Book review - How We Became Postmodern
'Post-truth politics may have started on the left bank of the Seine, but they ended up in the White House… postmodernism is intended to be subversive. Since civilisation works by order and authority, challenging these things is bound to seem disruptive. The trouble is that neoliberalism challenges them too. Nothing is more fluid and flexible than the marketplace. Nobody on Wall Street believes in absolute truth. The true anarchists are the free marketeers. So is postmodernism a critique of the status quo or a capitulation to it?..'
Stuart Jeffries: Everything, All the Time, Everywhere: How We Became Postmodern
Reviewed by Terry Eagleton
Postmodernism may be a
historical fact, but it finds history itself a bore. The past is simply a
collection of styles to be recycled, while the future will be just like the
present only with a richer array of options. There are no more grand narratives
like the idea of progress, no momentous transformation to be feared or hoped
for. The point is not to change the world but to parody it. History has come to
an end with Ben & Jerry’s and Grand Theft Auto.
When two aircraft slammed into the World Trade Center, a new grand narrative – the conflict between the west and Islamism – began to unfold. For some observers, this spelled the end of the postmodern era. Jeffries himself is not so sure: it may have lost some of its youthful zest, but its malign spirit still lives on. Postmodern ideas certainly survive in the current scepticism of truth. For a whole generation of young people, simply to have a conviction is to be guilty of dogmatism. When asked about his convictions, Boris Johnson replied that he had picked up a couple of them for speeding.
To suggest that someone’s opinion is
false is a form of discrimination. Every viewpoint should be respected, except
for racism, sexism, homophobia, elitism and antisemitism, which are deeply
offensive. So they are, but how do you decide this if moral objectivity is for
the birds? There are writers today who rightly insist that women have been
shackled and humiliated throughout history, yet who put words like truth and
reality in scare quotes…
Jon Henley: Rise of far right puts Dreyfus affair into spotlight in French election
Paul
Sagar - The last hollow laugh - Francis Fukuyama and 'The End of History’
Stanley
Rosen (1929-2014). A great philosopher passes
Mark
Neocleous: Resisting Resilience
Extract from David Hawkes; Ideology, (1996) p 189:
For Baudrillard, however, the tendency to think in binary oppositions is a problem to be overcome, and in this he is typical of postmodernist philosophy. This is why postmodernists are unwilling to speak of ‘ideology’, since this category implies a binary opposition between true and false modes of thought. The neo-pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty denies the possibility of ever identifying a systematically distorted consciousness, since “distortion” presupposes a medium of representation which, intruding between us and the object under investigation, produces an appearance that does not correspond to the reality of the object’ (1993, 17). There can be no distortion if there is no referent beyond or outside representation, for in that case there is nothing to be distorted. But Rorty’s argument implies, like Kant’s, that our inability to perceive the thing-in-itself is an eternal and inevitable condition, so that the pretence that we can perceive it becomes the very definition of superstition.
This argument takes no account of the particular historical conditions under which materialist relativism and belief in the determining power of representation have arisen and come to seem plausible. In particular, it ignores the influence on consciousness of money. Money is a system of representation that achieves determining power in practice. In a world dominated by money, then, we should expect that representation might also be accorded determining power in the realm of theory. If it is true that the autonomy of representation in philosophy is part of the same process as the seizure of global power by money, then the fact that money is an alienated and objectified form of human life implies an ethical condemnation of Rorty’s faith in signification’s constitutive role...
C.S. Lewis: The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it. It is good that the window should be transparent, because the street or garden beyond it is opaque. How (would it be) if you saw through the garden too. It is no use trying 'to see through' first principles. If you see through everything, then everything is transparent. But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To see through all things is the same as not to see. Abolition of Man, (1943) p 40
