The Revenge of the Humanities: Reality, Rhetoric, and the Politics of Postmodernism

Abstract

The debate between scientific realists and postmodern relativists has been generally treated as a philosophical disagreement over the status of epistemology. Here, however, I use material from Bourdieuian social theory and science and technology studies to illustrate how both scientific realism and postmodern deconstructionism can be seen as political and organizational strategies used in the historical and ongoing struggle between scientific and literary fields and camps. I argue that just as scientific realism and experimentalism were used to dismiss the knowledge contributions of literary fields and to relegate them to secondary status in the seventeenth century, postmodern deconstructionism and its turn to rhetoric and textualism is now being employed as a strategy to counter the political and intellectual dominance gained by the sciences over the last few centuries.