Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault

by Stephen R.C. Hicks

By the middle of the twentieth century, Left thinkers had available to them sophisticated theories of epistemology and language that told them that truth is impossible—that evidence is theory-laden—that empirical evidence never adds up to proof—that logical proof is merely theoretical—that reason is artificial and dehumanizing—and that one’s feelings and passions are better guides than reason.

Any attack on socialism in any form could be brushed aside, and the desire to believe in it reaffirmed. Those who adopted this strategy could always tell themselves that they were simply functioning as Kuhn said the scientists themselves function—by bracketing the anomalies, setting them aside, and then going with their feelings.

On this hypothesis, then, postmodernism is a symptom of the far Left’s crisis of faith. Postmodernism is a result of using skeptical epistemology to justify the personal leap of faith necessary to continue believing in socialism.

Therefore, it is a combination of the two factors—widespread skepticism about reason and socialism’s being in crisis—that is necessary to give rise to postmodernism.

Here it is useful to recall Lentricchia: Postmodernism “seeks not to find the foundation and the conditions of truth but to exercise power for the purpose of social change.”[299]

In postmodern discourse, truth is rejected explicitly and consistency can be a rare phenomenon. Consider the following pairs of claims. On the one hand, all truth is relative; on the other hand, postmodernism tells it like it really is. On the one hand, all cultures are equally deserving of respect; on the other, Western culture is uniquely destructive and bad. Values are subjective—but sexism and racism are really evil. Technology is bad and destructive—and it is unfair that some people have more technology than others. Tolerance is good and dominance is bad—but when postmodernists come to power, political correctness follows. There is a common pattern here: Subjectivism and relativism in one breath, dogmatic absolutism in the next. Postmodernists are well aware of the contradictions—especially since their opponents relish pointing them out at every opportunity. And of course a post-modernist can respond dismissingly by citing Hegel—“Those are merely Aristotelian logical contradictions”—but it is one thing to say that and quite another to sustain Hegelian contradictions psychologically.

Consider three more examples, this time of clashes between postmodernist theory and historical fact. Postmodernists say that the West is deeply racist, but they know very well that the West ended slavery for the first time ever, and that it is only in places where Western ideas have made inroads that racist ideas are on the defensive. They say that the West is deeply sexist, but they know very well that Western women were the first to get the vote, contractual rights, and the opportunities that most women in the world are still without. They say that Western capitalist countries are cruel to their poorer members, subjugating them and getting rich off them, but they know very well that the poor in the West are far richer than the poor anywhere else, both in terms of material assets and the opportunities to improve their condition.

Facts.

Postmodernism is therefore first a political movement, and a brand of politics that has only lately come to relativism.

Machiavellian rhetorical discourses Suppose that you are arguing about politics with a fellow student or professor. You cannot believe it, but you seem to be losing the debate. All of your argumentative gambits are blocked, and you keep getting backed into corners. Feeling trapped, you then find yourself saying, “Well, it’s all just a matter of opinion; it’s merely semantics.” What is the purpose in this context of appealing to opinion and semantic relativism? The purpose is to get your opponent off your back and to get some breathing space. If your opponent accepts that the debate is a matter of opinion or semantics, then your losing the argument does not matter: nobody is right or wrong. But if your opponent does not accept that everything is a matter of opinion, then his attention is diverted away from the subject matter at hand—namely, politics—and into epistemology. For now he has to show why everything is not merely semantics, and that will take him awhile. Meanwhile, you have successfully diverted him. And if it looks like he is doing a good job on the semantics argument, then you can throw in—“Well, what about perceptual illusions?”

Deconstruction as an educational strategy Here is an example. Kate Ellis is a radical gender feminist. Ellis, as she writes in Socialist Review, believes that sexism is evil, that affirmative action is good, that capitalism and sexism go hand in hand, and that achieving equality between the sexes requires an overthrow of existing society. But she finds that she has a problem when she tries to teach these themes to her students. She finds that they think like liberal capitalists—they think in terms of equality of opportunity, in terms of simply removing artificial barriers and judging everyone by the same standards, and they think that by personal effort and ambition they can overcome most obstacles and achieve success in life.[303] But this means that her students have bought into the whole liberal capitalist framework that Ellis thinks is dead wrong. So, Ellis writes, she will enlist deconstruction as a weapon against those old-fashioned Enlightenment beliefs.[304]

If she can first undermine her students’ belief in the superiority of capitalist values and of the idea that people make or break themselves, then their core values will be de-stabilized.[305] Pushing relativism, she finds, helps achieve this. And once their Enlightenment beliefs are hollowed out by relativistic arguments, she can fill the void with the correct Left political principles.[306]

The same strategy holds for the Machiavellian postmodernists—they say they want equal respect for all cultures, but what they really want in the long run is to suppress the liberal capitalist one.

If one’s deepest goals are political, one always has a major obstacle to deal with—the powerful books written by brilliant minds on the other side of the debate.

In American law, there is the Constitution and the whole body of common law precedent, and very little of that supports socialism. Consequently, if you are a Left-wing graduate student or professor in literature or law and you are confronted with the Western legal or literary canon, you have two choices. You can take on the opposing traditions, have your students read the great books and the great decisions, and argue with them in your classes. That is very hard work and also very risky—your students might come to agree with the wrong side. Or you can find a way to dismiss the whole tradition, so that you can teach only books that fit your politics. If you are looking for shortcuts, or if you have a sneaking suspicion that the right side might not fare well in the debate, then deconstruction is seductive. Deconstruction allows you to dismiss whole literary and legal traditions as built upon sexist or racist or otherwise exploitative assumptions. It provides a justification for setting them aside.

No. Deconstruction can simply be employed as a rhetorical method for ridding oneself of an obstacle.

On this Machiavellian hypothesis, then, postmodernism is not a leap of faith for the academic Left, but instead a clear-eyed political strategy that uses relativism but does not believe it.[309]

As Nietzsche noted in Daybreak: When some men fail to accomplish what they desire to do they exclaim angrily, “May the whole world perish!” This repulsive emotion is the pinnacle of envy, whose implication is “If I cannot have something, no one can have anything, no one is to be anything!”[312]

Slave morality is the morality of the weak, the humble, those who feel victimized and afraid to venture forth into the big bad world. Weaklings are chronically passive, mostly because they are afraid of the strong. As a result, the weak feel frustrated: they cannot get what they want out of life. They become envious of the strong, and they also secretly start to hate themselves for being so cowardly and weak. But no one can live thinking he or she is hateful. And so the weak invent a rationalization—a rationalization that tells them they are the good and the moral because they are weak, humble, and passive. Patience is a virtue, they say, and so is humility, and so is obedience, and so is being on the side of the weak and the downtrodden. And of course the opposites of those things are evil—aggressiveness is evil, and so is pride, and so is independence, and so is being physically and materially successful. But of course it is a rationalization, and a smart weakling is never quite going to convince himself of it. That will do damage inside. Meanwhile, the strong will be laughing at him. And that will do damage inside. And the strong and the rich will be carrying on getting stronger and richer and enjoying life. And seeing that will do damage inside. Eventually the smart weakling will feel such a combination of self-loathing and envy of his enemies that he will need to lash out. He will feel the urge to hurt, in any way he can, his hated enemy. But of course he cannot risk ...

In our time, the world created by the Enlightenment is strong, active, and exuberant. For a while in the past century, socialists could believe the revolution was coming, that woe would come to them that are rich, and that blessed would be the poor. But that hope has been dashed cruelly. Capitalism now seems like a case of “twice two makes four,” and like Dostoevsky’s Underground Man it is easy to see that the most intelligent socialists would just hate that fact. Socialism is the historical loser, and if socialists know that, they will hate that fact, they will hate the winners for having won, and they will hate themselves for having picked the losing side. Hate as a chronic condition leads to the urge to destroy.

Postmodernism then, in its most extreme forms, is about driving that point home and making the nothing reign.

With Marcel Duchamp the world of art got to postmodernism before the rest of the intellectual world. Asked to submit something for display by the Society of In-dependent Artists in New York, Duchamp sent a urinal. Duchamp of course knew the history of art. He knew what had been achieved—how over the centuries art had been a powerful vehicle that called upon the highest development of the human creative vision and demanded exacting technical skill; and he knew that art had an awesome power to exalt the senses, the intellects, and the passions of those who experience it. Duchamp reflected on the history of art and decided to make a statement. The artist is a not great creator—Duchamp went shopping at a plumbing store. The artwork is not a special object—it was mass-produced in a factory. The experience of art is not exciting and ennobling—at best it is puzzling and mostly leaves one with a sense of distaste. But over and above that, Duchamp did not select just any ready-made object to display. In selecting the urinal, his message was clear: Art is something you piss on.

Kunst ist Scheisse (Art is shit) was, fittingly, the motto of the Dada movement. Duchamp’s urinal was the fitting symbol. Everything is waste to be flushed away. On this hypothesis, then, postmodernism is a generalization on Dada’s nihilism. Not only is art shit, everything is.

While the neo-Enlightenment thinkers have come to terms with the modern world, from the postmodern perspective the universe has been metaphysically and epistemologically shattered. We cannot turn to God or to nature, and we cannot trust reason or man-kind. But there was always socialism. As bad as the philosophical universe became in metaphysics, epistemology, and the study of human nature, there was still the vision of an ethical and political order that would transcend everything and create the beautiful collectivist society.

The failure of Left politics to achieve that vision was merely the last straw. To the postmodern mind, the cruel lessons of the modern world are that reality is inaccessible, that nothing can be known, that human potential is nothing, and that ethical and political ideals have come to nothing. The psychological response to the loss of everything is anger and despair. But the postmodern thinkers also find themselves surrounded by an Enlightenment world that does not understand. The post-modernists find themselves confronting a world dominated by liberalism and capitalism, by science and technology, by people who still believe in reality, in reason, and in the greatness of human potential. The world that they said was impossible and destructive has both come to be and is flourishing. The heirs of the Enlightenment are running the world, and they have marginalized the post-modernists to the academy. Ressentiment is then added to anger and despair. Some retreat into quietism, and some retreat to a private world of aesthetic play and self-creation. Others, however, lash out with the intent to destroy. But again postmodernism’s only weapons are words.[319]

Deconstruction is a literary version of Duchamp and Rauschenberg. Deconstruction theory says that no work has meaning. Any apparent meaning can be transformed into its opposite, into nothing, or revealed to be a mask for something distasteful. The postmodern movement contains many people who like the idea of deconstructing other people’s creative work. Deconstruction has the effect of leveling all meaning and value. If a text can mean any-thing, then it means nothing more than anything else—no texts are then great. If a text is a cover for something fraudulent, then doubt about everything apparently great creeps in.

The best portrait of this psychology comes from that very dead, very white European male: William Shakespeare, in his Othello. Iago just hated Othello, but he could not hope to defeat him in open confrontation. How then could he destroy him? Iago’s strategy was to attack him where it would hurt most—through Othello’s passion for Desdemona. Iago hinted indirectly that she had been sleeping around, he spread subtle lies and innuendo about her faithfulness, he succeeded in raising a doubt in Othello’s mind about the most beautiful thing in his life, and he let that doubt work like a slow poison. Like the postmodernists, Iago’s only weapons were words. The only difference is that the postmodernists are not so subtle about their intended targets.

The contemporary Enlightenment world prides itself on its commitment to equality and justice, its open-mindedness, its making opportunity available to all, and its achievements in science and technology. The Enlightenment world is proud, confident, and knows it is the wave of the future. This is unbearable to someone who is totally invested in an opposed and failed outlook. That pride is what such a person wants to destroy. The best target to attack is the Enlightenment’s sense of its own moral worth. Attack it as sexist and racist, intolerantly dogmatic, and cruelly exploitative. Undermine its confidence in its reason, its science and technology. The words do not even have to be true or consistent to do the necessary damage. And like Iago, postmodernism does not have to get the girl in the end. Destroying Othello is enough.[320]

Yup.

Showing that a movement leads to nihilism is an important part of understanding it, as is showing how a failing and nihilistic movement can still be dangerous.