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The defining aspiration of philosophical and scientific discourse in the West has always been to rise above and resolve the contradictions of any particular manifestation of manichean logic. Currently, as I have noted, this aspiration has been condemned as futile, retrograde, and epistemologically imperialistic by varieties of postmodernist thought, for which there is no logic or dialectic, but only rhetoric, discourse clearly bound to specific purposes and occasions. For all my general hostility to the postmodern position, there is, I believe, one sense in which it is, indeed, quite accurate: for inasmuch as philosophical and scientific discourse have traditionally based themselves on the achievement of some totalized or totalizing metanarrative, these discourses, precisely in the extent of their claims, are, indeed, unaccept-


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able for secular criticism today. Not even those of us who are sceptical of the amiability of Rortyian conversations, or the pretensions to effectivity of the Lyotardian thousand bits of talk can quite be comfortable with the prospect of having to (re)assert the universal authority of any explanatory paradigm. Yet, as Nancy Hartsock points out, it is intolerable

to be imprisoned by the alternatives posed by Enlightenment thought and postmodernism: either one must adopt the perspective of the transcendental and disembodied voice of Reason, or one must abandon the goal of accurate and systematic knowledge of the world. (205)

"To put the question differently," as Todorov writes in the essay from which I have already quoted, "is there really no middle ground between worshipping dogmas as immutable truth and abandoning the idea of truth itself?" (1986 180). I don't know that there is such a "middle ground"—although I do believe that ethnocriticism's commitment to a movement between grounds may well offer something as near as one can come to what Todorov seems to be after. The question I want to raise here, however, is this: if one does indeed want to predicate one's discourse on something between truth and dogma (versions of logic or dialectic), on the one hand, and random talk ("only" rhetoric), on the other, how is one to recognize that "something" if and when it presents itself?

For no one is likely actually to admit her or his allegiance to a "transcendental and disembodied . . . Reason," or to "worshipping dogmas." By what means then are we to differentiate between discourses predicated upon the latter and those predicated upon "the goal of accurate and system-


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atic knowledge of the world" (Hartsock), or, indeed, even "the idea of truth itself" (Todorov)? A full consideration of this question is beyond my competence and, in any case, would require at least a full volume in itself. As signposts toward some answers, I will note only the importance I continue to find in Raymond Williams's insistence that the very nature of any epistemic or cultural hegemony is necessarily limited, so that rather than totalities, we always get in practice varying degrees of dominant, residual, and emerging values.[13] Here, too, I would also note the value of Jurgen Habermas's recent appeal to an admittedly ideal(ized) speech situation against which claims to rationality might be measured, and of Christopher Norris's suggestion that the actual process of any rigorous working through —be it deconstructive, Marxist, or whatever—can yield results which may make approximate truth-claims.[14]

The feminist philosopher Linda Alcoff calls this sort of working-through a form of doing "metaphysics" that "is conceived not as any particular ontological commitment but as the attempt to reason through ontological issues that cannot be decided empirically" (429). Alcoff proposes what she calls "positionality" as a strategy of self-conscious self-displacement within the epistemological and discursive frames any critic cannot help but inhabit. Alcoff's "positionality" is quite close to my ethnocritical stance and its commitment to testing itself in relation to otherness and difference may provide another route to cognitively responsible understandings, some approximation to Todorov's "middle ground."


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The point is to recognize that the difficulties currently in the way of establishing probabilistic claims to explanation, although they may be in the nature of the case, may also be a function, more locally, of our situation: not matters of essence, then, but of time, place, and culture. What we cannot see just here, just now, others may come to see readily enough. It is not yet certain that every epistemological break, in Foucault's terms, for all that it may newly instantiate the knowledge/power relationship, does so in exactly the same way and in exactly the same degree as those that have gone before; it's possible, indeed, even to read Foucault himself for this conclusion.

And it is particularly interesting for my ethnocritical position that Hartsock's invocation of accuracy, systematicity, and knowledge is in the interest of a move "Toward Minority Theories" (204). "Those of us who have been marginalized by the transcendental voice of universalizing theory," she writes,

need to do something other than ignore power relations, as Rorty does, or resist them, as figures such as Foucault and Lyotard suggest. We need to transform them. (204)

This transformation of knowledge by the hitherto marginalized in all their "concrete multiplicity" (204), Hartsock notes, is unlikely to reproduce Enlightenment metanarratives, because these various persons "are far less likely to mistake themselves for the universal 'man,'" thereby constructing "another totalizing and falsely universal discourse" (205). Of course, it is important also to resist some equally totalized and false metanarrative of absolute Otherness and the perpetuation of Difference.

This latter danger Todorov properly warns of in the essay


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from which I have already quoted, reminding us "that the content of a thought" should not "depend . . . upon the color of the thinker's skin" (177), as it should not depend upon the thinker's gender, class, ethnicity, and the like. Yet Todorov's own invocation of "the idea of truth itself," at least in his book The Conquest of America , seems to me—whatever its author's intentions—an attempt precisely to defend Enlightenment thought and Eurocentrism, constructing the ideological semiotics of the Other in an entirely manichean, scapegoating, and virtually neocolonialist manner.[15] I have no securely objective criterion for judging Todorov to be wrong : nonetheless, any critique of "immutable dogmas" that has the consequence of replicating those "dogmas"—albeit in the name of something more respectable than "dogma"—must, as the epigraph to this book from Anthony Wilden insists, be suspect on the face of it. If Hartsock looks "Toward Minority Theories," it seems to me that Todorov looks toward the reconstitution of (what once were) majority theories. What is needed is some move away from even the majority/minority dichotomy, without, however, denying the differential relations of power it seeks to name.


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