Postmodernity Revisited

A confusing term destined for the concept graveyard

I have spent many long years in the concept graveyard, thinking about what lies all around my feet. Some interesting concepts! Virtue, tyranny, the rabble: All of you had such great uses and are all unfairly buried here. I burn no candle for the old metaphysical concepts. They all lie here undisturbed. But I must admit, there are some concepts that I want to see interred in the ground, primary amongst them is the despicable postmodern. Postmodernism and postmodernity are bunk concepts. I wish that they were dead and forgotten! In time, they will be. I will explain my grievances here.

A concept or a category—for this essay we will treat these as synonyms—even though they generally are not!—is like a box that you can put things into. Not for storage! But for organization. Conceptualizing a thing is like arraying a number of boxes so that you can categorize things into them. A box that contains everything is almost always useless, and boxes that are discrete so that every item may have its own linguistic cubbyhole also have very narrow use. What narrow use is there for a concept that refers only to a unique object? I haven’t the faintest notion, but I am an open-minded man! In any event, what one mostly wants is a system of boxes of the right dimensions, in the right quantity, as is appropriate for the things that one is sorting. This is how it is with conceptualizing things, thus the old adage: “intellectuals make distinctions.” It is a sign of the time that it is common for writers who write in Academese to write about using “more capacious” definitions of things. “I prefer a more capacious definition of Liberalism,” a serious academic can today say, and nobody pushes back. Disappointing! Why on Earth would the capaciousness of the definition be a merit? We want concepts with the correct level of plasticity and scope as is appropriate to their tasks! What then should we make of the system of concepts that is “postmodernism,” “neoliberalism,” and now that we are here, the optimistically-named “late capital,” as well as their siblings, “modernism,” “liberalism,” and “capitalism?” I will tell you what we ought to make of them, because I have all the answers!

I hope you do not mind me starting by pointing out that any time we have a designation that people do not use for themselves, we very well may have some sort of problem. Maybe it is an epithet that one uses for a group that the group does not use for itself. Peculiarly, a social scientist may come along and say “these people are all members of a big faction together, but they just don’t know it yet.” These things should generally arouse suspicion in us. We should be suspicious that there is so much more discussion of postmodernity and neoliberalism than there are self-described postmoderns or neoliberals. This is not like the usage of “Fascism,” wherein people accuse one another of being fascists, because there both were and to a lesser degree are fascists, and because they are very unpopular today. Oh no no, it is really not clear at all that almost anyone is really postmodern. This is like the snotty intellectuals telling Americans that Americans don’t know what liberal really means. We must tread carefully, because we are dealing with the history of confusion.

Okay! Enough with the table setting! What was postmodernity supposed to mean, when we diagnosed people as postmodern despite their ignorance of the fact? Saying that we lived in postmodernity was supposed to mean that we no longer had any framing or overarching narratives to comprehend the world in which we lived. Perhaps it meant that we had no shared ones. It very quickly evolved; in the minds of Left-wing cultural critics it was a literary style associated with the breakdown of literary forms, the disintegration of space and time and the author himself, it was ironic and self-aware, it was referential to new media. Postmodernism was definitely the cultural style associated with mass culture in the capitalist world. Postmodernity very quickly meant antifoundationalism. It somehow became synonymous with deconstructionism. Conservatives eventually started saying that postmodernism is where it all went wrong in higher education.

Postmodernity is an essentially dysfunctional designation. Let’s begin by providing a survey of the problem, generally. If one uses it seriously in describing the history of literature, which is where it is primarily used, one discovers quickly that by any reasonable definition of postmodern one cannot help but get the impression that perhaps the Quixote itself may be postmodern. Cervantes, from the outset, is clear that he does not apprehend the order of nature. Could we see here cynicism or disorientation after the end of the medieval world? Don Quixote ultimately struggles with his celebrity. How self-referential, how meta? Avant la lettre, no? Almost certainly Tristram Shandy is postmodern. Sterne was influenced by Cervantes and was wildly popular in the mainstream of English culture in the 18^th century, and with a self-aware narrator, a less-than-linear plot, and fun typographical gimmicks that he used to engage in self-reflection about his own narrative structure. This was not just something that happened in the 18^th century; it was one of the major literary events in 18^th century London. If postmodernity was in the mainstream of English literature in the 18^th century, then we must surely have a serious issue. What of the canonical Modernists of the early 20^th century, the ones from the famous Lionel Trilling itinerary, like Woolf or Joyce? They are, end-to-end, almost entirely postmodern. Postmodern is a useless categorical distinction here, where it originated, in the history of literature. You may say: “The term ‘postmodern’ is used primarily to describe popular culture more than high literature.” Let it be clear at this point: Such usages of the term add variety, and with it inconsistency—they are no more coherent.

How did such an unbelievably slip-shod designation find widespread purchase? Well, let’s start at the beginning: A long, long time ago the Jews lost the favor of the Lord and the walls of Jerusalem fell. Oh what? Okay, that is too early, I concede, we won’t really start at the beginning. In that case, let’s pick up the story with Karl Marx.

Conspiracy Theory in the Science of History

At the very beginning of modernity, in the instants following Galileo’s death, something changed in the course of world history, and religion at this moment became an enemy of science, and the promise of defeating the church became alluring. This idea would reverberate for centuries, it is still not done, and it ultimately became the guiding ethos for the French Enlightenment, the French Left, and the lost causers who came after them, Karl Marx being the most important among them. Marx is many things, and foremost among them is that he is the singularly most important theorist of history in the modern age. Since the Renaissance history as a genre of writing has undergone an extraordinary reorganization, and one of the primary problems of history has been narrating the sources of modernity, the sources of revolutions, the sources of corruption or decline, and trying to explain, more generally, why some polities have set out on some special destiny to be a modern, world-historic, and free republic after all these thousands of years during which mankind chose to do otherwise, while others continue to wallow in the parochialism of medieval ignorance and meaningless violence. This great intellectual expansion of historical speculation has bequeathed us with a grand architectonics used by many recent intellectuals for conceptualizing their age of the world, and for doing a terrible job at it. Nowhere is this more clear than with Marx’s great invention, which is the largest and most popular framework for narrating modern history, a framework that is, at best, very deeply flawed.

Marx’s science of history is not just important for the history of history, but it is also one of the singularly most important moments in the history of modern conspiracy theory. Marx should be understood as being, amongst other things, a French Left lost causer. In the eyes of the French Left, The French Revolution did not go according to plan, nor did world history after that point, and so Marx started to elaborate an explanation of why history had gone sideways. I began to explain all of this a few weeks ago: Moderns have an expectation about how history should transpire now that we have technics and republican self-rule, and these expectations leave reality by comparison dark, perilous and difficult to comprehend. Marx elevated this to a science, which is the careful and analytical study of why something like “Liberal Democracy”—or some other modern political form seen by most people as freedom—is actually a false and evil form of pseudo-democracy, and the triumph of Liberalism is part of a vast conspiracy of brainwashing in support of the capitalist order, and in order to set man free the conspiracy of liberals must be slain. The reasons for this lie in an older history of republicanism. The republic requires citizens, but 19th century industrial capitalism was eating away at the material conditions for the class basis of a republic. The conceptualization of virtue central to Marx’s thought was dependent on an anti-religious ethic. By the second half of the 19th century, it was obvious that the world was slipping away from republican revolution and towards a dismal age of capitalism, imperialism and neo-gothic religion. Either that, or even worse: The parliamentary system of the English and the republican government of the United States were the fruit of progress. The latter prospect has always been unthinkable to the Euro Left.

Marx’s vast historical system heavily leans on his critique of ideology. In the Marxist scheme of history, the realms of ideology and culture are supposed to be epiphenomenal to underlying, real historical process, which transpires at the level of economic activity. In Marx’s classic formulation, liberalism is the ideology of capitalism. One of them is a mirage generated by the other, obscuring it in the process. It will be later, with György Lukács, that this gets systematized into a rubric for literary analysis and cultural criticism, and when this happens we get a framework for appending something like “literary modernism” onto the scheme of liberalism and capitalism.

It was at this point that the trick of elimination was employed, and with great deftness. As I will explain a bit more below, historical events in the 20th century were not comporting themselves rightly with Marxist prophecy about history, and so a man named Frederic Jameson would be the one to organize history into a nice little grid, building off the work of people like Lukács, and this grid would look like so:

The above grid projects a conspiracy of ignorance into the present and future, called “neoliberalism” and “postmodernism” at two different strata of reality, and it does so to salvage the grand historical vision of Marx from the lethal blow of 20^th century history. Neoliberals are few and far between, and yet neoliberalism is a structure that permeates society so deeply that people don’t even know they are neoliberals, and the same is true with postmodernity, very roughly at least. “Late capital,” as a phrase, serves mostly to amuse. In this grand intellectual edifice, the separation point between the late-19^th century and the mid-20^th century is associated with a very eventful period that gets schematized only by some Marxist intellectuals, like Eric Hobsbawm. For most, it is a lacuna.

What we have here, in the early 21st century, is an advanced and elaborate architectonics for understanding modern history, wherein modernism is replaced with postmodernity, capitalism with late capital, liberalism with neoliberalism. What happens in between—in roughly the ‘20s, the ‘30s and the ‘40s—is a mystery about which almost no one seems to know. Certain aspects of history are essentially hazy. They can’t be known clearly. The Second World War is, for example, essentially unknowable, and we have no reliable data on the rise of fascism. There is certainly, absolutely, totally no way to synthesize the story of the Soviet Union, or the Maoists, into this larger narrative.

When we look at this scheme of history against any factual knowledge of any involved topics, we get the impression that it is ill-fitting. Out the gate, the categorization of the 19^th century makes not much sense, namely the compression of diverse and disparate writers and cultural trends into a something called modernism—then we get this essentially hazy period about which nothing can be known that starts with the First World War and runs through to the 1940s or ‘50s—then we get to the back half of the 20^th century, and lo! it is postmodern and neoliberal. Ask not how these make sense as a total diagnoses of an entire age.

While we are here, let’s talk briefly about “neoliberalism.” Neoliberalism has parallel qualities to postmodernity. Liberalism was supposed to die after the First World War. Engels prophesied that a Weltkreig—an ancient referent to an apocalyptic war of the final days—would be instigated by the expansion of the new German state and would bring low the system of empires, beginning the end of the liberal age of the 19^th century and with it creating the precondition for revolution. This war came, it was the First World War, it was apocalyptic, and with it the revolution came, it was the Russian Revolution, it was a disaster, and then liberalism did the unthinkable; it stuck around like an unwanted dinner guest. Haven’t liberals learned that it is now the 21^st century? Liberalism is from another age, it was prophesied to die out, and so why is it still here? And so now we have neoliberalism, and it is a global conspiracy against revolution, and it is the ideological smokescreen for racism, imperialism and late capital… but there are mysteriously not so many self-described neoliberals.

The Foucauldian Moment

Now that we are done with the pars dastruens and a reader can see fairly clearly that there is an academic-intellectual edifice constructed around the idea of postmodernity, and that this edifice is of not much use to us if we want to understand things, we might be tempted to ask: What was it that swept through campuses during the cannon wars? Why are all these people talking about postmodernism? Why do conservatives think it is to blame for the current state of college campuses? To get the story fully straight we will have to begin to study the history of what people today refer to as “identity politics,” a history that holds tremendous interest to all of us, and while this essay is not an inquiry into the history or origins of idpol, we do nonetheless have no way to avoid the man of the hour himself: Michel Foucault.

The New Left was an object of some controversy for many years, and so I won’t cover it in too much detail but to say that there was an effervescence of protest and activism in Western countries in the second half of the 20^th century, and that the New Left was going to be anti-authoritarian and was almost certainly committed to emancipating humanity in primordial and profound ways previously outside of the realm of politics. Unsurprisingly, this has created great confusion, as some of the New Left were a lot like the Old Left, while some were not. What their relationship was with the Hippies remains, to this day, ambiguous. Some New Leftists now in their dotage will take credit for the entire era of 1960s activism, which quickly becomes dubious under scrutiny when one inspects closely the spiritualism that permeated the 1960s—in particular the importance of religious figures in race, peace, and environmental activism. However, the New Left were very frequently Feminists, and vice versa, and there was a cohort of intellectuals associated with their emergence, from Shulamith Firestone to Noam Chomsky. Many of these thinkers were self-consciously thinkers of 1969. In France, there was a set of thinkers who were self-consciously the thinkers of 1968, and the two household names from this cohort are Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault.

Jacques Derrida made his entrance into American intellectual history with his delivery of Structure Sign and Play at Hopkins in 1969, and from there began a French invasion of the American academy. The New Left had a form of Beatlemania and it would not subside until the 1990s were through, because any intellectual affair on campus takes decades to resolve, and trends blossom into written form always very late, because of the delays caused by various forms of matriculation, peer review and the great slowness that affects almost all manuscript preparation in the scholastic zone of the cosmos. Derrida was the father of “Deconstruction,” and he was a “post-structuralist,” but he was not the great postmodern thinker, he was just the man of the moment in the discipline of literature for a couple of decades that are now well in the past. Perhaps enemies of these new intellectual trends were just confused by the avalanche of new terms, and the “post” in “post-structuralist” caused some confusion with “postmodern?” It is clear why conservatives disliked all this, but why dislike “postmodernism,” when it is a vexed concept probably confused with post-structuralism, when they could just simply dislike the New Left, as Allan Bloom did, and they could just continue to dislike its legacy? In any event, there is more to say about Derrida.

Long ago, there were Modern Language Departments and the Modern Language Association. We could now study English or Spanish or French, rather than just studying Latin. The greatness of the moderns allowed for, even demanded, such a novelty. This was not enough, and some very serious intellectuals wanted departments of Comparative Literature, wherein they could combine social and linguistic theory with the study of not one, but multiple, languages. The mono-lingual are cretins and they need not apply; Comp Lit was only for scholars with very wrinkly brains! This was the heyday of linguistic structuralism, a promising social-scientific framework for linguistic and cultural theory that would allow thinkers to definitively comprehend how linguistic meaning was shaped in historical time, and how language in history provided the underlying architecture for cultures around the world and bounded out the parameters of artistic and intellectual expression within those cultures. Structuralists went out into Central Eurasia to study languages to advance the Soviet Union’s scientific knowledge of language and culture. It was exciting; Structuralism was a science. György Lukács’ structuralist Marxism was the basis for his 1916 Theory of the Novel—the masterwork of literary theory that all other literary theorists imitate. He then ended up as a loyal party member in the Soviet Union and spent the rest of his life writing doggerel that generally goes unread. American academician Frederic Jameson picked up Lukács’ theory of the novel as the basis for his own Marxist literary interpretation project, within which he systematized postmodernity as a structural idea, and helped to synthesize neoliberalism, as it is currently used, into this same system. This is how these key thinkers discovered the seeing stone used throughout the land by contemporary cultural critics: We have a linguistic science that tells us how society created the structures that produce and constrain its literature, so it follows by inverse that we can criticize the structure of that society by studying its literature. So, if you want to study late capital, you use your peeping stone and study postmodern literature rather than believe the lying sight of your eyes and study what most people would call economics. This system, and these categories, dominate in the humanities and perpetuate themselves through conferences, peer review, funding structures, and conversations in stairwells.

Derrida was a post-structuralist, which meant that he could do free word association and then try to claim it was a genius insight derived through a social science of literature. Derrida practiced deconstruction, which was an alternative to the dialectics of Hegel that somehow made even less sense. Deconstruction turned out to be Derrida’s particularly cunning art in which he utilized the seeing stone of Lukács to speak and write—in a manner that resembled free word association—about all topics far and wide, generally to the end of conning gullible teenagers. Somebody smart would point out here that he was some kind of anti-foundationalist, but before we talk about that we will have to talk in some future week about the very character of modernity, going back to the beginning.

In any event, Comparative Literature went into decline, and ended up dominated by idiots who thought themselves too good to study the literature of just one modern language, and instead chose to abuse the study of one literature in particular as a backdoor into a conspiracy theory of society in general.

The colossus of the age was Foucault, who went unchallenged for decades as the quantifiably most-cited figure in higher education, challenged only by Kuhn, and who is without question the thinker to discuss to understand the key intellectual trends of the age. Foucault deserves more attention later, but for now we will suffice with a sort of precis. Foucault was an historian of philosophy, and not just of philosophy but an historian of thought writ large. He practiced a series of methods, archaeology and genealogy most important amongst them. Neither of these two terms mean in this context what they mean in normal usage; they were supposed to be alternatives to the dialectics of Hegel and extensions of the genealogical project of Nietzsche. The minutiae are needlessly confusing, and so I will move past them for now—what you must understand right now is how Foucault positioned himself as the master thinker of 1968 and did so successfully. He narrated the history of thought—including the history of neoliberalism!—but not the history of postmodernity—so that the entire history of Western thought was a history of a grand conspiracy of power to constitute and shape human nature. Foucault went beyond the Marxist conspiracy theory to spread malevolent machination to every aspect of every institution in all societies on Earth and at a stratum of power and knowledge so pervasive and profound that the conspiracy operated in language at all places. In other words, Foucault gave the high-brow intellectual articulation of what a New Leftist meant when he talked about “the man.” And why was it so important that in his version of the history of the world that human nature be constituted by discourses of knowledge-power, as the Foucauldians would describe it? Because Foucault saw that the conspiracy theory that operated within the world view of the New Left would have to be so all-encompassing that it would contain every aspect of economics, statecraft and imperialism, as well as the now-classic triad of “race, class, and gender,” to unify all varied topics of both the Old and New Lefts. Foucault’s project was capable of being foundational to the New Left because it allowed a conspiracy theory to be at work in history structuring language and with it the domain of meaning possible in discourse, but this time to a new end: This time the conspiracy theory would be hoodwinking mankind into believing that gender has its roots in biology.

This is the story of the relationship between Marx’s Old Left and Foucault’s New Left. Marx had needed to provide a story about how the parliamentary procedures and republican institutions of the 19^th century were secretly puppeteered by a conspiracy of interests—bankers in New York and London, the Bourgeoisie, &c—and he needed to do so because the 19^th century was not meeting expectations. There were multiple problems, but chief among them were: Religion still existed, the world was dominated by empires and not a utopian world state with its capital in France, and the industrial and technological progress in which he believed were eroding the class basis for a democratic republic. Foucault was the master thinker of ‘68 and ‘69 precisely because he replaced that old story with a new one in order to help allay the Left’s indigestion about the progress of world history, and this new story was one that achieved two objectives: Firstly to tell a story about how the traditional social organization—and standing of the individual—that had been at the basis of modern political progress were actually secretly part of a conspiracy to oppress humanity, and secondly to break the fangs of eugenics by attacking scientific knowledge of human nature, which was a popular objective not just for Foucault, but for many thinkers of the age, both New Leftists and otherwise.

The postmodern confusion is not fully dispensed with, yet! The output of the French thinkers of ‘68 included, and this should be no surprise, the foundational work on postmodernism, 1979’s The Postmodern Condition, by a fellow named Jean François Lyotard. This book was—by Lyotard’s admission—just some stuff he wrote at the last minute while he was high on speed, but it would nonetheless give the idea of postmodernism its basic structure. As the New Left confronted that the Old Left’s prophetic expectation about secular history would not come to pass, they had to come round to things that liberals and conservatives had been saying for over a century. In this case, liberals and conservatives had been for quite a while theorizing how modernity confuses people’s sense of time, destroyed the old religious sense of things, liberals and conservatives had written histories of the ideas of progress and nostalgia, had been concerned about how there was a discombobulation about past and future that seemed to be widespread among the masses. Critics of totalitarianism took this idea quite seriously in their critiques of the Soviets. Just look, for example, at how much ink was spilled by Orwell on the topic of historical time and propaganda in totalitarian societies. 1984 was fully of this! Finally, after the failure of the Soviet Union was obvious, the French Left had no choice but to come around. Postmodernism was a way for some Frenchmen of the New Left to finally admit it was all true, but with a twist; it was everyone else who was confused, or: It was everyone who was confused, which is fine because now the French Left were willing to admit that they were confused as well, and so certainly there was no shame in it. It was certainly not the case that the Left had been specifically born of this confusion. This time around, confusion and unmooredness were not associated with the death of religion or with utopian expectation and were not the seeds of totalitarian ideology, but instead it was those dastardly liberals who were confused, and it was capitalism that had confused everyone! Or, to put it even a bit more sharply: Now that Parisian intellectuals have finally admitted that the idea of progress has a history, and that utopian revolution may not be on the horizon, everyone is supposed to think that it’s news. As though only 20th century lefties had ever experienced the shattering of their modern expectations. As though it were the case that when it happened to them, that the world had become essentially un-narratable to everyone.

What took the academy at this point was not “postmodernism” as some conservative cultural critics like to say. There is no postmodernism. It is a failed category. What took the academy at this point was the New Left. Postmodernism is what the New Left called normalcy after the totalitarian age went into its twilight and the former Communists all had to burn their cards and reinvent themselves, and after their students rebelled against them and tried to found a new version of the left because of the failures of the old one. All this concept has done is sow confusion without which the current-day intellectual spheres of the internet and the English-language world would look very different. The world—when seen by the light of my lantern—has no postmodernity in it; it only has intellectuals who have a superstition about its existence. In order to understand the spiritual history of the age in which we live, we will have to look at conspiracy theory in many forms, and at the history of idpol, and at Michel Foucault, and we will have to do so with concepts and categories appropriate to understanding the true nature of things as they transpire in the world today.