Reflection, Doubt, and the Place of Rhetoric in Postmodern Social Theory

We are told by theorists who have taken the turn that our current age stumbles upon the very transvaluation of Western values and vocabularies that Nietzsche urged more than a century ago. For evidence that our age has passed beyond good and evil, critics of culture and theorists of society refer us to the indecisive and cannibalistic paradoxes of the aesthetic (Foster 1983; Hebdige 1989), the self-critique of postmodern, deconstructionist epistemologies (Norris 1982, 1985), and the perplexing political, economic, and cultural characteristics of what Lyotard refers to generally as the condition (1984; see Giroux 1988, pp. 7-13). Although many of us have used such terminology at times, it still is difficult to understand precisely what postmodern might mean to theoreticians of society and critics of sociological texts. I hope to render a useful definition in this essay by addressing one peculiar product of the relationship between postmodernist epistemology and the condition. My essay performs this task in three sections. I begin with a brief sketch of the radically textual or rhetorical approach that postmodernists use to conceptualize scientific practice and knowledge generally. This approach adopts postmodernism's central epistemological notions, viewing knowledge as an act of poetic (hence textual) creation and thus conceiving science as an ongoing process of social (hence rhetorical) deliberation. We will see how this picture of science bears radical implications for social theory because it asks us to dispense with the very epistemology that gave modern social science its identity.