MetaCampbell: the epistemological problematics of perspectivism

Abstract

David Campbell's recent review article of single-authored monographs on the Bosnian conflict serves as a vehicle for him to sketch the outlines of what he calls ‘a different objectivity’. The article is interesting insofar as it represents a serious attempt by a self-proclaimed postmodernist/poststructuralist writer, although perhaps not a card carrying one to use his own phrase, to grasp the epistemological nettle. For despite the many trenchant critiques of prevailing epistemologies by post-modernist writers and much talk of a ‘postmodern epistemology’, there has been very little, if any, attempt to elaborate just what such an epistemology might involve. Campbell highlights what is a stake here by noting that ‘how one goes about making a judgement as to which narrative of the Bosnian War is better raises the thorniest of historiography's issues.’ Unsurprisingly, Campbell's answer to this issue is the standard postmodern fallback position of Nietzscheian perspectivism.