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.
