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In 1997, Duke UP published a collection titled Mathematics, Science, and Postclassical Theory, edited by Barbara Herrnstein Smith and Arkady Plotnitsky. The book advertised itself as "Science Studies", and came, in part, from a 1993 conference on "Mathematics and Postclassical Theory" at Duke's Center for Interdisciplinary Studies in Science and Cultural Theory. So what is this "postclassical theory", what might be its relevance for rhetoric scholars, and just how much math is required to use it?

Postclassical Theory and Postclassicism

Like the other posties (postmodernism, poststructuralism, etc), postclassicism claims, by its very name, to define itself against something: in opposition to, and as a successor of, classicism.¹ Here, that "classicism", or "classical thought", refers to some broad philosophical ideas that have dominated European-derived thinking more or less since Plato. Here's the editors' description from the introduction to MSPT:

While the term "postclassical theory" can be given a range of meanings in relation to more or less radical developments in [mathematics, science, theory, and philosophy], its use here is intended primarily to evoke the various critical analyses and efforts at reconceptualization ... that have emerged in the humanities and social sciences around a cluster of quite general but problematic concepts, notably, knowledge, language, objectivity, truth, proof, reality, and representation, and around such related issues as the dynamics of intellectual history, the project of foundationalist epistemology, and the distinctive (if they are distinctive) operations of mathematics and science.

Smith and Plotnitsky are careful to note that this is not a particularly new movement; their short list of relevant figures goes back to early modernity (even Shakespeare is included), and it's possible to argue that some pre- and para-Platonic Classical thinkers, such as the Sophists and Isocrates, could be claimed "postclassical" in this sense. But the MSPT collection is animated by a recent historical trend, composed of a handful of related strands.

First, there's the ongoing complication of formal (mathematical) and empirical (scientific) epistemologies over the course of the twentieth century, with discoveries such as formal incompleteness (by Cantor, Godel, Turing, etc) and fundamental physical limitations to measurement (by Einstein, Heisenburg, etc). While these did not undermine the Enlightenment project of the pursuit of rational knowledge, they do throw into question many of its underlying philosophical assumptions. (This bothers philosophers much more than it does scientists.) Second was the growing critique of science, technology, and the Enlightenment project by critical theory; this took various forms, some more successful than others, but as the "Science Wars" of the late '80s and early '90s began to cool off (mostly from exhaustion and widespread embarassment), more sophisticated and mature theoretical critiques of science - as philosophy, practice, cultural domain - emerged; today's fields such as Science and Technology Studies (STS) often include collaborations by working scientists and cutural theorists. A related third trend is the critique of humanism, particularly human exceptionalism, that has grown out of, on the one hand, ecology studies and ecofeminism (where non-human organisms are ascribed attributes that were classically reserved for humans); and on the other hand, psychology, neurology, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence (where the nature of concepts such as "consciousness" and "intelligence" has been broadly interrogated).

In short, some key attributes of postclassical theory are:

suspicion of, and inquiry into, basic concepts in European-derived epistemology and ontology (knowledge, etc)
theoretical engagement with fields that have sometimes been attributed special epistemological status (ie, philosophy, mathematics, and science)
on a related note, a rejection of disciplinary boundaries
refusal to accept rationalism and humanism as inherently good or correct (but at the same time, for most or all "postclassical" thinkers, an abiding scepticism toward mysticism and obscurantism)
a mandate to reassess all the ideas we receive from Classical thought

Isn't This Just Postmodernism Again?

That description may sound much like some of the ideas that have been lumped in with "postmodernism", and it's worth taking a moment to ask whether this "postclassical theory" is anything different.

First, it's worth noting that postclassical theory, both in the explicit definition that Smith and Plotnitsky provide, and as it's implicitly mapped out by the collection and related work, is rather more clearly defined than "postmodernism". Collections of postmodern theory tend to range widely, and the boundaries between, say, postmodernism and poststructuralism are not clear. (For that matter, even so-called "high modernism" is remarkably hard to pin down.²) Natoli and Hutchison's well-known Postmodern Reader can comfortably include Habermas, Jameson, and Giroux, but it's hard to see - valuable as their ideas might be - how these thinkers might be included in the postclassical camp (or even that they'd want to be).

Also, of course, the two movements define themselves against different targets. Modernity might be "only" a recent phase of the legacy of classicism, so there is a historical relationship, but postclassicism in concept reaches further back, and asks for a more radical revision of European-derived thought. In practice, postmodernism might ask many of the same questions - as the events of modernity, particularly the tumult of the twentieth century, highlighted them. Nonetheless, there is a sense that postmodernism is mostly concerned with a reappraisal of the relatively recent history of European thought, while postclassicism turns its attention to ideas that stretch back to its roots.

Some Theories from the MSPT Collection

What sort of theories made it into the original Mathematics, Science, and Postclassical Theory collection? I discuss the individual chapters in more detail below, but here are some of the major ideas.

As described above, challenging received ideas in epistemology and other areas. Postclassical theory is confrontational. The objects of its analysis are generally other theories; where it refers to material entities, processes, etc, it's generally to illustrate a theoretical concept. Postclassical theory is often not hermeneutic, not in the business of offering an interpretation.
Illustrating how privileged fields are "contaminated" by factors outside their epistemological domains. Social forces influence the development of mathematical formalisms. Contingency, rather than necessity, is dominant in many of the physical processes that science would like to model.
Conversely, the discoveries by mathematicians and scientists of the limitations of their own epistemologies, found and defined within those epistemologies, supersede classical conceptions of reality.
Attributes classically ascribed to individual humans, particularly agency, properly belong to neither individuals nor to humans.
Postclassical theory represents the way forward for philosophy.

The Editors

It's helpful to review the background of the MSPT editors, since they're key figures in the school.

First, Barbara Herrnstein Smith, co-editor of the collection. As the director of Duke's Center for Interdisciplinary Studies in Science and Cultural Theory, she was also the primary organizer of the colloquium where many of the essays were originally presented. But Smith has been a key (and formidable) figure in postclassical theory since well before that 1993 event, or the founding of the center.

Smith spent the first couple decades of her academic career as a literature scholar - her award-winning first book, from her dissertation, presents the theory of poetic closure. (Even here there's a whiff of postclassicism; the idea that poems work to construct meaning is a departure from classical ideas of mimesis.) Then in 1988, after a few detours like serving as president of the MLA, she wrote a book called Contingencies of Value, which suggested that there weren't a hell of a lot of absolute objective truths to serve as foundations for theory, and people ought to come to grips with contingency. This proved contentious; a number of ethicists and legal scholars accused her of advocating relativist ethics, for example. (I had the good fortune to hear her demolish some of these critics, at a small gathering in 1990 at Northeastern University. Useful tip: do not challenge Barbara Herrnstein Smith to a theory fight.)

Contingencies of Value drew on economics and the American pragmatist philosophical school, particularly the work of Richard Rorty. While it can certainly be considered a work of philosophy, it's generally critical of the European philosophical tradition - a critique that Smith has continued. Her more recent Scandalous Knowledge (2005), for example, takes on the "scandal of philosophy" - the problem of how we can know anything in the first place - by interrogating the entire classical conception of knowledge from a position of radical scepticism.

Arkady Plotnitsky, the other co-editor of MSPT, is a cheerful fellow who teaches in the English department at Purdue. Unlike most English professors, he came to the discipline from mathematics. (Plotnitsky might be the only person to mention Category Theory in an MLA presentation.) His work tends to connect critical theory, philosophy, mathematics, and science studies.

Plotnitsky's contributions include developing the philosophical idea of complementarity introduced by the physicist Neils Bohr. Complementarity is a complex concept, but one of its key aspects is the claim that there are phenomena in the real world which we can never have knowledge of. Plotnitsky has drawn a number of useful connections between complementarity and continental theory, particularly to Derrida but also to Lacan, Badiou, and others.

Plotnitsky has also offered some of the most sophisticated and intelligent interventions in the often-banal "science wars".

Mathematics, Science, and Postclassical Theory

This is what actually appears in the original MSPT collection:

"Introduction: Networks and Symmetries, Decidable and Undecidable", Barbara Herrnstein Smith and Arkady Plotnitsky: The editors' introduction offers the expected definition of the book's topic and a brief history. It also discusses some concepts that they see as key to postclassical thought, such as undecidability, networks of practices, and the importance of considering contradictory metaphysical positions.

"Thinking Dia-Grams: Mathematics, Writing, and Virtual Reality", Brian Rotman: Rotman looks at mathematics as non-alphabetic writing, in the way that we sophisticated comp/rhet theory-head types think of writing. This has some interesting consequences, for example in revealing the agency of mathematical signs in the construction of mathematical knowledge. Rotman also argues that mathematical rigor is a necessary consequence of the rules of mathematical writing.

"Concepts and the Mangle of Practice: Constructing Quaternions", Andrew Pickering: Pickering offers a short example of the method he uses in his book Constructing Quarks, and the theory he expounds on in his other book The Mangle of Practice. Thus this essay is a quick substitute for reading two entire books - an opportunity that should not be missed. To make it even shorter: ideas have agency. Pickering is interested in how concepts offer resistance, and how thinking agents (such as mathematicians) working in a field of conceptual agency have to make various moves to maneuver concepts into a form that satisfies some need. Pickering sees cultural practices as mechanical efforts to create conceptual models by producing associations between heterogeneous cultural elements. (This is closely related to Bruno Latour's method of the past decade or so.)

"The Moment of Truth on Dublin Bridge: A Response to Andrew Pickering", Owen Flanagan: Flanagan takes issue with how Pickering applies his method (originally developed to study the practice of physics) to the "more purely conceptual domain" of mathematics. While he accepts Pickering's overall direction, he raises three issues. He has some worries about Pickering's "mangle of practice" metaphor; and he thinks Pickering overstates the power of disciplinary agency. Finally, he thinks Pickering's final point about metaphysics and mathematics - which is basically that mathematicians sometimes thing about metaphysics, and those thoughts influence what sort of mathematical constructs they arrive at - can be taken even further. Mathematicians, Flanagan suggests, naturally consider metaphysical issues; they're almost unavoidable; and so mathematics has been strongly influenced by people wondering just what it's about.

"Explanation, Agency, and Metaphysics: A Reply to Owen Flanagan", Andrew Pickering: In his reply, Pickering essentially accepts Flanagan's critique of the mangle metaphor, and suggests that part of the problem is what we traditionally expect explanations to do (which is to present an account of causes and effects). On the other hand, he pushes back on the agency question, where he thinks Flanagan is distracted by flawed humanist notions of agency. (Here he describes his idea of agency as posthumanist, because it's neither founded on a humanist idea of agency as the action of a voluntary human actor, nor an antihumanist conception that sees agency arising from discipline.) He thinks Flanagan might be overestimating the importance of metaphysics, but agrees that it has an important role, whether it's a common concern for mathematicians or just one of the conceptual roads a mathematician might wander down.

"Agency and the Hybrid Collectif", Michel Callon and John Law: Callon and Law are two of the three scholars (the third is Latour) generally credited with creating and promoting Actor-Network Theory (ANT), a linchpin of postclassical thought. Like Latour, they're sociologists and key figures in Science and Technology Studies. This chapter is a conversation between Callon and Law, where they take up topics such as the question of non-human agency, how ANT can degenerate into a sort of liberal extension of the "agency franchise" to non-human actors, the necessity of looking at relations instead of at entities, and of widening the idea of representation to include things like skills.

"The Accidental Chordate: Contingency in Developmental Systems", Susan Oyama: Oyama is an (emeritus) professor of psychology, but most of her work has been in developmental systems theory, focusing on questions posed by biological theories, such as her famous intervention into the nature/nurture debate in The Ontogeny of Information. Here she riffs off Stephen J Gould's popular writing on the Burgess Shale fossils, arguing that contingency, not some sort of "programming", is the primary constituent of evolutionary development, and of development in general.

"Complementarity, Idealization, and the Limits of Classical Conceptions of Reality", Arkady Plotnitsky: Here Plotnitsky offers a short introduction to complementarity and idealization, two of his favorite concepts. He uses complementarity to explain radical alterity, the idea that there are things which are forever outside representation. This is also one of the few chapters to discuss classical thought specifically; Plotnitsky notes how complementarity in effect harkens back to certain pre-Socratic ideas in Western thought, particularly those of Democritus.

"Is 'Is a Precursor of' a Transitive Relation?", E. Roy Weintraub: Weintraub's an economist, and here he takes up a very simple question: if you have a pretty convincing argument that idea A led to idea B (ie, that A was a precursor of B), and another one showing that idea B led to idea C, can you put them together to argue that A led to C? No, you can't. The history of ideas may look like a causal progression, but that masks the fact that at any point, we could have gotten to the same place by another route. Every idea has multiple, incommensurate histories.

"Fraud by Numbers: Quantitative Rhetoric in the Piltdown Forgery Discovery", Malcolm Ashmore: Ashmore's chapter is a pretty straight-forward rhetorical analysis of quantitative claims in scientific fraud. Good solid stuff, and what's especially interesting is that Ashmore is poking holes in the debunking of the Piltdown claims; he points out that everyone assumes Piltdown is a forgery, without noting how its debunking is itself a rhetorical construct. The essay's also worth reading for Ashmore's critique of his own process in it.

"A Glance at SunSet: Numerical Fundaments in Frege, Wittgenstein, Shakespeare, Beckett", John Vignaux Smyth: Admit it - you were wondering how Frege's attempts to define mathematics using set theory relate to Shakespeare. Well, read Smyth's chapter, and you'll know. He's trying to show how there are conceptual connections between mathematical philosophers and poets; like a number of postclassical thinkers, he rejects the "two cultures" idea of a split between the sciences and the arts. Smyth's final point is that the arts and sciences remain deeply connected, and no intellectual discipline is privileged over the others.

"Microdynamics of Incommensurability: Philosophy of Science Meets Science Studies", Barbara Herrnstein Smith: To close out the book, Smith weaves some common threads from the chapters with her own critique of classical-derived epistemology into a theoretical program. She starts by criticizing the lack of engagement between the philosophy of science and science studies, and generalizes that into a theory which accepts incommensurability, the idea that there is no final, objective foundation on which competing accounts can be weighed against one another.

Postclassical Theory beyond MSPT

Ceci n'est pa une foundation

Probably the two figures most often cited by the postclassicists are the sociologist Bruno Latour and the late philosopher Richard Rorty. To my knowledge Rorty never described himself as a postclassicist, and Latour (who tends to be suspicious of all "post"-prefixed labels) seems unlikely to do so. And they have very different concerns and conclusions; no doubt it's possible to find places where they contradict each other. But they share key perspectives, such as a pragmatic antifoundationalism and a belief in the importance of contingency.

So while postclassicism doesn't have the sort of founding figures that, say, Marxism and psychoanalysis can look to, it's definitely helpful to have a sense of where these two thinkers come from and how they've inspired the postclassicists.

Latour

One of the three inventors (along with Callon and Law) of Actor-Network Theory. A key figure in the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge and Science and Technology Studies. Latour's earlier work (eg Laboratory Life) looked at what scientists actually did, and advanced the antirealist position that there's no simple correspondence between what scientists study and "the world". He co-developed ANT as a model for how scientists interact with not only non-scientists but non-humans as well in producing knowledge. As he moved into analyzing how people interact with technology, he demonstrated how we make non-human actors our delegates: we ask our seatbelts to protect us in collisions, we ask our postal systems to deliver messages for us, and so on. So we all operate in networks of heterogeneous actors.

His best-known book, the short and readable We Have Never Been Modern, explains ANT's relevance. Modernity, Latour says, is based on the idea of a separation of culture (human stuff) and nature (everything else). But this separation is false; it doesn't actually happen in any important material or cognitive way. And what's more, no one ever actually believed it; we've all been quite aware of how we're deeply embedded in the non-human. So WHNBM urges us to turn our attention to the assemblages of heterogeneous actors that we participate in and interact with.

Latour has of course been criticized, sometimes well. In Smoke and Mirrors James Brown counters Latour with a thorough (if, in my view, ultimately unconvincing) realist argument for science (ie, that science actually discovers truths about the world), for example. (At the height of the science wars, Latour and his fans saw many attacks along these lines, but most were unrigorous, ill-informed, and discardable.) And some years ago at MLA, Mary Louise Pratt offered a highly critical postcolonial reading of We Have Never Been Modern, centered on Latour's rather flip description of "the Third World" as an assemblage. And for his part, Latour vehemently denies any connection to postmodernism or poststructuralism, movements that his followers are generally rather more comfortable with. But even with these difficulties Latour's work has proven useful across a wide range of disciplines.

Rorty

One of the most prominent contemporary philosophers in the US - along with John Searle, perhaps the most prominent - Richard Rorty was a major figure in pragmatism, that most American of philosophical schools.³ Ironically, Rorty believed that philosophy was a largely pointless exercise - but then irony was one of Rorty's favorite tropes, a move he incorporated into his own methodology. When confronted with philosophical problems such as opposing conceptions of human nature, or the limits of epistemology, or the origin of cruelty, Rorty's response is to claim that it's necessary neither to pick a side nor to create a synthesis; instead, we can and should take philosophical positions as contingent, temporary, and provisional, as and when they're helpful to considering a problem.

Radically antifoundationalist, Rorty was unconcerned with truth, except when the search for it got in someone's way. He also felt that the best critique was to offer, and preferably work toward, a better alternative. He was consistently political but advocated a "solidarity" that could respond to contingencies, rather than any particular plan.

In his essay "Trotsky and the Wild Orchids", from the collection Wild Orchids and Trotsky (issued by mostly-leftist academics near the height of the "Culture Wars", in an attempt to reach a public which, as it turns out, didn't much care), Rorty makes a key postclassical argument. Contra Plato (and John "truth is beauty" Keats), Rorty says that people have no innate "moral sense": we aren't born with a capacity to appreciate goodness and be repelled by badness. We have to figure them out.

More major contributors

Haraway

Donna Haraway was probably the first academic to popularize Latourean postclassical thinking, particularly ANT and the idea of nonhuman agency, in English studies in the US. In her early ecofeminist critiques of science (eg the essays in Primate Visions) she was already interrogating the human / nonhuman division, and so apparently found Latour's ideas highly compatible. She began to explore them in the "Cyborg Manifesto" and the collection of essays Simians, Cyborgs, and Women (which reprinted the manifesto), and took that line further in subsequent work, such as the essay "The Promises of Monsters" (in Cultural Studies) and books such as Modest Witness@Second Millenium.FemaleMan Meets OncoMouse.

The prolific and eclectic Haraway has been critiqued from many sides, including by other postclassicists. (Smith takes her to task on a number of points in Scandalous Knowledge.) But it's fair to say that she has been a prominent target because her work is both important and inspiring, and few other thinkers have been able to make such extensive and deep connections among science, technology, feminism, ecology, postcolonialism, and cultural formations. There are few better examples of Actor-Network Theory in application.

Kuhn

Thomas Kuhn's 1962 The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is an important postclassical theory that predates the invention of postclassicism. (In the introduction to MSPT, Smith happily admits that there are many such examples.) Kuhn coined, or at least popularized, the idea of the paradigm shift. Scientists, he says, tend to see the world in the way that their theories (the "paradigm", or model) predicts; but eventually the existing paradigm becomes unacceptable (because it doesn't match experimental results, or lacks predictive power, or some other reason) and in a "revolution" it's replaced by a new paradigm. Kuhn's theory challenged the prevailing ideas of scientific rationality, particularly in the philosophy of science, and helped spur the development of the sociology of science.

For an interesting response, see Paul Thagard's Conceptual Revolutions, an awesomely structuralist elaboration of and/or correction to Kuhn's theory that attempts to show how rationalist-determinist processes produce the paradigm shift. Excellent tables and graphs.

Damasio

The neurologist Antonio Damasio is one of the best-known proponents of the hypothesis that reason is a trailing operation in cognition - that often we've already made a decision by the time we consciously think about it and try to apply reason to it. Damasio (with his wife Hanna and their research team) has conducted a number of experiments to show that most of the decisions people make happen unconsciously, and are prompted by bodily responses (sensations of pleasure, unease, etc) - what Damasio calls somatic markers. He made this argument in popular form in his 1995 Descartes' Error. Reviewers pointed out that few people today believe in the mind/body split, and indeed Descartes himself didn't endorse a simplistic version of it; but Damasio's work is still important for dismantling rationalist arguments.

Philosophers against truth

Horwich

Paul Horwich is an analytic philosopher who, in a 1990 book (second edition 1998) simply titled Truth, explained the minimalist deflationary theory of truth - a theory almost shorter than its name. Horwich explains that a claim like "it's true the sky is blue" is just a longer version of "the sky is blue". The phrase "it's true" doesn't add anything to the claim; "being true" isn't a thing in itself. As he puts it: "Unlike most other properties, being true is unsusceptible to conceptual or scientific analysis. No wonder that its 'underlying nature' has so stubbornly resisted philosophical elaboration; for there simply is no such thing" (5).

Consequently, Horwich argues against any reference or correspondence theories of meaning (the meaning of a claim doesn't arise from its referring or corresponding to some "truth" that exists in the world), and in favor of a use theory of meaning (the meaning of a claim is determined by its use).

Another deflationary position taken by some philosophers and logicians is that the only real "truth" is formal (mathematical) truth, because it's true by tautology: all formal truth is simply a demonstration that you can start with a set of assumptions and a collection of rules for manipulating them, and from that get to some other statement. All you've proved to be true is that your hypothesis is a restatement of your assumptions and operations.

Horgan

In 1987, Terrance Horgan published an article "Psychologistic semantics and moral truth" in Philosophical Studies. In surprisingly clear language for a philosopher, Horgan describes his project: an account of moral truth that doesn't rely on reference. In Horgan's model, an act isn't right or wrong because of some relation to the world. It's right or wrong because that's how it's described by a speech community.

Nyberg

David Nyberg, a philosopher of education, points out in The Varnished Truth that we all lie. Frequently. And we couldn't get by without it. Truth may be golden, but falsehood is invaluable.

Jullien

Pair Nyberg up with François Jullien. In a nifty little essay in Critical Inquiry in 2002, Jullien asks "Did Philosophers have to Become Fixated on Truth?". And indeed philosophers in the West, since the classical era, have mostly set their sights on defining, locating, and revealing Truth. But thinkers elsewhere often found other goals for themselves; Jullien describes how many of the Chinese sages, for example, were interested in topics such as the Good rather than the True.

On the edge: the New Pragmatists

The "New Pragmatists" - a school that is said to include Rorty, Stanley Fish, Walter Benn Michaels, and a handful of others, though it's worth noting that the members critique each other as often as they do anyone else - has some affinities with the Postclassicists. I've already noted that Rorty's work has been important for some postclassical thinkers, particularly Smith. Postclassical theory's scepticism, particularly toward epistemology, is broadly similar to pragmatism's attitude. When Cornell West defined pragmatism as the "American evasion of philosophy", epistemology - the scandal of Smith's Scandalous Knowledge - was what he saw it evading.

The New Pragmatists are often critical of the Postclassicists: Fish has criticized Rorty (and philosophy and theory in general), Michaels has criticized Haraway and others (and theory in general), and so on. But these are in a sense sibling disputes; the New Pragmatists conflict with the Postclassicists mostly because they're operating on the same theoretical terrain.

Fish

Stanley Fish's work is famously contentious and arouses a great deal of ire, but I'd call it pleasantly cynical. Fish thinks, in essence, that people do what they do, and talking about it in highly abstract ways might be fun but isn't going to change anything. You can get a good feeling for his work in "Why Literary Criticism Is Like Virtue" and "Truth But No Consequences: Why Philosophy Doesn't Matter". Even when I think Fish is wrong (there are at least four exceptions to the rule he posits in the latter essay, for example), he's interesting and generally entertaining.

Michaels

Walter Benn Michaels, with Steven Knapp (who has since kept a lower profile), published a piece modestly titled "Against Theory" in Critical Inquiry in the mid-1980s. This was at the height of "high theory" in English studies in the US, and "Against Theory" (which was of course itself highly theoretical, though not as Michaels and Knapp defined theory) was a resounding slap in the face to all of the theory stars - particularly the Yale deconstructionists (Culler, de Man, etc) and other prominent advocates of Continental theory. There were so many responses that the press collected the lot up into a nice little book for your enjoyment.

Michaels and Knapp argued thusly: theory is an attempt to guide interpretation; but interpretation happens all the time, as soon as we encounter a text; thus nothing can come "before" it in order to guide it; so theorists should stop trying. They supported their case with various clever thought experiments, most notably variations on the "wave-poem" (a line of verse that might, or might not, have been created by accident - read the essay and it will all be clear).

This attack on theory could itself be seen as postclassical; certainly it strikes at the heart of what Aristotle was trying to do in his work on poetics and rhetoric, and arguably at the methods of Socrates and Plato as well. Interestingly, though, it is equally hostile to the rest of postclassical thought as it is to classical thought. It's an equal-opportunity dismissal.

Since then, Michaels has done quite a bit of work that continues in this vein. In "The Shape of the Signifier" (the original article in Critical Inquiry; I understand he's since expanded it into a book, but I haven't read it), for example, he makes a strong argument for intentionality - that the meaning of a work is the meaning the author intended, nothing more or less, and a reading is more or less successful depending on how well it elucidates that meaning. In the process, he criticizes various postclassical theorists (including Haraway, again) for suggesting that statements allow a multiplicity of meanings, an epistemological stance which Michaels believes prevents reasoned debate and democratic decision-making. (In other words, it's an argument for communicative reason, not terribly different from, say, Habermas.)

Nonetheless, Michaels' engagement with poststructuralist and postclassical thought, however contentious, is considerably more sophisticated and forward-looking than the (generally banal) criticisms of those schools from the reactionary right or the hard-line scientific realists. By seriously engaging with questions of meaning, intention, and the epistemological dimension of language, rather than simply assuming that language is a medium for the faithful transmission of ideas, Michaels has taken on board the postclassical attitude of questioning even the most basic assumptions.

Postclassical Theory and Rhetoric

Critical theory is, of course, in and of itself relevant to rhetoric. First, since theory is a sustained argument, it's a rhetorical exercise, and thus a site for rhetorical analysis. Second, as the domain of rhetorical analysis is widened to include all signifying practices, any theory that's relevant to signification, interpretation, etc becomes a theory of rhetoric as well. And third, because rhetoric affects how people interact, theories of those interactions - of politics, economics, and so on - are important in understanding rhetoric.

But what specifically in postclassical theory makes it relevant to rhetoric? Some suggestions:

Rhetoric traditionally has had strong ties with the European Classical period, a tradition that's still strong in the discipline today. So rhetoricians have a particular need to question classical ideas.

Many of the common topics in postclassical thought, such as contingency and relativism, were key points of contention among classical schools, notably between the Periclean Athenians and the Sophists. Rhetoric scholars familiar with this history already have some insight into those questions.

By rejecting epistemological foundations beyond persuasion, much of postclassical theory in effect endorses rhetoric as the (or at least a central) arbiter of epistemology and cosmology. As with Kuhn and other post-rationalist analysts of science, many postclassical theories see dispute between conceptions (rather than a consensus with a perceptible reality) as the mechanism that generates new and more sophisticated models of the world.

The cross-disciplinary investigations of the postclassical theorists show the epistemological force of rhetoric in disciplines that have sometimes been considered immune to rhetoric, such as mathematics.

A number of postclassical scholars present rhetorical analyses. Rhetoric scholars may see those as anything from flawed and undeveloped to exemplary (or having elements of both extremes); but in any case they're worth looking at.

Postclassicism, at its heart, is rhetorical, in a mode that recalls both the Sophists' rejection of propriety and Socrates' questioning of every assumption, among others. It's the assumption that everything is available to be challenged - indeed, that it demands that challenge.

1. Note that as far as I'm aware Smith and Plotnitsky don't use the term postclassicism; I'm using it here to mean an orientation toward the "postclassical theory" they describe and include in the collection.

2. On the question of defining modernism, see for example Astradur Eysteinsson's The Concept of Modernism, Andreas Huyssen's After the Great Divide and other work, and Marjorie Perloff's essay "Pound/Stevens: Whose Era?". In the last, a famous essay from the early '80s, Perloff shows how literary critics arrive at precisely opposite definitions of literary modernism, depending on whether they pick Pound or Stevens as their champion to represent the period.

3. For an introduction to pragmatism and its relationship to rhetoric, you might want to read my own short essay on the subject, "Rhetoric is its Effects" (PDF, 6 pages plus appendices). Or you might not.

-- Michael Wojcik (wojcikm4@msu.edu)

Postclassicism