Ebrahim Moosa offers several objections to my attack on postmodernism. I maintain that those objections presuppose a postmodern stance rather than present a defense of it. At heart, Moosa, as a consummate post-modernist, is interested in what a theory reveals about the theorist, whereas I, as a recalcitrant modernist, am interested in what a theory reveals about religion.
Would that all exchanges were as gracious as Ebrahim Moosa's. But as grateful as I am, I am not prepared to concede any of my criticisms of postmodernism on theorizing.
Moosa asks whether my own analogy of scholarship to diagnosis abets my purpose. I still think it does. His noting that a diagnosis may be wrong makes a doctor fallible, but still expert. One of the hallmarks of science is its allowance for error, just for error that can be detected and corrected. Only the Pope is assumed to wax infallible. Indeed, one of the most influential shifts in modern thought has been from a foundationalist, if still corrigible, view of science to a non-foundationalist one, according to which the capacity simply to be refutable is the hallmark of science.
One of the confusions I noted was that of failed theories with all theories. The leap from fallibility to futility I deem illogical. An unabashed expression of this leap appears in one of the postmodern classics recommended by Moosa: Talal Asad's Genealogies of Religion. Asad tells us in advance that his exposé of the limited applicability of Clifford Geertz's theory of religion will prove that "there cannot be a universal definition [or theory] of religion" (1993: 29). On the basis of his assessment of a single theory of religion, Asad asserts that any universal theory of religion is not merely difficult but impossible to achieve. Of course, nothing that he shows yields this conclusion, which parallels Tomoko Masuzawa's about theories of at least the origin of religion.
Moosa points out that no physician "worth her salt" would rely on merely mechanical tests to make a diagnosis. She would also seek "knowledge from the patient." But so would any modernist theorist. What else is fieldwork? To imply that a modernist theorist would do the equivalent of merely taking tests is to evince one of the misconceptions of social science that I enumerated: that of science with materialism. Still, [End Page 176] just as the diagnosis of illness rests with the physician, so the diagnosis of religion rests with the scholar.
Moosa suggests that in my preference for the "disinterested" scholar, I am overlooking the "power-knowledge equation." I think that he thereby evinces one of the confusions I named: that of explanation with effect. Of course, the doctor has power over the patient and does so by virtue of knowledge. The question is whether the power affects the diagnosis. If not, then the issues of power and knowledge are distinct.
Nobody denies that theories arise in specific times and places and that those times and places may affect the theories. But there is a difference between showing the limitations and declaring them a priori. Nobody denies that theorists have motivations of all kinds. In The Double Helix James Watson declared that he was after the Nobel Prize. But was his discovery of DNA thereby undermined? To conflate motivation—"interests"—with truth is to commit the genetic fallacy.
The easiest way to uncouple the postmodernist linkage of interest to truth is to observe that the purported interests being served by theories scarcely explain why modernists bother testing, revising, and even abandoning their supposedly self-serving theories. Nor does that linkage explain why successful theories transcend their contexts and manage to explain religions around the world, past and present. Postmodernists cannot account for either the failure or the success of theories because they collapse discovery into invention, thereby committing another of my confusions.
Moosa points out that postmodernists, not only modernists, are interested in theories, which for postmodernists "enable visibility." Perhaps so, but a central difference remains, and it is evinced in the AAR Presidential Address by Edith Wyschogrod that he commends (Wyschogrod 1994). Wyschogrod, having refuted in a paragraph the whole modernist notion of "factuality," graciously permits the retention of a postmodernist factuality, which allows us "to see what has been forgotten or effaced in the historical and cultural production of the factual attitude." Following Foucault, she shifts the focus from "objects of study"—religion—to "discursive formations." From theories, we now learn not about "the world" but about "the conditions of emergence of the object of study" (Wyschogrod 2004: 5–6). Put summarily, where postmodernists like Moosa and Wyschogrod are interested in what theories illuminate about their authors, stalwart modernists like me are interested in what theories illuminate about their subjects. [End Page 177]
