Reflexivity and Positivity

Abstract

Since the run-up to the Millennium, yet another ‘turn’ seems to have been underway in social and cultural theory. It has not quite materialized even now, and it may not even come to receive a commonly agreed name, but something like a ‘turn to positivity’ is going on across the human sciences. And the turn to positivity is a slow one because unlike all the other turns of recent decades, positivity signals a definite corrective to the previously dominant mood of sceptical, pluralistic multiplicity in intellectual life. The need for such a corrective has been apparent for some time. In Spectres of Marx, for example, Jacques Derrida declared that there had been quite enough ‘interminable self-critique’, and he proposed that we should ‘never be ready to denounce’ that ‘messianic affirmation’ and ‘spirit of Enlightenment’ that were evident in the Communist Manifesto (Derrida 1994: 88–9). Richard Rorty went on to name Derrida himself as one of the chief instigators of ‘principled, theorized, philosophical hopelessness’ (Rorty 1998: 36–7), just as Rorty’s own conversational postmodernism has often been the target of exactly the same charge.