2

Although this topic has, of late, been much considered, it may not be amiss, here, to outline more specifically my own "discontents" with postmodernism, the better to situate the ethnocriticism I want to offer in its place.

As Jean-François Lyotard has written, "Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives" (xxiv). "Metanarratives" are those discourses which, at least from the time of the Enlightenment, have either made truth-claims analogous to those of "science," or, have made claims to "philosophical" status, offering themselves as more inclusive or comprehensive than so-called "first-order" or "natural" narratives. Philosophy has always aimed, in Christopher Norris's phrase, to operate on "a higher plane of understanding," where the subject under discussion "would yield up its true . . . significance" (15),

if nothing else, a determination to sustain the Aristotelian distinction between logic, or dialectic, and rhetoric. It is the postmodernist's insistence, however, that philosophy's claim to produce just this sort of metadiscourse ruled by reason and logic is always trapped in the prisonhouse of rhetoric and ideology; thus any would-be explanatory account in the interest of truth or knowledge is inevitably just another occasion-bound story (rhetoric).

As it is for philosophy, so, too, is it for social science, most particularly, history and ethnography: we always tell just another story, inevitably our story. Now it would be absurd to pretend that there is not a good deal of truth to this; from the pessimist's perception of the eternally half-empty rather than half-full glass, we must either imperialistically "tell our own story" as the other's, or imperialistically speak for the other, violent translation or insidious ventriloquism, the only alternatives. But this kind of either/or reasoning, as I shall take considerable pains to argue, is itself a pure product of Western logic, and leads to the practice of what I will call philosophy and social science in the ironic mode, most particularly, as I shall explain further in chapter 2, in the mode marked by the rhetorical trope of catachresis , the figure of abusio or misuse.

This postmodernist position has, of course, been "scientifically" and "philosophically" contested, most powerfully, perhaps, by the continuing meditations on the subject of Jurgen Habermas.^[6] I offer my own version of an epistemological critique, one deriving from my interest in a frontier perspective, later. Here, however, I want to argue against the politics of postmodernism—once more in the interest of ethnocriticism's very different politics.

To reduce all discourse to voices in occasional conversation, in the Rortyian postmodernist mode, or to equivalent stories, à la Lyotard, is, as Rorty wholeheartedly admits, to privilege the paradigm of a liberal, bourgeois consensus society—one, unfortunately, that either does not anywhere actually exist or is not nearly so amiably consensual as claimed. Lyotard, as I understand him, would go much further than this;^[7] he seems to see his radically relativist view as consistent with such things as justice and liberation. The logic here—for all that logic is a discredited category for postmodernism—has to do with the notion that once all metanarrative aspirations are either abandoned or undermined, then, as David Carroll writes, we will have

Hundreds, thousands of little dissident narratives of all sorts . . . produced in spite of all attempts to repress them, . . . circulat[ing] inside, or even initially, outside the boundaries of the totalitarian state. (75)

Carroll continues, extrapolating from Lyotard:

The importance of these little narratives is not only that they challenge the dominant metanarrative and the state apparatus that would prohibit or discredit them, but that they also indicate the possibility of another kind of society. (75)

But what can the social referents of such ostensibly descriptive commentary actually be? Are Carroll, and, in his own way, Lyotard thinking of what was called samizdat publi-

cation in and out of Russia? If so, I would challenge them to name specifically not even "Hundreds, [or] thousands of [the] little dissident narratives" they have in mind but even a couple of dozen that have had any social effectivity whatsoever except to the extent that, "challeng[ing] the dominant metanarrative" of one "state apparatus," they supported the metanarrative and state apparatus of antagonist states to those in which they originated. I applaud the courage of dissident speakers and writers everywhere, but surely we need to distinguish between speaking oppositionally and toppling the state. In America, as Paul Goodman used to point out, we let everybody say or publish whatever they choose; we just restrict access to the microphones, controlling not the production of counterstories but their distribution.

As I have worked on this book over the past two years, I have many times taken a break by looking out the window, at Tomkins Square Park. From perhaps the summer of 1989 until their removal on December 13, 1989, there were a very great many speakers to be seen and heard in the park. Mostly black and Hispanic, mostly homeless, some down on their luck, some severely disturbed, or badly addicted, the park people audibly told stories to each other; to the working class young cops who, for a while, at least, were gathered here thicker than thieves;^[8] to the Yuppies who,

hurrying to their new renovations, didn't stop to listen. Until the 1988 police riot, the homeless most thickly congregated at the south end of the park, at Seventh Street; after, most of them moved their tarpaulin, box, and board shelters over to Tenth Street, the north end of the park, where I lived. The population density of the park people increased as the summer of 1989 ended. The smell of urine was strong on the southerly breeze; then it grew prematurely cold in the "big shitty," and the foremost smell was wood smoke from the "fire barrels," the garbage cans used as makeshift stoves and heaters. Walking in the park (it is quite safe by day), having Rorty and Lyotard and Carroll in mind, I tried to listen to the stories being told; I tried, too, to see these "petits récits ," the "wisps of narrative" unquestionably produced by the people in the park as "dissident" in some meaningful way, a "challenge [to] the dominant metanarrative or the state apparatus that would prohibit or discredit them." But it is their marginality and complete containment that most strike me; only the TV news, which translates for them, is widely heard.

Now, at the end of the summer of 1990, most of the park people are gone—gone from Tomkins Square, that is; doubtless they continue to produce their narratives elsewhere. Who hears them? Where are they to be heard? Of course, this is not the sort of thing that Carroll and Lyotard

are talking about. True, no doubt, but then, why aren't they talking about these things? Now that Germans from the east and west are sharing their stories, their currency, and, apparently, their commitment to the Natopolitan world; now that Violeta Chamorro has nominally taken over Nicaraguan politics, and Islamic fundamentalists have taken power in Algeria and the Sudan; now that the Poles have followed an American whizkid economist's recommendations and lifted price controls on food and other staples, and Russians and Americans revel in the luxury of a common "enemy" like Saddam Hussein: do we look out upon a more consensually democratic, liberated world?

Is Lyotard's Paris that different from New York? Is it independent of all the rest of the world? What is Carroll's Irvine like, I wonder, that he can write what he does. So far as they "respect the alterity of the other . . . and the conflictual diversity of the social space itself" (Carroll 72), comfortable, middle-class, male, white academics can offer an example that has, perhaps, a certain value. But unless they—we—engage in something more than catachrestic narrative politics, it's all just a "language game" for the privileged, and, so far as I can see, no model for anyone, anywhere.