Critiquing a Critique of Postmodernism?

Been reading a monograph by Dr. Adrian Howe, a postmodern feminist, called Sex, Violence and Crime: Foucault and the ‘Man’ Question. She's a criminologist who approaches her subject from a poststructuralist perspective. One section tackles another criminologist critical of PM-modes of thinking, Stan Cohen. I think her discussion worth posting about because it highlights my own skepticism to PM questioning and problemization.

So, Howe has two basic issues with Cohen (States of Denial: Knowing about Atrocities and Suffering).

1. Cohen resusitates the public/private distinction that feminists hate, and
2. his anti-postmodern way of tackling issues like denial strategies, discrediting whistleblowers, re-naming & justifications. He's critical of such things, of course, but as acts, not as matters of discourse

So, let's take Howe's second problem with Cohen in particular. According to Howe, Cohen lambasts the idea “that there can be no access to current or historical reality from outside a vantage-point of power,” which is the most “pernicious element” of the postmodern critique of positivism or Enlightenment rationality (qtd. in Howe 17). [Hint: my argument is that Howe's attempted refutation actually largely substantiates Cohen's assertions here.]

Howe responds to Cohen  by noting that “unsubstantiated assertion is elevated to an art form in the anti-postmodern camp” (18), a frequent complaint by postmodernists like to make. . . . but then she basically substantiates Cohen claims through the following summary of Judith Butler. For context, Butler wishes to "interrogate" -- a favorite postmodernist word -- what truly authorizes acts of "conceptual mastery." To wit:

Taking a position that ‘places itself beyond the play of power’, that ‘lays claim to its legitimacy through recourse to a prior and implicitly universal agreement’ is, Butler argues, ‘perhaps the most insidious ruse of power’. What form of ‘insidious cultural imperialism’, she asks, ‘legislates itself under the sign of the universal’? . . . power pervades all conceptual frameworks, including that of postmodernisms’s critics. Crucially, however, the imbrication of all speaking positions in a ‘field of power is not the advent of a nihilistic relativism incapable of furnishing norms, but, rather, the very precondition of a politically engaged critique’. That is, recognizing and fully owning one’s privileged speaking position is our first ethical duty” (Howe 18; all quotes are Butler's).

That is to say, any claim of denial against the ubiquity of the power structures inherent in discourse is itself the surest sign of power -- an"insidious" (Butler's word) rhetorical move, a form of "cultural imperialism" or conceptual "mastery."

Of course, Butler and Howe themselves are engaging in a power move. "If you disagree with you, that simply proves that we're right." They bolster their counter-power move through language like "insidious," "imperialism," "mastery," and "ruse of power." . . .  which ignores, of course, that such language works more strongly on the level of emotion than on logic, which needless to say suggests a less-than-arduous analytical rigor. That's why philosopher like to use formal logic: natural language contains so much ambiguity and emotiveness that the pure logic of arguments becomes easy to miss.

So, a problem emerges for Howe and Butler. If everything's a power move, how do they avoid their charges against Cohen being directly against themselves? Really, they can't. Postmodern discourse is a sort of power move on equal status as the alleged power moves of non-postmodern discourse. 

They can, however, add their caveat about the  "first ethical duty" being to question one's own subject-position, which apparently Cohen doesn't do to their satisfaction. If power pervades all conceptual frameworks, including the frameworks employed by postmodernists, then postmodernists can seem to avoid the self-referential problem simply by claiming that they occupy the high ground. "We question our subject positions, but you don't." Note, of course, the vagueness of a verb like "questioning"; too often -- and this seems the case here -- a phrase like "questioning our subject-positions" operates as a way to forestall critique; one's opponents refuse to question their subject-positions as rigorously as you yourself do.

The problem with this view, though, is precisely what Cohen --as quoted by Howe -- says it is. If PM discourse is a power move, and it is, then it's not enough to question our own subject position when it comes to things that seem to demand a refusal of problemization: things like atrocities (Cohen's main interest), or the undeniable fact of global warming, or "real" facts over "alternative facts." PM must avoid truth claims . . . but truths claims undeniably have politically effective power.

The issue is that PM is so clearly a tool of the cultural & political left that PMists simply do not have to deal with postmodernists from the cultural and political right. As such, such postmodernists -- who hail almost entirely from the cozy confines of academia -- never really have to face having their core methodology used against them. Nietzsche and Heidegger were perhaps the last really useful postmodern thinkers on the right, but the postmodern left treats Nietzsche's and Heidegger's political views as historical idiosyncrasies rather than a direct outgrowth of their views on language, valuation, and historicity. But those implications are almost entirely ignored by the PM Left.

And it's interesting how Howe seems to refuse to accept the logical consequences of her own position. For example, dismissing the anti-PM claims of nihilism and relativism, Howe states:

many poststructuralist feminists, me included, have no intention of turning away from questions of truth and justice. . . . We also continue to strive to get justice for victims—never forgetting, of course, that what counts as justice is as discursively mediated as truth.” (178).

She's absolutely right about that, I think -- most poststructuralist feminists do not have any interest in turning away from truth claims. They certainly want to appeal to truth claims . . . even though, as Howe clearly states earlier, all claims to truth are "insidious" power-ploys that suggest a something that exists outside representation. Postmodern feminists like Howe are claiming, "We believe in justice . . . but, at the same time, we don't believe in justice." Judith Butler herself used this have-one's-cake-and-eat-it-too ploy when she devised her arguments in favor of "strategic essentialism": we'll employ theoretically untenable essentialist views when it's (politically) convenient to do so.

Rather than making several "unsubstantiated assertions," then, Cohen's characterization of postmodern issues appears absolutely accurate.