Review of The Trouble with Theory (The Australian, 26/07/2008)

Gavin Kitching
The Trouble with Theory: The Educational Costs of Postmodernism
Allen & Unwin; $29.95; 220pp

In their lively and sometimes penetrating critique of conservative opinion writing in Australia, The War on Democracy (2006), Niall Lucy and Steve Mickler make the sound observation that for many commentators postmodernism has become an intellectual Aunt Sally. ‘Journos would never write about a plane crash, say, or attribute a statement to the Prime Minister, without thinking to research their facts beforehand. But anything goes when it comes to postmodernism, provided it’s disparaging and preferably abusive.’ Postmodernism and poststructuralism are often criticised in ways that imply an understanding of what is being criticised, though whether such an understanding exists is debatable to say the least. We’ve all heard of the Sokal hoax, though few of us could say in any detail precisely what was exposed by it. What, then, are we criticising when we criticise postmodernism? If postmodernism is a punchline, what’s the joke?

Gavin Kitching’s The Trouble with Theory is about as far from the op-ed spirit as it is possible to be without being boring. Here, indeed, are no cheap laughs at the expense of the ugly, circuitous prose of certain philosophers and academics. Rather, this book is the work of an author with a solid grounding in linguistic philosophy and a quarter of a century of teaching experience. Moreover, it does postmodernism the favour of taking it as seriously as it takes itself – an approach that has enormous benefits. A recent book on intelligent design bypassed the usual argument about whether ID is pseudoscience, accepting that it is scientific and, in so doing, demonstrating just what flimsy science it is. Kitching does something similar with postmodernism, taking it at its own best estimation in order to demonstrate that its ‘hallowed nostrums’ are largely unoriginal when true and, when original, largely false. The result is a philosophical critique that sets an athletic Enlightenment cat among the plump postmodernist pigeons.

Proceeding from an empirical analysis of a stack of undergraduate theses, Kitching argues that students of theory tend to assume a peculiar ‘landscape’ – an ‘alienated world’ of ‘matrices’, ‘frameworks’, ‘fields’ and other impersonal ‘objects’ between which there are ‘relations of effect’. Importantly, this is not a peopled landscape, save for the ‘subjects’ that move through its ‘spaces’, possessed of ‘subjectivities’. Nor, in the majority of undergraduate theses, is there any authorial presence to speak of. Students adopt an ‘objectivist’ stance, the inference being that if no human being is putting these theses down on paper then ‘reality’ must be doing so.

The ‘subjectivities’ to which human beings are (for want of a better word) ‘subject’ are, invariably, the result of ‘discourse’, which, for most students, is identical with language. All assume the pre-eminence of discourse in the ‘social construction’ of society – of power, gender, identity and so on. This, writes Kitching, ‘raises the ticklish question of whether, or to what extent, the social landscape pre-exists the discourse or the discourse the landscape.’ Indeed, it is here that the confusion arises, as students and teachers fail to grasp the philosophical conception of language underpinning their most valued assumptions. This conception entrains certain contradictions, not the least of which is the fact that students, in insisting on the power of discourse, seem themselves to have transcended it. As Kitching puts it:

They write theses of the form ‘language constructs the social world in this way (singular) but I see through this construction and reject it’. But, of course, if they can see through the construction and reject it, why (one might ask) can others not do so too? And if others do do so, then in what sense is the construction socially or politically dominant?

Of course, argues Kitching, words have power. But power is not a property of words. Rather, it is the power of certain people to use those words in particular ways that is the decisive (political) factor. Kitching draws on Ludwig Wittgenstein’s notion of language as a set of tools that can be used for a variety of purposes. ‘Thus, you can use a hammer to knock in a nail, but you can also use it to pull out a nail, prise open a lock, prop a door back, dig a hole in the ground, or attack someone.’

It is about here that the reader begins to ask whether Kitching has taken that hammer to a nut. After all, do we really need Wittgenstein (and there is a lot of Wittgenstein in The Trouble with Theory) to convince us of the philosophical problems inherent in postmodernism? Probably not, but he does allow Kitching to expose the roots of postmodernist theory, which, he suggests, descend into the soil of late 1960s radicalism and ‘a highly dubious’ period in French intellectual history. This is important, because postmodernist theory is often regarded, with some justification, as a philosophical delivery system for a radical, largely left-wing, agenda. The rejection of imperialism; the defence of anarchist notions of the state; opposition to constructions of identity based on gender, race etc. – these are just a few of the causes to which the student of theory is committed. As it happens, Kitching is sympathetic to some, though not all, of these positions. But, he argues, postmodernist theory can only serve to undermine them. Students ‘have been led down the path to philosophical incoherence by righteous indignation’, with the result that the right has taken heart, banging the sword of Plain Speaking against the shield of Common Sense in a pre-battle show of confidence. If postmodernism is philosophically flawed, politically it is worse than useless.

The Trouble with Theory is not, therefore, a politically conservative book, and herein lies its great strength. Eschewing the usual wild right hooks in favour of a few well-aimed left jabs, Kitching has knocked postmodernism on its arse where most have only rocked it back on its heels. Will it beat the count? I seriously doubt it.