Poststructuralist theorists, among others (notably, feminists), have criticized educators for working within a discourse of critical rationalism which reifies the humanist subject—the rational, self-motivating, autonomous agent—as a subject of history, change, and resistance. They maintain that what separates being an individual from being a subject is a linguistic membrane known as discourse. Discourses provide individuals with identifications which convert them into subjects. By contrast, the rationalist position associated with the modern Enlightenment rests on a "metaphysics of presence" which constitutes the individual as a noncontradictory, rational, self-fashioning, autonomous being: Descartes' fully conscious "I" immediately transparent to itself. There is a logic of identity here in which the self defines itself in opposition to the "other." The forced unity of this position and the unilinearity of its progressive rationality work to deny the specificity of difference and heterogeneity. The subject is projected as a unity, but this disguises and falsifies the complex disunity of experience.¹⁸

The debate over postmodernity is largely related to the advent of multi-national or late capitalism, which has formed, from its "centerless ubiquity,"¹⁹ a new postmodern subject out of the pathological jumble of consumer myths and images fed by the global dispersal of capital and its constant promises of fulfillment through an ever-expanding market economy which structures the shape and direction of our desire. The debate, moreover, is about the construction of our identities as raced, classed, and gendered beings which have been decentered irrevocably, thereby giving ominous weight to Brenkman's observation that "the obligation to critize and transform outer reality wanes as authentic meanings and values are granted a purely inner reality."²⁰

Postmodernist efforts to decenter the subject have met with criticisms and cautions. Hartsock sounds a note of deep suspicion that just at a time when many groups are engaged in "nationalisms" which involve redefining them as marginalized Others, the academy begins to legitimize a critical theory of the "subject" which holds its agency in doubt and which casts a general scepticism on the possibilities of a general theory which can describe the world and institute a quest for historical progress.²¹ Henry Louis Gates, Jr., echoes a similar concern. He argues that in rejecting the existence of a subject, poststructuralist theorists are denying those who have been subjugated and made voiceless and invisible by the high canon of Western literature the chance to reclaim their subjectivity before they critique it.

To deny us the process of exploring and reclaiming our subjectivity before we critique it is the critical version of the grandfather clause, the double privileging of categories that happen to be preconstituted. Such a position leaves us nowhere, invisible and voiceless in the republic of Western letters. Consider the irony: precisely when we (and other third world peoples) obtain the complex wherewithal to define our black subjectivity in the republic of Western letters, our theoretical colleagues declare that there ain't no such thing as a subject, so why should we be bothered with that? In this way, those of us in feminist criticism or African-American criticism who are engaged in the necessary work of canon deformation and reformation, confront the skepticism even of those who are allies on other fronts, over the matter of the death of the subject and our own discursive subjectivity.²²

Elsewhere, postmodernist discourse has met the charge that its over-determination of the subject through discourse renders the social agent as politically innocuous as the liberal humanist. The obsession of both poststructuralists and the new historicists to formulate the self as an effect of discourse rather than as its origin necessarily submits human subjects to determinations over which they have little control. Frank Lentricchia targets "a literary politics of freedom whose echoes of Nietzsche and his joyful deconstructionist progeny do not disguise its affiliation with the mainline tradition of aesthetic humanism, a politics much favored by many of our colleagues in literary study, who take not a little pleasure from describing themselves as powerless. This is a literary politics that does not . . . [answer] . . . the question: So what?"²³