictual societies further tend to relativism. All three are part of the "postmodern condition." But please note that I say "tend to": I doubt that a "radical relativism" can be sustained in practice.

How would you characterize literary criticism and theory of the last fifty years or so?

IH: Well, that's a topic for a book, indeed for a library of books, written and burned. Let me read you, however, a mildly satirical, but I think relevant, passage in an article I have recently published, "Queries for Postcolonial Studies," a topic I usually shun:

Deep in the unconscious of the academic humanities there is a story, and it goes something like this. "Once upon a time, along, dark time ago, there was a tribe of writers in the American South, terribly misnamed the New Critics. They paid inordinate attention to the forms of literary works, and to special devices like irony and paradox. For an unconscionable time, they dominated the reading scene. But when the sixties finally arrived, thank God, the New Critics were exposed for their literary exclusiveness and political conservatism. The air was cleared, and adventurous young critics began to turn to Continental Europe for inspiration: to existentialism and phenomenology, to the philosophy of consciousness and reception theory, to critical philosophy, to structuralism. These critics gestured in the right direction, but they had to wait for the advent of poststructuralism to discover the full possibilities of their deconstructive art. Deconstruction, alas, soon became tedious, hollow, disengaged. Feminist, et hnic, posteolonial, and cultural studies came to the rescue, saving deconstruction from its innate sterility, and enriching their own socio-political 'agenda'--yes, that's the word--with all kinds of subtle demystifications and demythifications. It may be safely said that with the current prevalence of cultural studies, in their varied forms, criticism has reached its apogee. It only remains for us to stand our ground against sundry humanists, reactionaries, counter-revolutionaries, and proto-fascists still skulking in the corridors of academe."

Parody, you cry, caricature! Caricatures have a disconcerting habit of coming to life in academe, especially in American academe. But let that pass: the point is that a self-congratulatory myth of progress informs criticism in the era of cultural wars. Progress? Culture is a wrinkled palimpsest, and the arrow of history moves like a swallow, if not a boomerang. As Thomas Kuhn has argued, the sciences and the humanities develop with disparate logics. There are no Ptolemaists or Nostradamists in reputable science departments; there are, however, Platonists, Aristotelians, Thomists, Kantians, Hegelians, Marxists, Nietzscheans, Freudians, Heideggerians, Lacanians, Foucauldians [ldots] in reputable departments of the humanities. This is not to say that the paradigms of science are "better"; it is only to say that they respond to different criteria of confirmation and disconfirmation. The paradigms of the humanities--Kuhn would say "schools"--respond to fashion, true, but also to genuine needs for social change. T his last is admirable, though it signals no epistemological progress. The opinions of certain influential critics receive no sanction from a logic of inexorable ascent in our ideas about human reality. (qtd. from Philosophy and Literature 22 [1998]: 329-30)