What’s So Bad About Politically Correct Art?

Political correctness has always mattered a lot to me. As far back as I can remember it’s been important to be on the right side of things—further even: In my baby book under “baby dislikes” my dad wrote “nuclear proliferation” and “caviar.” In middle school I started going to anti-war rallies and spending my time arguing dress code constitutional law with the principal. My high school class voted me “most outspoken,” which was a nice way of saying that I wouldn’t shut the fuck up about politics, no matter the subject. There are a lot more people who complain about “PC” than people who actually conform to the stereotypes, but I more or less do.

When I was a culturally engaged kid (roughly ’96-’06), political correctness was politically incorrect. In the Bay Area where I grew up we could assume most people were liberals, Democrats, and more specifically anti-Bush—if not necessarily anti-war. But this was the heyday of the Man Show and South Park and Crank Yankers and, especially as a boy, the last thing you were supposed to be was offended. By that time conservatives had already been bellyaching for years on the covers of national magazines about the “PC” menace, gleefully comparing college students to the Red Guards and, yes, Nazi stormtroopers. The script hasn’t changed much.

Political correctness connotes not just the inability to let go and enjoy yourself (e.g. I have never seen a Will Ferrell comedy), but a weak character. American history and humanities curricula still draw heavily on Cold War liberal ideas about the individual, and to be politically correct, we learn, is to surrender rather than cultivate your judgment. Fahrenheit 451, 1984, Lord of the Flies, The Scarlet Letter, The Crucible, Animal Farm, Brave New World, To Kill A Mockingbird: When Americans learn about politics what we learn is that critical thinking means thinking “for yourself.” Groupthink is part and parcel of tyranny, and attempts to get everyone to think the same way—or make everyone act as if they’re thinking the same way—are tyrannical. What is the crime of calling a classmate’s shoes “gay” compared to the crime of telling other people what they’re allowed to say? It is, we are told, a slippery slope to Hitler.

The object of political correctness is rarely politics itself, at least not the formal kind. The “politics” cancels itself out—a secret ballot can’t be politically correct. The object is instead cultural, discursive, aesthetic. Political correctness is when you bring politics into spheres where it doesn’t belong, where it edges out judgment (or non-judgmental taste and tradition). Politics is about picking between options and letting yourself be counted on one side or the other, while judgment and taste are where and how we define ourselves as individuals. And only as judging, tasting individuals are we capable of delegating our judgment by vote. Political correctness, then, poisons our culture and the democracy that depends on it.

That is, as I understand it, the strongest version of the argument against political correctness. It is fundamentally a liberal argument in the classical sense, which helps explain why some of the strongest and most consistent reactions against PC come from one-tick-left-or-right-of-center pundits like Jonathan Chait and David Brooks. The issue among progressives and conservatives is where the lines of separation between spheres should be, which helps explain why the story of a gay wedding cake—a private baked good linked to a traditional religious rite that is also now a civil right—has acquired outlandishly large significance. Discrimination is a synonym for both judgment and taste, and the long conservative fight for the right to discriminate against is about more than organizing oppression, it’s about preserving that capacity.

(It’s worth noting that any moderately close reading of American history shows that elected progressives do not fight to extend the realm of the political so much as manage demands from elements in the public to do so. As I write it’s been less than 10 years since we marched in Washington, DC, for gay marriage, and Democratic lawmakers were not running out to join us.)

Conservatives can be politically correct, too, as liberals like to remind them. When they defended the criminalization of homosexuality, for example, they extended the realm of politics into the bedroom. The fight to ban abortion is likewise an intrusion of the political into the medical. Strict libertarians of the Reason magazine type consistently oppose political correctness of both kinds, defending the right to our taste in both cake customers and sex acts. But though the unrealistically fair-minded see the political spectrum as a horseshoe, when we’re talking political correctness, we’re talking about the left.

Where libertarians want to shrink the realm of the political as small as possible, for the PC, “everything is political.” This was a repeated complaint in John Taylor’s 1991 New York cover story “Are You Politically Correct?” The noted academic taste-and-judgment fanatic Stanley Fish is overly fond of the “Is everything political?” phrase, using it in op-eds year after year to argue against politics in the classroom. The lament “everything is political now” turns up 1,180 results on Google, including the Chicago Tribune headline gem: “Everything is political these days, even the moon landing.” But who are the people who really do believe that everything is political?

Communists.

     Hitherto philosophers have had the solution of all riddles lying in their writing-desks, and the stupid, exoteric world had only to open its mouth for the roast pigeons of absolute knowledge to fly into it. Now philosophy has become mundane, and the most striking proof of this is that philosophical consciousness itself has been drawn into the torment of the struggle, not only externally but also internally. But, if constructing the future and settling everything for all times are not our affair, it is all the more clear what we have to accomplish at present: I am referring to ruthless criticism of all that exists, ruthless both in the sense of not being afraid of the results it arrives at and in the sense of being just as little afraid of conflict with the powers that be.—Karl Marx, letter to Arnold Ruge (1843)

If you ask the average conservative, they’ll probably tell you political correctness starts with Soviet Russia, more specifically Josef Stalin. On one level this story is simply wrong. But on a deeper, more important level, it’s complicatedly wrong. Marching the political into “all that exists” truly is part of the Marxist plot, from the factory to the family (“Do you charge us with wanting to stop the exploitation of children by their parents?” says the Manifesto, “To this crime we plead guilty.”) Succeeding waves of Marxists have paid him the highest tribute by occasionally finding Marx himself politically incorrect, extending his analysis even further into society in accordance with the method.

“Cultural Marxism” has no particular meaning within the tradition of Marxist thought, whereas it does have a noted history as a code phrase on the antisemitic right. Lately it’s become a sort of harder-core synonym for political correctness, one that evinces a familiarity with far-right politics rather than garden-variety annoyance at college students. And yet, I admit, there’s some validity to the idea. The complaint—similar to the one about political correctness—is that Marxists want to subject every facet of society to politics, including the cultural sphere, which liberals (from right to left) believe is properly a realm of individuality.

Here’s how we might imagine they understand the cultural Marxist slippery slope: Instead of judging a comedian based on how funny they are, cultural Marxists want to judge adherence to a political line, which isn’t really judgment at all, it’s verification. At that point we’re no longer audience members or consumers or even people, we become bureaucrats, always looking for a condemnatory box to check. Slowly and then quickly cultural producers are incentivized and forced to conform, and we’re left in a desert of art so sycophantic it barely deserves the title.

With the development of social media and the contentification of everyday people’s regular speech we have a greater awareness of the role we all play in forming culture. What separated earlier generations of professional artists and critics from the amateurs was plausible reach, but now anyone online could go viral. This is occasionally thrilling for everyone involved (see: Lil Nas X), but it also makes more of us subject to expectations and pressures of political correctness that used to be reserved for public speakers. And if we’re deprived of a space beyond politics we can’t develop the courage or ability to exercise judgment, and we become the most dangerous kinds of citizens: all political allegiance, no critical thought.

This vision of life without thought is a caricature of socialism that Americans learn in school, along with social-contract theory, which is taught as fact. Politics is where we surrender our freedom to the state in return for a vote, yes, but also a retained freedom in the spheres of judgment and taste, which is where individuality and creativity thrive. The trade is between each individual and society as embodied in the nation: There are laws, but otherwise no one can tell you anything. On the other hand, Marxists, we’re told, don’t believe in the individual at all. Everything must be sacrificed to the collective.

Despite what you may have heard, Marxists recognize that people exist. But unlike liberals (in both red and blue flavors), we don’t understand the world via the existential individual’s relationship to society. Recorded human history is the history of class conflict, and every child is born into a specific historical moment and into a specific position within that specific moment. Societies, we Marxists believe, have their characters determined by their relations of production, sometimes called society’s “base.” Feudal society was feudal, and capitalist society—under the first truly global mode of production—is capitalist. That means, in the simplest version, that the conflict between workers and owners is what structures the rest. “It is as though light of a particular hue were cast upon everything,” Marx writes, “tingeing all other colors and modifying their specific features.” Upon everything.

Under capitalism there’s no movie set that’s not a workplace, no marriage that’s not a workplace, no classroom that’s not a workplace. All is bathed in the light of that particular hue. If that sounds unfortunate or monotonous, it should. As Americans we’re taught to see that rosy light as an eternal sunset, history and struggle being put to bed, liberal democracy, the foundation for free taste and judgment. Marxists see a red dawn, a storm rising on a new day. Any mode of production based on exploitation is unstable and rife with conflict. (In order to use Marxist analysis without drawing attention to it, sociologists often say “conflict theory” instead.) Owners try to get the most out of their workers and workers try to get the most out of life, goals that are fundamentally at odds. The sparks from these grinding gears light the whole world.

If everything is properly understood as political—that is to say, engaged one way or another in the all-consuming struggle that defines society—how do we tell what’s on the right side? We’re taught to see political correctness as a shortcut around thought, where all that’s necessary is to verify adherence to the latest in PC phraseology. With a socialist party it’s even easier: agree with the Party. But Marxism is about constant criticism, and the most vibrant contemporary schools of thought emerge in part out of criticisms of the Soviet system. And not, like say Camus or Orwell, from within the liberal tradition.

The visual arts are a frequent subject of anti-PC complaint, with conservatives fearmongering about the bland uniformity of socialist painting. Making politically correct art is easy, they say, so if we judge art according to its political correctness, we surrender the lens of quality. John Berger confounds this view. Berger is one of the few great critics who is also universally acclaimed as a great artist. With novels like G., To The Wedding, and the Into Their Labors trilogy, Berger proved himself skilled beyond doubt, and his Ways of Seeing (and its BBC adaptation) is perhaps the single most influential work of English-language art criticism. And yet, Berger was resolutely politically correct, to a degree that sometimes shocked his liberal peers. In a debate with British art historian Benedict Nicolson over the work of Italian socialist painter Renato Guttuso,

Berger is rigid:

Berger: A work of art is moving in direct ratio to the degree to which it extends our experience of significant, objective facts.

Nicolson: Come now! … It would be foolish to argue that Van Gogh was less significant as an artist when expressing intensely personal emotions than when gearing his sensations to some social ideal.

Berger: I completely disagree. The most moving Van Goghs are precisely those in which his intense emotions are are applied to objective reality. It was because his own over-personal sensations finally smothered his vision that he killed himself. One day his work will be reassessed in the light of this fact.

Harsh!

Nicolson finds it hard to believe Berger is actually saying what he’s saying. How can an artist of Berger’s capacity—never mind an art critic of his ability—talk about a universal standard for judging quality? How can someone who crafts fictions at the highest level talk of “objective reality” that way? To Nicolson’s complaint that Guttuso would “never depict corruption among the workers” because to do so would be contrary to the painter’s politics, Berger answers it would be contrary to the truth:

Arbitrarily isolated facts can only lead to triviality in art…Of course, there are individual corrupt workers. Of course, there are decent bourgeoisie. But the fact remains that it is the peasants in Italy who remain undernourished, the working class who, in the struggle for their rights, get shot, and the bourgeoisie who connive.

Not individuals but classes. This is what Berger means by “objective”: more than the accurate story of something that happened, it’s about grasping the class struggles that structure the world. The best an artist who misunderstands the objective truth of their society can hope for, as Berger writes about Jackson Pollock, is that “his talent will reveal how it itself has been wasted.” It’s a difference in task akin to that between “blowing smoke rings and struggling like a wainwright to fashion a wheel that will turn.” Content to blow smoke rings, Pollock’s drip paintings are politically incorrect because he fails to develop the significance of his subject. Berger never joined the Communist Party and he maintained a deep contempt for state bureaucracy. His PC model was not passed down from above. Rather it came from his rigorous application of the Marxist method to the interpretation of culture. It’s not quite as easy as it sounds.

In 1972, the 24 year old Chilean artist, poet, and activist Cecilia Vicuña began work on a series of four paintings called Héroes de la Revolución. The democratic socialist government of Salvador Allende was in power, and Vicuña, like our stereotype of a good PC painter, produced portraits of socialist icons: Marx, Lenin, Fidel Castro meeting Allende, and left-wing Chilean folklorist Violeta Parra. But these aren’t the kitschy realist works we’ve come to expect. Her Marx stands outsized on an aqua-green hill, the trees behind him purple. He is dignified, besuited with his hair in a white mane, a steady look toward the horizon. Above his head floats a banner with his name in cursive, flanked by seven colored roses: pink, yellow, and baby blue. Behind Marx to his left, in the background, two thick-thighed naked women make out. “In order to exalt Marx, I wanted to associate him with ideas that dogmaticians consider way removed from him, such as eroticism, poetics, blues, jazz and rock, female and homosexual liberation and that I consider intrinsic to the revolution,” Vicuña wrote at the time.

Even though she was an active member of the government’s party, Vicuña ran into some problems. She told the journal Manifesta that the painting of Castro and Allende was set to be shown at the National Fine Arts Museum but at the last minute they asked her to censor it. The painting shows the two leaders in profile, large heads tapering to small feet. Their right hands are clasped, with his left Fidel points to a butterfly balanced on Allende’s outstretched palm. Below them is a garland of flowers and in the same cursive, “Fidel” and “Allende,” like a journal doodling from a socialist historical slash fic. Their heads are leaned out and their hips tilt toward each other. Allende’s background arm is naked, and in the original (a black-and-white picture of which is memorialized in the artist’s book Sabor a Mi) so was Fidel’s foreground leg. The museum’s director told her that the right-wing attacked left-wing leaders as queers and the painting risked being misinterpreted as mocking its subjects. Vicuña covered Castro to the ankle.

Vicuña’s paintings wouldn’t hang long in the National Museum. On September 11, 1973 Augusto Pinochet seized power in a coup, beginning his brutal reign of terror in Chile. Vicuña and the museum director both went into exile, her staying London, him fleeing to Catalonia. Allende, after a live farewell address via radio and right before the presidential palace was taken, shot himself in the head. He’s said to have used an AK-47 he had received as a gift, bearing the engraving: “To my good friend Salvador from Fidel, who by different means tries to achieve the same goals.” Vicuña didn’t paint any more Heroes.Who’s the politically correct one in the story? Liberals would probably say the censorious museum director, but don’t forget the artist was doing a portrait series called Heroes of the Revolution honoring—and she was honoring—Marx, Lenin, and her socialist president. (It’s not an anomalous situation either, plenty of left-wing artists have clashed with left-wing authorities.) Almost 50 years later, I think Vicuña got the politics right the first time. My favorite of the series is Marx, in large part because of the color palette. With the brown sky and blue-green hill it has a frolicking almost psychedelic vibe, and lording over it like a calm tuxedoed godzilla is Karl. The world is transformed: down come the walls between seriousness and frivolity, between masculine and feminine, between thought and being. A socialism that’s afraid of a naked leg or lesbian sex is a brittle thing. And, as we learned from the 20th century, a moral disaster waiting to happen.

One of the more politically correct movies I’ve ever seen is John Singleton’s 2005 action drama Four Brothers. On its face it seems like a strange choice because much of the movie consists of racist dickhead Mark Wahlberg joyfully playing a racist dickhead. Along with his three brothers—all four of them adopted as children by the same do-gooder—Wahlberg’s character seeks vengeance when their mom is murdered. They trace the hit to local gangster Victor Sweet (Chiwetel Ejiofor).

The turning point isn’t when Wahlberg’s character beats up Sweet and throws him into an ice-fishing hole, it’s before, when his brother Jeremiah (André Benjamin) reveals that he’s made a deal with Sweet’s henchmen, offering them money that had been promised to Sweet to turn on their boss. Up until then the fact that Jeremiah had been “in the union” with Sweet’s guy Evan (Jernard Burks) was exposition, post-industrial Detroit worldbuilding. In his political correctness Singleton brings it to the fore at the crucial moment. And in a movie full to the brim with starpower, it’s Burks, a Black actor whose credits are listed mostly by occupation rather than character name, who delivers the killer line to his gangster boss: “The one thing you forgot about me is this: l was in the union for a long time. l ain’t never missed no meetings.”

There’s always some surprise twist in an action drama like Four Brothers; how else would the underdogs win in the end? But of all the double-crosses and shocking reveals Singleton and the writers David Elliot and Paul Lovett could have picked, they choose the one that extends our experience of significant, objective facts. It seems to come out of nowhere, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. The conflict that structures society is not about gangs of individuals haphazardly tossed into battle with each other, as we’re often led to believe by action flicks, it’s between classes of oppressors and oppressed. Victor Sweet forgets it as well, treating his employees with the vicious disrespect that’s characteristic of villains, and Jeremiah is able to save the day by maintaining his fidelity to the organized labor movement.

Was John Singleton a PC hack? Everyone likes Boyz n the Hood.

Nothing undermines the standard complaints about politically correct art more than the overrepresentation of committed Marxists in the various artistic canons.

    The only way that poets and painters can fight against the bourgeois economy is to give their works precisely that content which challenges the bourgeois ideological values propping up the bourgeois economy.—Rene Magritte

   My joining the Communist Party is a logical step in my life, my work and gives them their meaning. Through design and color, I have tried to penetrate deeper into a knowledge of the world and of men so that this knowledge might free us.—Pablo Picasso

   I feel uneasy about my painting. Above all I want to transform it into something useful for the Communist revolutionary movement…I have to fight with all my strength to contribute what my health allows to the revolution. The only true reason to live.—Frida Kahlo

There’s no shortage of quotes like these from names American schoolchildren would associate directly with quality and uncompromisingly original artistic vision, and I could do the same exercise with poets, playwrights, novelists, composers, musicians, dancers, actors, directors, etc. Often, as in Magritte’s case above, they used Marx to argue against a Party that was supposed to represent his thought. These artists—there are too many to list, including whole movements, such as the Harlem Renaissance, that American pedagogy has stripped of their communist politics—held themselves and each other to the standard of political correctness, applying it (as Kahlo does in the quote above) critically. To be politically correct is not to be self-satisfied or to rest on your laurels of compliance; it is to constantly hammer at your own work, your own self, and the world around you, so that it might become “something useful” politically. It means engagement and protest and weighing compromise and sometimes fleeing for your life. Far from staid or conservative, it’s a risky, experimental way to live.

Political correctness (as shorthand for “cultural Marxism”) is politically incorrect under liberalism because it asks that we think of ourselves as members of a class before we think of ourselves as individuals. Since classes are constituted by relations of exploitation, we think of ourselves first as workers or bosses in conflict, and women and men in conflict, and colonizers and colonized in conflict. (Looking at class relations beyond worker/boss is no violation of Marxist orthodoxy.) We shape our judgment and taste with our politics rather than the other way around. This is anathema to liberals, for whom individuals must think and act primarily as individuals, lest conformity overflow judgment, capsize meritocracy, and drown democracy.

Liberals find the idea that anything is more important than the individual, well, offensive. But does the world treat us as individuals? Is that what you tell a boss who has just laid you off? “I’m sorry the stockholders took a hit, but I need this job, and as you know nothing is more important than the individual.” Do we each wander a lonely path, advancing next to but separate from the people around us according to a mix of skill and luck, like a board game token? Does the world conform to our judgments, or is truer to say we mostly get what we get? Is it all-against-all or class-against-class? If the answer is the latter—and it is—then whose side you’re on precedes your individuality in importance. The individual only comes out when the authorities are looking for a distraction, a scapegoat, or an excuse.

The significant objective fact is that we live in a class society, and until we don’t anymore, that will continue to be the significant objective fact. To be PC is to acknowledge that truth as found, to recognize that we don’t each of us need to go rummaging through the bargain basement of ideas to understand society. The task for communists is to work with constancy and rigor in our thought and action toward a revolutionary break with class society. It’s only there, on an earth where people are not grouped for exploitation, where we can speak meaningfully about the individual. We’re looking forward to it.

Capitalism’s “particular hue” colors everything on the planet and even some stuff beyond; capitalists have wasted countless lives to make it so. If political correctness means Marxism which means the abolition of class society which means everything changes, then by the transitive property of equality, PC means the end of the world. When people object to political correctness that’s the real root of what they’re talking about: They think we want to destroy the whole world as their eyes have adjusted to it. And they’re right. But would that be so bad? To smash that ugly fluorescent overhead light would change everything, it’s true, but we needn’t fear being left in the dark. As the politically correct Langston Hughes wrote in his poem “Ballad of Lenin,” one of the ones we don’t learn in school:

The sun sets like a scar.

Between the darkness and the dawn

There rises a red star.

What’s So Bad About Politically Correct Art? Why PC is not PC under liberalism. By Malcolm Harris.  Mother Jones, February 28, 2020.

Malcolm Harris is the author of Kids These Days and Shit is Fucked Up and Bullshit​: History Since the End of History, from which this essay was excerpted.

Malcolm Harris | Shit is Fucked Up and Bullshit.

Our economic situation, political discourse, and future prospects have gotten much worse since a guy brought a sign that said "Shit is Fucked Up and Bullshit" to the Occupy Wall Street protests. We all knew what he meant then . . . but where are we now? And how has so much happened since the so-called end of history?

Malcolm Harris, one of our sharpest and most versatile critics, tackles these questions in over 30 new and selected pieces, examining everything from the lowering of wages to the rise of fascism--and the maddening cultural landscape in between. Along the way, he cops to being the guy who tricked protestors into thinking Radiohead was playing Occupy Wall Street; investigates why the robots that will replace us so often look like sex objects; and, most comfortingly, assures us that Marx saw the necessity of a crisis moment just like the one we're in.

Rarely does a writer come along who can turn our world so thoroughly upside-down that we can finally understand it for what it really is, but Harris's wry and biting essays do just that, and help us laugh at what we see. Join us in the Rare Book Room as he discusses his work with Yale University's Martin Hägglund!

Malcolm Harris is a freelance writer and an editor at The New Inquiry. His work has appeared in the New York Times, New Republic, Bookforum, the Village Voice, and n+1. His first book was Kids These Days: The Making of Millennials. He lives in Philadelphia.

Martin Hägglund is Professor of Comparative Literature and Humanities at Yale University. He is the author of four highly acclaimed books and his work has been translated into ten languages. He was elected to the Harvard Society of Fellows in 2009, awarded The Schück Prize by the Swedish Academy in 2014, and received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2018. His most recent book, This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom, was published last year by Pantheon.

Martin Hägglund talks with Malcolm Harris.  Strand Books, February 25, 2020.

More articles by Malcolm Harris. Muck Rack

Postmodernism and Donald Trump

I was watching CNN’s Reliable Sources a couple of weeks ago and was struck by an exchange between host Brian Stelter and Andrew Marantz, author of Antisocial, a new book about online extremism.

They were discussing the false narratives surrounding President Trump and why they’re so difficult to cut through. As long as Trump has a right-wing media ecosystem to spin and protect and lie for him, the argument went, it’s just not clear that the “facts” matter all that much.

“People focus on the underlying facts,” Marantz told Stelter, “but the underlying facts are not the things that matter in terms of narrative-shaping ... narrative-shaping happens on Fox News, in Congress, on the internet.”

That facts don’t seem to matter anymore is hardly a new observation. But it’s all the more urgent now, as we trudge into an impeachment process that will almost certainly lead to an unsatisfying conclusion in which no one version of the truth is likely to come out and be held by the public. In the 21st-century media ecosystem, “alternative facts” — as Kellyanne Conway’s famous formulation goes — can reign supreme, or at the very least blot out the truth.

But what really struck me about Stelter and Marantz’s conversation is how its insights about the death of facts and the profusion of narratives sprouted from a philosophical movement that began almost four decades ago but has since been blamed for the nihilism of the Trump era.

That movement is called “postmodernism,” and its legacy, while mixed, is very much worth revisiting. Postmodernism isn’t any one thing. It refers to a host of ideas and literary movements and even architectural styles. But what its critics fixate on is its purported attack on the idea of capital-T truth. Some key postmodern thinkers reveled in the idea’s destabilizing power and opened the door to questioning the very notion of objective knowledge. To hear critics tell it, the postmoderns created the post-truth future.

There is some truth to the critique. A version of postmodernism that questioned objective truth and promoted relativism was fashionable, even celebrated, in the academy in the 1980s and 1990s. But did the scribblings of obscure French philosophers really impel us into the age of Trump?

More likely, the changes that brought us that world were already underway when Jean Francois Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition — the book that coined the term — dropped in 1979. Forty years later, it’s more useful and accurate to view Lyotard and his fellow postmoderns’ work as a diagnosis of a world that was then already being fractured by mass media and technology.

Postmodernism didn’t set us on our path toward information dystopia. At its core, it identified a crisis that was brewing in its time — and that has reached a boil in our benighted present.

Postmodernism has been a favorite scapegoat for our ills for decades now. The conventional critique of postmodernism is that it’s nihilistic, a knock that you hear from critics on the left and the right.

In the Trump era, the critique has deepened — not just nihilistic, critics say, but the source of our era’s woes. Liberals like the former chief book critic for the New York Times, Michiko Kakutani, argue that postmodernism spilled out of the academy and seeped into the broader culture, devaluing the very concept of objectivity. She lays the fact-averse both-sideism of the Trump age at the feet of postmodernism, which she believes cemented the idea that no “perspective” can be privileged over another.

The psychologist and pop-philosopher Jordan Peterson believes postmodernism’s obsession with marginalization and cultural appropriation kicked off our current political correctness “crisis.” As he describes it in a blog post, postmodernism was the brainchild of a handful of leftist academics in the ’70s and ’80s who argued that “since there are an innumerable number of ways in which the world can be interpreted and perceived ... no canonical manner of interpretation can be reliably derived.”

For Peterson, postmodernism’s skepticism of capital-T truth unleashed the menace of identity politics and placed race and identity at the center of the struggle for power. There are a few problems with that logic, but if you buy Peterson’s premise, then his conclusion more or less follows.

Steven Pinker, the Harvard psychologist and author of Enlightenment Now, has expressed what is probably the most common complaint about postmodernism. He thinks of it as a progressive phantasm that has destroyed the liberal arts. “The humanities,” he says, “have yet to recover from the disaster of postmodernism, with its defiant obscurantism, self-refuting relativism, and suffocating political correctness.”

On Pinker’s view, postmodernism threatens the progress of science (by questioning the possibility of objective truth) and is also a poison pill for liberal democracies because it replaces the pursuit of shared truth with a leftist culture war over power and identity.

These sorts of takes — and there are enough to fill a library — are all united in their hostility to a school of philosophy they consider gleefully anti-truth.

Responding to critics of postmodernism can be exhausting because it’s never clear what they mean by the term — or, in many cases, because they’re attacking a cartoon version of it.

As Aaron Hanlon, an English professor at Colby College, explained last year in an excellent Washington Post column, postmodernism is “a contested series of assertions by many different people from several disciplines, hardly a monolithic philosophy.” And many philosophers widely considered “postmodern” rejected the label, preferring terms like “post-structuralist” instead.

But the postmodernism most people have in mind has its roots in a school of French philosophy that emerged in the 1970s.

The basic idea, popularized by Lyotard’s 1979 book The Postmodern Condition, was that we had reached the end of what he called “meta-narratives.” That meant there was no longer any single dominant account of the world, like historical Marxism or really any theory that attempted to explain human life in terms of absolute universal values.

It’s not so much that these accounts previously explained the world and then suddenly they didn’t; his point was that the world had become too fragmented and pluralistic to support anything like a moral or social consensus. None of our stories about history and justice — and for Lyotard, all ideologies were stories — could make any claim to superiority over the others.

Lyotard’s book is the first genuine work of postmodernism and probably still the clearest and most relevant. Lyotard — and I can’t stress this point enough — wasn’t saying that objective truth was impossible; instead, he argued that what passes for truth in postindustrial society is often a reflection of who holds power, and to forget that is to risk being manipulated.

He was making this claim against the backdrop of a society that lacked the basis for a common project. We were, instead, an atomized “consumer society” defined almost exclusively by commercial interests. At the same time, the institutions charged with discovering and disseminating truth — the government, media, the academy — were increasingly beholden to capital.

Lyotard believed that capitalism and technological changes resulted in the “mercantilization” of knowledge, which is a fancy way of saying that knowledge had become a commodity to be bought and sold like anything else. All of this, he insisted, would be intensified by the digital revolution (though he preferred the phrase “computerization”). He even suggested that in the future the great battle would be over who gets to control information.

Lyotard was too pessimistic about the reliability of science under capitalism, but his book isn’t — in any sense — a rejection of truth. His book was a warning, not a celebration. It wasn’t a call to nihilism or defense of relativism. He was identifying a crisis that was already underway. And his argument was less about the possibility of truth and more about how what we take to be true is often a reflection of unseen cultural and economic forces.

One of the reasons postmodernism has gotten such a bad rap is that other theorists — like Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Lacan, all French philosophers writing before and after Lyotard — took the movement in a different, more relativistic direction. And the writing itself became more dense and indecipherable.

Over time, as Hanlon told me, thinkers like Derrida, Foucault, and Judith Butler, the celebrated American philosopher, emerged as the faces of postmodernism and “stole the show from Lyotard’s diagnosis and distorted the legacy of that book.”

The postmodern writer who took Lyotard’s work seriously and pushed it into the digital age is Jean Baudrillard, another French academic. Baudrillard began his career studying the impact of consumerism on everyday life. Like Lyotard, he believed postmodernity was defined in large measure by “consumer society.” He also shared Lyotard’s view that new media technologies would become a massively disruptive force that would “scramble” our grand narratives.

But Baudrillard became singularly focused on media. He published arguably his most famous book, Simulacra and Simulation, in 1981, in which he explored the consequences of living in a heavily mediated world. The individual, he argued, had become submerged in content, symbols, and ads — and we can now add misinformation and clickbait to that list.

Baudrillard was one of the first postmodern philosophers to sound the alarm about the political implications of these transformations. Like a lot of postmoderns, he emerged out of the Marxist tradition. But he quickly realized that, in the late Cold War era, political resistance was getting harder and harder. Citizens were shape-shifting into consumers and actively participating in their own marginalization.

It’s crucial to remember that Baudrillard was thinking all of this through with Lyotard’s argument about the end of meta-narratives in the background. In Baudrillard’s mind, the triumph of liberal democracy, and the collapse of the Soviet model had paved the way for sterile consumerist politics. The future, he warned, would be shaped by markets and brands and an oversaturated media landscape.

For postmoderns like Baudrillard, television and now the internet immersed people in their own private realities. The constant battle for our attention means that we can experience whatever version of reality we prefer, whenever we prefer. Even worse, because media platforms are competing to win audiences, the incentives will always push them in the direction of catering to our worst impulses. After a while, we’re just awash in self-curated content.

Baudrillard popularized the world “simulacra” to describe the unreality this puts us in. Twitter, as Jonathan Chait recently suggested, is a kind of simulacrum. Spend enough time on it and your picture of reality becomes predictably warped. The content you consume is easily mistaken for the real world.

Baudrillard warned, almost three decades ago, that representations had become their own reality — far more real than actual reality. And that was before Twitter or Facebook were even conceivable.

The American postmodernist, Frederic Jameson, made very similar arguments in his 1991 book, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Contradictions of Late Capitalism. Jameson, like Baudrillard, thought we were witnessing the rise of a “mass culture” in which media and capitalism color our experience of reality. Jameson was thinking less about “narratives” and more about how market ideology flattened culture and obliterated distinctions between high and low art. But he echoed Baudrillard’s warnings about the loss of a shared reality.

Thinkers like Lyotard, Baudrillard, and Jameson hold up pretty well, but there’s no denying the relativistic outgrowths of postmodernism. Many postmoderns held that truth was socially constructed, though not all of them argued that all truth claims were valid. But some of them did go that far.

This is the part of the critique of postmodernism that can be hard to rebut. As Michael Lynch, a philosopher at the University of Connecticut told me, postmodernism had its strengths and weaknesses. “Its crucial insight is that power in all its dark forms is what often determines what passes for truth in our culture and ignoring that makes you vulnerable to manipulation,” Lynch says.

But the big error, Lynch added, “is to infer from this that truth itself was determined by those in power. That collapses what passes for truth with truth itself, which is just a mistake, both politically and logically.”

Lynch, of course, is right. Some of the postmoderns took this initial insight from Lyotard — that power often dictates what we take to be true — and extended it to mean that there is no truth as such.

In other words, postmodernism, like any body of thought, is shot through with bad ideas, absurd claims, and shoddy thinkers. But if we look past the excesses and focus on the things it got right, it actually explains quite a lot about what we’re living through.

Moreover, any argument that says postmodernism “killed truth” implies that a small cadre of (mostly French) theorists writing obscure books and journal articles somehow transformed the world. If the world has changed, it has more to do structural changes in the information space — namely the explosion of digital technology — than with the works of Derrida or Foucault or any other writer.

Postmodernism doesn’t explain everything about our current moment, but it absolutely explains some of it — like, for example, the “narratives” problem Stelter and Marantz lamented on CNN.

For the postmoderns, discrete facts weren’t all that valuable to most people. What really mattered were the narratives we relied on to make sense of all those facts. Think of narratives as a device for connecting the dots, a way of mapping our experience of the world. This process of connecting the dots has never been immune from bias or distortion.

The postmoderns made a simple point: Technology and globalization were making the world infinitely more complicated and that meant more information to process, more dots to connect. And one way to manage this chaos is to lean more and more on narratives that strip the world of its complexity — and often reinforce our biases at the same time.

In that sense, it’s not exactly new that people are constructing fact-free narratives about the world around them. What is new, and what the postmoderns were warning about decades ago, is the volume of narratives and the proliferation of media technologies designed to flood our consciousnesses with as much content as possible. This has changed the game and, to borrow Lyotard’s phrase, “scrambled” our perceptions of reality.

The best postmodern thinkers, in other words, anticipated where we were heading as a society. They could see how innovations in technology, capitalism, and media were distorting our shared sense of truth. And none of them — not even the most pessimistic — could’ve imagined the epistemic anarchy unleashed by Facebook or YouTube algorithms.

We’re now, as philosopher Thomas De Zengotita told me, “the authors of our own universes.” We’ve combined the puerility of televisual culture with the self-centeredness of digital culture. The result is the total triumph of the mediated self, where everyone can create, perform, and affirm their identity and their truth and the marketplace will oblige them at every step.

“And this whole technology thing,” De Zengotita wrote in 2005, “is only just getting started.” The media technologies that define our worlds are getting more sophisticated and more immersive every day. All of which is to say, the crisis signaled by postmodernity will only deepen.

But there is some value in at least understanding how we got here and why we can’t go back.

The post-truth prophets. By Sean Illing. Vox, November 11, 2019.

Ever since Donald Trump won, an odd idea has repeatedly bubbled to the surface of political media: that it takes volumes of dense and complicated philosophy to explain one of the stupidest people to ever live. A whole genre of thinkpiece implies that Trump and his rise to power are either the result of, or explicable by, “postmodernism.” For those whose faith in the institutions of the American republic has been challenged by the boorishness of its current president, it may be comforting to search for a deeper meaning. It is tempting to imagine that contemporary turns of phrase like “alternative facts” and “truth isn’t truth” are expressions of a widespread shift in the human relationship to reality, rather than the gibberish of idiots who are telling lies.

It has been three years, and we are still stuck in this endless struggle with the definition of postmodernism and What It Means. Yesterday, a Vox piece by Sean Illing attempted, in the Vox style, to explain the whole thing once and for all. The article does correct some of the prevailing errors that often accompany media treatments of the subject. There is no strange assertion that postmodernism is a Marxist conspiracy, for example, and a distinction is recognized between a school of thought and the study of it. But the fundamental problem remains: this has nothing to do with anything.

The article, titled “The Post-Truth Prophets,” properly pushes back against claims that “postmodernism spilled out of the academy and seeped into the broader culture.” In the process, however, it makes some assumptions: that there is or was a movement or idea of postmodernism, that there are “postmodernists” or “postmoderns,” and that there is something postmodern about the Trump administration. “Some key postmodern thinkers reveled in the idea’s destabilizing power and opened the door to questioning the very notion of objective knowledge,” Illing writes.

The article is accompanied by a collage displaying Trump standing in front of a microphone, accompanied by two French philosophers: Jacques Derrida, leering over a chair, and Michel Foucault, shouting into a bullhorn. Derrida and Foucault are the two primary villains for many opponents of so-called postmodernism — Jordan Peterson, the Canadian psychology professor adored by the right, has called them “the two architects of the postmodernist movement.”

But even the very idea that there was or is a “postmodernist movement” is questionable. In 1983, Foucault was asked in an interview with the scholarly journal Telos to elaborate on the postmodern aspects of his work. “What are we calling postmodernity?” he replied. “I’m not up to date.”

To its credit, the Vox piece avoids this conflation, instead looking for a documented point of origin. That origin is properly located in Jean-François Lyotard, author of the 1979 book The Postmodern Condition, based on a study commissioned by the Council of Universities of the Government of Quebec originally titled “The Problems of Knowledge in the Most Developed Industrial Societies.” It dealt with the way we interpret reality in the context of mass media, the reproduction of cultural commodities that starts with the printing press. But it may be overstating the case to say, as Illing does, that “Lyotard’s book is the first genuine work of postmodernism.” The term had already been used in cultural criticism, as in literary critic Ihab Hassan’s 1971 study The Dismemberment of Orpheus: Toward a Postmodern Literature, and architectural historian Charles Jencks’s 1977 book The Language of Post-Modern Architecture. It necessarily denotes quite different things when pertaining to science, literature, and architecture — their unification requires an interpretive leap.

For Lyotard, it described an “incredulity towards metanarratives” — the latter word naming the story underlying every other story, like a religious doctrine or a philosophy of history. Illing is cautious about this, attributing Lyotard’s assessment not to an endorsement, but “a diagnosis of a world that was then already being fractured by mass media and technology.” But one of the problems with the claim that a “postmodern movement” exists is the question of what was there before the fracture.

There is not a great deal of agreement on the definition of modernity itself, either the time in which it occurred, or the forms of thought, culture, and political organization aligned with it. Again, these answers vary depending on whether we’re talking about literature, architecture, science, or whatever else. There is not even consensus over whether modernity is over yet. Another French philosopher, Bruno Latour, went as far as to write a book claiming We Have Never Been Modern.

The urge to group these thinkers together is not unreasonable, but it doesn’t hold up — and it leads to some unenlightening errors. It is in the attempt to chart a coherent arc that the cracks in the foundation start to show, as when Illing tries to account for the subsequent reputation of Lyotard’s ideas:

“One of the reasons postmodernism has gotten such a bad rap is that other theorists — like Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Lacan, all French philosophers writing before and after Lyotard — took the movement in a different, more relativistic direction. And the writing itself became more dense and indecipherable.”

It is hard to argue that Derrida, Foucault, and Lacan took a “movement” initiated by Lyotard in a different direction (the above quoted text corrects an earlier published version, which claimed the other authors “followed” Lyotard). All three wrote their best-known work before The Postmodern Condition was published in 1979 — Lacan, in fact, died shortly after, in 1981. Besides, none of these thinkers dealt primarily with technology or contemporary media; Derrida concerned himself with the interpretation of the canon of Western philosophy, Foucault with historical research, and Lacan with various and sundry topics like sex and knots.

The thinker who dealt most closely with the subjects Illing cites as endemic to postmodernism was Jean Baudrillard, whose major role in the popular consciousness is as an inspiration for The Matrix. Illing sees Baudrillard’s contribution as a kind of media criticism, an exploration of “the consequences of living in a heavily mediated world” — a fair description of much of his work. This, Illing says, has consequences for public opinion.

“Baudrillard popularized the world “simulacra” to describe the unreality this puts us in. Twitter, as Jonathan Chait recently suggested, is a kind of simulacrum. Spend enough time on it and your picture of reality becomes predictably warped. The content you consume is easily mistaken for the real world.”

This is the very state of affairs that has led to Explainers. “We live in a world of too much information and too little context,” says Vox’s website. “Too much noise and too little insight. That's where Vox's explainers come in.” But Baudrillard’s critique ran deeper than that. The problem was not merely that representations of reality might be inaccurate — it was that a corresponding reality was not accessible. A simulacrum is not a distorted representation, but a representation for which no original exists. Simulacra and Simulation invokes Disneyland, with its reproduction of the archetypal American town. “Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, when in fact all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer real, but of the order of the hyperreal and of simulation,” Baudrillard wrote. The “real” town is also pretending to be a town.

Illing doesn’t quite deal with these more complex questions, concluding that postmodernism is a decent idea taken too far. “Some of the postmoderns took this initial insight from Lyotard — that power often dictates what we take to be true — and extended it to mean that there is no truth as such,” he argues. But philosophy consists of literally millennia of debate on the nature of truth. As for the question of how to understand Donald Trump, we may well be aided by a study of how information is distributed and exchanged in contemporary society. But the phenomenon he represents is fairly simple, one that has existed for as long as philosophy has: a very stupid man has more power than he deserves, and he is going to abuse it until someone stops him.

Postmodernism, explained and explained and explained again. By Shuja Haider.  The Outline, November 12, 2019. 

Three years into Donald Trump’s presidency, the moral panic over “fake news” and “post-truth” has not abated. If anything, it has now blossomed into a full-blown culture war. Conservatives insist that their views are suppressed by Facebook and Twitter; progressives accuse the same platforms of not doing enough to crack down on hate speech and foreign manipulation of elections.

Mark Zuckerberg’s recent testimony in US Congress – where politicians competed to deal him the lethal rhetorical blow – doesn’t bode well for Silicon Valley. The Valley’s only savior, at this point, is the Communist Party of China. Only indefinite trade war with China will prevent US lawmakers from regulating the “strategic” tech sector; to break up the industry would weaken Washington’s global standing. The Trump administration is not blind to these risks.

Invoking the Chinese threat has bought the tech companies some time but it won’t work forever. The impending tech bubble is only going to increase everyone’s hatred of Silicon Valley; the calls for action will grow louder. The public humiliations of WeWork and Uber, the former darlings of tech investors, are signs that public tolerance of highfalutin technology platforms (and their leaders) is already running short. More government regulation is, indeed, likely to follow – and stemming the tide of “fake news” would be one of the highest priorities.

But just how strong is that tide? What remains unexamined – in the public debate but also in many academic discussions of “post-truth” – is the background assumption that ours is the time of postmodernism on steroids: a time where no firm truths hold and no single narrative can survive the assault of radically different worldviews grounded in diverse material, cultural, and racial experiences.

To deny that something like this is happening – facilitated by the business models of digital platforms, their algorithmic nudges, and the filter bubbles that result thereof – would be disingenuous. But the fragmentation of truth is only one – and perhaps not the most important part – of the story.

One unappreciated paradox of today’s “digital condition” is that it celebrates post-truth and hyper-truth simultaneously. As narratives get fragmented, allowing competing truths to proliferate, there’s also a concurrent effort to deploy bots, ledgers, and algorithms to produce a singular, objective, and eternal truth.

The first stage of this “objectification” began with Wikipedia. Although the platform could be used to provide multiple readings and interpretations of any subject or phenomenon, a decision was taken that a “community” of editors and writers, armed with trustworthy and reliable sources, would converge upon a single interpretation of history.

While the critics of Wikipedia zeroed in on the fact that it was, in a truly radical manner, democratizing the production of knowledge – everyone could contribute! – they missed a more fundamental, conservative side of the project: while many controversial topics featured lengthy and often bitter discussions among the editors, the front-end presentation often gave no explicit sign of internal disagreement. The controversy and disagreement were, thus, hidden from the average viewer.

Instead, the proliferation of editorial and citational guidelines and regulations on Wikipedia ensured that those rules were presumed to have more say in determining the content of a page than the information supplied by the very subject of the entry. Hence the many curious cases of people complaining that Wikipedia has wrong information about them but they cannot change it as they are not presumed to be “authoritative” sources about themselves. This adherence to rationality and rules is the true modernist part of Wikipedia that has, so far, befuddled many of its observers.

The second stage of the “objectification” of narrative began with the rapid explosion of the blockchain technology. It created the illusion that everything can be embedded in digits and eventually presented, in an unalterable manner, on the “ledger”: the final truth, set in stone, not to be altered by anyone.

Applied to the narrow world of commercial transactions or computer events, this assumption appears harmless. Applied, however, to the more substantial issues – politics, arts, journalism – this “epistemology of the blockchain” creates the rather perverse expectation that, unless and until something has been packaged in a blockchain-friendly way, it must be corrupted by subjectivity, venality, or bias. Subjectivity is the enemy; opacity is sinful.

In other words, we’re starting to see an irony of the “post-truth” world: the democratization of knowledge has been matched by the intensification of the bureaucratic model. This time, however, the human side of bureaucracy is presented as archaic and uncool, to be replaced by “objective” algorithms and ledgers. The one true utopia of this mode of thinking – already glimpsed in places like Singapore or Estonia – is a fully-automated bureaucratic system enforcing the rules with Prussian efficiency.

The digital culture that ensues makes for a very odd beast. Not surprisingly, it’s conducive to the kind of cognitive dissonance feeding the alt-right. On the one hand, in a populist manner reminiscent of Wikipedia, it dispenses with expertise, as everyone is assumed to be equal to everyone else, much like the nodes on the blockchain network (another myth). On the other hand, it intensifies the modernist faith in rules and regulations – and the possibility of finding, by some quantitative means, the single truth, which can then be made available to all, without any intermediation by forces other than technology. If one had to come up with a label for this ideology, “populist modernism” would be quite appropriate.

The contradictions of such a bizarre ideological mix are quite apparent: in dispensing with the experts, it replaces them with faith in “technology” and “progress”. But since such accounts usually lack any meaningful discussion of the political economy of technology (let alone that of progress), they have nowhere to fall back upon to explain historical change. What, after all, drives and shapes all that technology around us?

In such accounts, “technology” is usually just a euphemism for a class of uber-human technologists and scientists, who, in their spare time, are ostensibly saving the world, mostly by inventing new apps and products. The experts, thus, are brought in through the back door, but without any formal acknowledgement (or possibility of democratic contestation). These experts – whether Wikipedia editors or blockchain engineers - are presented as mere appendages to the sheer force of technology and progress, when in reality they’re often its drivers.

This is hardly the sort of secure, reliable foundation on which democratic culture can flourish. It’s one thing, in a typical postmodernist move, to celebrate “situated knowledges” and “multiple epistemes”, refuting any appeals to the one and only truth; a visit to a grad school seminar in humanities will confirm that this kind of language is still very much alive in academia. It’s quite another to do it while also building a system to algorithmically enforce the truth through the zealous application of bureaucratic rules and regulations that would make Otto von Bismarck look like a carefree bricoleur.

Facebook, which is built on the populist assumption that horizontal communication among users trumps vertical preaching by experts, exemplifies this dilemma: for all its populism, it now faces the enviable task of using its algorithms to fight “fake news.” This, however, cannot be done without accepting the virtues of expertise and grounding one’s approach in a singular, coherent worldview.

The problem with Facebook is that it doesn’t even know that it has this problem: it will, thus, most likely continue its schizophrenic efforts of groping in the dark, erecting the sort of expert-led bureaucracy that it was supposed to demolish.

Nothing good will come out of such efforts, but they do highlight a fundamental truth that we seem to have forgotten: both fake news and its opposite, the excessive quest for hyper-rationalization, are the consequences – not causes! – of our problems. Postmodernism did not begin in Mark Zuckerberg’s dorm room.

Can the US government stem the tide of ‘fake news’ in a postmodern world? By Evgeny Morozov. The Guardian, October 31, 2019.

‘Subtext we know. But what do you call the message or meaning that’s right there on the surface, completely open and obvious? They never talk about that.’ Fred, the expat PR in Whit Stillman’s comedy Barcelona (1994), living in the early years of post-Franco Spain, can clock hidden meanings but not surface truths. His friend enlightens him. What’s above the subtext? ‘It’s the text, Fred.’

It’s largely an inheritance of literary theory from the 1980s and ’90s that we speak of ‘subtexts’ at all. Poststructuralism, which flowered on US campuses during this era, did to ‘grand narratives’ (truth, justice, freedom, the Enlightenment) what US President William Howard Taft did to unions: busted them. In a nutshell, deconstructionists liked to examine works of art rhetorically, showing how hidden meanings and surface truths exist in tension with one another. What I say, in other words, is not always what I am saying.

Semiology, the study of signs, was a topic du jour in the late 1980s, when Peter Thiel, then a philosophy student at Stanford University, walked into a literature seminar. The professor, a maddeningly contrarian émigré named René Girard, was an autodidact and lifelong Catholic apologist who had, in his youth, visited Pablo Picasso in his studio and once reportedly punctured a hole in a Henri Matisse painting during a botched curatorial gig. In 1966, at the start of his long academic career, Girard invited Jacques Derrida to speak at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore – a talk widely seen as the birth of deconstruction in the US.

Girard’s own writing linked the human impulses to desire and to imitate. Why do we like the things we do? Our responses are not only intrinsic: we click ‘like’ on our social-media feeds because other people have also done so. Desire is fundamentally imitative. As Hermia says in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1595–96), we ‘choose love by another’s eyes’. When two people desire the same thing, they engage in ‘mimetic rivalry’ and they fight. Girard’s account of society is one of individuals warring with one another for resources they desire, imitatively, but cannot share. Peace is reached only after a mob declares a loser, who is scapegoated (in Girardian terms, ‘lynched’). Communities are inherently conflictual.

‘I suspect that when the history of the 20th century is written, in 2100, Girard will be seen as one of the great intellectuals,’ said Thiel in an interview he gave in September with the Hoover Institution, a public policy think-tank based at Stanford. A few years after graduating from university, Thiel co-authored a screed against diversity and multi-culturalism on campus, titled The Diversity Myth (1995). Today, some 25 years later and two billion dollars richer, he is better-known as the co-founder of PayPal, the backer of Facebook and founder of, among others, Palantir, which provides surveillance software to the US government. He consistently cites Girard in lectures, presentations and his own writings.

The Thiel-Girard brotherhood emblematizes the ways in which postmodern theories became ossified, as infrastructures of knowledge, and the way in which many were usurped by the political right. Thiel today is the brains behind another organization – with a name straight from a Philip K. Dick sci-fi novel – Imitatio. The sole aim of Imitatio is to support research and publishing about mimetic theory and Girard. It’s chilling to think that Girard’s most famous disciple – and, arguably, one of the most powerful people in the world – is shaping our reality guided by theories of radical division, scapegoating and violence. Connect the dots.

  

This autumn, Thiel is back at Stanford, co-teaching a course in the university’s German department. Students in ‘Sovereignty and the Limits of Globalization and Technology’ are reading Girard alongside the influential Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt, the 2006 Regensburg lecture by Pope Benedict XVI and a book by William Rees-Mogg. Father of Jacob (current UK Leader of the House of Commons), former editor of The Times newspaper and a lifelong Eurosceptic, Rees-Mogg is known for the bestselling The Sovereign Individual (with James Dale Davidson, 1997) – a book whose original, opportunistic, subtitle is: ‘How to Survive and Thrive During the Collapse of the Welfare State.’

An investment guide for the end-times, the purpose of this book is to teach readers how to make money from the collapse of the world as we know it. This collapse, for Rees-Mogg, is imminent when we transition from an industrial to an information society. ‘Violence will become more random and localized,’ Rees-Mogg argues. ‘Incomes will become more unequal within jurisdictions and more equal between them.’ Smells like opportunity, to some.

Like the climate, many of our institutions – cultural, political, commercial – are quaking under various pressures. Looking to infrastructure, the focus of this issue of frieze, means addressing the changes affecting the deepest reaches of what we take for granted: environment, society, cultural establishments, communication networks, the media. To comprehend what the ramifications will be for the arts, we need to look beyond the usual places: to artists working on the Mexico-US border, to those mapping our changing landscape, or to the emergence of a ‘new sublime’, which architect Rem Koolhaas identifies in the world’s rural areas. We must also recognize that Thiel, Girard and Rees-Mogg are instances of what the urbanist Keller Easterling, writing in these pages, terms a ‘superbug’: a structure that seeds misinformation and plays on ambiguity and conflict, rousing division and inciting forms of resistance that too often come up short. The writing’s on the wall: we need a new activism. For that, though, we must look well beyond the subtext.

Has Silicon Valley Hijacked Postmodernism?  By  Pablo Larios.   Frieze, October 31,  2019 

There still remains much confusion over what postmodernity actually means, so take this sentence as only one attempt, courtesy of Urban Dictionary: “A term that you keep on hearing about in college and have to look up on Wikipedia. Basically says “fuck it” to the search for any intellectual conclusions.” Or, with less hostility from the same website: “The idea that there is no objective meaning, only subjective meaning, the meaning one brings to a thing, irrespective of the intent of the author, or of the Author, or of reality.”

Intellectuals who have fundamentally misunderstood postmodernism have claimed that it represents nothing—that the only purpose of said philosophy is to evade conclusion and remain aloof from the material condition of the common man. Criticisms of postmodernism intrude from both the left and right. From the right-wing, postmodernity may be associated with cultural Marxism—which is a way of both dismissing Marx and liberalism at once, and perhaps more importantly to link them in their same shared safe space of victimhood that will never be taken seriously by the right precisely because if the right were to see hierarchy, power, oppression, or privilege, it would no longer be able to look in the mirror.

More troubling is the critique of postmodernism from the left, where leftists may associate this grand theory with neoliberalism’s ethos of immorality and individualism. In short, the left is getting postmodernism completely backward when one thinks of it this way. Postmodernism is actually a way to build on Marxism, rather than replace it or distract from it. Any other conclusion would be buying the false divide between intersectional forms of liberation.

What postmodernity claims is that there is no truth precisely because the individual subject has a cultural/historical context—which seems directly in line with Marx’s radical humanism that treated human beings as actors and victims of a system, rather than competitive and unworthy figures.

To claim that subjectivity is nothing would be not dissimilar to Mr. Trump’s claim that all news is fake. Critics of postmodernity see it as the other way around. They assume that denying the existence of objective truth is denying truth altogether. Even Michel Foucalt, perhaps the most famous quote on quote postmodernist rejected the label because he wanted to be seen as someone who questioned the system. Mr. Foucalt should have embraced the label because the claim that there is no objectivity not only naturally favors the unheard (class and otherwise), we see that it fundamentally rejects the authoritarianism of even its own voice.

Even the best of critics of the corporate distribution of information and art in today’s neoliberal global economy find themselves in a position of totalitarianism. This is because they undergo the following process, which is the same as Mr. Trump’s analysis, even if far more accurate in its attempt at objectivity. Step 1 is to take what is accepted as the objective truth (accepted mainstream history, news, art, etc.) and point to its corruption (primarily financial but also could be ethnic or any other type of supposed imperfection, or a linkage, such as Jewish owned media smears). Once the objective truth of the “ruling class” is accepted by the consumer as merely subjective propaganda, we find the next step is to insert one’s own subjective interpretation of reality as objective truth, rather than, as a normal person might do, offering up your ideas as subjective alternatives. Now we find that there is new authority in the rogue subject and truth comes to gain meaning not through proof, but through the authority of the actor involved.

So, when postmodern folks claim subjectivity it is not that they are saying nothing, it is that they are acknowledging both their own flaws and the need for constant interrogation of the facts laid out before us. The idea that one must come to a conclusion in order to find truth is actually the definition of fascism. If a dictionary must appear in its final form, who says the human race must not also? And how would such a society deal with change—specifically that of cultural migration and economic unease.

So, hopefully, this at least establishes the urgent need to abandon the very concept of objective truth. Objective truth is anti-democratic. There is no such thing as an unbiased statement that has not been shaped by elements of power or hierarchy. There is no such thing as a random statement, and there is no such thing as a true statement. In fact, a random statement and a true statement amount to the same thing, and it is only by connecting them that we can give meaning to either.

I can hear the grumbles now. Saying truth is the same as randomness is actually saying nothing! Really? Then why on earth react to it at all? If this statement really said nothing, wouldn’t a more adequate response be: ‘what do you think?’ or even, just in case ‘can you speak up?’ No, but truth, in how we arrive at its exact conclusions, can only retain any meaning if we acknowledge how arbitrary it is to get to that exact spot of perfection. It is only then that we can begin to unpack the biases that got us to that spot, which of course aren’t random at all, and link throughout history, sociology, geography, physics and biology. It is only after we unmask the assumption that is in authority that we can dethrone it and restore democracy.

Now, there is nothing true about democracy either. Each person operates within their own distance from the truth but at least, to borrow Marx, implies ownership of the production of truth, rather than the blind following of it. Does such a philosophy naturally imply the free market, rather than Marxism? Not necessarily. The distribution of goods, the control over the means of production, those sorts of things are not the same as ideas, let alone people. It could be very possible to have a centralized form of economics that thrived for diverse ideas and people. In fact, such a neutral form of economics—pure in its democracy and lack of discrimination—would imply absolute blindness to differences and a replacement of this hierarchy of difference with universal human rights. That doesn’t mean that each difference wouldn’t get a say, it is to say that each would have a right, no matter their say.

It is fairly obvious that an economy that has no such tools to guarantee human rights would naturally create hierarchies to (re) order distribution and create profits. The idea that one must have an objective idea of truth to reject neoliberalism implies that the neoliberalism was a cultural, not an economic counter-revolution. This seems to apply a backward order of operations. Even though the neoliberal has assaulted the cultural and the personal, it a truly perplexing leap for Marxists to make the claim that as soon as the economic theory of their “objective” choice falls out of favor, we suddenly are not talking about economics anymore, but culture that drives the economy. Just dead wrong.

The goal of the lie of objective truth is to establish power for a certain group of people, so that they can therefore profit from and exploit the people whose truth does not fit the proper definition of normality. That’s why Foucalt saw prisons so clearly. What is a prison? And who decides it?

The corporate class accomplishes their goal by constructing the terms “left-wing” and “right-wing” and then implying that the world runs on a war of ideas (culture) rather than a war of resources (economics). Let’s look at the origin of the terms left and right, which like Mr. Foucalt, must be excused (more like celebrated) as French!

During the French Revolution, the terms left and right merely referred to which side along a row one sat. The rich noble folk were on the right, the working class challengers on the left. It was simply a geographical distinction of interests (I was going to say class but that is not even exact, as we’ll discuss in a moment). The key point here is that people didn’t have different ideas about what was most “effective” in politics, the sides simply had different goals.

In fact, one doesn’t ever have an idea if it does not fit the goal they have in mind. It is said that the only people who believe in love are rich men and pretty women because why else would they get married? Now, if one gets the joke there it is simply that one can come to believe an ideology because it is convenient for them to do so. If one runs an oil company, it is convenient to believe climate change is not real. If this oil executive has an ocean front property, perhaps the more convenient idea becomes that poor people are lazy and deserve to die, seeing that denying climate change would lose them their home. Now, not everything is self-interested as I describe above, I would like to think most things aren’t, but it is all goal-oriented, many times altruistic.

But a pure all-knowing form of truth? Impossible! Fascist! And above all arrogant and blasphemous.

So when one sees a framing such a debate between left and right we must expose it. Firstly, such framing trivializes matter to personal preference, rather than material existence. The truth is that politics decides who lives, who dies, who cries, and who laughs. It is not enough to say people have an ideological disagreement. Do some people really favor death? And some sadness? While the other half of people favor life and happiness? Seems unlikely.

An idea is only seen as “working” by the corporate-controlled media if it gains profit. The truth is that the more a company neglects their consumers and workers, the more profit they will gain, and the more this company will grow. So a company that loses money is most likely “good” for most people, just not for their CEO. This is why there should be no private companies, only government ones that lose boatloads of money and provide for consumers and workers alike.

In a previous article, I argued that we should replace ideology with class but I have since come to recognize that class itself is just one of many material conditions (even if it is, as Marxists say, the defining one). Ultimately the role that class plays in the argument we have outlined is no different a role than any other group and therefore in political terms should exist not as a passive condition but an active group in which to organize common interests.

This is why it is astounding that many on the left and right agree that identity politics is bad or “gone too far” or something. Class, as the lettered John Helmeke points out, is an identity. This is not just superficially, obviously, but materially. Which is true for all identity politics, and this is why the materialist left should be pro-identity politics.

The argument against postmodernism is that it takes what was once concrete class and labor-based criticism and obscures it into liberal cultural nonsense. Wouldn’t it be more accurate to say that culture has multiplied and thus so should criticism? It surely is true that labor and class in the corporate media is the last thing to get talked about, and in that sense cultural radicalism will always be taken more seriously than economic radicalism in these spaces.

Still, should resentment of this fact really drive any discussion? Should we really be so keen on the objective, measurable role of wealth inequality that we reject all nuance and democratic possibility in our discourse?

This is not to say that the postmodern tilt to inaction and uncertainty is not in many ways perfect for the corporate bottom line. However, what we must begin to understand is that the tyranny of intolerance comes from the consolidation of ideas and diversification of economics. What the anti-modern subject of today argues is that the ideas have become too astray from their everyday lives while economics have become too centralized in a few hands.

This seems to be a backwards critique. Competition of economics is naturally bad for it allows companies to compete for the lowest price, thus the worst working conditions or the most environmental exploitation. If there was a government monopoly with no interest in price, this would never happen, barring corruption, which is cited as an inevitable form of communism. Surely that is true, but corruption is exactly where capitalism starts, so if communism was to end there, we’d find ourselves no worse in trying. On the other hand, anti-modern folks find that the diversity of ideas, the decentralizing of traditional social structures and the increasing intelligence of the average person must be alienating from the natural human way.

Here we find the great blind spot in an objective reality that is so resistant to change, or ironically, to truth. Postmodernity may be ahead spin but isn’t that the point of any worthy idea? To improve, rather than dull the masses? Would babying people under the guise of anti-intellectualism be anything more than privileged and condescending reductive assumptions about the so-called common man?

The greatest artists leave the viewer with a question, with a hunger to learn more, with possibility, with uncertainty, and with joy in the process. It is past time to reclaim postmodernism as the future of humanity. We have come too far to limit ourselves to concrete truths when the everyday concrete struggle for water, food, shelter, health care and peace remain so allusive. Why limit our thoughts in the same way we limit resources? Why can’t our ideas be bold enough to expand, to multiply, to breathe?

If the postmodern critics throw stones out of insecurity and shame for their lack of understanding, let me assure them that there is no need. No one understands it, and that is the beauty of every important idea, and the beauty of every stranger. To react with so much intolerance to ideas that challenge makes one wonder about the durability of tolerance for the Other, which will be the central question of our times as the old becomes uprooted and often dropped at our doorsteps, challenging the welcome mat, or even the 2nd amendment warning on the door.

It is true that every objective truth, ever marker of grand civilization, has been built on the back of the common man (especially common woman) and common beast. To ask the subjective truth its thoughts on such a matter naturally invites the Other in, and reminds us not that there is no objective truth, but there are always many sides unheard in its effects. Until every side, at every time is heard, by everyone, can the truth ever be known, or can it only be thrived for? The only lie is to say that truth has already been found. Such is the tyranny of Mr. Trump has he attempts to replace democratic education with the adoration of authority.

Killing Ideology: A Defense of Postmodernism. By Nick Pemberton . CounterPunch, September  6, 2019.