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Toward end of After Theory, Docherty provides the basic outlines of postmodernist theory, kind of theory which text in fact has practiced throughout. All thought since Enlightenment, he tells us, has been based on logic, which in its operations is indistinguishable from ideology. Neither one requires or permits real critical thinking; is system ... which does thinking and which provides answers. This view implies that theories cannot be challenged by reference to facts; that what we may see as philosophical or ideological differences are infallibly generated from assumptions by policed or disciplined conventions; and that rationality, a system of oppression, is terroristic (pp. 207-09). The alternative is alterity and heterogeneity. Since this thinking orjudging has no criteria ... it becomes difficult to understand (p. 11). Such views are commonplace in thirty-odd books now produced annually with word postmodern in title. Lacking jurisdiction competent to hear their claims, postmodernists find themselves subjected to peremptory judgment by rationalists-a perfect example of differend, as conceived by Lyotard: A case of differend between two parties takes place when 'regulation' of conflict that opposes them is done in of one of parties while wrong suffered by other is not signified in that idiom (The Differend, p. 9). By this high standard of justice, it is unfair to criticize postmodernism in rational idiom. But by same token, postmodernists have no right, Lyotard would say, to deprive rationalists of any means to argue their own case. This differend cannot be adjudicated, but it can be complicated by showing that it is tangle of differences, not clearcut opposition. Objections to theory, for example, take varied forms. Rationalists hold that some theories are demonstrably wrong. Many have argued that theories of some things are bound to be wrong. That was what Kant held concerning aesthetic; in Gadamer, sphere of untheorizable is extended. Most species of genre of postmodernism hold that all theories are bound to be wrong. But here discriminations prove useful. The antitheorisms of Wittgenstein, Rorty, Dreyfus, Derrida, and Lyotard are distinct. In case of Docherty, rejection of theory appears to arise from following syllogism: (1) Scientific theories are paradigmatic of rational thought. (2) Marxism, rigorously scientific theory, has proven false. (3) Therefore, all theories are false (p.
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