Civilian Scholarship

Volume 8, number 1, of Common Knowledge succeeds volume 7, number 3, after a hiatus in which the editorial office has moved from the United States, where our primary concern was with the "culture wars," to the Middle East, where the belligerence is less metaphorical. CK's progress from the New World to the Old has been logical, an extension of its commitments extramurally and internationally. A journal with a name implying quiet cooperation has its work cut out for it in this place and now: I am writing from Jerusalem in the ninth month of the "Al-Aqsa Intifada." A tacit premise of this journal's first seven years was that poststructuralist and, more generally, skeptical theories of knowledge, meaning, and value should never have become a field of battle. To the extent that such theories (or anti- theories) have worked to lower the pretensions of true, real, and other hazardous words, postmodernism has been a project that traditionalists and moderates should appreciate and support. Even when arrogantly framed, poststructuralist claims give the old-fashioned wisdom of humility a new life. It has not been the argument of sober theorists that "nothing is true" or that "anything goes." What's been claimed, first, is that being right is not such a big deal--and second, that (as Susan Sontag put it last year from a podium in Jerusalem) "something else is always going on." There is too much truth for anyone or any combination of us to take in, digest, and utter. As for "anything goes": what-goes depends on who's going, and when. No one serious in these debates has proposed that reality and [End Page 1] validity are imaginary or even unavailable (in principle) to our understanding, but on the contrary that reality and validity are inexpensive and in plentiful supply. As for facts, it's not that we don't know any, but rather that we know so many and that the ones we know, much of the time, don't well cohere. The most effective transmitters of this avant-garde wisdom have, in my experience, been lullabies, the tunes accompanied by stories that help us get some rest. Once the melody of Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature is in your repertoire, the hypertension that attends on using real and true in sentences subsides. Unfortunately, we have as yet no lullaby that calms us down about our use of just, as shrill an adjective as ever. Justice, truth, and peace are the principles that the Mishnah says maintain the world (Avot 1:18)--of the three, justice and truth have always had obsessive partisans among scholars; but peace? Living where I do, peace seems to me an idée fixe over which intellectuals could usefully obsess now. But even within the poststructuralist common room, there are voices shouting as though ontologies were in conflict. How is that possible, now that the big words have been lower-cased and scare-quoted? About what can those people be arguing? Rorty has on occasion said that, despite all ("all" being historicism), he'd like us to feel that we can fight and die for a cause we know is not transcendent, but historically situated and conditioned. I would have thought that the prime benefit of his kind of relativism is that we would feel no longer any such needs. I used to think--it seemed possible--that we contend over territory, even where, as in the academy, the territories are trivial (Who gets the corner view? Whose protégé gets tenure?). But I've come to think that we fight in order to evade peace, which apparently some of us fear and others despise. Heraclitus is quoted on the beauty of conflict in so many epigraphs and book reviews, it's untoward--yet knocking our heads together seems an unobvious route to enlightenment. Constructing a reality, as postmoderns tend to say we do, is, one would think, a tranquil and cooperative labor, involving negotiation, compromise, patience, and plenty of time...