Philosophy and politics of Postmodernism
Review of Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault by Stephen R.C. Hicks
I have long been curious about the definitions of modernism and postmodernism. What are they rebelling against? What were their proponents thinking? What if any relevance do the labels have today? This book is a good place to get a grounding in certain aspects of these questions.
According to Hicks, postmodernism started as a philosophical movement, then merged with the political far left, and is now the province of disappointed academic “intellectuals” who wish to use it to attack what is good in western culture, that is, capitalism, science, and freedom. I will unpack all of this below, but that is about it for the core logic of the book.
The context in which postmodernism arose, Hicks believes, was in the Enlightenment. The philosophes were the original “moderns”, who believed they could study and understand nature through scientific reasoning, a combination of logical theory and confirmation by observation. They believed in the autonomy of the individual, who would later come into his own in liberal democracies and free-market capitalism; his ideas of happiness and life goals were his to formulate and pursue in freedom. There were objective, indeed “right” answers to every question to be found scientifically. It is this process, we learn, that the postmodern philosophers reject.
The definition of postmodernism for Hicks is that the world has no intrinsic nature – it cannot be understood through reason or logic, i.e., there is nothing to “get right” – and so ideas about reality must be “deconstructed” socio-linguistically in order to reveal the power relations behind our conceptions. The rhetoric of progress and indeed of scientific objectivity, in this view, functions as a self-serving smokescreen to divert the exploited classes from seeing their oppression by race, sex, and class, etc. All interpretations are equally valid and relative. The individual matters less than the “collective”.
According to Hicks, Kant, in rebelling against Enlightenment certitudes, was the originator of these notions; he opened the door to skepticism, irrationalism and eventually, postmodernism. Reason, Kant argued, was incapable of knowing ultimate reality; this was because we perceived the world through our sense organs and interpreted our perceptions through reason and logic, which are internal and self-referential rather than “objective”. In other words, we cannot recognize necessity and universal truths because we impose those concepts upon our perceptions with our brains – the mind is not a passive observer, but an organ, i.e., an active constructing mechanism seeking to organize and integrate our perceptions into concepts. The only thing we can know, in this view, is the structure of our own minds.
Kant’s radical contempt for reason threw out nearly 2,000 years of western philosophy, which had striven to understand nature and reality objectively. The philosophers who followed him added a number of elements of their own. Hegel saw individuals as part of a whole, participants in a grand collective movement; progress was about the clash of contradictory ideas, rendering truth relative as opposed to immutable. Kierkegaard argued that because absolute knowledge was impossible, we had to make an irrational leap of faith; his emotional landscape was dread and loneliness. For his part, Schopenhauer emphasized the power of will and passion as the only means to pierce through the illusions of reason. Nietzsche advocated for individuals to tap into our deepest, darkest selves, in our will to power. Finally, Heidegger shifted the emphasis to activity, all while decrying the lack of meaning or substance in everything but the fear of death.
So far, so good. This is a solid definition of postmodernism as philosophy. But when Hicks turns to politics, I believe he begins to go seriously off the rails. Postmodernism, he states, has become “monolithically far left”, seeing everything as political and relative, rejecting science and individual freedom in favor of collectivism as embodied in socialism. The far left, he posits, makes 3 claims: 1) capitalism is by nature exploitive; 2) only socialism is humane, peaceful and cooperative; 3) capitalism is less productive than socialism, which will “usher in a new era of prosperity”. In this world, Hicks continues, the state must enforce the will of oppressed peoples in favor of the collective good, overriding “self-centered individualism”, etc. Another offshoot of this reasoning is nationalism and the “unique genius” of the Volk, though Hicks inexplicably fails to note that this is a far right version of postmodernism.
Having set up this strawman, Hicks then digresses with a pathetically elementary refutation of Marxism, conflating social democracy, socialism, and Stalinist communism in the process. I don’t dispute that Marx’s predictions failed to materialize and that liberal capitalism rebounded and generated a prosperity unmatched in human history – these are good things. However, there is a lot more to the debate than Hicks seems to understand, like hybrid systems where the state is deeply involved in the capitalist economy and it works pretty darn well, e.g. Sweden or Singapore. It’s as if Hicks has read his Hayek and imagines that’s all there is to it.
So, what is the upshot of this? Hicks claims that left-wing academics, disappointed in the failure of socialism, have turned to postmodernism in order to continue their critique of capitalism without the need to refer to inconvenient facts: with their rejection of reason and truth, they can advance any argument they so desire. Furthermore, with socio-lingustic deconstruction, these so-called intellectuals can dissect oppressive language and usages ad infinitum, in effect turning anyone they want into oppressors and baddies, etc.
The lack of nuance in Hicks’ argument makes him look like a fool. For starters, I do not think that ALL intellectuals of a postmodern bent completely reject science and the search for truth, but rightly point out biases that their ideological opponents prefer to ignore. Capitalist economies do not result in optimality, let alone “lift all boats” and the like – the predictions of supply side economics have equally failed and for discernible reasons, conservatives continue to lie about their “success”. Of course, there are too many postmodernists who indulge in excessive nonsense on campus, I don’t deny it. It’s just that the questions that postmodernists raise can also be fruitful for learning and if wrong, should be refuted by debate, even as I find Hicks’ attempt to do so laughably crude. Indeed, Hicks would have us believe Pangloss.
Finally, when Hicks turns to subjects other than politics and philosophy, he has little to add. This hugely disappointed me. In the fields of architecture and design, modernism refers to optimal designs – “form follows function”, “less is more”. However, postmodern design prefers ornamentation for the sake of aesthetics or shock value, not because they reject reason or have a political agenda. Hicks does not seem to know this. Then, in the field of art, Hicks goes badly off base. The modernists were seeking to throw out bourgeois convention in order to portray inner lives and play off the absurdity of modern society as well as shock the “establishment”. In this way, the Expressionists experimented with color and bizarre poses to evoke emotion, the interior life. They distrusted reason in accordance with Freud, but sought truth in emotion. Hicks even mislabels Dadaists as postmodern, when in fact by some definitions they are the fullest culmination of the modernist project. The real postmodern artists emerged in the 1960s, with Warhol and op art, which were crassly commercial and denying the importance or comprehensibility of inner life.
In spite of this critique, I would still recommend the book. It got me to think, Hicks writes well, and communicates his enthusiasm for philosophy as well as his passion for right wing politics, though anyone who has read the newspapers in recent years knows that the left has no monopoly on denying facts or the validity of the scientific method.
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