What Comes for This Culture After Deconstruction?
But can we live in a world lying in ruins, deconstructed by postmodernism? A contemporary philosopher, David Harvey, ends his great study on postmodernism with this observation: "Postmodernism is undergoing a subtle evolution, perhaps reaching a point of self-dissolution into something different. But what?"
To this question - and to theologian Alister McGrath's similar question: "What will replace atheism?" - the answer is: Atheism (no God) will be replaced by pantheism (everything is god). Logos (word) will be replaced by mythos (myth). This spiritual, nonrational answer arises from the heart of postmodernism. Jacques Derrida, hailed as the creator of postmodernism, argued that the purpose of that deconstruction as to "deconstruct the dualisms and hierarchies embedded in Western thinking" - such as good-evil, mind-body, male-female, truth-fiction. These "false polarities," he claimed, "must be deconstructed." Such a rejection of opposites is in fact, as we will see, a fundamental aspect of religious paganism, so that postmodern philosophy fits surprisingly well with the religious yearnings for the morality and spirituality of inclusion - pantheistic "all is one" wholeness. Theologian Kevin Vanhooze agrees. Arguing in terms of literary theory, the point at which postmodernism began its critique of philosophy, Vanhoose notes that the postmodern philosophers Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida are:
"counter-theologians: there is not outside the play of writing, nothing that guarentees that our words refer to the world. the loss of a transcedent signifier - Logos - [along with the "death of God] thus follows hard upon the death of the author ....With the death of the author and the rejection of the authonomous text, the reader is born ... With the birth of the reader, the divine has been relocated: the postmodern era is more comfortable thinking of God not as the trancendent Author but as the immanent Spirit."
Simply put, God, the omniscient author, is not longer relevent, so no one now knows the plot. If there is no ultimate meaning to the world (since God, the ultimate author of meaning, is irrelevent), then the author of any text has no access to its meaning. Meaning can be created only subjectively by the reader.
But note the spiritual implications. Any individual reader has direct, mysterious-mystical access to "the Spirit." This, as we will see, is paganism in a nutshell. The deconstructed world will be put back together again not by reason but by "myth" or "unreason," as The Seduction of Unreason, the title of a recent book on modern philosophy, indicates.
Before we move on:
- What is paganism?
- What purpose is foundational to deconstruction? How might this fit into the pantheistic view that "all is one"?
- Deconstuction first arose in the field of literary theory, and postmodernism holds that the reader personally and subjectively creates a text's meaning. According to Vanhoozer, how does this prioritize the reader over the author? In a theological sense, how does this "relocate" the divine?
- How is the reader's access to the "immanent Spirit" a reflection of pagan beliefs?