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.
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