Postmodernism: A Very Short Introduction

by Christopher Butler

In arguing that language can lead us astray in this way, and that ‘reality’ can never be wholly or convincingly mastered, deconstruction refuses to accept the possibility of any sustained realism in the texts it attacks. This attack on realism is absolutely central to all types of postmodernist activity. But in refusing to come inside any existing system, or to make any exposition of one, in anything but a playful or evasive manner, it also has to deny the possibility of proposing a system of its own, without betraying its own premises. Hence the accusation frequently made against deconstructor postmodernists, that they are just sceptics who cannot make significant moral or political commitments. Deconstructors too often, true to their own premises, tangle themselves up in a perpetual regress of qualification. Much deconstructive criticism (for example, Geoffrey Hartman’s Glas and much of the work of Paul de Man and Hillis Miller) now seems to be self-indulgent and self-absorbed, and ultimately uncommitted to anything that matters.