Category Archives: Remembering Postmodernism

HOUSEKEEPING NOTE: There has been an unwanted lag in this series of posts, mainly because I’ve been struggling with what was supposed to be part three. Struggling in a good way! The TL;DR on it is that it occurred to me that a consideration of the artistic and literary responses to the two world wars respectively offers a useful insight into key elements of modernism and postmodernism. What initially seemed a straightforward, even simple breakdown has proved (not unpredictably, I now see) a lot more complex but also a lot more interesting. What I ultimately post may end up being the more straightforward version or possibly a two-part, lengthier consideration. One way or another, I’m quite enjoying going down this particular rabbit hole.

So in the meantime, in the interests of not letting this series lag too much, I’m leapfrogging to what was to have been part four.

My doctoral dissertation was on conspiracy theory and paranoia in postmodern American literature and culture. Towards the end of my defense, one of my examiners—a modernism scholar with a Wildean talent for aphoristic wit—asked “Is modernism postmodernism’s conspiracy theory?”

I should pause to note that I thoroughly enjoyed my thesis defense. This was largely because my examiners really liked my thesis, and so instead of being the pressure cooker these academic rites of passage can sometimes be, it was three hours of animated and lively discussion that the defense chair had to bring to a halt with some exasperation when we ran long. For all that, however, it was still three hours of intense scholarly back-and-forth, and so when my examiner asked about modernism as postmodernism’s conspiracy theory, my tank was nearly empty. I found myself wishing—and indeed gave voice to the thought—that the question had been asked in the first hour rather than the third, when I could have done it justice. I still kick myself to this day for not prefacing my response with a Simpsons reference (something the questioner would have appreciated), Reverend Lovejoy’s line “Short answer, yes with an if, long answer, no with a but,” and then getting into the intricacies and implications of the question. As it was, I seem to remember saying something insightful like “Um … sure?”

I’ve thought about that moment many times in the seventeen years (yikes) since I defended, mostly out of fondness for the questioner, who was and remains a friend, as well as annoyance with myself for not giving the question an answer it deserves (now that I think of it, perhaps I should include that in this series). But over the past few years, I’ve thought of it more in the context of how postmodernism itself—and its related but widely misunderstood concept “cultural Marxism”—have come to be treated as essentially conspiratorial in nature.

As I’ve alluded to in previous posts, there is a (mis)understanding of postmodernism among anti-woke culture warriors as something specifically created by Leftists for the purpose of attacking, undermining, and destroying the edifices of Western civilization, as variously manifested in Enlightenment thought, the U.S. constitution, the traditional Western literary canon, manly men, the virtues of European imperialism, and so on. Postmodernity, rather than being the upshot of unchecked corporate capitalism and consumer culture, is seen instead as being the specific invention of resentful and closeted Marxist academics.

Of late, which is to say over the past five years, the most vocal purveyor of this conspiracy theory has been Jordan B. Peterson and his figuration of “postmodern neo-Marxism.” Anyone who knows even the slightest thing about either postmodernism or Marxism understands that, in this formulation, it is the word “neo” doing the heavy lifting—which perhaps betrays at least a slight understanding on Peterson’s part that there can be no such thing as “postmodern Marxism,” as the two terms are very nearly antithetical. Marxism is a modernist philosophy rooted in Enlightenment thought; what I’ve been loosely calling “postmodern thought,” which is to say the loose categorization of theories and philosophy arising largely out of the need to make sense of the postmodern condition, is generally antagonistic to the instrumental reason of the Enlightenment and such totalizing ideologies as Marxism, taking its philosophical leads instead from Friederichs Nietzsche, Edmund Husserl, and Martin Heidegger. So if you’re going to attempt to conflate Marxism with postmodernism, it’s going to have to be very neo- indeed.

Peterson’s basic premise is that the “two architects of the postmodernist movement”[1]—specifically, the French theorists Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida[2]—were themselves dyed-in-the-wool Marxists; but that when they were making their academic bones in the 1960s, they were faced with the unavoidable failure of Communism as a political force.  In one of his ubiquitous YouTube lectures, he declares that “in the late 60s and early 70s, they were avowed Marxists, way, way after anyone with any shred of ethical decency had stopped being Marxist.”

The “postmodernists,” Peterson continues, “knew they were pretty much done with pushing their classic Marxism by the late 60s and the early 70s,” because the evidence of Stalin’s atrocities were by then so unavoidable that carrying on under the Marxist banner was untenable.

This assertion, as it happens, is laughably untrue: the Communist Party of France reliably garnered twenty percent of the legislative vote through the 1960s and 70s. There was no shortage of people, inside the university and out, who were “avowed” Marxists. There was really no reason Derrida and Foucault—who incidentally hated each other, so were hardly co-conspirators—would have been compelled to disguise their Marxist convictions. If indeed they had any: it is an irony that Peterson can make this argument in part because neither Derrida nor Foucault were avowed Marxists. They have, indeed, often been looked upon with suspicion by Marxist scholars, and frequently castigated (Derrida especially[3]) for precisely the reasons I cited above: namely, that they eschewed the principles of Marx’s teleological philosophy and an extrinsic historical order. They were, to coin an expression, a little too “postmodern” for Marxists’ tastes.

Though Peterson is by no means voicing an original idea—the charge that “cultural Marxists” comprise a shadowy cabal of professors seeking to destroy Western civilization was first articulated in the early 1990s—he does imbue his attack with his own uniquely greasy brand of ad hominem logic familiar to anyone who has taken issue with his many transphobic screeds. See if you can spot the code words:

Foucault in particular, who was an outcast and a bitter one, and a suicidal one, and through his entire life did everything he possibly could with his staggering I.Q. to figure out every treacherous way possible to undermine the structure that wouldn’t accept him in all his peculiarity—and it’s no wonder, because there’d be no way of making a structure that could possibly function if it was composed of people as peculiar, bitter, and resentful as Michel Foucault.

Michel Foucault, for those unfamiliar with him, was queer; much of his work was preoccupied with the ways in which people marginalized and stigmatized by their sexuality were policed by society, and the ways in which that policing—that exercise of power—was effected discursively through the designations of mental illness (Madness and Civilization, 1961), the disciplining of society via surveillance (Discipline and Punish, 1975), and the ways in which the categorization of sexual identities exemplifies the normative determination of the self (The History of Sexuality, four volumes, 1976, 1984, 1984, and 2018).

Peterson’s characterization of Foucault is, in this respect, frankly vile—as is his description of Foucault when he first introduces him into his discussion: “A more reprehensible individual you could hardly ever discover, or even dream up, no matter how twisted your imagination.” His repetition of the word “peculiar” is an obvious dog-whistle, and he damns Foucault for being an “outcast,” “bitter,” and “suicidal,” as if Foucault’s “outcast” status as a queer man with a galaxy-sized brain was somehow a character flaw rather than a function of the strictures of a society he understandably took umbrage with.[4] Peterson might be the psychologist here, but I do sense a certain amount of animosity and revulsion that is not entirely directed at Foucault’s philosophy.

One way or another, the charge here is that Foucault and Derrida effectively invented postmodernism as a means of sublimating their doctrinaire Marxism into something more insidious and invidious, which would burrow into university humanities departments like a virus; still speaking of Foucault, Peterson says, “In any case, he did put his brain to work trying to figure out (a) how to resurrect Marxism under a new guise, let’s say, and (b) how to justify the fact that it wasn’t his problem that he was an outsider, it was actually everyone else’s problem.” Some fifty-odd years later, goes the Peterson narrative—which, again, is not specific to him, but prevalent among his fellow-travelers on the so-called “intellectual Dark Web”— we’re dealing with the harvest of what Derrida and Foucault sowed in the form of Black Lives Matter and critical race theory, trans people asserting their right to their preferred pronouns, cancel culture, and the general upending of what cishet white men perceive as the natural order of things.

We can argue over how we got to this moment in history, but the idea that the postmodern condition—or whatever we want to call the present moment—was orchestrated by a handful of resentful French intellectuals should be relegated to the same place of shame as most conspiracy theories. As I’ve been attempting to argue in this series of posts is that while thinkers like Foucault and Derrida have indeed profoundly influenced postmodern thought, they are not—nor are any of their acolytes—responsible for the cultural conditions of postmodernity more broadly. They have, rather, attempted to develop vocabularies that can describe what we’ve come to call postmodernity.[5]

NOTES

---

[1] The substance of Peterson’s conspiracy theory of postmodernism I quote here is from an invited lecture he delivered at the University of Wisconsin in 2017, posted to YouTube (the relevant bit starts at 29:30)

[2] Though Peterson acknowledges that Foucault and Derrida aren’t the only two masterminds of postmodern thought, they are, to the best of my knowledge, the only two he ever really talks about. I find it odd that, as a professor of psychology and practicing psychologist, he never (again, to the best of my knowledge) ever deals with the work of psycholinguist Jacques Lacan, whose poststructuralist adaptations of Freud are almost as influential as the work of Foucault and Derrida. Given how consistently he gets wrong the basic premises of Foucault and Derrida—but especially Foucault—the absence of Lacan from his diatribes strikes me as further evidence of the poverty of his understanding of the very issues he addresses.

[3] Derrida never tipped his ideological hand one way or another until his book Specters of Marx (1994), which he wrote in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the putative death of Communism. In this book he does his deconstructivist schtick, playing around with the trope of the “spectre,” talking a lot about the ghost of Hamlet’s father, and sort of admitting “Yeah, I was always a Marxist.” Some Marxist thinkers were overjoyed; many more were decidedly unimpressed, deriding him as a Johnny-come-lately only willing to assume the Marxist mantle as he sat among what he assumed was its ruins. In an essay bitterly titled “Marxism without Marxism,” Terry Eagleton wrote: “it is hard to resist asking, plaintively, where was Jacque Derrida when we needed him, in the long dark night of Reagan-Thatcher,” and continues on to say, “there is something rich … about this sudden dramatic somersault onto a stalled bandwagon. For Specters of Marx doesn’t just want to catch up with Marxism; it wants to outleft it by claiming that deconstruction was all along a radicalized version of the creed.”

[4] For those familiar with Peterson, this is consonant with his worldview, especially with respect to his anti-transgender animus. He is an unreconstructed Jungian: which is to say, he believes fervently in a sense of the biological imperatives of mythology—that all of our stories and narratives, our societal customs and traditions, are dictated by our most elemental relationships to nature. Hence his weird grafting of pseudo-Darwinian evolutionism onto myths of all stripes, from the Bible to ancient Egypt to the Greeks, and how these innate understandings manifest themselves in the popularity of Disney princesses or the necessary disciplinary presence of the bully Nelson in The Simpsons (seriously). The bottom line is that Peterson’s worldview is predicated on a sense of the innate, immutable nature of gender, gender roles, hierarchies, and the individual as the hero of his own story. Feminism, in this perspective, is a basic betrayal of human nature; people identifying as a gender other than their genitalia dictates? Well, that’s just beyond the pale.

[5] The opacity of those vocabularies, especially with regards to Derrida and Lacan, is another example of just how complex the postmodern condition is. Old joke from grad school: What do you get when you cross the Godfather with a poststructuralist? Someone who’ll give you an offer you can’t understand.

And we’re back! To reiterate my caveat from my previous post, these discussions of postmodernism are filtered through my lens as an Americanist. Postmodernism is a global phenomenon, and while it is conditioned by American cultural and economic hegemony, its manifestations are various and culturally specific around the world. A significant element of the post-WWII world was the collapse of empires and the fraught process of decolonization, as well as the rise of the neo-imperialism of corporate capitalism. What we’ve come to call postcolonialism isn’t synonymous with postmodernism by any means, but on that Venn diagram there is more than a little overlap.

I reiterate this caveat in part because this post is probably the one in this series most specific to U.S. history. I have thus far offered a broad introduction to postmodernism and offered my specific understanding of what I consider its most basic unifying element; what I want to do here in this post is provide some historical context for the material circumstances that gave rise to the postmodern condition.

Are you sitting comfortably? Then we’ll begin.

Whenever I teach my second-year class on American Literature After 1945, I always begin the semester with a lecture in which I contextualize, historically, where the United States was at the end of the Second World War. And I begin with a question: where do you think the U.S. ranked globally in terms of the size and strength of its military in 1939? My students, to their credit, are always wary at this question—they know I wouldn’t ask it if the answer was obvious. So, obviously not #1 … but they’ve all grown up in a world (as indeed I have) in which American military might is vast, and the Pentagon’s budget is larger, at last accounting, than the next fourteen countries (twelve of which are allies) combined. So some brave soul will usually hazard a guess at … #5? No, I reply. Someone more audacious might suggest #10. But again, no. In 1939, I tell them, the U.S. ranked #19 globally in its military’s size and strength, with an army that was smaller than Portugal’s.

The point of this exercise, as you’ve probably gleaned, is to describe how the U.S. went from being a middling world power to a superpower in the course of six years—and how that fundamentally changed U.S. society and culture, and in the process reshaped the world.

There’s an episode of The West Wing from season three that centers on President Bartlett’s State of the Union Address; at once point speechwriter Sam Seaborn (Rob Lowe) talks about how a president’s words can inspire a nation to great achievements, citing FDR’s SOTU in 1940 in which he predicted that the country would build 50,000 aircraft by the end of the war—which proved incorrect, as the U.S. actually built over 100,000.

While Roosevelt’s shrewd leadership of the U.S. through WWII should not be discounted, Sam’s historical factoid has more to do with propping up the Aaron Sorkin Great Man Theory of History: Oratorical Edition™. But this historical actuality does offer a useful thumbnail sketch of the sheer size and scope of the United States’ industrial capacity when totally mobilized. Consider the haunting images of planes and ships mothballed after the war, all of which had been churned out by American factories and which were now the detritus of a massive war effort.

The U.S. emerged from the devastation of the war with its industrial infrastructure intact, unlike those of its allies and enemies: Britain’s had been badly damaged, France’s suffered from the fierce fighting after the Normandy landings, and both Germany and Japan had basically been pounded flat by Allied bombing; the Soviet Union had had to move its factories far enough east to be out of the range of the Luftwaffe, while also suffering 10 million military and 14 million civilian deaths, more than any other combatant nation by a magnitude (the U.S. by contrast lost 418,500, only 1700 of which were civilians). [EDIT: as an historian friend of mine pointed out, China actually suffered losses comparable to Russia’s between 1937-1945]

All of which meant that the United States had gone from being ranked nineteenth in military strength to number one with a bullet (pun intended), with the world’s only fully functioning industrial base of any note; meanwhile, the returning soldiers benefited from the G.I. Bill passed in 1944, which, among other things, provided for college tuition. The discharged veterans poured into colleges and vocational schools and emerged with degrees that put them in good stead to swell the ranks of white-collar workers and take advantage of other provisions of the G.I. Bill, such as one year of unemployment compensation, low-interest loans to start a business or a farm, and low-cost mortgages. This government investment led to the greatest expansion of middle-class prosperity in history.¹

The industry that had been cranked up to eleven in the war did not sit idle; as Americans earned more, they spent more. The Big Three automakers switched from jeeps and tanks to cars for the newly suburban nuclear families. Factories changed over from military production² to making refrigerators, washing machines, and a host of new appliances that, the rapidly expanding business of commercial advertising declared, all households needed. And somewhere in all of that, television made its presence known as sales of television sets grew exponentially: 7,000 in 1945, 172,000 in 1948, and 5 million in 1950; in 1950, twenty percent of households had a television set; by the end of the decade, ninety percent did.

Meanwhile, the wartime acceleration of technology facilitated the rapid growth of, among other things, air travel: the first commercially successful jetliner, the Boeing 707, took to the skies in 1954.

But, you might ask, what does all this have to do with postmodernity? Well, everything … what I’ve been describing are a series of paradigm shifts in travel and communication technology, as well as the United States’ transition from industrial capitalism to full-bore consumerism. These changes were not just material, but symbolic as well, as the U.S. created of them a counter-narrative to Communism. Consumerism became understood as patriotic: the wealthier Americans grew, the more cars and appliances they bought, the more the American Dream could be held up as the obvious virtuous alternative to dour Soviet unfreedom.

This postwar period that comprises the 1950s and early 60s was the era, in the words of scholar Alan Nadel, of “containment”—a time that was marked, to oversimplify somewhat, by “the general acceptance … of a relatively small set of narratives by a relatively large portion of the population.³ Or to put it even more simply, it was a time of pervasive public trust in American institutions, especially government and the military. Now, to be clear, “pervasive” doesn’t mean “total”—this was also, after all, the time of McCarthyism and the Red Hunts, as well as the first glimmers of cultural dissent that would influence the counterculture of the 1960s (most especially embodied in the Beat Generation), and also the snowballing insurgency of the Civil Rights Movement. But taken overall, the 1950s—for all its nascent and repressed anxieties—embodied a complacency facilitated by prosperity and the higher standard of living prosperity made possible. As Nadel argues in his book Containment Culture, this delimiting of narratives was about containment: containing women in their domestic spaces, containing men in the role of patriarchal breadwinner, containing fathers, mothers, and children in the bubble of the nuclear family, containing Black Americans within the confines of Jim Crow, containing ideological expression within apolitical art forms like abstract expressionism and critical methodologies like the “New Criticism” being practised in English departments across the country, and above all containing the Soviet cultural threat with the power of America’s example and its military threat with the example of America’s power.

It didn’t take long for the 1950s to be nostalgized and mythologized in popular culture: American Graffiti was released in 1973, and Happy Days first aired in 1974. Indeed, the 50s were mythologized in popular culture at the time, with shows like Leave it to Beaver and Father Knows Best embodying the utopian ideals of domesticity and the nuclear family. Even popular stories of youthful rebellion were stripped of any possible political content, perhaps most explicitly in the very title of Rebel Without a Cause (1955), or in Marlon Brando’s iconic line in The Wild One (1953): when asked what he’s rebelling against, he replies “Whaddya got?”

When Donald Trump made “Make America Great Again” his slogan, he was tacitly citing the 1950s as the apogee of America’s greatness.⁴ This was possibly the canniest of his various simplistic catch phrases, given that 1950s nostalgia has reliably proven attractive at such moments of cultural crisis or ennui as the early 1970s; but like all nostalgic figurations, it leaves a lot out. There were those during the 1950s who labelled the period the “age of anxiety,” though as I’ll delve into more deeply in my next post, it could also have been called the age of avoidance: the rhetoric and discourse of containment sought, among other things, to deflect from such new global realities as the threat of nuclear conflict and the haunting aftermath of the Holocaust.

One way to understanding the emergence of postmodernism—and this is indeed one of the primary arguments of Alan Nadel’s book—is as a product of the breakdown of containment, of the fracturing of a societal consensus in which a relatively large number of people accepted a relatively small number of narratives into a more chaotic and fragmented social order that was deeply suspicious of such narratives. Though this breakdown progressed over a series of shocks to the system—the assassination of JFK, the start of the Vietnam War and the concomitant rise of the anti-war Left, the growth and visibility of the Civil Rights Movement culminating in the traumatic murder of Martin Luther King, Jr., the assassination of Robert Kennedy, all of which unfolded on television screens across the nation—this fracture was seeded in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. The war spawned a world that was more truly global than at any point in history. The world was simultaneously smaller and larger: smaller because of the instantaneous nature of televisual and telephonic communication, as well as the fact that one could travel around the world in a matter of hours rather than weeks or months; larger because of the ever-increasing volume of information available through new communications technology.

The increasingly efficient and indeed instantaneous transmission of information facilitated the more efficient transmission of capital, which in turn facilitated the growth of transnational corporate capitalism, which by the time we reach the orgy of financial deregulation also known as the Reagan Administration becomes less about manufacturing and industry than the arcane calculus of stock markets. By this time, America’s postwar preeminence as the sole nation with functioning industrial infrastructure had been steadily eclipsed as the rest of the world rebuilt, or, as with the case of China and Southeast Asia and the Indian subcontinent, had begun to establish their own industrial bases—facilitating the departure of blue-collar jobs as multinational corporations offshored their factories to whatever countries offered the lowest wages and best tax breaks.

This confluence of historical, economic, technological, and cultural circumstances created a profound sense of dislocation, a disruption of what Marxist theorist and literary scholar Fredric Jameson calls our “cognitive map.” Jameson is the author of Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991), arguably one of the definitive works theorizing postmodernism (as well as being exhibit A of why “postmodern neo-Marxism” is an incoherent concept, but more on that in a future post). He borrows the concept of cognitive mapping from urban theorist Kevin Lynch’s 1960 book The Image of the City; in Lynch’s telling, cities are comforting or alienating to the extent to which one can have a “cognitive map” of the urban space in which one can picture oneself in relation to the city. Cities with a straightforward layout and visible landmarks (such as Toronto) are comforting; cities that are confusing and repetitive sprawls (such as Los Angeles) are alienating.⁵ Jameson adapts this concept to culture more broadly: how we see ourselves in relation to what Jameson calls the “totality” of our culture and society is predicated on how much of it we can know. Someone living in a small town with no need to have intercourse with the larger society has a fairly straightforward cognitive map. Someone whose life and livelihood depends on circumstances well outside their control or understanding fares less well when they are negatively impacted by the offshoring of jobs or a financial meltdown that erases their retirement savings. By the same token, the individual in the small town’s ability to maintain their cognitive map will be impacted by financial downturns, or even just by having cable TV and the internet.

We could well substitute “sense of reality” for “cognitive map.” Where we find ourselves—have indeed found ourselves for several decades now—is in a place where reality feels increasingly contingent and unstable. When I wrote my doctoral dissertation on conspiracy theory and paranoia in American postwar culture, my argument basically fell along these lines—that the dislocations of postmodernity make the certainties of conspiracism attractive. I defended that thesis seventeen years ago (egad); as evidenced by the 9/11 Trutherism, anti-Obama birtherism, and the current lunacy of QAnon, conspiracism has only metastasized since then.

I am, to be clear, leaving a lot of stuff out here. But my overarching point is that what we call “postmodernism” is no one thing. It is, rather, the product of all the stuff I’ve described, and more. When the Jordan Petersons of the world accuse postmodernism of positing that any and all interpretations of something are all equally valid, they’re leveling that charge against nerdy academics influenced by a handful of French theorists and philosophers who are not, in fact, saying any such thing; Peterson et al are, though they don’t seem to know it, railing against a cultural condition that has made certitude functionally impossible, and which promulgates an infinitude of interpretations through no fault of philosophers and theorists and critics doing their level best to find the language to describe this condition.

NOTES

1. To hearken back to my posts on systemic racism, Black Americans largely found themselves shut out of the G.I. Bill’s benefits, both because of explicit restrictions written in by Southern Democrats, but also because almost all banks simply refused to extend the low-interest loans and mortgages to Black veterans. While white America enjoyed the fruits of the postwar boom, accruing wealth that would be passed onto their children and grandchildren, the exclusion of Black America from the 1950s boom continues to contribute to the stark wealth inequality between whites and non-whites in America today.

2. Which is not to say, of course, that U.S. military production slackened much; even as the nation demobilized, it shifted focus to the new enemy, the U.S.S.R., and poured huge amounts of money into R&D for possible new conflicts. Indeed, it can be argued that the recessions of 1947 and 1950, resultant from the downturn of wartime production, were counteracted by the Truman doctrine in 1947—the principle asserting America’s obligation to contain Soviet expansion globally—and the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950. Both events goosed the stock market with the promise of increased military production. By the end of Dwight D. Eisenhower’s presidency in 1961, he had grown so alarmed by the growth of military production and the power shared by the Pentagon and arms manufacturers that the architect of the D-Day landings said, in his valedictory address to the nation:

This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence—economic, political, even spiritual—is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society … we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

3. Alan Nadel, Containment Culture (1995) p. 4.

4. The peculiar genius of the slogan “Make America Great Again” is precisely its ahistorical vagueness—playing upon the intuitive contradiction felt by people whose instinct is to think of America as the greatest nation in the world, but who cannot see evidence for that greatness in their day to day lives. Hence, it must be returned to that state of greatness; and though the slogan’s vagueness allows its adherents to imagine for themselves precisely when America was great, the most standard conservative default setting is the 1950s (allowing for the likelihood of the most nativist part of the MAGA crowd pining nostalgically for the 1850s).And indeed, the touchstones of Trump’s 2016 campaign promises—the return of well-paid factory jobs, higher wages for the working class, the tacit and sometimes explicit exclusion of people of colour, and the return to a masculine America in which women know their place—all hearkened back to the era of containment (eliding, of course, the 90% top marginal tax rate and the fact that working-class jobs could support a family because of the pervasiveness of unions). Trump’s promises were all about containment, the boxing-in and walling-off of Black, queer, and women’s voices, and containing America itself from the influx of immigrants, refugees, and Muslims, all of which envisions a very strictly contained understanding of what comprises “real” America.

5. Posthumous apologies to Kevin Lynch for so egregiously oversimplifying his nuanced discussions of urban space.

On rereading my introductory post in this series, I realized I forgot to include an important caveat about the particularity of my perspective. To wit: I am, academically speaking, an Americanist—which is to say my principal research and teaching focus is on contemporary American literature and culture. To that end, my understanding of everything I will be talking about will be filtered through that particular lens of expertise. Postmodernism is, by definition, a global phenomenon, and as I will discuss in my next post, globalism as we know it is, to a large extent, the product of a world war in which the United States emerged as the hegemon of the Western world.

But however much the U.S. put its stamp on what we call postmodernism and postmodernity, there are many iterations specific to other nations, other cultures, other histories—not least of which is the weird Venn diagram of postmodernism and postcolonialism. Or the equally weird 1980s feedback loop between American and Japanese postmodernism.

But for the sake of keeping things simple, though I’ll be gesturing to other such iterations of the postmodern, I’ll mostly be keeping to my wheelhouse. So please chime in with all the stuff I’m leaving out.

OK, so that being said, let’s recap: my introductory post was basically about the complexity of postmodernism and the fact that there is no one definition, and that there is no unifying thread linking all aspects of postmodernism.

So let me suggest own theory of the unifying thread linking all aspects of postmodernism.

Very simply: the postmodern condition is one in which our tacit understanding is that language does not reflect reality, but that language creates reality.

Before I go further, let me stipulate that the phrase “tacit understanding” is doing the heavy lifting in that sentence: as I’ll elaborate below, there is a broad range of responses to my suggestion, not the least of which is outright hostility. An instinctive response from certain quarters to the idea that language “creates” reality would be to see it as confirmation that postmodern thought is all about absolute relativism and the denial of objective truth. As physicist and notorious anti-postmodernist Alan Sokal said in the 1990s, anyone suggesting that gravity was a social construct was welcome to walk out of his third-floor office window.

Except that neither I nor any “postmodern” thinker of any substance is suggesting that objective reality doesn’t exist, or that it only exists as something conjured from words, any more than the postmodern thinkers Sokal mocked believed we could all float up into the air if we just denied the existence of gravity or deleted the word from the dictionary. I find it’s useful in this discussion to make a distinction between “reality” and “actuality,” in which the latter is the world as it is, and the former is how we make it comprehensible to one another.¹ No postmodernist thinker not holding court in a 3am dorm room blue with pot smoke seeks to deny the actuality of the world. We all inhabit bodies that feel pain and experience the sensoria of our immediate environments, and if we choose to step out of a third-floor window, it almost certainly isn’t to prove a point of about social constructionism.

In fact, the word and concept of gravity is as good a starting point as any. The word “gravity” comes to us from the Latin gravitas, which means “seriousness” and was one of the ancient Roman virtues. It also could mean dignity or importance, or the moral rigor required to undertake a task of great importance. When you consult the Oxford English Dictionary, the first three entries are (1) “the quality of being grave”; (2) “Grave, weighty, or serious character or nature; importance, seriousness”; (3) “Weighty dignity; reverend seriousness; serious or solemn conduct or demeanour befitting a ceremony, an office, etc.” Only after wading through those three entries do you get to number four, which breaks down gravity’s meanings “in physical senses,” and only at number five to you arrive at “The attractive force by which all bodies tend to move towards the centre of the earth; the degree of intensity with which a body in any given position is affected by this force, measured by the amount of acceleration produced.”

The mathematical expression of Earth’s gravity is 9.6 m/s², which is your vertical acceleration should you jump out of a plane or Alan Sokal’s office window. A postmodernist consideration of gravity would not be skeptical of the fact that things fall, but rather would be preoccupied with how we understand it, and how the linguistic signifier “gravity” possesses meanings other than its mathematical rendering—pointing to its origins meaning seriousness and “weighty” as a metaphor referring to matters of importance, to the word’s shared root with “grave” and the semantic overlap there. One might also cite the history of how we’ve come to understand gravity, from Aristotle’s assertion that heavy objects fall because their element is of earth, and thus seek their natural state. Though the apple falling on Isaac Newton’s head is almost certainly apocryphal, it makes for a good story, even if his mathematics did not actually do much more than Aristotle to clarify not just how but also why gravity works. That had to wait for Einstein’s theories of relativity and the understanding of gravity as curvatures in space/time shaped by objects with mass. And even now, physicists still scratch their heads over the relationship between gravity and quantum mechanics.

None of which questions the actuality that objects fall to the earth at 9.6 m/s². What it does do is get us into language games that highlight the contingency of meaning, and a simple trio of facts that I always lead off with in my first-year classes: all language is descriptive; all language is metaphorical; all language is rhetorical. Which is to say, all language seeks to describe the world, it does so invariably through analogy, and it seeks to persuade. What language creates, as I said above, is a shared reality that at its best sharpens and clarifies our understanding of the actuality we all individually inhabit. Also, it’s fun: one of the great pleasures of reading a gifted poet or prose stylist is seeing the ways in which they can make you think of certain things anew by using language in challenging and novel ways. Heh, “novel” ways—see what I did there? By which I mean even the humble pun has the capacity to highlight the slipperiness of our shared vocabularies. “I don’t think you quite grasp the gravity of your situation” is a pun that has been used, among other places, in Star Trek and Doctor Who to refer to the fact that the seriousness of one’s circumstances specifically relates to the imminent danger of falling from a great height. My favourite line from Back to the Future is when Doc Brown, puzzled by Marty McFly’s constant use of the word “Heavy!” finally demands whether something has gone wrong with gravity in the future. And of course, there’s the old chestnut that there is no gravity—the Earth just sucks.

But, I can hear some people protesting, maundering about the various meanings of gravity isn’t what we’re concerned with—what we’re concerned with is postmodernism’s denial of objective truth! Which is a big deal! And yes, it would be a big deal if that were indeed the case. The problem is that the word “truth” entails some significant gradations between straightforward facts in evidence and the capital-T Truths bound up in abstractions like justice, morality, and good and evil. Your average postmodernist has no quibble with facts in evidence, but takes issue with the notion of transcendent truths—such as a concept of absolute justice, or that evil exists outside of our capacity to characterize it semantically. Where people most commonly get postmodernism wrong is in characterizing it as a denial of actuality. One suggestion that has surfaced in a significant number of think-pieces over the past several years, that Donald Trump operates out of the “postmodern playbook,” insofar as he treats reality as fungible and truth as something subject to his own whim, is also a basic misapprehension.² Postmodernism—or, more accurately, postmodern thought—isn’t about the denial of objective truth or actuality, but the interrogation of the premises and cultural assumptions on which the conceptions of capital-T objective Truths are based.

To return to my earlier assertion and its load-bearing words: when I say that “the postmodern condition is one in which our tacit understanding is that language does not reflect reality, but that language creates reality,” I’m not necessarily asserting that language actually creates reality. (As it happens, I find this understanding completely persuasive, but that’s just me). I grasp why this idea is anathema to many, many people, especially religiously devout people who are deeply invested in the assumption of transcendent Truths that exist beyond language. Relatedly, there is also the very long idealist tradition in Western thought and philosophy that is predicated on the basic idea that there is an objective, external Truth towards which we strive, with language as our principal vehicle in doing so.³ What I’m arguing is that the postmodern condition is one in which the prospect of language creating reality isn’t necessarily something that presents itself as such, but is rather a felt experience presenting in most cases intuitively as suspicion, fear, or just a general anxiety. It is usually not articulated specifically, except by nerdy academics like myself or in angry rejections of postmodern thought by other nerdy academics.

This is what I mean by “tacit understanding”: something bound up in a broader cultural condition in which the critical mass of information and the critical mass of media through which we access information, a global economic system that is bewildering to literally everybody, technology that far outstrips the average individual’s capacity to understand it—and I could go on, but I’ll refer you back to my previous post’s bullet-points—has created a cultural condition in which the language/reality relationship has become, shall we say, unmoored. This unmooring was not the specific creation of such anti-postmodernists’ bêtes noir as Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault; it is, rather—as I will be delving into in future posts—the elemental lived experience of the cultural condition of postmodernity.

Or to put it more simply: you might reject with all your being the idea that language creates reality, but you live in a world so thoroughly suffused by consumerism, so fractured by the multiplicity of disparate media platforms, so atomized by digital culture, that your lived reality is one in which any access to what you consider objective truth is rendered at best deeply fraught and at worst impossible. Those who wonder at the lunacy of QAnon really need only understand this basic dimension of the postmodern condition: namely, that when people’s sense of reality becomes unmoored they will often latch onto epistemic systems that give them a sense of order (no matter how batshit that system might be). Conspiracy theorizing and conspiracy-based paranoia of course long predate the postmodern era, but they find particularly fertile ground in a situation where reality itself feels contingent and slippery.

By the same token, “the imagination of disaster”—as Susan Sontag called it in her classic 1965 essay—has become pervasive, either imagining extinction-level events (alien invasion, asteroid headed for Earth, etc.) that are ultimately averted after much destruction, and which re-establish a sense of order; or, increasingly, depicting post-apocalyptic scenarios in which civilization has collapsed and survivors navigate a new sparsely populated world. Both are fantasies of return: in the first case to a society in which we can have faith in our institutions, in the latter to a more elemental existence shorn of the distractions and trivialities of postmodern life. Indeed, I would argue (and have argued) that post-apocalyptic shows like The Walking Dead share DNA with fantasy like Game of Thrones, insofar as both zombie apocalypse and fantasy are inherently nostalgic, imagining as they do a return to premodern, pre-industrial worlds in which “objective reality” is boiled down the immediacy of survival, whether in the face of attacking zombies, or the imperative of destroying the One Ring⁴ … in other words, something elemental and visceral and not subject to the seeming infinitude of mediations and contingencies of meaning manifest in the postmodern condition. As a number of thinkers have suggested, it is easier to imagine the destruction of contemporary civilization than how it might be fixed. Perhaps most notably, Fredric Jameson wryly observed that “It seems to be easier for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth and of nature than the breakdown of late capitalism,” and that “perhaps that is due to some weakness in our imaginations.”⁵

Perhaps it is a weakness of our imaginations, but one that, according to Jameson’s voluminous writings on postmodernism, is entirely understandable. In what is perhaps the definitive study of postmodernism, his 1991 book Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Jameson argues that one of postmodernism’s key features is its sheer inescapability: the “prodigious new expansion of multinational capitalism”—which is more or less synonymous with the postmodern condition—“ends up penetrating and colonizing those very precapitalist enclaves (Nature and the Unconscious) which offered extraterritorial and Archimedean footholds for critical effectivity.”⁶ Or, to translate it into non-Jamesonian English, if you can’t get outside out something—physically, mentally, or otherwise—how can you effect a proper critique? How can you address something with which you are always already complicit?⁷

Keeping in mind that Jameson made that observation about “Archimedean footholds” in a book published in 1991, I think it’s safe to say that we can remark, from our perspective thirty years later, on how the situation he describes has only expanded by a magnitude with the advent of the internet and the current impossibility—short of decamping to live “off the grid” in the wilderness (itself a disappearing enclave)—of extricating oneself from the digital networks that now penetrate all aspects of life.

So how did we get here? Well, that’s my next post. Stay tuned.

NOTES

1. We find the same distinction in the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, who distinguished between the noumenon, or “the thing in itself” (das Ding an sich) and the phenomenon, or the thing as it appears to an observer. By the same token, psycholinguist Jacques Lacan—who weirdly is entirely ignored by postmodernism’s detractors (who generally choose to train their fire on Derrida and Foucault)—distinguishes between the “Real” and the “Symbolic.” The Real aligns with actuality, our experience of the world; the Symbolic by contrast is the realm of language, and any translation of the Real into language takes it out of the realm of the Real and into the Symbolic. In other words, your personal experience is specific to you, but is ultimately incommunicable as such—to communicate it to others means translating into the realm of the unreal, i.e. of language and our shared vocabularies.

2. The Trumpian world of “alternative facts” is not a product of the postmodern condition, but is more properly associated with authoritarianism—something Hannah Arendt, in passages much-quoted these past few years, asserted in The Origins of Totalitarianism: “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist,” she writes, “but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.” She also said that “Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it.”

3. As I’ll discuss in a future post, modernist art and literature was largely predicated on the premise that true art was about the accessing of reality—T.S. Eliot called this the “objective correlative,” the idea that the right combination of words and metaphors could conceivably access the fundamental truth of a given emotion. But for the modernists, “objective reality” was vanishingly difficult to touch; its principal revolt was against nineteenth century and Victorian positivism, and its assumption that objective reality could be rendered unproblematically through the practices of realism.

4. There’s an article or possibly an entire book to be written about how the popularity of The Lord of the Rings in America was in part a function of antipathy to the early stirrings of postmodernity—especially considering that Tolkien was especially popular on college campuses in the 1960s, which, when you think about it, is more than a little counter-intuitive, that a deeply conservative, essentially Catholic story would take root amidst leftist radicalism. Even those people amenable to the rise of the New Left and the newly translated writings of Derrida and Foucault et al were inclined to wear buttons declaring “Frodo Lives!”, which suggests that postmodernist theory might have fascinated people, but the lived reality of postmodernity still inspired imaginative escape to worlds not ruled by moral ambiguity and contingent realities.

5. Fredric Jameson, The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983-1998. p. 50.

6. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. p. 49.

7. Because I don’t want these blog posts to turn into novellas, I will just quickly here note in passing that, within the arguments between those theorizing postmodernism, is this very question. More doctrinaire Marxists like Jameson or scions of the Frankfurt School like Theodor Adorno (more on the Frankfurt School and “cultural Marxism” in a future post) assert that the postmodern condition obviates the possibility of substantive cultural critique. Other critics and theorists see fifth columnists: Linda Hutcheon argues at length that postmodernist art and literature weaponizes irony and parody in what she terms “complicitous critique,” while such thinkers of the Birmingham School as Dick Hebdige and Stuart Hall—who effectively invented what we now call “cultural studies—argued that even within the worst excesses of a consumerist culture industry, artists carve out their own enclaves of resistance.

Before I get under way: why “remembering” postmodernism? Several reasons: back when I was an undergraduate, I came across a book about Canadian art titled Remembering Postmodernism. It struck me on two points: one, that the afterword was written by Linda Hutcheon, whose books and articles on postmodernist fiction had been my gateway drug into the topic; and two, that the title was pleasantly cheeky, considering that as far as I was concerned at the time, postmodernism was an ongoing thing.

Now, I never actually read the book, mainly because postmodernist art was—however interesting I found it—somewhat outside my wheelhouse. But the title stuck with me. Two years ago I taught a fourth-year course on American postmodernist fiction, which I titled “Remembering Postmodernism.” In that instance, the expression was a straightforward acknowledgement of postmodernism as an historical period: we started with Thomas Pynchon’s 1966 novel The Crying of Lot 49 and ended with Monique Truong’s The Book of Salt (2003), and a large part of our discussion of Truong’s novel was whether it was, in fact, postmodernist, or whether it represented whatever the next (as yet unnamed) historical phase was.

Now I’m doing these posts and contemplating whether it’s worthwhile to write a book called The Idiot’s Guide to Postmodernism, for the simple fact that there’s an awful lot of talk about postmodernism and postmodernists these days, and none of it seems to have the slightest clue about it. It is rather a term of disapprobation that seems designed on one hand to vilify contemporary university humanities programs as irredeemably “woke,” and as a shorthand to encompass the varying iterations of “wokeness” on the other.

Hence, as far as I’m concerned, we need to remember what postmodernism was and think about what it might still be. And remembering is a useful term insofar as it means both the calling to mind of things forgotten, as well as the act of re-assemblage.

If I were to ask you what the opposite of “remember” is, you’d most likely say “forget,” for the simple reason that that is entirely correct. But in a more strictly linguistic and semantic way, the opposite of “remember” is “dismember.” Sometimes when we remember something, it’s a simple matter of that something simply springing into our mind—where we left our car keys, for instance, or the fact that today is someone’s birthday. The more laborious process of remembering, however, is one of re-membering, of finding those sundered scraps of the past and putting them together like Isis reassembling Osiris’ dismembered body. 

And lest you think this post is just an excuse for me to nerd out over semantics (which, to be fair, it totally is—more of that to come), the fallibilities of memory and their relationship to how we conceive of history are quite germane to postmodern thought.

So, I want to do a deep dive on postmodernism over a series of posts. And to be clear, by “deep dive” I actually mean more of a SparkNotes-type run-through of its history, its basic premises, and what it means in the grander scheme of things. I’ve been studying and writing on postmodernism for the better part of my academic career, starting with my undergrad years, and there are libraries-worth of scholarship on the subject. So I’m hardly going to do much more in a handful of blog posts than offer the general contours.

Why, then, do I want to even bother? Two reasons: first, as I posted previously, because I want to use my blog this summer to work through my confused thoughts on a variety of issues. And second, because nobody honking off about it in the present moment—outside of those who have actually considered postmodernism within the confines of academe—seems to have any bloody clue what they’re talking about. As a case in point, I recently read an otherwise interesting article in The Bulwark, an online publication by anti-Trump conservative thinkers, on anti-democratic intellectuals of the new Right who opine that the tenets of “classical liberalism” in fact contain the seeds of tyranny. The article in question was a reasoned and persuasive defense of Enlightenment thought and its influence on the United States’ founding fathers. But then there was this paragraph:

Contemporary “political correctness” or “wokeness” comes from Marx and Nietzsche by way of the Postmodernists, not from John Locke or the Founding Fathers. A serious person would feel the need to at least attempt to trace some of that intellectual history and confront the ideological differences.

Yes, a serious person would feel the need to at least attempt to trace some of that intellectual history and confront the ideological differences—which the author of this article obviously did not do when throwing Marx, Nietzsche, and postmodernism into the same bucket and tacitly ascribing a causal line of influence. He is smart enough at least to cite Marx and Nietzsche—which is more than most people invoking the dreaded specter of postmodernism do—and obviously knows enough to understand that there is a relationship between those two thinkers and some aspects of postmodernism. In other words, there is a very general sense in which he isn’t wrong, but any number of specific senses in which everything about that statement betrays a profound ignorance of all three of its subjects—starting with the basic fact that Marxism and postmodernism are, if not strictly speaking antithetical, then extremely antagonistic.¹

But what is postmodernism? Well, let’s start with the pervasive misapprehension that it constitutes a sort of absolute relativism—a contradiction in terms, yes, but one that ostensibly obviates the possibility of objective meaning. After all, if everything is relative to everything else, where is the capital-T Truth?

As with the paragraph I quoted above, this understanding gets some things right, but remains a basic misapprehension for the simple reason that there is no singular “postmodernism.” The rejection of absolutes, the fundamental skepticism about grand narratives, and the understanding of power not as something external to ourselves but bound up in the flux of discourse and language, are all key aspects of what I’ll be calling “postmodern thought.” Postmodern thought is what Jordan Peterson is referring to when he asserts that, for postmodernists, all interpretations of anything at all are equally valid. I will have occasion in future posts to explain why this is completely wrong (which doesn’t differentiate it from most of his assertions), but for my first few posts I want to distinguish between the various intellectual strands of thinking that emerged from postmodernism, and postmodernism as the cultural condition that gave rise to postmodern thought.

Because the one thing I want to clarify, even if I don’t manage to make anything else clear in these posts, is that postmodernism—or more specifically postmodernity—is above all other things a cultural condition emerging from a confluence of historical circumstances and contexts. The tacit understanding of postmodernism when deployed as a term of disapprobation is that it is a pernicious relativist mode of thinking that exerts a profound and deleterious influence on, well, everything; in the crudest and most conspiratorial version of this thinking, such contemporary social movements that enrage conservatives like feminism, trans rights, Black Lives Matter (and the current bête noir, “critical race theory”) , and a host of other “woke” causes, can be traced back to a handful of French intellectuals in the late 1960s who invented postmodernism as a means of pursuing Marxism and the destruction of Western civilization by other means.² And while the loose assemblage of schools of thought I’m calling “postmodern” has undoubtedly shaped contemporary attitudes—sometimes positively, sometimes not—my larger argument is that they have emerged in response to cultural conditions; what postmodernism’s detractors call “postmodernism” has usually been less a tool of cultural change than a series of attempts to find language to describe the dramatic cultural transformations of the post-WWII landscape. The cultural changes in question, from intersectional understandings of identity to the normalization of gay marriage, might have been facilitated in part by aspects of postmodern thought, but have been far more facilitated by the technological and economic transformations of postmodernity.

Which, once again, brings us back to the basic question of just what postmodernism is. As I say above, it is a lot of things, including but not limited to:

• The cultural logic of late capitalism.
• The breakdown of faith in such societal grand narratives as religion, governance, justice, science, etc.
• A set of aesthetic practices in art, fiction, film, and architecture (among others) that reflect and articulate such breakdowns.
• The rise of multinational corporate capital, and its transformation of the imperialist project from a national, colonial one to the subjugation of national interests to the global market.
• The ascendancy of neoliberal free-market fundamentalism.
• The snowballing of technology, especially communication technology—from television to the internet to social media—and the concomitant erosion of traditional informational gatekeepers (e.g. legacy media).
• The inescapability of consumer culture and the culture industry.
• A set of philosophical, theoretical, and critical attempts to adequately describe all of the above.

So … that clears things up, right? Just kidding—of course it doesn’t. But hopefully that starts to communicate the complexity of the subject.

I do want to make clear that this series of posts is not meant as an apologia for postmodernity, postmodernism, or postmodern thought. I have for many years studied postmodernism and written about it and taught it in university classrooms, but I would not call myself a postmodernist (though others, mostly the people who don’t really understand it, certainly would). My own thinking and philosophical inclinations bend toward pragmatism (the philosophical kind) and a sort of small-h humanism; my lodestars in this respect are Richard Rorty and Terry Pratchett. I passionately love some aspects of postmodern culture, mostly its aesthetic incarnations—the fiction of Toni Morrison and Don DeLillo, for example, or films like Blade Runner—and I find the theoretical armature defining postmodernism, whether it’s celebratory like that of Linda Hutcheon or Brian McHale, or damning like that of Fredric Jameson, fascinating; but huge swaths of what I’m calling postmodernity are pernicious and harmful (corporate capitalism and social media among them).

This series of posts is rather a quixotic attempt to re-inject some nuance into what has become an impoverished and overdetermined understanding of a bewilderingly complex concept. More importantly, it is my own way of working through my own thoughts on the matter. So bear with me.

NOTES

1. There is also the rather amusing thought of just how disgusted Nietzsche would be with “woke” sentiments.

2. More on this in my future post on “The Conspiracy Theory of Postmodernism.”