Chapter VII: Conclusion: Timeless Instabilities - Amorphous

Futures

Postmodernism is a discourse that begins with delegitimizing all forms of knowledge

associated with the Enlightenment. Following Lyotard’s famous doctrine of

“incredulity toward metanarratives,” (The Postmodern Condition xxiv)

postmodernists launched a bold offensive against everything that constituted the

modern. Postmodernism undermines the foundations of modernist discourse and

creates an epistemelogical crisis. It is an anti foundational philosophy that presumes

the end of modernism and attempts to establish itself on its ruins. As Richard

Beardsworth rightly points out, Lyotard’s attempt in The Postmodern Condition is “to

define a socio-historical category, what comes after modernity, the ‘post’ of

postmodernity” (43). The term postmodern originated as a reaction to the artistic

movement of late 19th

and early 20th

centuries. The postmodernists declared that

modernism was completely exhausted and was a dying aesthetic.

However, there are oppositional voices like that of Habermas, for example,

that defend modernism on the ground that it is still an incomplete project. Habermas

contends that one cannot declare the end of modernism by closing only one sphere of

modernity, that is, aesthetic modernism. Societal modernity is an ongoing process that

cannot be ‘closed’ so easily. The postmodern debate stirs up other important debates

of cultural modernism and societal modernity. The efforts of postmodernists to

collapse the boundary between culture and society are thwarted by the left whereas

neoconservatives react with some confusion. For many, like Daniel Bell, the social

outcome of capitalism is less important than its cultural outcome.

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Modernism struggled with binary oppositions like past and present, change

and stability, community and alienation, god and man. But, postmodernism attempts

to overcome the tension by casually canceling the oppositional other of the binary. It

chooses present over past, instability over stability superman over god and alienation

over community. It is essentially a reaction to cultural modernism which was

representative of bourgeois art. Bourgeois art had alienated itself from the praxis of

everyday life and the avant gardists, who are often seen as the latecomers to

modernity tried to relink art with practical life. However, their experiment failed only

because capitalist modernization had taken western societies too far ahead in a

different direction. Habermas rightly points out that the debate on the end of

modernism cannot be properly understood if one concentrates too much on art. It is

important to understand the condition of modernity and its links with enlightenment

philosophy. The failure of modernism can be attributed to the extravagant

expectations of enlightenment thinkers who thought that scientific knowledge would

ensure progress and emancipation for all humankind. The disastrous events of the 20th

century such as, Auschwitz and Hiroshima destroyed the optimism of the modernists.

Theories of the death of art claimed that art had realized the Hegelian absolute

spirit in a strange and perverted way. They followed the line of Nietzsche and

Heidegger who had argued earlier that history had arrived at its teleological end.

Nietzsche, with his excessive subjectivity believed that the anarchistic power of

reason could be countered by Alexandrian myth. Heidegger, towing Nietzsche’s line,

believed that art and metaphysics could be merged to produce a new artistic

philosophy. Both of them together created the greatest epistemological crisis in

western philosophy. Such theories about the death of art concurred with

eschatological notions that history was moving towards a definite end. This belief in a

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determinate end to history was the legacy of the Judeo-Christian tradition bequeathed

to western metaphysics. The death of art, in essence, implied the death of western

metaphysics. Postmodernism emerges as a theory of culture from this crisis created

primarily by Nietzsche. Nietzsche was quick to realize the basic discordance between

art and truth in modernity and sought to reconcile the two by invoking Alexandrian

myth. Nietzsche’s philosophy is a rejection of Kantian metaphysics and an inversion

of the Hegelian dialectic. With Heidegger this metaphysical tradition inaugurated by

Nietzsche comes full circle. Cultural postmodernism is a continuation of the same

tradition. Postmodernists announce the end of modernist art, architecture and culture

and inaugurate a new era of commodity art.

Modernity was the apogee of enlightenment rationality; it created tensions

between faith and rationality, meaning and meaninglessness, self and the world and so

on. The technological world that scientific rationality produced was a challenge to

modernist thinkers like Weber, Marx and Durkheim. Enlightenment thinking had

divided German intellectuals between two opposing political and philosophical

camps: the Marxists and the liberals. Liberals like Nietzsche were unwilling to desert

their faith and jump to the socialist camp. In fact, Nietzsche’s extreme disgust with

the diremptions of modernity drove him towards anarchistic visions of apocalypse,

that is, the telos of Christian faith. Weber wallowed in the space between the two in

great uncertainty about the future of modernity.

Postmodernity emerges from these tensions and contradictions of modernity. It

challenges the episteme of western philosophy by arguing that abstract notions of

philosophy cannot be adequately articulated in language and logic. The anti-

foundationalist stand of postmodernism refuses philosophy its right to language; at the

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same time it tries to lay its own foundations in a play of language. Lyotard borrows

from Wittgenstein’s to propose that all forms of knowledge are legitimated through

endless language games. This is the curious linguistic turn of postmodernism. It plays

with language to destabilize enlightenment theories as much as it tries to legitimate

itself through the same language game. This is the essential paradox of

postmodernism. Nevertheless, the postmodern debate instigates two diametrically

opposed reactions: one from the Marxists and the other from neoconservatives. The

neoconservative stand that rejects enlightenment philosophies in favour of discourse

gets the approval of the Catholic Church. It reflects the latest trend in official

Christianity: a trend that shows an anti-science attitude.

Mario De Caro and Telmo Pievani suggest that “since Joseph Alois Ratzinger

became Pope Benedict XVI, in April 2005, the Catholic Church’s attitude toward

science, and particularly toward the theory of evolution, began to change again—this

time in a direction that Galileo would not have appreciated” (Caro and Pievani 7).

They argue that the catholic church has been talking against the theory of evolution in

particular, in recent times and more generally about “the ethical, political, and

spiritual dangers of the excessive allegiance to science within contemporary Western

societies” (7). Postmodernism celebrates an anti-science attitude even though the

culture it promotes is thoroughly implicated in a technologically determined world: a

world of images produced by the market and the media. This is the second

contradiction in postmodernism. In a world rife with religious fundamentalism,

postmodernism’s allegiance to religion and its anti-scientific stand are indeed

controversial.

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The Marxists, on the other hand, rebut postmodernism for its refusal to

politically engage with history. As Terry Eagleton rightly points out, the

postmodernists portray an anarchistic vision of the very same epistemology they wish

to destabilize. They are not interested in a political critique of capitalism, instead, by

indulging in a shadow fight with the culture of capitalism the postmodernists

unconsciously convert their theory into an ‘ahistorical’ discourse. In effect,

postmodernism becomes both apolitical and ahistorical. Further, it borrows the

concept of the fragmented self from modernism and the idea of dissolution of art in

everyday life from the avant garde. However, in an ironic twist, it removes critical

distance from the schizoid self and radical political elements from the avant garde. As

a result it cancels the revolutionary impulse of modernism and converts it into a weak

and docile narrative. Postmodernism is the institutionalization of these elements of

modernism in a different form. Jameson’s view of postmodernism is quite different

from that of Eagleton.

For Jameson, the effacement of the boundary between high and popular

culture and the commodification of art in late capitalism are the key features of

postmodernism. He identifies pastiche and schizophrenia as two significant aspects of

postmodern art. Both refer in some way to the representation of highly subjective

experiences in postmodernism that often turn out to be incoherent. Jameson’s

argument focuses mainly on the consumer culture of late capitalism and fails to probe

the economic logic that produces that culture. As a result, it becomes a superficial

critique of capitalism. Eagleton reacts to Jameson’s idea of parody by suggesting that

postmodernism actually parodies the revolutionary impulse of the avant garde.

Postmodernism carries the project of the avant garde further of bringing art close to

life. However, paradoxically, it inverts that project by trying to take life close to art.

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And later it claims in Baudrillardian fashion that reality cannot be represented in art

since there is no reality beyond the hyper reality of the image. Reducing social reality

to the level of images perceived on the mental screen is the most absurd inversion

postmodernism effects. It is the same as inverting Marxism to revert to Hegelianism.

Postmodernism collapses the superstructure into the base, the cultural into the social

and claims that the social as implied in many modernist theories is no longer valid.

Baudrillard, for example, announces the end of the social arguing that simulation

technology has imploded the meaning of the social in the endless images on TV. “The

social only exists in a perspective space; it dies in the space of simulation, which is

also a space of deterrence” (In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities 92).

However, on close examination, it becomes clear that the shift from

modernism to postmodernism is not the same as the shift from modernity to

postmodernity. If aesthetic modernism refers to particular practices in the field of art,

architecture and literature, postmodernism includes films and pop art to make the list

longer. Modernity and postmodernity on the other hand, refer to the societal

conditions created by particular modes of industrial production. The transition from

modernity to postmodernity signals a shift from the Fordist model of centralized

production and distribution to the post-Fordist model of decentralized production and

flexible accumulation. Whereas modernism / postmodernism binary is implicated in

the cultural field alone, the meaning of modernity / postmodernity is invested in the

socio-economic sphere. According to Raymond Williams, society and economics

were limited categories when compared to culture which was more a delimited

category. Nevertheless, it is important to keep in mind the inevitable connections

between culture, economics and society while making an analysis of postmodernism.

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Neoconservatives like Daniel Bell try to break these connections and declare

each of them as autonomous, self-constituting spheres. They argue that the

independent artist made use of this autonomy to produce the kind of art that

transgressed all limits ascribed to it. Neoconservatives perceive art practices of

adversary culture as decadent forms of bourgeois society and push the blame for this

development onto the economic practice of capitalism. They try to save culture from

capitalism in the hope of saving at least some sedimented aspects of religion from the

ruthless leveling process of capital. Such attempts land the neoconservatives in a

dilemma because they try to save both faith and capitalism which is an impossible

proposition. One can save only either and not both of them. The neoconservative

position on postmodernism leads to the holier than thou tradition of Anglo-American

liberal humanism. The Marxist stand leads one to two slightly different positions: one

focusing on consumer society theories such as that of Mike Featherstone and Fredric

Jameson and another leading to a more radical critique of post-industrial society. The

post-industrial society theories delve deeper into the economic processes of late

capitalism to suggest that postmodernism is linked to globalization.

The logic of consumption turns everything into commodity and culture is no

exception. Commodified culture is subject to the leveling logic of capital and the free

market determines its parameters. In late capitalism, culture is reduced to acts of

consumption and leisure time activities. The culture of consumption is the inevitable

corollary of what Scott Lash and John Urry designate as ‘Disorganized Capitalism’.

It does not desire the integration of needs because that would imply the integration of

the social. Therefore, consumer culture has serious sociological implications because

individuals begin to relate the possession of commodities with social status. In

commodity culture, cultural products act as symbols of social capital. Bourgeois art

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breaks the boundary between art and everyday life to infuse aestheticism into

industrial design, advertising and media practices which become the prominent sites

of cultural production. Sociologists recognize these developments in culture and use

terms like, information society, knowledge society, media society and consumer

society to designate the new society. However, postmodernism’s obsession with

culture and its deliberate attempt to supersede the social produces a methodological

crisis in sociological theory.

The Postmodernists’ claim of complete autonomy for culture and their

argument that culture is self constituting gives one the impression that postmodern

culture and postmodern society are two different categories. However, this is the

deception postmodernism effects; it claims greater autonomy for culture with the

intention of dissolving the social in the cultural. Therefore, postmodernity and

postmodernism become commonly interchangeable terms unlike modernity and

modernism. The term modernity has political-ideological connotation whereas

modernism generally refers to aesthetic or cultural practices. Talcott Parsons suggests

that it is necessary to keep the analytical boundaries of the different spheres as distinct

as possible in spite of interpenetration between them. A cultural critique of capitalism

like that of Jameson will lead one to a superficial criticism of consumer culture; on

the other hand, a socio-political critique will help one unearth the ideological

processes that support the functioning of the system. Postmodernists like Baudrillard

argue that there is no longer any social because the fragmentations produced by the

media have destroyed the sociality of the contract between individuals and society.

There can be no postmodern sociology because of such inherent paradoxes and

contradictions in postmodernism. Postmodern sociology can have no concept of

postmodernity since the social is collapsed into the cultural. Therefore, the

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postmodernists’ call to revamp the methods of classical sociology can be declared

invalid.

On the other hand, a socio-political analysis reveals that the hyper-real world

of simulation, the global network of media and the market with which postmodernism

associates itself is, in fact, linked to the processes of globalization. The absorption of

popular or mass culture into commodity culture marks a significant transformation

where culture includes other aspects like individual style and preferences. Moreover,

mass culture theories carry the logic of consumption to a level where it becomes a

new ideology by itself. According to Baudrillard, the ideology of consumption

socializes the masses by freeing them in the market just as the ideology of production

in the early stages of industrial capitalism produced the masses. In other words, the

ideology of consumption is a further step in the productivist logic of capitalism. The

1960’ decade saw the unhindered expansion of consumer culture and pop art

production in Europe and America. The art of Andy Warhol, for example,

demonstrates that commoditized art does not make any distinction between cultural

capital and economic capital. Consumer culture proves the fact that art, like capital,

carries only exchange value. In that sense, postmodern art is a further development

over avant garde art. Whereas the avant gardes still believed that art carried a value

transcending that of capital, the postmodernists make a daring compromise to expose

art to the logic of the market. Moving beyond the political economy of use value, art,

in its fully aestheticized phase becomes the supreme form of capital.

The emergence of postmodern ideology in the 1960’s coincides with the

weakening of leftist politics following the failure of revolutionary movements in

France, and also with the rise of free market capitalism in England and America.

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Reaganism and Thatcherism replace many socialist concepts including the concept of

the welfare state. If the market produces commodities, the media produce images of

commodities. The corporate television as the prime producer of images colludes with

the corporate market to produce image as commodity and vice versa. This media-

market coalition in the age of globalization has inaugurated a new postmodern

politics. It signals the decline of political ideologies and the rise of postmodern

politicians who begin to act as agents of the corporate elite who support or constitute

the coalition. The kind of politics influenced or rather dictated by the media-market

combine support the process of globalization which is the most palpable symbol of

postmodernism today. Globalization has several dimensions to it, though, at first

glance, it may appear as a purely communicational concept. Any debate on

globalization and its relation to postmodernism will lead to two different positions:

one that celebrates globalization suggesting that it promotes cultural pluralism and

another that denounces it arguing that it forces smaller economies to integrate with the

larger global economy. Nevertheless these two positions share a common axis since

cultural globalization and economic globalization are mutually complementary and

contradictory. They are interconnected in a strange dialectics of the market.

Neoconservatives in host countries oppose globalization on the ground that it

forces cultural homogenization through export of commodities and culture, whereas

Marxists oppose it arguing that it weakens indigenous economies by making them

dependent upon stronger and stable economies of the west. The Marxists also propose

that large flows of international capital allow greater exploitation of local labour.

Interpenetration of cultures in globalization has, in fact, sharpened cultural difference

and identities and quite often economic resistance may assume the form of cultural

resistance in host countries. Traditional cultural identities associated with rituals raise

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their head in the form of various fundamentalisms in a technologically advanced

postmodern age. In an age of information and communication revolution,

multinational capitalism and consumerism, postmodernism and religious

fundamentalism share a platform of strange incongruities.

Globalization marks a shift in economic practices with a remarkable increase

in the number of transnational corporations and the creation of a new transnational

capitalist class. Leslie Sklair refers to the new class as the “international managerial

bourgeoisie” (Sklair 62) and it consists of various professionals who come together as

partners in global finance and trade. The members of this class function as purveyors

whose business is to promote the consumerist goals of the global capitalist system. In

addition, large scale cultural flows through the media and migration of huge

populations across the globe has intensified interpenetration resulting in hybridity.

The cultural logic of postmodernism celebrates this hybridity in the name of

pluralism. The silence of Marxism amidst all the noise generated by the rhetoric of

postmodernists is rather perplexing. It signifies the decline of European Marxism and

the subsequent rise of postmodern / anti-Marxist rhetoric in the Anglo-American

context of the 1960’s. It also signifies the failure of leading French intellectuals like

Levi-Strauss, Lacan, Barthes and Althusser to articulate the ideas of the revolution to

the public. The failure of Marxism to shape the collective imagination of the people

implies the failure of the people to shape their political futures. In post-war Europe

Marxism began to wane in popularity as the idea of conflicting classes of the

bourgeois and proletariat failed to catch the imagination of the people. Moreover,

classes lost their visible identities when businessmen, technocrats, bureaucrats and

selfish politicians formed an axis to share political power.

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By the end of the 20th

century, developments in the field of information and

communication technology helped the process of expansion of Taylorism to all

sectors of industry. With the decline in trade union politics and the deskilling of

labour, industrial management is all about effective implementation of technological

rationality. Computerization assists in the process of control and surveillance so

crucial to management. Postmodernism emerges as a cultural theory amidst such

major shifts in the character of industrial society. It refuses to engage politically with

the realities of global politics, on the contrary, it plays a touch – and – go game with

ideologies. Its anti-Marxist rhetoric collaborates to a large extent with its anti-science

and quasi-spiritual attitudes. The postmodernists revel in the fragmented social which

is of their own making and deny metatheory’s role in interpreting the complex

economic and social processes responsible for the apparent fragmentation.

Postmodernism’s opposition to Marxism is mostly based on its anti-

enlightenment stance. Enlightenment disenchanted the world and rendered its

theological interpretations impossible. Disenchantment of the world had troubled

Weber and Nietzsche in the 19th

century by dislocating meaning. They believed that

enlightenment philosophies were responsible for such disenchantment that dissolved

“overarching systems of religious understandings of the world” (Lorraine Y. Landry

143). Postmodernism’s cultural revivalism can be understood as its effort to reenchant

the world: to fill it with possible new cultural meanings. This explains its dubious

silence on another metanarrative – religion. Postmodern liberals reject Marxism

dubbing it a metanarrative whereas neoconservatives accept postmodernism

conditionally. Nevertheless, both show a movement in the same direction. The

symptoms of religious revival are seen in the fringes where postmodernism tries to

appropriate quasi-religious forms into the culture of capitalism. Moreover, by

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destroying all binaries, especially the most crucial binary of the subject and object, it

turns out to be a pseudo-scientific project. It is designed to cheat the critical human

subject by dissolving the object in the subject. Therefore, postmodernism is more a

loss of critical subjectivity than subjectivity per se. The apparently naïve subjectivity

of postmodernism conceals its thirst for power and privilege associated with religion.

It is a new post-Marxist cultural liberalism that cannot distance itself from religion

because it is born out of it.

Another important feature of postmodernism that makes it anti-Marxist is its

antagonism to scientific rationality. Recent developments in science like cloning, the

human genome project or in vitro fertilization have proved to the world that

humankind is able to achieve what was formerly thought of as impossible. Viewed

positively, this appears as the realization of the utopian aspirations of enlightenment,

however, from another angle, it appears as a dangerous narrowing of boundaries

between human and animal, and human and machine. From a theological perspective

the super human being has indeed become a reality and has begun to play god. This

clearly explains postmodernism’s opposition to science and also to Marxism.

The rise of postmodernism coincides with the historic decline of Western

Marxism and the entry of capitalism into former socialist economies. Perry Anderson

attributes the decline to certain shifts that turned Western Marxism away from radical

political action towards philosophy. This was an attempt to invert Marxism and put its

rational kernel back into Hegelian thought. In fact, Marxism lost its radical content

when it entered French intellectual thought. The decline of critical intellectuals

groomed in dialectics marks the birth of eclectic postmodern philosophers. Ironically,

it was French intellectuals who gave the term ‘Intellectual’ its significance when they

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abruptly intervened in French politics of the 19th

century by taking sides in the

infamous Dreyfus affair. Many intellectuals have played significant roles in politics;

among them are Antonio Gramsci, Edward Said and Noam Chomsky. Gramscian

intellectuals are supposed to play a major role in locating social activity in specific

class-struggles and in defending class interests. Lenin also believed that philosophical

knowledge of metaphysics, ethics and morality should also turn towards praxis to

locate itself in material history.

Traditionally, intellectuals were moral philosophers who passively ruminated

on the world but Marxist intellectuals like Gramsci assigned a new historic role to

them. However, postmodernists undermine both Marxist historicism and

intellectualism and give it a linguistic turn. They prioritize language and psychology

over politics and class struggle. Cultural studies experts like Stuart Hall gave the

culturalism / structuralism debate a turn that marked the shift away from Marxism.

This was a shift from Gramscian intellectualism to post-Marxist culturalism.

Culturalism produced an entirely new class of intellectuals who, freed from political

and social commitments beyond the academy made knowledge their social capital.

Academic intellectuals can be further differentiated as humanistic intellectuals and

technical intelligentsia. Owing to the growing influence of the technical intelligentsia,

given their links with industry, the position of humanistic intellectuals has

considerably weakened in the academy. Nevertheless, intellectuals have evolved over

time though the political influence of humanistic intellectuals may have considerably

reduced in the 21st century. The Western intellectual no longer carries the radical

questioning attitude that often led to his own persecution. Therefore, the death of the

critical intellectual can be taken as a symbolic death that signifies the death of

ideologies.

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The social world that reproduces the material conditions of existence

challenges intellectuals to take an ideological stand on political issues. However,

postmodern intellectuals refuse to do this and try to reproduce their own class in

bourgeois institutions like the university. Humanistic intellectuals had always played

the role of cultural legislators; however, they proselytized on cultural matters in a

different social environment. As Zygmunt Bauman rightly suggests, in late capitalism,

the market invaded social space to an extent that it drastically changed that

environment. It introduced the culture of consumerism which became the habitat of

postmodern philosophers.

Postmodern philosophers make a historic compromise with market forces and

destroy the foundations of western philosophy that served as the living bases of

humanistic intellectuals. With this, the intellectual is finally freed from the burden of

representing anything or anybody. He neither represents the masses nor any particular

ideology. The high intellectuals of postmodernism collude with the market, the

publishing industry to get pecuniary benefits and flirt with the media to gain celebrity

status. The Postmodern intellectual surrenders to the ideological structures of the

market and the media. Without political ideologies he loses his subject identity. He

can no longer critique anything because he belongs to those “structures of betrayal”

(Bove 101) that resist criticism. Regis Debray calls this the historic betrayal of

postmodern intellectuals. Within the postmodern discourse, one is called upon to

mourn the death of ideology and loss of the critical subject. Postmodernism not only

invalidates the knowledge practices of modernism, it also destroys the intellectual

associated with those practices.

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