Postmodern Pat
The other day, I stopped off at a local KFC and ordered chicken and fries. As I picked up my order and was about to head out to the car, the woman serving me glanced up and said, "Have a postmodernist day!"
No, that's not true. What she did say was: "I'm afraid we're all out of regular chicken, so you've got postmodern chicken instead." Or - on reflection - maybe that was "spicy chicken", but she said it with a postmodernist expression.
No, that's not true either. Actually, I didn't go to KFC at all. I was just trying to figure out how I might use "postmodern" or "postmodernist" in a sentence in a way that might convey something - anything really - to the reader. As you see, it's not easy.
I think many people have the same problem. The true meaning of "postmodernist", assuming there is one, is fenced in by a wall of impenetrable books, invariably in French, that few people dare to read and none seem any the wiser for having read. This has led some to one of the following conclusions: (1) it's a word we don't need; (2) it's some sort of conspiracy, perhaps involving Marxists. I think they're both wrong (pace Jordan Peterson). It's a word we might one day be grateful for, but it's one of those annoying variables that has to be reset, or redefined, every time we use it - like, say, "love", or "liberal", or the position of a toilet seat. So here's the definition I'll be using henceforth:
Postmodernism is the hangover you get after you've overindulged in modernism.
This would be fine if we could all agree about what modernism is or was. Unfortunately, it seems we can't do that either, at least when we are talking about modernism in the arts. So once again, I'll have to provide my own definition, for the purposes of what follows. This would be:
Modernism is the belief that by rejecting tradition and outdated social structures, and embracing rationality, we can bring about social progress.
Seen in this light, we can find instances of the Modernist outlook in the Utopian thinkers and movements of the nineteenth century (Fourier, Saint-Simon, Owen et al), in pop-Marxism, in Nazism, in the eugenics movement, in some of the social-Darwinist ravings of HG Wells and GB Shaw, and of course in the Fabian Window. But why stop there? The belief in social progress, and in its rational underpinnings, coupled with contempt for mere "tradition", is a staple for the majority of thinkers of the contemporary left (the fact that some of them call themselves "progressives" is something of a giveaway). Modernism is very much alive and well in the present day - so much so that some will find it deeply mysterious how anyone could seriously disagree with the idea of social progress. For the benefit of any such, here's how:
If progress is to mean more than what is presumably referenced in the annoying cliché "going forward", i.e. "not going backwards in time", one assumes it's about getting better over time. This "better" clearly involves a value judgment. But value judgments, whether ethical or aesthetic, are subjective, and can only be made by individuals, not by groups or societies. We may be able to build some degree of consensus over our shared values - this is arguably a sine qua non if you want to have a society at all - but such consensus will only ever be partial, and minimal, and subject to permanent revision. For example, it seems likely that the majority Catholic population of the Iberian peninsula following the Reconquista saw the Edict of Expulsion and forced conversion of Muslims as "progress" towards a "better society", but most people today would not view the imposition of a religious monoculture by force as in any way progressive. Thus, a person who at the time opposed this policy would have been seen as regressive by his contemporaries, and would be seen as progressive today.
What I'm driving at is that a great deal of contemporary thought and political activism today seems to be imbued with Whig history - that is, with the seductive notion of a large-scale transhistorical progression towards greater and greater well-being for more and more people, and greater and greater convergence towards "enlightened" (good, "true") values among the world's population - a notion that I would argue is both fundamentally Modernist, and fundamentally mistaken.
It is wrong, and dangerous, for a number of reasons. First, it instills a false sense of security: if all history is a continuous crescendo of human advancement, then tomorrow will inevitably be better than today - and we don't need to worry about the national debt, or the credit bubble, or global warming, since the superior knowledge and competence of tomorrow's technocrats will solve whatever problems today's profligacy has caused, or worsened. Secondly, it encourages you to take a side wherever you find a diversity of conflicting interests, and to adopt an aggressively moralistic stance in support of that side. If, for example, you detect a tendency for "modern" societies to abandon religious belief, you may conclude that the abandonment of belief is "progressive", and its preservation "regressive", and will be tempted to write off religious believers as reactionary, as obstacles to progress, or even as morally defective (all the while blissfully unaware that your own belief in "progress" is as much a blind leap of faith as any of the religious dogmas you oppose). Thus, we tend to find among "progressives" a strict conformity of views with little tolerance for diversity, an aggressive policing of opinion and a tendency to exclude and ostracise dissenters, in spite of the fact that many self-styled progressives claim to favour a liberal, tolerant and inclusive society.
This smug belief that we can arrive at a good approximation to Utopia simply by plotting graphs across history and extending the lines rightward and upward (more affluence, more "equality", more "rights", more government regulation, more longevity, more automation, more globalisation, smaller families, etc. etc, Pinker has the list) tends to obscure and conceal both conflicts of interest (between individuals, between the individual and society, between groups within society, not to mention the environment) and the tradeoffs and complexities that necessarily underlie any sensible definition of human flourishing. It becomes hard to accept that as a species (or as a "nation"), we have advanced in some respects, but have comprehensively fucked up in others. Ignoring one or other side of a complex tradeoff is always so much easier.
Worst of all, Modernism tends to harbour a collectivist mentality. If we are concerned with the "progress", not of an individual, but of a "society" (species, race, nation, Volk, according to taste), the conceptual decoupling of the collective (the thing that "progresses") from the individual (the thing whose welfare is, presumably, the sole determinant of said "progress") leads us to hypostatize the collective and treat it as something with legitimate interests above and apart from those of the individuals comprising it - perhaps the most dangerous error that the human mind is capable of.
At which point, enter postmodernism.
I know this isn't the only reading of what postmodernism is, but to my mind, it's the best entry point. If PM is to be more than just an effete intellectual pose, a pretentiously opaque style of writing or an adaptive mutation of intellectually bankrupt Humanities departments, it must - surely? - trace part of its genesis to the fact that the Modernist ideal, as described above, in spite of its enduring appeal, demonstrably led, in the twentieth century, to some of the greatest horrors ever seen in human history, in the form of the various century-defining totalitarianisms (Stalinism, Nazism, Maoism and the rest). Today's leftist "progressives" like to think that they are as far removed as it is possible to be from the Petri dish of fascism; yet it is disturbing to find, on examination, the same intellectual pedigree (and, arguably, the same temperament) underlying both. You don't need to believe in horseshoe theory to notice the same smug dogmatism, the same fanatical devotion to a Greater Good, the same quasi-religious pursuit of an earthly Utopia, the same hatred of ideological enemies, in the staring eyes of the neofascist and the neomarxist. To which the postmodernist (by my understanding) says "fuck this" - or rather, to use one of the several canonical terms, "deconstruct this". "I define postmodern as incredulity toward meta-narratives," says Lyotard, where such metanarratives may be presumed to include the epistemic framework of conviction that is required for the fascist or Marxist to prioritise her important, "progressive" truth above the humanity of her intended victims. Postmodernism acknowledges that the various scientific and political and metaphysical discourses we encounter are constantly vying with one another for superiority ("hegemony") in some mental hierarchy - whether in the individual mind or the social "marketplace of ideas" - and rather than throwing its weight behind any one of them, attempts to lay bare the limitations, shortcomings and internal contradictions and hypocrisies of each, to "decentre" them, to separate the Emperor from the discursively constructed new clothes - and thus, hopefully, to render them less murderous than they might otherwise have been.
The trouble is - and this is where things get a bit confusing - this promise or potential to reveal the contingent, compromised nature of a particular discourse, and the illegitimacy of its claims upon our assent (or even our attention), dovetails rather neatly with the much earlier claim of orthodox Marxism, that dominant ideas and discourses within a society are nothing more than the cultural superstructure that rests upon and partly conceals the "economic base", the unequal relations of power and oppression that indirectly determine what we can and cannot say and how we can say it. Since the mechanisms of causality obtaining between this economic base and cultural superstructure were never fully explained by the bushy-bearded Master, it's hardly surprising that Marxists post 1968 should have been drawn to a body of work (Derrida, Foucault, Baudrillard, etc) that promised, in tandem with the Frankfurt School, to provide the tools to substantiate the whole "superstructure" theory - to show how what appears to be a persuasive logical argument, or a sound scientific construction, or an all-conquering consumerist ethos, is in fact merely the expression of an unequal power relationship, relying for its efficacy on our own fatal investiture in the system. Thus, the future leaders of the Revolution, by adopting the opaque terminology and stylistic idiosyncrasies of the French deconstructionists, are equipped both with an explanation for why the masses have so far failed to rally behind their cause (too much hyperreality, doncha know) and a means to demonstrate their fitness to lead (by demonstrating a Houdini-like ability to escape from even the heaviest logical and discursive chains and padlocks, armed, faute de mieux, with the rhetorical skeleton key of strategic Bulverism).
In short, a philosophical tendency that, in appearance, was born out of a healthy opposition to the sort of Grand Narratives that lead to genocide, was (in some quarters) opportunistically co-opted by purveyors of the sort of Grand Narratives that lead to genocide.
Which is why I find it convenient to characterise Postmodernism as a hangover. You need, after all, to be a very special type of person to experience reading a page of Derrida as anything other than a sudden, vicious, stabbing headache. But just as the hangover is a necessary transition to sobriety, so the Walpurgisnacht of nonsense that the postmodernists cavort in may be seen as a necessary purging of the intellectual hubris that led to the Final Solution, the Killing Fields or the Holodomor. Well, that's if you want it to.
It would appear that, for some, Derrida and Foucault are already old hat, and so is Postmodernism. That would be a shame if so, since the first readable postmodern document has yet to be written, and the label still languishes in want of a worthy referent. But until the philosophical prodigy appears who can inject some inspiring content into the bloated body, we're left with the ugly spectacle of Modernists of varying stripe - some Marxist, most just poorly educated instinctual "social justice" despots - squabbling around the carcass, and picking at to the terminology - the decentering, the deconstructing, the decolonising, the dewhatevering - to feed their illiberal agenda.
No, that's not true. What she did say was: "I'm afraid we're all out of regular chicken, so you've got postmodern chicken instead." Or - on reflection - maybe that was "spicy chicken", but she said it with a postmodernist expression.
No, that's not true either. Actually, I didn't go to KFC at all. I was just trying to figure out how I might use "postmodern" or "postmodernist" in a sentence in a way that might convey something - anything really - to the reader. As you see, it's not easy.
I think many people have the same problem. The true meaning of "postmodernist", assuming there is one, is fenced in by a wall of impenetrable books, invariably in French, that few people dare to read and none seem any the wiser for having read. This has led some to one of the following conclusions: (1) it's a word we don't need; (2) it's some sort of conspiracy, perhaps involving Marxists. I think they're both wrong (pace Jordan Peterson). It's a word we might one day be grateful for, but it's one of those annoying variables that has to be reset, or redefined, every time we use it - like, say, "love", or "liberal", or the position of a toilet seat. So here's the definition I'll be using henceforth:
Postmodernism is the hangover you get after you've overindulged in modernism.
This would be fine if we could all agree about what modernism is or was. Unfortunately, it seems we can't do that either, at least when we are talking about modernism in the arts. So once again, I'll have to provide my own definition, for the purposes of what follows. This would be:
Modernism is the belief that by rejecting tradition and outdated social structures, and embracing rationality, we can bring about social progress.
Seen in this light, we can find instances of the Modernist outlook in the Utopian thinkers and movements of the nineteenth century (Fourier, Saint-Simon, Owen et al), in pop-Marxism, in Nazism, in the eugenics movement, in some of the social-Darwinist ravings of HG Wells and GB Shaw, and of course in the Fabian Window. But why stop there? The belief in social progress, and in its rational underpinnings, coupled with contempt for mere "tradition", is a staple for the majority of thinkers of the contemporary left (the fact that some of them call themselves "progressives" is something of a giveaway). Modernism is very much alive and well in the present day - so much so that some will find it deeply mysterious how anyone could seriously disagree with the idea of social progress. For the benefit of any such, here's how:
If progress is to mean more than what is presumably referenced in the annoying cliché "going forward", i.e. "not going backwards in time", one assumes it's about getting better over time. This "better" clearly involves a value judgment. But value judgments, whether ethical or aesthetic, are subjective, and can only be made by individuals, not by groups or societies. We may be able to build some degree of consensus over our shared values - this is arguably a sine qua non if you want to have a society at all - but such consensus will only ever be partial, and minimal, and subject to permanent revision. For example, it seems likely that the majority Catholic population of the Iberian peninsula following the Reconquista saw the Edict of Expulsion and forced conversion of Muslims as "progress" towards a "better society", but most people today would not view the imposition of a religious monoculture by force as in any way progressive. Thus, a person who at the time opposed this policy would have been seen as regressive by his contemporaries, and would be seen as progressive today.
What I'm driving at is that a great deal of contemporary thought and political activism today seems to be imbued with Whig history - that is, with the seductive notion of a large-scale transhistorical progression towards greater and greater well-being for more and more people, and greater and greater convergence towards "enlightened" (good, "true") values among the world's population - a notion that I would argue is both fundamentally Modernist, and fundamentally mistaken.
It is wrong, and dangerous, for a number of reasons. First, it instills a false sense of security: if all history is a continuous crescendo of human advancement, then tomorrow will inevitably be better than today - and we don't need to worry about the national debt, or the credit bubble, or global warming, since the superior knowledge and competence of tomorrow's technocrats will solve whatever problems today's profligacy has caused, or worsened. Secondly, it encourages you to take a side wherever you find a diversity of conflicting interests, and to adopt an aggressively moralistic stance in support of that side. If, for example, you detect a tendency for "modern" societies to abandon religious belief, you may conclude that the abandonment of belief is "progressive", and its preservation "regressive", and will be tempted to write off religious believers as reactionary, as obstacles to progress, or even as morally defective (all the while blissfully unaware that your own belief in "progress" is as much a blind leap of faith as any of the religious dogmas you oppose). Thus, we tend to find among "progressives" a strict conformity of views with little tolerance for diversity, an aggressive policing of opinion and a tendency to exclude and ostracise dissenters, in spite of the fact that many self-styled progressives claim to favour a liberal, tolerant and inclusive society.
This smug belief that we can arrive at a good approximation to Utopia simply by plotting graphs across history and extending the lines rightward and upward (more affluence, more "equality", more "rights", more government regulation, more longevity, more automation, more globalisation, smaller families, etc. etc, Pinker has the list) tends to obscure and conceal both conflicts of interest (between individuals, between the individual and society, between groups within society, not to mention the environment) and the tradeoffs and complexities that necessarily underlie any sensible definition of human flourishing. It becomes hard to accept that as a species (or as a "nation"), we have advanced in some respects, but have comprehensively fucked up in others. Ignoring one or other side of a complex tradeoff is always so much easier.
Worst of all, Modernism tends to harbour a collectivist mentality. If we are concerned with the "progress", not of an individual, but of a "society" (species, race, nation, Volk, according to taste), the conceptual decoupling of the collective (the thing that "progresses") from the individual (the thing whose welfare is, presumably, the sole determinant of said "progress") leads us to hypostatize the collective and treat it as something with legitimate interests above and apart from those of the individuals comprising it - perhaps the most dangerous error that the human mind is capable of.
At which point, enter postmodernism.
I know this isn't the only reading of what postmodernism is, but to my mind, it's the best entry point. If PM is to be more than just an effete intellectual pose, a pretentiously opaque style of writing or an adaptive mutation of intellectually bankrupt Humanities departments, it must - surely? - trace part of its genesis to the fact that the Modernist ideal, as described above, in spite of its enduring appeal, demonstrably led, in the twentieth century, to some of the greatest horrors ever seen in human history, in the form of the various century-defining totalitarianisms (Stalinism, Nazism, Maoism and the rest). Today's leftist "progressives" like to think that they are as far removed as it is possible to be from the Petri dish of fascism; yet it is disturbing to find, on examination, the same intellectual pedigree (and, arguably, the same temperament) underlying both. You don't need to believe in horseshoe theory to notice the same smug dogmatism, the same fanatical devotion to a Greater Good, the same quasi-religious pursuit of an earthly Utopia, the same hatred of ideological enemies, in the staring eyes of the neofascist and the neomarxist. To which the postmodernist (by my understanding) says "fuck this" - or rather, to use one of the several canonical terms, "deconstruct this". "I define postmodern as incredulity toward meta-narratives," says Lyotard, where such metanarratives may be presumed to include the epistemic framework of conviction that is required for the fascist or Marxist to prioritise her important, "progressive" truth above the humanity of her intended victims. Postmodernism acknowledges that the various scientific and political and metaphysical discourses we encounter are constantly vying with one another for superiority ("hegemony") in some mental hierarchy - whether in the individual mind or the social "marketplace of ideas" - and rather than throwing its weight behind any one of them, attempts to lay bare the limitations, shortcomings and internal contradictions and hypocrisies of each, to "decentre" them, to separate the Emperor from the discursively constructed new clothes - and thus, hopefully, to render them less murderous than they might otherwise have been.
The trouble is - and this is where things get a bit confusing - this promise or potential to reveal the contingent, compromised nature of a particular discourse, and the illegitimacy of its claims upon our assent (or even our attention), dovetails rather neatly with the much earlier claim of orthodox Marxism, that dominant ideas and discourses within a society are nothing more than the cultural superstructure that rests upon and partly conceals the "economic base", the unequal relations of power and oppression that indirectly determine what we can and cannot say and how we can say it. Since the mechanisms of causality obtaining between this economic base and cultural superstructure were never fully explained by the bushy-bearded Master, it's hardly surprising that Marxists post 1968 should have been drawn to a body of work (Derrida, Foucault, Baudrillard, etc) that promised, in tandem with the Frankfurt School, to provide the tools to substantiate the whole "superstructure" theory - to show how what appears to be a persuasive logical argument, or a sound scientific construction, or an all-conquering consumerist ethos, is in fact merely the expression of an unequal power relationship, relying for its efficacy on our own fatal investiture in the system. Thus, the future leaders of the Revolution, by adopting the opaque terminology and stylistic idiosyncrasies of the French deconstructionists, are equipped both with an explanation for why the masses have so far failed to rally behind their cause (too much hyperreality, doncha know) and a means to demonstrate their fitness to lead (by demonstrating a Houdini-like ability to escape from even the heaviest logical and discursive chains and padlocks, armed, faute de mieux, with the rhetorical skeleton key of strategic Bulverism).
In short, a philosophical tendency that, in appearance, was born out of a healthy opposition to the sort of Grand Narratives that lead to genocide, was (in some quarters) opportunistically co-opted by purveyors of the sort of Grand Narratives that lead to genocide.
Which is why I find it convenient to characterise Postmodernism as a hangover. You need, after all, to be a very special type of person to experience reading a page of Derrida as anything other than a sudden, vicious, stabbing headache. But just as the hangover is a necessary transition to sobriety, so the Walpurgisnacht of nonsense that the postmodernists cavort in may be seen as a necessary purging of the intellectual hubris that led to the Final Solution, the Killing Fields or the Holodomor. Well, that's if you want it to.
It would appear that, for some, Derrida and Foucault are already old hat, and so is Postmodernism. That would be a shame if so, since the first readable postmodern document has yet to be written, and the label still languishes in want of a worthy referent. But until the philosophical prodigy appears who can inject some inspiring content into the bloated body, we're left with the ugly spectacle of Modernists of varying stripe - some Marxist, most just poorly educated instinctual "social justice" despots - squabbling around the carcass, and picking at to the terminology - the decentering, the deconstructing, the decolonising, the dewhatevering - to feed their illiberal agenda.
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