FutureChurch

"Postmodernism" is a loaded word for South African Christians: it polarises people into binary opposites before either side has said anything. It either means that you are doing some really cutting-edge things when it comes to cultural engagement for the sake of the gospel, or it means that you don't believe in truth, the Bible or much else.

If you research postmodernism a little, you'll come across Jacques Derrida, who coined the word "deconstruction."

Most people I know haven't a clue what deconstruction is, but think they do, and use their understanding incorrectly (I know: I used to be one of them).

Below I've posted a few extracts from John Caputo's book, "Deconstruction in an nutshell" (1997) (which has helped me to understand what deconstruction actually is) where he talks about the reaction Derrida has provoked. If you exchange "Derrida" for "the emerging church conversation" you may get a sense of why many of us are frustrated with people who criticise us before they actually understand what it is we're saying. I post this because of the strong resonances with critics of postmodernism and the emerging church conversation in South Africa at present.

It is not uncommon to portray Derrida as the devil himself, a street-corner anarchist, a relativist, or subjectivist, or nihilist, out to destroy our traditions and institutions, our beliefs and values, to mock philosophy and truth itself, to undo everything the Enlightenment has done - and to replace all this with wild nonsense and irresponsible play. That, alas, is how he is portrayed by his - often very irresponsible - critics who speak in the name of academic responsibility. Elaborating and document the way [our conversation with Derrida] puts the torch to this stupefying misrepresentation of deconstruction is the principle goal, nay, the most solemn duty, of the present volume. - page 36

Let me risk, with fear and trembling, the following axiom, which governs what I call a certain "axiomatics of indignation" that Derrida seems to provoke: the most fundamental misunderstanding to beset Derrida and deconstruction is the mistaken impression that is given of a kind of anarchistic relativism in which "anything goes." On this view, texts mean anything the reader wants them to mean; traditions are just monsters to be slain or escaped from; the great masters of the Western tradition are dead white male tyrants whose power must be broken and whose name defamed; institutions are just power-plays oppressing everyone; and language is a prison, just a game of signifiers signifying nothing, a play of differences without reference to the real world. Thus the dominant reaction that Derrida provokes among his critics, who do not content themselves with simply disagreeing with him, is indignation. His critics seem to immediately to shift into high dudgeon, cloaking themselves in a self-righteous "moral" or "ethical" mantle - where ethics has the look of a self-approving good conscience - appointing themselves Defenders of the Good and the True. Critics of deconstruction feel obliged to rush to their closets, dust off and don their academic suits of armour, and then collectively charge this enemy of the common good, their lances pointed at his heart. For if Derrida's shenanigans arouse their arie when deconstruction is confined to reading Joyce or Mallarme, you can imagine how the tempers of these Knights of the Good and True flare when deconstruction threatens to spill over into the streets, when it gets translated into politics and ethics. Then the influence of this dreadful nihilism is intolerable, for it poses a threat to the common good. Ergo, we, the Good and the Just (self-authorised and self-knighted, to be sure) - that is what "we" almost always means - must stamp it out.
- page 37/8

It is inconceivable to me that [a particular group of Derrida's critics] have read Derrida with care, if they have read him at all. What they know of Derrida, I would bet the farm, if I had one, has been gathered by hearsay and the public press, from secondary, not to say second-rate sources, from dinner-hour gossip at annual meetings of groups like the A.P.A, from at most a casual scanning of a famous text or other. Their condemnation of Derrida is not a carefully reasoned and researched judgement, but an allergic reaction to something different, an expression of contempt for a different philosophical style by which they are shocked and scandalised; but it is impossible to believe they have carefully studied what they have denounced. In other words, their condemnation of Derrida violates on its face the very "values of reason, truth and scholarship" with which they so self-righteously cloak themselves, in the name of disinterestedly "protecting" [a university which was considering awarding Derrida an honorary doctorate] from itself. As if anyone asked them!
-page 40

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