Post Modernism
Was/is postmodernism merely designed to cause splits among the left and to develop identity politics as against anything meaningful? I started a doctorate on this, some thirty years ago, and gave up as I was chasing my tail. The fact that 's its rise was contemporaneous with the Reagan-Thatcher-Mitterand-Kohl proto-neo-liberal narrative, and BP painting their petrol stations green, makes me think it was largely negative. Can anyone think of any positives? Is Chomsky right about Zizek?
Comments (50)
That concession alone doesn't automatically refute your theory: Their works could have been appropriated and used for nefarious ends - in some plot to fragment the leftist opposition to neoliberalism, etc. - but basic tenets of postmodernism (as I understand them) are not exclusive to those who identify with liberal or progressive politics.
The reason I say that is because the 'modern period' was still characterised by a generally realistic metaphysic and an overall faith in progress; WWI started to puncture that, by horribly demonstrating that the grand march of progress still barely masked barbarity and self-destruction. And then in the 1920s the discoveries of quantum mechanics and the uncertainty principle undermined philosophical realism without offering anything to replace it. That was when the vertiginous sense of 'all that is solid melting into air' really began to take hold. (It's still happening, but we're so glued to our screens we don't notice.)
It is 'post' because it passed through the stage of modernity before rejecting or modifying it (analogous to the way that a post-Christian philosophy differs from a non-Christian philosophy). It is informed by modernity but it sees through or transcends or rejects many of the reflexive certainties of modernity. It is characteristically troubled and fragmented as a consequence. So there really is no such thing as a particular post-modern school or system or way of thinking, in the sense that earlier forms of intellectual life could be so characterised; it is fragmented because it reflects the fragmentary or dis-integrated nature of the //post//modern world.
I have one anthology, The Truth about the Truth, Walter Truett Anderson, which I found helpful, but for the above reasons, it was a completely heterogeneous set of essays - there was no real unifying theme. I particularly liked the contributions from Huston Smith (but then, I'm pretty new-age) and Vaclav Havel. There are other elements of post-modernist philosophy that I have appreciated, but as a fashion, I think it's overall an abyss and the symptom of a wounded civilisation.
I think most people would put the beginnings of postmodernism as later than that date of 1915, which is when Einsteins General Theory was published.
Accounts I've read put it mostly in the 1950s and 1960s, with perhaps just a few forerunners in the forties.
I think of it as in a way a reaction against the horrors of the second war, which was seen by some as the culmination of modernism.
In order to use anything that is 'post', one has to understand and know just what was before it, the thing before the 'post'.
If you know modernism (and obviously you have to know Enlightenment philsophy), then perhaps postmodernism can give you some new critical views that might be positive. The problem is when young students don't know the classics or what modernism was all about, postmodernism just confuses them. All they end up doing is saying things like "Objectivity doesn't exist".
I always remember how my economic history professor got gloomy when a student said that he or she (usually it was a he) had decided to make his Master degree work or Doctoral thesis on something related to Foucault. She knew that most likely the thing wouldn't be finished. Sounds familiar, Ricardoc?
The same problem arises with post modernism. We have to say, what modernism was, who described modernism thus, whether their description was contemporaneous with the phenomenon itself, whether it was consistently used, when, and by whom. Having established that, we then have to look at the concept of postmodernism, which, while it may legitimately be used to descibe the end of the Edwardian summer, was used by whom and where and when.
Now, the fact it pops up in the world of academe after fifteen years of some of the most militant behavious since the turn of the century, makes me wonder if it were not merely a fad designed to remove leftist academics from their posts. Nobody talks about it anymore. Maybe, having made undergraduates get heavily into debt to get their degrees, the powers that be no longer have to concern themselves with radicalism escaping the campuses. Or, maybe, it was abolishing full employment as a social priority .
As against 'we are all socialists now', we say, ' We are all up to our ears in debt now, and really need jobs!!' Who wants a pseudo-philosophical fig leaf when we just kick the slaves in their economic genitals.
So, all we have left is the epistemological ephemera of the likes of the Slovenian Scruff!!
:up: nice analysis
As I understand the postmodern trend, it's always moving on to something else...never resolving anything
Western cultural history was dominated by the idea of the Second Coming, the Eschaton. It is arguable that the whole notion of ‘progress’ in the West grew out of this underlying notion. Of course, this doesn’t mean that it was always taken literally, but there was the basic expectation that history was a linear narrative, the unfolding of the divine Plan. You even see that echoed in Hegel. And then, of course, Marx famously ‘stood Hegel on his head’. But his expected earthly paradise ushered in by the Worker’s Revolution never eventuated either. The West lost the very rationale that had propelled it. And meanwhile the Biblical prophesies of the end of the world never began to seem so plausible. If you read many of the 20th century existentialists, there’s an acute sense that the whole of history might be a bad joke.
I have read several analyses that in effect, the physical cosmos is now assigned the role that was previously accorded to the Creator. Interstellar travel is, then, the sublimated longing for Heaven — we will ‘slip the surly bonds of Earth’ and advance, warp speed, to other worlds, other galaxies. That seemed to be the late great Stephen Hawking’s almost plaintive belief.
Regrettably, I don’t believe it. We have a spaceship - only one.
Quoting unenlightened
Policies based on political philosophies other than one’s sense of oneself. You know - ‘I believe in public education’, ‘I support free enterprise without bureaucratic interference.’ And so on.
Quoting Merkwurdichliebe
One of the Pomo leitmotifs is ‘rejection of meta-narratives’. That covers a lot of ground.
Oh right, so my beliefs and philosophy are not part of my identity? Can you just draw that line a little more sharply for me, because it always tend to look as if my politics is all about high principle, like the superiority of the white man and the absoluteness of property rights and so on, and everyone else's is about religious, ethnic, racial, or sexual identity, and therefore illegitimate.
Politics with a defined practical necessity where the decisions don't have anything to do with the identity of the people.
Is monetary policy about identity politics? I don't think that loose monetary policy defines the identity of people. You see being a Keynesian or a monetarist doesn't in the same way define your identity.
Or how about transport policy? Do we go with rail or shipping?
??? That's some research you did. Postmodernism arose long before the late 1970s/early 1980s.
"One last word on identity politics: Every form of politics can take its identitarian turn. Here's what I mean by that: Everyone in politics tries to sidestep the critical role and need for argument, the need to craft a coalition and mobilize around a set of ideas and interests. Rather than build a case, people appeal to a condition. Identitarianism is not peculiar to a politics of race or gender or sexuality, not at all. The original identitarianism is nationalism or religion. There are terrible identitarianisms of class. (That's why I cringe every time someone depicts the working class as a brawny factory worker. Or of Joe Biden as somehow a "fighter for the working class." Or the notion that the working class is automatically something.)
All of these identitarianisms sidestep, as I say, the need for moral and political argument, the need to craft coalitions of interest and ideology that are not immediately apparent or present but that have to be created. I'm not against a politics based on conflict, on arraying one group against another. I'm against building those conflicts on spurious appeals to "you're one of us." Even if that "us" is an oppressed group. Kafka said, "What do I have in common with Jews? I don't even have anything in common with myself." All of us are divided in multiple ways, first and foremost within ourselves. That's what politics at its best does: to craft a commonality out of that preexisting division. Identitiarians begin with the most spurious identity of all--the undivided self--and build from there."
Well I'm sorry, but that has the same ring of hypocrisy to me. I craft coalitions of interest and ideology, but when anti-racists and feminists do it... Now if one were to talk of fundamentalisms, that brook no compromise, I could see something of the undivided self at play, but it is not Isis or the KKK that anyone means when they talk about 'identity politics' is it?
But feminism and anti-racist movements do not largely conform to the description I gave above. I think - though I could be wrong - we might agree on this. Those who like to wield and weaponize the term 'identity politics' do make it seem as though they do though. Which is still not to say that the description is not useful, or true of some politics.
What folks are probably referring to with "identity politics" are the squeaky wheels who focus on things like race and gender essentially as a means of controlling what other people can choose to do. It's not anything like a broader academic analysis of a movement. It's just a reaction to people who make a lot of noise via media/social media and who have some impact due to that fact (because people are afraid of losing advertisers, they're afraid of being sued, they're afraid of boycotts, etc.)
All politics is an effort to control or change what people can 'choose to do'. So this is unhelpful and unspecific.
What happened to the "squeaky wheels who focus on things like race and gender essentially as a means of " part of the sentence?
But that has nothing to do with what I was saying. I was talking about what the people using the phrase "identity politics" are probably referring to. It's something rather specific and limited in reference.
The same, I should probably add, goes for the term 'post-modernism'.
Sure.
I'm not defending either side. It's more than seeing words "race" and "gender," but it's not much different than that.
In any event, there's something they have in mind--the stuff they observe that they're labeling in a particular way.
Quoting StreetlightX
I think we probably do agree, you and I, but I'm not so sure about Corey Robin. "The Identitarian movement or Identitarianism is a European, North American, Australian and New Zealander far-right and white nationalist movement that originated in France." (Thus Google) As I said already, that just isn't what people mean when they talk about identity politics.
That has more to do with Nazis rebranding themselves as 'ethno-nationalists' or 'identitarians' rather than the usual connotations of (left liberal) identity politics.
Edit: though those doctrines are about as 'identity politics' in the strict sense as they come.
Hive-mind [s]politics[/s].
1) As my mother used to say about Mussolini. 'I was there', and the postmodern narrative had no force in academia before these woolly headed ex-trots strted publishing non-theoretical histories in the late seventies. You know, the same gang who supported the project for the American century, Wolfowitless and that gang.
There were some publications which mght be deemed post modern, but as it is a term generally used to describe everything from Mission Viejo, to Bliarism to Lacanianism, we are all humpty-dumpty. For example, in the world of architecture it was used for eclecticism, in which case you could say it began under the Victorians. It only got picked up by the corporate media in the 1980s. You know, with feminism and green-painted petrol stations.
And, 2) Hermione, the political process is not fair and the state is not some neutral referee. I am amazed in this day and age I have to say this. It is like 2008 never happened. Identity politics is merely a divide-and-conquer ruse to keep us proles in our place, you know.
I am grateful that the English department at the provincial state college I went to in the '60s was not afflicted by postmodernism. I took some classics courses in the early 80s at the U of MN and they were uninfected too. But by the 80s PMS (post modern syndrome) was definitely in the air, and was becoming pervasive (at least in some departments; I don't think Mechanical Engineering or Agriculture departments were much affected). The Ag people had real shit to deal with, so didn't need to cook up synthetic forms of BS.
Yeah, absolutely. My mother trained in the sixties, I in the eighties, she had to put up with theoretical lectures on modernp. art, I spent months in a South London boys comp. No substitute for shovelling shit.
I started a doctorate in the 1990s and my supervisor was very post m. It was as if here was a product with which he might scoop the market. I transferred to Bristol and studied the semiotics of French televison for two years before realising it was absolute bullshit. there are no social phenomena - merely what our masters wish us to see.
I believe the identity of political individualism is libertarianism.
Does it have to be?
Can it coherently be framed as identity politics if everyone occupies a demographic of one?
If the goal is a demographic of one then political individualism or libertarianism would be a poor choice to start with because the value set it holds to is rather unusual, in the USA anyway. Something like 10% of Americans are registered libertarian.
I’m not sure if it’s even possible to have large cooperative groups without a unifying identity/ideology, and any identity may necessarily rely on an ‘other’ to give it meaning.
It's not ironic in the least. In my uneducated and completely irreverent opinion (as I'm not well-read in Nietzsche and have a low opinion of him), Nietzsche first gave voice to the notion that there is no objective reality (well, first in relatively recent times, the Sophists beat him to it in some ways but we'll leave that aside.) I think it comes from his mis-reading of Schopenhauer, which gave rise to his notion of 'perspectivism', which is 'that all truth claims are contingent on, and the product of, a person's perspective. Nietzsche's philosophy attacks the concept of essential truth and seeks to destabilize the concept of universal morality.' One of the reasons he's such a sacred cow in modern campuses. The only irony is that he is regarded as a philosopher, in my view.
It grew out of the aftermath of WWII. Started with many playwrights like Brecht who focused on questioning the form of theatre within the plays he wrote. The traditional views and "truths" had too much emphasis on optimism in the industrial age and WWII put a knife through that heart. Postmodernism grew out of the philosophical skepticism people had against the old "truths" that were taken for granted before witnessing the horrors of WWII.
While continental philosophy and postmodernism may be criticized for being vague and not enough analytical in form, the ideas are still very important. Nietzsche would be at home in postmodernism ideas and he was before his time. If he hadn't died at such an early age and if his sister hadn't corrupted his ideas into Hitler's head, the would probably look quite different today. I wonder how the birth of postmodernism had looked if Nietzsche had lived on.
I think to postmodernism was inevitable though. Soon or later people will question ideas, question the nature of thinking. The more we knew about how human psychology works, the more we knew about science and technology, the less sense religious ideas made. Postmodernism is a skepticism which grew out of questioning such "truths" about the world. As the world progress, postmodernism will eventually appear as a skeptical form.
Maybe because most people don't understand post-modernism? And think it's something Jordan Peterson complains about, something vague that exists today. Post-modernism has become some politically charged term by tribalistic groups who haven't read a word of philosophy.
Postmodernism indeed has its roots in the later 1800s. Two of the bigger influences on it were the realization that Euclidean geometry wasn't akin to God-given law and the weirdness of black-body radiation physics and quantum phenomena. There were parallels in the arts with the rise of impressionism, Fauvism, expressionism, etc. and the move away from traditional diatonicism in music, leading to serialism and atonalism shortly after the turn of the 20th Century.
The unfortunate truth. This is why academia in the social sciences is dying a slow death. But that's what you get when you throw out objectivity as a method.
Starting from the students who are taught post-modernism, yet don't know anything else about philosophy. Besides, interdisciplinary studies demand too much from ordinary students.
Where do they teach post-modernism outside of itself as a philosophical foundation?
By implication, it also means that some teach anti-post-modernism without knowing anything about philosophy. Have you seen the infantile arguments between the two sides? It's tribalism
In both a narrow and a broader context, he's invariably attacking what stems from religious morality, and if you look at his life and times, there are reasons for this, though they're not necessarily "reasonable" reasons.
He also attacks the results, both in his time and in the future he imagines, of the removal of subjective morality. Anyone who takes from his writing that they should follow suit or live by any code or invent any philosophy based on the emptiness of morality he describes he actually condemns them to the nihilism he sees burgeoning in his time--within that same writing.
I haven't read enough Schopenhauer to comment on his interpretation of the man's work, but I do know that in Nietzsche's time, numerous philosophers were misinterpreting each other's work, and he noted instances of this about his own work. The same misinterpretations are happening to this day, so it seems.
Post-modernism as I understand the movement, maybe not well enough, is pushing its philosophy in precisely such a direction as Nietzsche condemned as a phase of vapidity and ignorance before philosophy would perhaps gradually get back on track.
To predict something is not the same as to encourage it, especially when it's being openly discouraged I would say. To take everything a philosopher despises about a potential future and become it is not to be influenced by that philosopher--it is to be in opposition to that philosopher.
And so they willfully embrace their ignorance while impressing it on young minds under the thin veil of "higher education".
From this, more recently, we have the nonsensical phrase of the crypto-conservtive, 'Cultural Marxism' - whatever the hell that means. And we also have achieved the apotheosis of identity politics where whether or not you are allowed to choose your own gender matters more thanwar, pestilence or famine. Petty-bourgeois individualism has become an epistemology in its own right.
A further source of intense amusement concerned a book entitled 'Down the Road and Far Away.' It was ostensibly written by a young Asian girl, and was snapped up by Virago Press. When the author turned out to be ab ABglican clergyman, the sound of book pulping deafened the world of literature.
They're becoming the most despised aspects of the most pessimistic grievances of a bygone philosophical era while calling themselves "progressive".
Oh that's easy. For instance in Social History.
You don't have to have any, absolutely no studies in philosophy, but in social history you do stumble into Foucault. After all, Foucault's famous book The History of Madness is, as the title say, a historical study.
And thus the professor has to give a really short introduction to Foucault and then the history students use postmodernism quite easily. And not in the context of literary criticism, but as part of historiography.
In the 60's it was typical in the leftist Finnish university circles to brag about finishing all volumes of Das Kapital.
But it's an age old philosophy trick to right as difficult as you can. Especially when you don't have much to say. Simplicity isn't something appreciated in academia. I think that Foucault himself admitted this when someone found his talks and opinions (aside a lecture perhaps) quite clear and his books very confusing and difficult.