Sean Illing interviews Stuart Jeffries, author of Everything, All the Time, Everywhere: How We Became Postmodern, and the discussion focuses on themes I've been making for years now about why the Left hasn't the resources to fight the Right. I'll say more about it below, but my argument over the years is that insofar as the Left has been captured by Postmodern theory, its politics align with Neoliberal capitalist objectives. In other words, the anti-capitalist postmodern theorist is as incoherent as the traditional values conservative who celebrates capitalism.
Sean Illing
I wanted to avoid the temptation to ask you to define postmodernism at the top, but I feel like we have to do it, right?
Stuart Jeffries
So the simple idea is that postmodernism is what comes after modernism. And modernism was a very earnest and serious commitment to progress, a commitment to overturning the frills and furbelows of Victorian culture and early 20th century decorative culture, in the arts and in architecture. It’s joyless, really.
And postmodernism is a rebellion against all that. It’s a rebellion against the idea that we should become leaner and fitter and meaner in our architecture and in our literature. It’s a rebellion against the idea that we’re on some path to improving ourselves as human beings, that we’re heading toward some kind of absolute perfection. Postmodernism disdains all that. It says that’s garbage. The postmodernists said we’re going to tear up the rule books to make buildings, to make art, and make it all about expression and fun.
Now the weird thing about postmodernism is that when you put it like that, it sounds great! But my book is about how there’s another “ism” looming as postmodernism emerges and it’s called neoliberalism, which is a new form of capitalism and very much the world we’re living in now. We’re living in a neoliberal era and postmodernism has become a cultural handmaiden for that.
...
Sean Illing
Do you feel like the emancipatory potential of postmodernism was squandered? Like, there was a genuine subversiveness to it that could’ve been revolutionary, but in the end it gets commercialized and becomes another trick of capital.
Stuart Jeffries
Absolutely. If you read Francois Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition [the book that coined the term “postmodernism” in 1979], or if you read Gilles Deleuze, both of them are quite radical thinkers. Both of them are born of the disappointment of the failure of the student rebellions in ’68 in Paris. Their ideas are filled with mourning over the lost revolution.
But they’re not Marxist revolutionaries anymore. And Deleuze, the great postmodern theorist, starts to think about desire as a liberator. So forget about socialist organizing, forget about trade unions and barricades — it’s all about desire. Desire is truly revolutionary.
And that just seems so incredibly naive to say now, because you think of how desire — sexual desire, the desire for products, the desire for material titillation — is utterly conformist. Our desires are constantly manufactured and then sold back to us. Desire is so obviously a tool for capitalism.
Marxism was the last grand narrative for the Left, and once you give up on the grand narrative all you have is individuals, and what motivates individuals? Well since the metaphysical imaginary for both capitalism and postmodernism is rationalist materialism, the only thing that makes life worth living is desire, and that's a very individual thing, so the politics becomes not about defining a collective vision for a better society, but rather only the negation of whatever impedes individual desire.
As soon as you understand that, you understand everything that has gone wrong on the cultural Left and why it was so easily captured by Neoliberalism, why it isn't subversive or revolutionary in any truly meaningful way and is really just a branch of the same disease that brings us unimpeded capitalism, which thrives on unimpeded desire.
The inevitable result is that a Progressive politics without a narrative loses to a politics that has one. The folks on the Right haven't heard the news yet about the unbelievability of grand narratives. Maybe they should take a course on it. In the meanwhile, the people on the Right, whose desire is primarily grounded in wanting to destroy the cultural Left and its capture of American cultural institutions makes it very easy for them to get organized in movements designed to do just that.
What does the Left have to offer as a counter--anarchic, evanescent, happenings like Occupy or quixotic, unpopular riots like the anti-WTO demonstrations in Seattle? But except for a few of the most hardcore on the Left, as soon as Left politics stops being fun or entertaining, there is no 'desire' for it. And besides, the politics of the Left can't compete with the politics on the Right for being fun. Those folks on January 6 were having a ball. Owning the Libs is great sport. Watching Libs get apoplectic about Trump is a hoot.
Liberals just don't understand how boring and uninspiring is their sanctimony, how ridiculous their woke fetishes, how easy they are to mock and to dislike. Their political naïveté and rhetorical ineptness bred in university seminar rooms is truly breathtaking, and yet all the youngsters these days in the media who went to prestigious universities and liberal arts colleges are its acolytes. The Right scares them, as it should, but this generation simply hasn't the ability to push back because it has no place to set its feet. The cultural Left has become the new "establishment", but theirs is an establishment without a foundation except for old habits that grew out of beliefs they no longer hold.
The only possible argument against Neoliberalism needs a foundation that lies deeper than desire. That is an intellectual impossibility given the presuppositions held by the cultural Left, and so inevitably it will be defeated, if not by the Right, by a more sophisticated and deeply grounded movement on the Left.
Listening to the entire interview is well worth it. See "How Neoliberalism Captured the Cultural Left III" where I talk more about Jeffries book.
See also How Neoliberalism Captured the Cultural Left I and "Young Socialist Intellectuals".