Postmodernism's Bad Name

Just read this comment by Koszmik at TPM Book Club:

Postmodernism, the serious intellectual movement, emerged in a post WWII Europe fatigued by war, having gladly moved beyond feudal and imperial classicisim, but was still struggling with modern ideologies most personified by Cold War propaganda promising two mutually exclusive modern utopias. Postmodernism is essentially an attempt to deconstruct the nature of ideology, both classical and modern. But it's still constructive deconstruction, understanding not destruction. Any appearance of a paradox, or nihilism, is simply a misunderstanding.

Which gets to a problem with "Post Modernism(TM)" the popular identity brand, and any perceived differences between hippies and hipsters.

It's embrace of "devolution" as somehow ironic and tragically hip, the embrace of paradox and perpetual irony, is just a cognitive dissonance, incredibly pretentious, and has become cliched and even orthodox.

It's always in style and never in style, because it's always ahead of itself and too cool for itself. It's always ironic, even when it's not, ironically. It's not pretentious, fraudulent, or clinched, because everything is pretentious, fraudulent, and clinched. The shallower something is, the more profound it is. Everybody trying their hardest to be apathetic. Obsessive trendiness masquerading as compulsive disaffection.

It's not postmodernism so much as a complete failure to understand postmodernism. Sophistic, pretentious, hollow. A classical and postmodern example of a little knowledge being a dangerous thing.

Postmodernism is one of those terms that means a lot of things to different people. Mostly it connotes a kind of pretentious intellectuality. The term, I'm pretty sure, was first coined in the architectural world, but it has meanings in literature, philosophy, and history. I have used the term on this blog mainly to convey what I see as a cultural historical transition as in premodern, modern, postmodern.  The premodern in the West was medieval. The modern was the cultural impulse in the west for which the Renaissance and Reformation are usually thought of as its beginning, the Enlightenment it's high point, and World War I its endpoint. The postmodern doesn't really have a name yet.  The zeitgeist of the postmodern to date is fragmentation and decadence.

So I would disagree with Kozmik's characterization to the extent that his first paragraph depicts the real postmodernism and his description of "Postmodernism (TM)" depicts the fake version. I think they are both valid responses to the collapse of modernity. There are three possible responses to the collapse of modernity: the first is to live as if it hadn't collapsed (the majority), the second, to embrace the decadence and absurdity of a world where there is no longer a robust set of collective meanings and values (PostmodernismTM), or, third, to embrace the decayed forms that have followed from the collapse of modernity as the soil out of which something new shall emerge. 

My critique of liberalism lies in that it is in the first category listed above.  Its assumptions are for the most part Enlightenment modern and proceed as if that cultural impulse was still a vital force. So I am sympathetic to the postmodern inclination to give such a prominent place to understanding power relationships--there simply is not enough discussion and so a general lack of sophistication about how power works, particularly among liberals who want so much to believe in the system without really countenancing the fundamental way in which the system is rigged. Liberals are radicals whose naivete about power has not yet been deconstructed. They still believe in the system and either cynically accept the way it is rigged as "reality" or are in denial about how power really works rigged. The former, like Clinton are decadent liberals; conservatives like Reagan are neo-liberals. Neo-Liberals understand power in Social Darwinist terms--they use that knowledge to run rings around liberals (like Warren Christopher in "Recount") who believe the system still works.

I could be wrong about this, but I see Obama as a postmodern in the third category. He understands the nature of the collapse, but refuses cynicism, and recognizes that he must use the vocabulary of liberalism because that's the language understood by the majority whose habits of mind are still modern. If he is who I think he is, then he will refuse naive liberalism while at the same time work to retrieve the essential from the liberal tradition while retrieving what is essential from the faith traditions of the West. This is both a radical and conservative project--radical in that it rejects as profoundly flawed the current wealth and power arrangements; conservative in the Burkean sense that rejects Jacobin top-down solutions and looks to retrieve from the past that which is necessary to evolve into the future. That's the nature of the project in the poltical and cultural spheres as I see it. We'll see if I'm just projecting too much on Obama.  I could be.

I don't know Kozmik's metaphysics, but I would agree with him that there is nothing definitionally nihilistic about postmodernism's deconstruction project, and to the degree that he sees himself in the third category above, we are allies.  But after the deconstruction, what is left?  That's the really interesting question for me. For many, the honest answer is nothing, so they revert to the entertainment that is Postmodernism(TM).  For others maybe there is some assertion of a positive value in the "human" or in "equality" or "freedom" as if they were values that had value simply by our willfully asserting that they are valuable. For me both those responses, while understandable, are inadequate insofar as they fail to embrace the fundamentally spiritual character of the human project.

My longstanding argument here has been that in a period of decadence, such as the one in which we're currently living, the vitality has left the collective meaning framework that gave the pre-decadent society its confidence and vibrancy.  That epoch in the West gave us science and Bach, Beethoven and Rembrandt.  It gave us Shakespeare, Goethe, Tolstoy, Dostoyevski, Coleridge and Wordsworth.  It gave us Hegel, Marx, and Kierkegaard. If the modern period officially died during World War I, here's a question the answer to which I think proves my point about decadence:  What person born in the West after WWI has the same greatness of soul as any those (and many, many others) named above? I can't think of a one, and I've thought a lot about it.

The reason: there's nothing, no zeitgeist, no spirit of the times, for talented or genius level personalities to work with. The zeitgeist of the Postmodern period to date has been fragmentation and decadence. There is nothing in our collective lives that gives us a sense of robust future possibility. There is nothing that works on the collective level to energize our imaginations and which inspires great works. So in the artistic and creative sphere, what you get is Postmodernism(TM).  If there is a positive imagination of the future human it is of some kind of cyborgism.  It's as if since the collapse of the modern we have become or want to become some different species from the people listed above.

But the the way forward requires a dismantling or deconstruction of our old mental habits while at the same time retrieving and assembling in a new constellation the shards from the past.  That is the formula for Renaissance, and renaissance is in a very real sense first and foremost a gift and then secondarily a response to that gift.  Renaissance is our near-term future, even if not in my lifetime or yours, but without it there really is little hope that we will remain recognizably human. We are gradually shrivelling into something else. 

Comments

[Bonnie Prince Charlie]

I haven't been here in a while and am delighted to be back. Reading this blog in a small way gives me what I received when I took that leap and became a Christian eight years ago -- a view of the world that at last made sense and, more importantly, gave reason for hope.

You're right: we are living in decadent times. And both sides of the current debate contribute to that decadence. It remains to be seen if Obama will in fact be an agent of change, or even can be. There are vast forces arrayed against him, as well as inertia, and he may not turn out to even be that interested in such change. But the slow wheel of time is tending toward that change. People want it. Orwell was wrong -- there is hope.

[Rob Melly]

Jack,

Posts like this are one of the main reasons I love your blog. But it forces me to question why this sort of understanding and outlook on the current state of Western civilization is so rare. I refuse to believe that there is anything particularly revolutionary or special about this sort of thought; it seems quite natural to me, but maybe that's only because I've already drank the kool-aid.

[Jack Whelan]

Rob--

People who are interested in the shift that I am talking about go to sites that are more for specialists like the Immanent Frame: http://www.ssrc.org/blogs/immanent_frame/
I try to make some of these ideas understandable for a non specialist readership, but my experience is that only a handful of people are really interested.

This blog is about culture and politics and how the two interact. I've spent much more time on politics because the crisis we're in has demanded it. If things settle down, then I will shift to do more about culture, and that means digging more deeply into the weeds of religion and philosophy.

P.S. A quick response to your other comments at other posts. I like Macintyre but can't respond in any meaningful way to your question about him in a short response like this one. He and I both agree that Nietzsche's diagnosis of the terminal illness of Enlightenment modernity was accurate and that his prescription of the uebermensch was no real solution--I see it rather as descriptive. I see Nietzsche is more as a sensitive herald of what was happening, a miner's canary, announcing to the world that the west was suffocating for lack of spiritual oxygen. The will to power is what filled the void. The European loss of Christianity is not a political problem; it's a spiritual cultural problem, and I talk about it in my post here: http://afterthefuture.typepad.com/afterthefuture/2005/12/from_outer_to_i.html

So critiques of bureaucracies and hyper-individualism are, from where I sit, complaints about the symptoms that cannot be dealt with adequately if we don't understand the causes. I'm not sure that Macintyre would agree with my argument that the causes are rooted in the fundamental fact of Western decadence. I don't see that in moral terms, but rather in neutral historical cultural terms. It's what happens to any cultural epoch when its life cycle ends. This does not mean the end of civilization but rather the end of one of its chapters.

It's awkward to live in the in-between time, the time of neither being in the old thing or the not-yet born new thing. We're like the Israelites wandering in the wilderness. But the new will come--it always does--whether in our lifetimes or not remains to be seen. But in the meantime we should tend to proper sowing and let the harvest take care of itself.