The Myth of Postmodernity
printable version
TAKIS FOTOPOULOS
Abstract:
In this paper the claim that the advanced market economies
have entered a new era of postmodernity (or a postmodern
turn) is critically assessed and found to be unjustified by
the changes at the economic, political, cultural, or
scientific and theoretical levels of the last quarter of a
century or so. These changes in no way reflect a kind of
break with the past, similar to the one marking the
transition from the ‘traditional’ society to modernity. It
is therefore argued that advanced market economies,
following the collapse of liberal modernity in the 19th
century and that of statist modernity (in both its
versions of social democracy and Soviet statism) in the 20th,
have, in fact, entered a new form of modernity that we may
call neoliberal modernity, rather than a
postmodernity. Neoliberal modernity represents a synthesis
of the previous forms of modernity and at the same time
completes the process which began with the
institutionalisation of the market economy and
representative ‘democracy’ that have been presently
universalised in the form of the internationalised market
economy and the developing supra-national forms of
governance respectively.
1.
The shift to modernity
A
fruitful way to examine the postmodernist claim that advanced market economies
have entered a new era of postmodernity which represents a break with modernity
at all levels (economic, political, theoretical, scientific, cultural) is to
compare the social and paradigmatic changes that took place in the last twenty
five years or so with the corresponding changes from traditional to modern
society.
As
it is well known, modern society emerged, very unevenly, out of a system of
rural societies that had endured 5,000 years. In fact, one may argue that the
technology and social organization of the Neolithic revolution remained the
basis of all civilization until the coming of industrialism. Industrial
production then spread, always very unevenly, from Europe to the rest of the
world. However, the identification of modernity with industrialism (in the past
propagated only by ‘orthodox’ social ‘scientists’ but today adopted
widely even by ‘radicals’ in the ‘new social movements’) is unfounded.
The uneven process of industrialization, for instance, cannot be seriously
interpreted in terms of the lack of industrialist entrepreneurs, industrial
values etc, whereas it is perfectly explainable in terms of a market-based
economic development.
Therefore, to blame industrialism for the evils of modern society, as many
‘radical’ ecofeminists, Greens, supporters of indigenous movements, some
postmodernists, irrationalists (New Agers and the like), even some
eco-anarchists do, is at best misguided and at worse misleading. This is because
such a view encourages many activists to fight
against
the wrong targets (industrial
society) rather than against the system of the market economy and representative
‘democracy’ which are, in fact, the ultimate causes for the present
concentration of economic and political power and, consequently, for the present
multidimensional crisis.
As
I attempted to show in Towards An Inclusive Democracy,
industrial production constituted only the necessary condition for the shift to
modern society. The sufficient condition was the parallel introduction—through
decisive state help—of the system of the market economy
that replaced the (socially
controlled) local markets that existed for thousands of years before. It was the
institutionalisation of this new system of economic organisation that set in
motion the marketisation process,
whose
main characteristic is the attempt to minimise effective social controls over
markets for the protection of labour and the environment. In fact, one could
argue that had a social revolution accompanied the Industrial Revolution—so
that the use of machines, in conditions of large-scale production, could have
been made compatible with the social control of production—the present
marketisation of society would have been avoided, as well as the huge
concentration of income, wealth and economic power that was related to this
market-based industrialisation. But, given the class structure of the commercial
society which characterised several European societies during the Industrial
Revolution, it was not surprising that the organisation of the supply of the
services of ‘labour’ and ‘land’ was based on the transformation of human
activity and natural resources into commodities, whose supply did not depend on
the needs of human beings and the ecosystem respectively, but on market prices.
Furthermore,
neither was the system of the market economy
the outcome of some sort of an evolutionary process, as Marxists usually
assume, nor was its political complement, representative ‘democracy’,
the result of some kind of evolution in political institutions.
The institutionalisation of both the market system and representative
‘democracy’ was the result of deliberate action by the state, which was
controlled by the merchant class --the new economic and political elite that
emerged during the Industrial Revolution in Europe and the USA.
It can , also, beshown that there was nothing ‘evolutionary’
about the emergence of the merchant class either. As Polanyi, quoting Pirenne,
points out: ‘It would be natural to suppose, at first glance, that a merchant
class grew up little by little in the midst of the agricultural population.
Nothing, however, gives credence to this theory”.
But,
let us see briefly how the two main institutions of modernity, the market
economy and representative ‘democracy’
were established. As regards, first, the institutionalisation of the
market system, the nation-state, which was just emerging at the end of the
Middle Ages, played a crucial role in creating the conditions for the `nationalisation'
of the market (mercantilism) and in freeing the market from effective social
control (liberal modernity). The emergence of the nation-state, which preceded
the marketisation of the economy, had the effect not only of destroying the
political independence of the town or village community but, also,
undermining their economic self-reliance. It was only by virtue of
deliberate state action in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries that the `nationalisation'
of the market and the creation of internal trade was achieved.
In fact, the 16th century can be summed up by the struggle of the nascent state
against the free towns and their federations, which was followed in the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by further state action involving the
confiscation, or `enclosure' of communal lands—a process that was completed in
Western Europe by the 1850s.
But, the `freeing' of trade performed by mercantilism merely liberated trade
from localism; markets were still an accessory feature of an institutional
set-up regulated more than ever by society. Up until the Industrial Revolution,
there was no attempt to establish a market economy in the form of a big,
self-regulating market. In fact, it was at the end of the eighteenth century
that the transition from regulated markets to a system of self-regulated ones
marked the `great transformation' of society, that is, the move to a market
economy. Up until that time, industrial production in Western Europe, and
particularly in England where the market economy was born, was a mere accessory
to commerce.
Second,
as regards the rise of representative ‘democracy, we should go back to the
last quarter of the 18th century when the ‘Founding Fathers’ of
the US constitution, literally invented representative ‘democracy’, an idea
without any historical precedent in the ancient world. Up until that time,
democracy had the classical Athenian meaning of the sovereignty of demos,
in the sense of the direct exercise of power by all citizens --although, of
course, the Athenian democracy was partial, given the limitations it imposed on
the right to citizenship which excluded the majority of residents (women,
slaves, foreigners). The Founding Fathers considered as completely unacceptable
this direct exercise of power, ostensibly, because it was supposed to
institutionalise the power of the ‘mob’ and the tyranny of the majority. In
fact, however, their real aim was the dilution of popular power, so that the
claims of representative ‘democracy’ about equal distribution of political
power could be made compatible with the dynamic of the market economy that was
already leading to a concentration of economic power in the hands of an economic
elite.
This was of course a constant demand of liberal philosophers since the time of
Adam Smith, who took pains to stress that the main task of government was the
defence of the rich against the poor—a task that, as John Dunn points out, is
“necessarily less dependably performed where it is the poor who choose who is
to govern, let alone where the poor themselves, as in Athens, in large measure
simply are the government”.
It should also be noted here that the introduction of representative
‘democracy’ had nothing to do with the size of the population. The Founding
Fathers’ argument, as Woods points out, ‘was not that representation is
necessary in a large republic, but, on the contrary, that a large republic
is desirable so that representation is unavoidable’. Therefore, the
Federalist conception of representation, and particularly that of Hamilton, was
intended to act as a filter, i.e. as the very antithesis of isegoria,
which means not just freedom of speech –the sine qua non of representative
‘democracy’-- but equality of
speech, which is a necessary requirement of democracy.
This way, democracy ceased to be the exercise of political power and was
identified instead with the resignation from it and the associated transfer of
this power, through the elections, to a political elite. In other words, the
Founding Fathers not only saw representation as a means of distancing the people
from politics but, in fact, proposed it for the very same reason for which the
Athenians were against the institution of election (apart from exceptional
circumstances when specialist knowledge was required)
: because it favored the economically powerful. Thus, whereas for the
Athenians the regime which was dominated by the rich (by definition a minority)
was considered to be oligarchic,
for the Founding Fathers like Hamilton not only was there
no incompatibility between democracy and the domination of the
economically powerful but in fact this was considered to be the rule.
The more or less simultaneous institutionalisation of the system of the
market economy and representative ‘democracy’, during the Industrial
Revolution in the West, introduced the fundamental element of modernity : the
formal separation of society from the economy and the state which has been ever
since the basis of modernity. Not only direct producers were not able anymore to
control the product of their work but, also, citizens were offered a new form of
political organisation called ‘democracy’, in which the direct exercise of
political power –the characteristic of classical democracy- was impossible. In
other words, the market economy and representative democracy had in fact
institutionalised the unequal distribution of political and economic power among
citizens. Furthermore, it could be shown that the gradual extension of the right
to citizeship to the vast majority of the population –a process that was
completed only in the tewntieth century—did not offset the effective loss of
the meaning of citizenship, in terms of the exercise of power. Thus, the type of
citizenship introduced by representative democracy was a passive citizenship
which had nothing to do with the active citizenship of classical democracy. It
was therefore not surprising that
the extension of civil rights did not have any marked effect in reducing the
concentration of political and economic power which has always characterised
modern society, apart from a temporary effect on economic inequality during the
statist phase of modernity, as we shall see below.
In this problematique, it was the institutionalisation of the market
economy and its political complement in the form of representative
‘democracy’ which were the ultimate causes for the characteristics usually
assigned to modern society, such as the replacement of the group or the
community (as the traditional basic
unit of society) by the individual; the assignment of specific, specialised
tasks to modern institutions within a highly developed division of labour in
contrast to the traditional social or political institutions (family, community,
king etc) ; the government of the institutions of modern society by ‘rules’ rather than, as in traditional society,
by custom and tradition, and so on.
2.
Forms of modernity: The liberal and the statist forms
The marketisation process that was initiated by the emergence of the
market economy made apparent the contradiction between
the
requirements of the market economy and those of society. This contradiction was
due to the fact that, in a market economy, labour and land had to be treated as
genuine commodities, with their free and fully developed markets, whereas in
fact they were only fictitious commodities. It was the same contradiction that
led to a
long
social struggle, which raged for over a hundred and fifty years, from the
Industrial Revolution up to the last quarter of the twentieth century, between
those controlling the market economy, (i.e. the capitalist elite controlling
production and distribution) and the rest of society. Those controlling the
market economy (with the support of other social groups which were benefiting by
the institutional framework) aimed at marketising labour and land as much as
possible, that is, at minimising all social controls aiming at protecting labour
and land, so that their free flow, at a minimum cost, could be secured. On the
other hand, those at the other end, and particularly the working class that was
growing all this time, aimed at maximising social controls on labour (not so
much on land before the emergence of the Green movement), that is, at maximising
society's self-protection against the perils of the market economy, especially
unemployment and poverty. The outcome of this social struggle led first to the
liberal form of modernity which, after a relatively brief intermission in the
form of statist modernity, was succeeded by today’s neoliberal form of it.
At the theoretical and political level,
this conflict was expressed by the struggle between economic liberalism
and socialism, which constituted the central element of Western history,
from the Industrial Revolution up to the mid 1970s. Economic liberalism was the
ideology which had as its main aim the justification of the project for a
self-regulating market, as effected by laissez-faire policies, free trade and
regulatory controls.
Socialism,
on the other hand, was the ideology which had as its main aim the justification
of the project for social control over economic resources in order to cover the
needs of all humans (rather than simply the needs of those who can survive
competition, as in economic liberalism) and to conserve productive organisation
and labour.
During
the liberal phase of marketisation in the
19th century, which barely lasted half a century between the 1830s
and the 1880s, the first attempt was made to establish a purely liberal
internationalised market economy in the sense of free trade, a ‘flexible’
labour market and a fixed exchange rates system (Gold Standard). However, this
attempt failed and liberal modernity collapsed as it did not meet the necessary
condition for a self-regulating market economy, namely open and flexible markets
for commodities and capital, which were not feasible in a period in which big
colonial powers like England and France were still exercising almost
monopolistic control over significant parts of the globe at the expense of
rising non-colonial powers (like the USA) or smaller colonial powers (like
Germany).
So, after a transitional period of protectionism, the liberal form of modernity
was succeeded in the 20th century, with the decisive help of the
socialist movement, by a new form
of modernity: statism.
Statist
modernity took different forms in the West and the East (namely the regimes of
Eastern Europe, China and so on). Thus, in the West,
statism
took a social-democratic form and was backed by Keynesian policies
which involved
active
state control of the economy and extensive interference with the self-regulating
mechanism of the market to secure full employment, a better distribution of
income and economic growth. A precursor of this form of statism emerged in the
inter-war period but it reached its peak in the period following the second
world war, when Keynesian policies were adopted by governing parties of all
persuasions in the West during the era of the socialdemocratic consensus, up to
the mid 1970s. On the other hand in the East,
for the first time in modern times, a ‘systemic’ attempt was made to
reverse the marketisation process and create a completely different form of
modernity than the liberal or the
socialdemocratic one (which, in a sense, was a version of liberal modernity).
This form of statism, backed by Marxist ideology, attempted to minimise the role
of the market mechanism in the allocation of resources and replace it with a
central planning mechanism.
However,
statist modernity, in both its socialdemocratic and Soviet versions, shared the
fundamental element of liberal modernity, namely,
the formal separation of society from the economy and the state. In other words,
the basic difference between the liberal and statist forms of modernity
concerned the means through which this separation was achieved: in liberal
modernity, through representative ‘democracy’ and the market mechanism,
whereas in statist modernity through representative ‘democracy’ and a
modified version of the market mechanism (social democracy), or, alternatively,
through soviet ‘democracy’ and central planning (Soviet statism).
Furthermore, both the liberal and the statist forms of modernity shared a common
growth ideology
based on the Enlightenment idea of
progress, which has led to the creation of the two types of ‘growth economy’:
the ‘capitalist’ and the ‘socialist’ growth economy.
Still, for reasons that I could not expand on here, both forms of statist
modernity collapsed. The Western form of statist modernity collapsed in the
1970s because of the fundamental incompatibility that was created by the growing
expansion of the state role in the economy and the parallel increasing
internationalisation of the market economy
―as a result mainly of the activity of the emerging TNCs and their
requirements in terms of openness of the commodity and capital markets.
On the other hand, the Eastern form of statist modernity collapsed a decade or
so later because of the growing incompatibility between the requirements of an
‘efficient’ growth economy and the institutional arrangements (particularly
centralised planning and party democracy) which had been introduced in
accordance with Marxist-Leninist ideology.
The collapse of statist modernity in both its forms was one more indication that
the fundamental institutions on which modernity was based, contrary to
postmodern arguments, were the market economy and its political complement in
the form of representative ‘democracy’ and that any effective interference
with the market mechanism was doomed to failure.
3. Postmodernity
or a neoliberal form of modernity?
The change in the ‘objective’ conditions I mentioned in the last
section and in particular the growing openness of the commodity and capital
markets which led to the present internationalisation of the market economy
(incorrectly called ‘globalisation’)
―as the inevitable result of the dynamic of the market economy― was
not the only cause of the collapse of the statist form of modernity in the West.
The economic crisis which erupted in the 1970s, as
a result of the incompatibility between statism and internationalisation (and,
not as it is usually stated, because of the oil crisis, which was simply the
immediate cause that precipitated the crisis), led also to the rise of the
neoliberal movement. The emergence of this movement was not simply expressing
the Right’s inevitable backlash, as Left analysts often argue, in the
aftermath of the collapse of the New Left following the aborted uprising of May
1968. The rise of the neoliberal movement expressed the need of the economic and
political elites to fight statism, in view of the economic problems (inflation
and then stagflation) that had been created by the incompatibility between
statism and internationalisation and in view also of the change in the balance
of power against them that growing statism implied.
Thus,
the political program of the neoliberal movement, which rose first in the
academia (Chicago school, resurrection of Hayek and so on) and then among the
Anglo-American political elites, mainly expressed the new
requirements of the economic elites, in view of the aforementioned changes in
the objective conditions.
In contrast to the Liberal Old Right
that
was founded on tradition, hierarchy and political philosophy, the neoliberal New
Right’s credo was based on the belief of economic ‘democracy’ through the
market and individualism,
in the sense of the citizen's liberation from `dependence' on the welfare state.
Ironically,
the main demand of the New Left for
self-determination and autonomy was embraced by the neoliberals and was
reformulated
by them in a distorted form as a demand for self-determination through the
market! In this sense, the
neoliberal agenda has a striking similarity with the analysis of the neoliberal
trend within the postmodern movement, what we may call ‘neoliberal
postmodernism’ (see section 7).
The neoliberal movement, when it came to power, first in Britain and the
USA and later on (in the form mainly of the present ‘social-liberal’
governments) all over the advanced market economies and beyond, introduced a
series of structural changes, which characterise the present neoliberal
form of modernity. Such changes were the liberalisation of markets and
particularly of the labour market --with the aim to make it ‘flexible’
through the abolition of the full employment commitment, the encouragement of
part time and occasional work and so on; the liberalisation of commodity markets
through GATT and the World Trade Organisation; the liberalisation of capital
markets through the lifting
of exchange and other controls; the privatisation
of state enterprises --which enhanced the ‘individualistic‘ character of
this form of modernity compared with the mildly ‘collectivist’ character of
statist modernity; the drastic shrinking
of
the welfare state and its replacement by a safety net and the parallel
privatisation of social services (health, education, social security); and,
finally, the redistribution of taxes in favour of high income groups which
further enhanced the concentration of income and wealth.
As a result of these changes,
by the early 1990s, an almost fully liberal order has been created across the
OECD region, giving market actors a degree of freedom that they had not held
since the 1920s.
At the same time, the
internationalisation of the neoliberal market economy coincided with significant
technological changes (information revolution) which marked the shift of the
market economy into a post-industrial phase that resulted in a drastic change in
the employment (and consequently the class) structure of advanced market
economies with significant political and social implications.
As a result of these technological changes, the nature of the production process
has changed and is characterised today by ‘de-massification’ and
diversification, in place of the mass production that was particularly dominant
in the era of statist modernity. However, neither “de-massification”, nor
the growing diversification of production has affected the degree of
concentration of economic power at the company level,
which has continued growing over the entire period since the emergence of
neoliberal modernity. Furthermore, the combined effect of the
‘objective‘ and ‘subjective’ factors I mentioned was that the
internationalisation of the market economy has accelerated sharply since the
1970s.
It
is therefore obvious that this new form of modernity is in a much better
position to succeed in creating a self-regulating economy than the previous
forms of modernity since the basic factor that led to the collapse of the latter
has been eliminated, that is, the restrictions on the markets for commodities,
labour and capital that have introduced various degrees of ‘inflexibility’
into them. Such restrictions represented, of course, society's self-protection
mechanisms against its marketisation but, as such, were incompatible with the
‘efficient’ functioning of the market economy. Since the present neoliberal
consensus (adopted by both conservative and social-liberal parties in
government) has eliminated most of these restrictions, a historic opportunity
has been created for the marketisation process to be completed.
In
this sense and with hindsight, it is now obvious that Polanyi was wrong in
thinking that the statist form of modernity was evidence of the utopian
character of the self-regulating market and of the existence of an “underlying
social process”
which leads societies to take control of their market economies. In fact, the
statist form of modernity proved to be a relatively brief interlude in the
marketisation process and merely a transitional phenomenon, mainly due to the
failure of the liberal form of modernity to create a system based on an
internationalised self-regulating market economy, and, of course, to the
parallel rise of the socialist movement.
In
fact, the present form of modernity meets all four conditions which, according
to Polanyi, have to be met for a successful self-regulating market economy.
Thus, first, the universalisation of the flexible markets for commodities,
labour and capital is more advanced than ever before in History; second, the
liberal state, in the form of representative ‘democracy’, has today been
universalised after its virtual demise in many parts of the world during the
statist form of modernity; third, the balance-of-power system,
after the collapse of Soviet statism which was undermining the
institutions of modernity, has been re-established; and finally, the
international monetary system is moving again,
after the successful launching of the Euro, towards the establishment of
some kind of fixed parities between the three major international currencies
(Euro, US dollar and yen) in the first instance, and, at the end,
into some sort of an international version of the Gold Standard
system--in other words, into a global monetary system (and possibly a single
currency) in a new interlinked economic space which would unify the richest
parts of the world.
However,
the present neoliberal form of modernity
should not simply be seen as completing the cycle that started with the
emergence of liberal modernity. In fact, it represents a new synthesis, which
avoids the extremes of pure liberalism, by combining the essentially
self-regulating markets of liberal modernity with various elements of a
‘mild’ statism: safety nets and various controls in place of the welfare
state, “new protectionist” non-tariff barriers (NTBs), such as export
restraints and orderly marketing arrangements, direct or indirect subsidies to
export industries, and so on.
The
conclusion from the above analysis is that the neoliberal liberalisation of the
market economy and the associated internationalisation of it do not simply
represent a change of policy brought about by some cultural decadence but that
in fact they express a significant
structural change (although not a break with the past) which marks the entry
into a new form of modernity. This is also illustrated by the fact that the
basic elements of neoliberalism have already been incorporated into the
strategies of the international institutions which control the world economy (IMF,
World Bank), as well as in the treaties that have recently reformed the EU
(Single Market Act, Maastricht Treaty, Amsterdam Treaty). It is for this reason
that once
the internationalised neoliberal market economy was institutionalised, the
political parties in government, either conservative or ‘socialist’, had
to follow the same policies in order to protect the competitive position of the
economic elites, on which further growth (and their own political survival)
depends.
The
present situation, although not
a break with modernity, it does differ significantly not only from the
statist form of modernity, as I attempted to show above,
but also from its liberal form
and
this is why it constitutes a new form of modernity.
To mention some significant differences between the liberal and the
neoliberal forms of modernity, it is noteworthy that today’s emerging
‘postmodern’ paradigm, unlike that of the liberal (and the statist) form of
modernity, is not based on some sort of ‘scientific’ truth.
Also, economic growth, unlike in the liberal form of
modernity (and even more so in statist modernity), is not identified
anymore with progress. The idea of progress
is not fashionable anymore after the attacks it received recently from
all sources: from ecologists, up to the new irrationalists and Third Wordists.
Instead, growth per se, growth for the improvement in material welfare and open
consumerism, has become the prevailing ideology today.
In
this problematique, I would disagree with the argument that today’s situation
is a revival of liberal modernity. Within the same problematique, I would
disagree, also, with Arran Gare’
that it was the rise of the postmodern movement, which, expressing a kind of
cultural failure and decadence, undermined the radical version of modernism,
promoted the decadence of social democracy and helped facilitate the
triumph of neo-liberalism and the reinvigoration and globalisation of the market
economy. Gare is of course right in pointing out that that the biggest factor
leading to this decadence was today’s concentration of power, although
he does not
take the extra
step and examine the relationship between the main political and economic
institutions of modernity (representative ‘democracy’ and market economy)
and the present concentration of power, which is the inevitable outcome of the
dynamics of these institutions. However, to simply blame this decadence for the
rise of neoliberalism and postmodernism ignores the structural changes that led to the present neoliberal
form of modernity. Furthermore, although one would agree with Gare that
post-modern theory has been used as an ‘ideology’ to legitimise neoliberal
modernity, it should not be forgotten that postmodernism developed mostly
independently of these structural changes, as the result of a combination of
parallel developments at the epistemological level (the crisis of
‘objectivism’ and ‘scientism’), the ideological level (the decline of
Marxism that was linked to the collapse of ‘actually existing socialism’,)
and the ecological level (the vast ecological crisis which cast a serious doubt
on the meaning of progress).
So,
given that Marxists of almost all persuasions, postmodernists, as well as
supporters of the inclusive democracy paradigm, all agree that the 1970s did
mark the beginning of a new period, the issue is whether this new period
corresponds to a break with modernity, a postmodern era, or whether instead it
simply represents a continuation of modernity, what we called a new neoliberal
form of it.
For
many postmodern theorists the new period represents a rupture, which is as great
as the rupture between modern and premodern societies. Paradoxically, however,
even founders of postmodernism are sometimes ambivalent about this crucial issue
concerning the nature of today’s society. It is indicative for instance that
what Perry Anderson calls ‘the first book
to treat postmodernity as a general change of human circumstance’, Lyotard’s
The Postmodern condition, classifies
postmodernism as part of the modern, (which
it considers as a constant state), a kind of internal renewal of it rather than
a rupture with it. Thus, as Lyotard puts it: ‘what, then, is the postmodern?
What place does it or does it not occupy in the vertiginous work of the
questions hurled at the rules of age and narration? It is undoubtedly a part of
the modern’. On the other hand, for
those of the liberal side of postmodernism, who usually identify modernity with
industrialism, the end of statism and the emergence of post-industrial society
are synonymous with the rise of a new era of postmodernity, if not with the end
of History itself!.
In
the Marxist space we may distinguish the following trends. For some Marxists,
the rise of postmodernity was marked by the restructuring of global capitalism
and the emergence of a new regime of ‘flexible accumulation’ in which
autonomous financial markets significantly limited the economic sovereignty of
nation–states. For other Marxists
the features of flexible accumulation are not as important as to significantly
reduce the state’s economic sovereignty, whereas postmodernism in the arts was
a figment so that what in fact happened was only a gradual degradation of
modernism itself, as a result not of economic or cultural changes but mainly of
political changes, i.e. the political defeat of the radical generation of the
late sixties. Finally, for Marxists
of the ex-New Left variety,
postmodernism is a real phenomenon which emerged, also in the seventies, within
the context of three new ‘historical coordinates’: first, the virtual
extinction of the bourgeois class and its replacement by an ensemble of
administrators and speculators of contemporary capital with ‘no stable
identities’; second, the technological inventions that transformed again urban
life, notably colour television; and, third, the political changes that followed
the political ferment of the sixties and particularly the rise of the
neoliberal Right in the USA and UK that
led to the collapse of the regimes in Eastern Europe and the abandonment of the
old social democratic goals.
It is therefore clear that the Left, and particularly the Marxist
version of it, never grasped the significance of the rise of neoliberalism in
the
mid 1970s, which, to my mind, marked the start of a shift towards a new form of
modernity and not just a change in policy, as Marxists of various persuasions
maintain: from Alex Callinicos,
the theoretical guru of British Trotskyites, at the end of the 1980s, to Eric
Hobsbawm, the doyen of Marxist historians, who, together with other equally
perceptive former Marxism Today writers, as late as 1998, were still
proclaiming the end of neo-liberalism’!
In fact, recent developments in the internationalised market economy fulfilled
the prediction made in TID that, in the competition between the
Anglo-American model of capitalism and the European ‘social market’ model,
the latter had no chance to survive because, as I put it at the time of writing
(1995-1996), ‘it is not a model for future capitalism but a remnant of the
statist phase of marketisation which obviously cannot survive the present
internationalisation of the market economy’.
However, the Marxist Left still seems very surprised by the final predominance
of the Anglo-American version of neoliberalism over the European ‘social
democratic model’, and the fact that the latter not only did not attempt to
undermine the former but also effectively has copied it, to the dismay of the ex
‘New Left’! In fact, one may argue
that
it was this profound failure of the Left to grasp the fact that neoliberalism represents not just a policy change
but a structural change marking the shift to a new form of modernity, and the
parallel confusion of modernity with industrialism, that have led to the myth
about a new era of postmodernity.
In my view, the significant changes at the economic level I mentioned, as
well as the changes at the political, the scientific, the theoretical and the
cultural levels I am going to consider in the rest of the paper, in no way
constitute a rupture with the past, similar to the rupture marking the move from
the traditional to the modern society. Although the present changes do amount to
significant structural changes, they are always changes
within the
existing structures rather than changes of the structures themselves. But,
to talk about a rupture, or a transition towards a new structure, one would have
to show convincing signs of new forms of economic and political
organisation beyond the market economy and representative
‘democracy’, the two fundamental institutions characterising modern
society, and such signs are simply non-existent. Far from it, these institutions
are not only still surviving but, in fact, are being increasingly
universalised and are spreading all over the world.
Therefore,
the hypothesis that advanced market economies have entered a postmodern era, or
even a transitional period towards it, is invalid. In fact, the emergence of the
internationalised ‘new economy’, as well as that of post-industrial society
and the consequent rise of the
‘knowledge class’, can simply
be seen as a stage in the development of the market economy and industrial
society that emerged in the modern era, i.e. as the result of long-term trends
implicit in the marketisation process and the science-based industrialization
rather than any break with it.
But
let us now consider the differences involved in the shift to modernity compared
to the shift to the mythical postmodernity at the political, the scientific, the
cultural and the theoretical levels.
4.
Political structures of modernity and ‘postmodernity’
The starting point in the following analysis,
which I expanded elsewhere long before postmodernism became fashionable,
is the idea that there can be no
‘general theory’ of History, which could determine the relationship between
the cultural and the political or economic elements in society. In other words,
the Marxist view that the economic base determines the cultural superstructure,
even if it is only ‘in the last instance’, has to be discarded and assumed
instead that the dominant element in each social formation is not determined,
for all time, by the economic base, or any other base. The dominant element is
always determined by a creative act, i.e. it is the outcome of social
praxis,
of the activity of social individuals.
Thus,
the dominant element in theocratic societies like that of Iran or Afghanistan is
cultural, in the societies of ‘actually existing socialism’ was political
and so on. Similarly, the dominant element in market economies is economic, as a
result of the fact that the introduction, during the Industrial Revolution, of
new systems of production in the context of a commercial society, where the
means of production were under private ownership and control, inevitably led to
the transformation of the socially- controlled economies of the past into the
present market economies. This is why the members of the ruling elite in
modern societies (market economies) are basically drawn from the economic
sphere, whereas in premodern societies (pre-market economies) they were drawn
from other spheres (political-military, cultural etc).
Still,
the existence of a dominant element does not preclude autonomy of the other
elements. The relation between the various elements is asymmetrical (in the
sense that in market economies the economic element conditions the political
element and vice versa in actually existing socialism) but it is also a relation
of autonomy and interdependence. In other words, culture, economics and politics
are not independent ‘spheres’. In fact, they are interdependent even in
market economies where the separation into spheres is obvious. On the other
hand, in premodern societies, it is not even possible to distinguish between the
various spheres that constitute an integrated totality, and we are only making
these distinctions here for systematic reasons.
Thus, there was no division between economy and society in premodern societies
and even the division between polity and society was not always evident (the 200
hundred history of Athenian democracy is an obvious example) let alone the
division between society and other spheres (cultural etc).
In
this problematique, there is a definite rupture in the shift from premodern to
modern political structures. In premodern societies there was no single form of
political structure appropriate to them and as the main element characterising
the totality was non-economic the forms of political structure ranged from
(partial) democracy in classical Athens to various forms of oligarchic regimes
in ancient Rome and the Middle Ages. On the other hand, the typical form of
political structure in a modern society, which can be shown to be more
consistent than any other political structure form (theoretically as well as
historically) with the market economy, is the representative (liberal)
‘democracy’. However, there are significant variations between the various
forms of political structures in the era of modernity. Thus, the representative
‘democracy’ of liberal modernity evolved
into a political system of a much higher degree of concentration of
political power in the hands of the executive during the statist era, both in
the West and, even more so, in the East. This system is presently being replaced
by new internationalised political structures to fit the already
internationalised economic structures. Thus, in
neoliberal modernity, the old Westphalian system of sovereign nation-states is
being replaced by a multi-level system of political-economic entities:
‘micro-regions, traditional states and macro-regions with institutions of
greater or lesser functional scope and formal authority’.
In
fact, the trend toward the accelerating internationalisation of the market
economy has already led to a debate about the future of politics and democracy,
‘as we know them’ in modern society.
However, although the internationalisation of the market economy does challenge
the nation-state that developed in modernity, there is no reason to assume that
it also challenges the fundamental political institution of modernity:
representative ‘democracy’. Far from it, as we have seen in the last
section, this institution has now expanded to the Third World and even to the
old Second World, in which a determined
attempt
was made to develop new political structures during Soviet statism. So, as the
traditional differences between liberals and socialists over the role of the
state in today’s’ neoliberal form of modernity are phased out, the
consequence is the demeaning of even this distorted form of ‘democracy’,
with electoral contests becoming expensive beauty contests between the leaders
of bureaucratic parties, characterised by minimal programmatic differences and a
common objective: state-craft, that is, the management of power.
However, it is interesting to
note that it is not the Left anymore which attempts to degrade representative
‘democracy’. The Left-- from Bobbio, who characterised liberal democracy as the ‘only
possible form of an effective democracy’
to
Habermas and from mainstream Greens to postmodernists-- has wholeheartedly
nowadays embraced liberal ‘democracy’. Thus,as
Perry Anderson, the New Left Review editor, points out referring to the adoption
of representative ‘democracy’ and the market economy by prominent Left
figures like Lyotard, Habermas, Hassan and Jencs:
common to all was subscription to the principles of
what Lyotard —once the most radical— called liberal democracy, as the
unsurpassable horizon of the time. There could be nothing but capitalism. The
postmodern was a sentence on alternative illusions
Today,
it is the turn of the economic
elites which control the market economy to downgrade representative democracy in
favour of the markets and the ‘new social movements
―presumably
as less threatening to their power than even representative ‘democracy’ is― using
in the process of doing so the postmodern discourse.
Thus,
as Thomas Frank argues in a recent book on what he calls ‘market populism’,
the new ideology promoted by the economic elites is that markets is a far more
democratic institution than representative ‘democracy’ because, in addition
to mediums of exchange, they are mediums of consent, a powerful tool of economic
democracy! Furthermore, management
theory of the 1990s, using language reminiscent of postmodern theory, defines
the problems of the corporation as those arising because of the fact that the
individual worker is voiceless, oppressed by bureaucratic unions-- the real
problems of today being on how to ‘empower the individual’ and to fight
against ‘certainty’ and elitism. Not surprisingly, Demos
writer Charles Leadbeater, also embracing the market economy, uses postmodern
theory to celebrate the intrinsic link between the dawning ‘knowledge
economy’ (which thrives on a culture of dissent, dispute, disrespect for
authority, diversity and experimentation’) and ‘democracy’, and concludes
that to fully swallow the ways of ‘the New Economy’ (i.e. the neoliberal
form of modernity) we would have to adopt a new narrative, ‘an engaging and
compelling account of the future that captures the popular imagination , and
which people can buy into, endorsing and enacting in their own lives’.
Finally,
Newsweek, celebrating the end
of the twentieth century, did not hesitate to call it ‘the people’s
century’, on account of the fact that, as its columnist Kenneth Auchincloss
put it, for once in human history ‘ordinary folks changed history’. Of
course, these ‘ordinary folks’ were not the Russian workers who took part in
the 1917 uprising, nor the Spanish anarchists and other radicals who fought in
the civil war, not even the students and workers who took part in the May 1968
uprising but, instead, the feminists, the anti-war and civil rights movements
and…entrepreneurs like Bill Gates!
It
is not, of course, surprising that the ‘new social movements’ do not seem
threatening to the ruling elites. The neoliberal form of modernity is associated
with the fear of unemployment and uncertainty concerning the ability to
adequately cover basic needs (health, education, housing). This uncertainty, in
turn, has contributed significantly to the retreat of radical currents within
the feminist movement, the withdrawal of students from public life, the
withering away of labour militancy and so on. At the same time, the hope
invested in the Green movement has already faded, since the dominant trends
within it do not challenge the fundamental institutions of the market economy
but, instead, either adopt the social-democratic ideology of enhancing the civil
society and resort to environmentalism (Europe) or, alternatively, turn to
irrationalism and mysticism (USA). The active role that the disgraceful European
Green parties played in NATO’s crime against the people of Yugoslavia,
which, as it is now revealed, implicitly agreed even to the use of a form of
nuclear weapon (depleted uranium) in NATO’s bombardments (whereas they still
protest against nuclear energy!) has effectively extinguished any hopes that the
Green movement could play a liberatory role in today’s society.
5.
A paradigm shift in science?
The
strongest claims in favour of the view that advanced market economies have
entered a postmodern era, or at least a postmodern turn, are made with respect
to science, the arts, theory and culture generally. As Best and Kellner
point out in their excellent presentation of the case for a postmodern turn:
‘The
scientific developments we just described have significant similarities to
recent changes in the arts and social theory, leading us to believe there is a
postmodern paradigm shift taking place in multiple fields of knowledge and the
arts. It appears that the epistemological, metaphysical, and ethical assumptions
about the nature of the world are rapidly changing in all fields, creating new
configuration of thought, what Kuhn calls a “paradigm shift.” In his most
general sense of the term, a “paradigm” is an “entire constellation of
beliefs, values, techniques, and so on shared by the members of a given community”.
We have argued in the previous chapters that we are currently undergoing a major
paradigm shift within the culture at large, parallel to the shift from
premodern to modern societies and from medieval to modern theory’.
One immediate point that should be made here is that, as I argued in the
last section, there is no causal relationship, even an indirect one, between
changes in the economic and political structures and changes in the scientific,
theoretical or cultural levels. Therefore the structural changes in the economic
and political structures which mark the move to the neoliberal form of modernity
(or to ‘postmodernity’ according to postmodernists) do not necessarily imply
corresponding changes in science or culture and, vice versa, any changes in the
latter do not necessarily imply changes in the former, as –rather
inconsistently with the core of postmodern theory--some postmodernists seem to
imply in their effort to justify their thesis for a move to a postmodern
society. Here however a brief digression is needed
to introduce the concept of the ‘‘dominant social paradigm’’
(which has to be distinguished from culture that is a broader term).
We
shall define the ‘dominant social paradigm’ as
the
system of beliefs, ideas and the corresponding values, which are dominant (or
tend to become dominant) in a particular society at a particular moment of its
history, as most consistent with the existing political, economic and social
institutions. The term ‘most consistent’ does not imply of course any kind
of structure/superstructure relationship a la Marx. Both culture and the social
paradigm are time- and space-dependent, i.e. they refer to a specific type of
society at a specific time. Therefore, they both change from place to place and
from one historical period to another and this makes any ‘general theory’ of
History, which could determine the relationship between the cultural
and the political or economic elements in society, impossible. Culture,
exactly because of its greater scope, may express values and ideas, which are
not necessarily consistent with the dominant institutions. In fact, this is
usually the case characterising the arts and literature of a modern society,
where, unlike the case of feudal
societies before, artists and writers have been given a significant degree of
freedom to express their own views. But, this is not the case with respect to
the ‘dominant social paradigm’. In other words, the beliefs, ideas and the
corresponding values that are dominant in a market economy, have to be
consistent with the economic element in it, i.e. with the economic institutions.
This has always been the case in History and will also be the case in the
future. No particular type of society can reproduce itself unless the dominant
beliefs, ideas and values are consistent with the existing institutional
framework.
But, let us come back to the recent paradigmatic changes. There is little
doubt that there have been significant recent developments in the scientific,
theoretical and cultural fields. However, as I argued above--and on this many
postmodernists would agree—even if the aforementioned developments amount to a
paradigm shift in the Kuhnian sense, namely, in the sense of a break, or rupture
with the previous paradigm, a paradigm shift by itself, does not indicate a move
to a new era. This is particularly so if the present paradigm shift does not
bear any comparison with the major break that characterised the move from
premodern to modern society, as I will argue below. In that case, the paradigm
shift could, at most, justify an hypothesis about a move to a new form of
modernity –an hypothesis which would be further validated if it could be shown
that this paradigm shift is consistent with a move of this nature and that the paradigm itself, in its new form, is fast becoming the
dominant social paradigm in today’s neoliberal modernity. The fact that within
the postmodern paradigm there are ‘oppositional’ currents arguing against
the symptoms (but usually not against the institutional causes) of neoliberal
modernity, does not of course invalidate this hypothesis. Similar dissenting
voices-- in fact much more radical-- were also present during the previous forms
of modernity (libertarian and statist socialists, anarchists and so on)
The
move from premodern to modern society represented not just a radical change in
society’s political and economic structure but also a similar break at the
scientific, the theoretical, and the cultural levels. The work of Newton,
Copernicus, Kepler, Bacon, Galileo, and Descartes was not simply important per
se, i.e. for their fundamental contributions to science, but because it
established the authority and autonomy of reason, which dominated all
philosophising and theorising of modern society since then. Reason, of course,
was not discovered in the Enlightenment era. The philosophers of ancient Greece
had first explored the powers and uses of reason that was the basis of both
ancient Greek philosophy and democracy, which, not accidentally, flourished,
together in classical Athens. However, apart from this relatively brief
historical interval, the dominant social paradigm of premodern society was not
based on reason but on irrational beliefs of various kinds (religions,
superstitions, animistic beliefs etc), whereas in the Middle Ages, religious
irrationalism in the form of Christianity constituted the main element of
the dominant social paradigm. In fact, it was in reaction to theological
‘explanations’ of the world that scientific explanations were developed in
the Enlightenment, on the assumption that knowledge should be used not to serve
God but, rather, to serve the needs of human beings.
The
revival of reason was based not simply on the propaganda of people like
Descartes and Leibniz but mainly upon the conviction that for the intellectual
conquest of the natural world reason had really worked. It was the enthusiasm
born out of these scientific successes that gave rise to the second main element
of the Enlightenment: the idea of progress. However, the fact that progress was
identified with economic growth had nothing to do with reason, or with science
for that matter. Progress wqs
identified with growth when the grow-or-die dynamic of the market economy, which
was established during the Industrial Revolution and
the scientific discoveries of the 18th century and their
technological applications, gave
rise to the growth ideology. So, as I attempted to show in TID,
it is not the ‘growth ideology’, which is the exclusive or even the main
cause of the emergence of the growth economy, as most Greens, ecofeminists and
various irrationalists (New Agers and the likes) argue. The growth ideology has
simply been used to justify ‘objectively’ the market economy and its
dynamics—a dynamics that inevitably led to the capitalist growth economy.
However,
the facts that the same idea of progress (as development of productive forces)
has also been adopted by radical modernists like Marx and that the growth
ideology became the ultimate ideological foundation for all forms of modernity,
liberal or statist, had the result that the same ethic to dominate Nature, which
led to today’s’ ecological crisis, became part of the dominant social
paradigm’ in both the East and the West. This was a fact of tremendous
importance given that, as Marxists of the Frankfurt School and libertarians like Murray Bookchin
have shown, there is an intrinsic relationship between the domination of nature
and the domination of human beings in a subject-object relationship in which
men are the subjects, while nature, women, slaves are the objects of domination.
So,
the fact that the modern scientific paradigm was both anthropocentric and
patriarchal, or generally based on the idea of domination, was not the cause of
the dominating character of modernity, as Greens, feminists and others in the
‘new social movements’ naively (or often deliberately in order to avoid
marginalisation by the establishment) assume. Modern scientists were simply
adopting the ‘dominant social paradigm’, the main values of which were
anthropocentric, patriarchal and were extolling progress in the form of growth.
The very fact that the so-called ‘postmodern’ scientific paradigm is much
more Nature-friendly and much less patriarchal than the modern one, although it
is still based on the same principles of reason and
growth, is a proof of this.
Still,
the fact that the scientific paradigm, on which the scientific successes of
modernity were based, was a mechanistic one, based on certainty and objective
truth, had very important implications. As it is well known, the major
architects of the modern world-view (Galileo, Bacon, Descartes, and Newton) saw
the cosmos as a vast machine governed by universal and invariable laws, which
function in a stable and orderly way that can be comprehended and controlled
by the rational mind. A side effect of the predominance of this mechanistic
paradigm was that even the radical critiques of modernity, notably by Marx, were
also based on the same mechanistic paradigm. This was inevitable in view of the
fact that for many Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment thinkers, the project of
establishing a science of history and society presupposed the ability to
formulate hypotheses and laws of an explanatory power analogous to that attained
by theories in the physical sciences. In their effort to transcend religious and
metaphysical conjectures concerning the destiny of human affairs, radical
critics of modernity took it for granted that their task was one of
constructing, upon the basis of hard observable facts, interpretations that
would not only rescue the human studies from ignorance, uncertainty, and
primitive superstition but also give them an instrument (complete with ‘its
own ‘laws’) for predicting and controlling the future. Thus, the modern
paradigm adopted by both supporters of liberal modernity and its critics was
deterministic, ‘objectivistic’ and, mechanistic, in an explicit attempt to
be taken as seriously as the scientific
paradigm.
It
was in reaction to the mechanistic and deterministic worldview of Newtonian
Physics that a series of developments took place in the twentieth century which,
for postmodernists, mark the emergence of a postmodern paradigm based on
concepts such as entropy, evolution, organism, indeterminacy, probability,
relativity, complementarily, chaos, complexity, and self-organization.
Furthermore, as Best and Kellner point out, ‘in significant ways this new mode
of thought is congruent with changes that have occurred in social theory, and it
also overlaps with recent shifts in the arts, suggesting that the postmodern
turn is not merely a sign game, struggle for cultural capital, or frivolous fad
but, rather, concerns the construction of a new transdisciplinary paradigm.
These developments, according to the same authors, refer to at least five major
areas, some of which emerged in the 19th century but most flourished in the 20th
century: thermodynamics; evolutionary biology and ecology; quantum mechanics
and relativity theory; cybernetics and information theory; and chaos and
complexity theory. As a result of such changes, Best and Kellner argue, a
transition has been effected ‘from mechanical dynamics to thermodynamics, from
a static and deterministic view of life to a new theory of
“dissipative structures” based on principles of complexity,
self-organization, and order emerging from the “chaos’ of nonequilibrium
conditions. Change and time introduce instability and disorder into the world,
but these in turn create new and more complex forms of order’.
Also, postmodernists argue, it was as a result of such scientific developments
as the development of the framework of entropy, that the idea of progress has
been challenged in the present period —although one may argue here that the
framework of entropy was developed much before the supposed beginning of the
postmodern shift in the 1970s and that it was the massive realisation of the
eco-catastrophic implications of growth in the period of neoliberal modernity
that effectively challenged progress rather than any scientific developments.
However, despite the fact that, as a result of these developments,
science today is much less mechanistic than it used to be, it would be wrong to
conclude that today’s’ world is not organised anymore around
science and quantitative reasoning, or even that it is showing tendencies
to move away from science and quantitative reasoning, when in fact computer
science, celebrated by postmodern writers as the science of the future, is very
much based on them. Furthermore, ‘instrumental knowledge’, (i.e.,
knowledge for the sake of domination), is still the prevailing type of
knowledge and is bound to be so in the future, as long as the economic and
political institutions of modernity (market economy, representative
‘democracy’) prevail, irrespective of scientific or theoretical developments
like the ones emphasised by postmodernists. Best and Kellner
themselves also notice the continuities between modern and ‘postmodern’
science, although, of course, they give much more emphasis to the significant
shifts involved:
At a
general level, there are some significant continuities between modern and
postmodern science, but there are also fundamental shifts and reversals,
involving tenets of modern science that postmodern science repudiates. Both
modern and postmodern science utilize experimental and empirical methods of
hypothesis, observation, experiment, and prediction; both are interested in
detecting order, in control, and in discovering laws and regularities.
But, apart from the continuities, it is not accidental that accidentally,
some important tools of ‘postmodern’
science, like systems theory and complexity, have already been used widely to
legitimise the neoliberal form of modernity.
Particularly so if, ,
as I
attempted to show elsewhere,
one may raise serious reservations on whether such tools may offer useful
insights in the interpretation of social
reality
(as opposed to that of natural reality) and whether they are compatible at all,
both from the epistemological point of view and that of their content, with a
radical analysis aiming to systemic change towards an inclusive democracy.
Similarly,
the fact that, according for instance to Bohr’s theory of complementarity,
reality is irreducibly plural and complex and no single theoretical description
can exhaust it—a fact, which implies that various languages and perspectives
are needed in the analysis of reality -- could not be used to justify the
postmodern view that social reality as well cannot be explained in terms of a
single tradition (the Lyotardian idea that the world is
fragmented
into a plurality of discourses each local and autonomous). This could easily end
up with the sort of conformism characterising most postmodern theorists.
Clearly, even if the theory of complementarily is a useful tool in the analysis
of natural reality, the same cannot be held with respect to the analysis of
social reality, unless we assign to this theory a status of ‘objectivity’,
so much despised by postmodernists. But, if we reject this status and we have to
deliberately select the criteria we use to interpret social reality, in full
knowledge that our criterion of choice is axiomatic and that our conclusions do
not claim any ‘objective’ validity,
then, obviously, we cannot rely on a multi-perspective interpretation of social
reality (can we use both the autonomy and the heteronomy tradition, or both the
socialist and the fascist ideology to interpret social reality?)
It is perhaps
in only one sense that ‘postmodern’ science does break from modern science.
This is the sense defined by Griffin,
according to whom, ‘postmodern science seeks to loosen the boundary between
scientific and “non-scientific knowledge” in order to incorporate other
realms of knowledge and value in the sciences, involving “a new unity of
scientific, ethical, aesthetic, and religions intuitions” and a “creative
synthesis” of premodern, modern, and postmodern ideas.’ But, if this is the
only sense in which so called postmodern science really breaks from modern
science, then, those in the Marxist
or anarchist side who criticise
postmodernism as a form of irrationalism are right. Similarly, one may argue that if all postmodernist
critique amounts to is basically a denunciation of progress, ‘objectivity’
and’ certainty’, this is no reason either to go back to irrationalism.
Without retreating to primitive ways of thinking we can still achieve the same
result by resorting to an analysis based on reason
rather than one based on the insights of Taoism or Zen! As Guy Debord,
the founder of situationism, aptly put it referring to the crisis of (but also
the need for) science:
When
official science has come to such a pass, like all the rest of the social
spectacle… It is not surprising to see a similar and widespread revival of the
authority of seers and sects, of vacuum packed Zen or Mormon theology.
Ignorance, which has always served the authorities well, has also always been
exploited by ingenious ventures on the fringes of the law.
In fact, the irrational element, despite the efforts of rationalist
postmodernists (usually of the post-Marxist variety) to downgrade it, exercised a decisive influence in the postmodern paradigm.
Jeremy Rifkin’s New Age ecometaphysics and mystical tendencies that
‘wax poetically about love, the “timeless” realm of the spirit, and the
‘natural goodness of the cosmic process’
are well known. Furthermore, it is not accidental that postmodern science has
been linked with ecology mainly through deep ecology, which is considered a form
of postmodern ecology, but which at the same time, as Best and Kellner admit, is
‘typically mystical, and its deification of nature usually leads to neglect of
the socio-economic forces that are destroying nature’.
It is obvious
that the irrational trends in ecology and postmodernism in general have their
origin in the collapse of the myth of progress. However, the collapse of this
myth does not mean that we have to go back to forms of irrationalism in order to
criticise the modern techno-science, or that, alternatively, we have to fall
into the trap of positivism. The alternative to objective rationalism,
‘certainty’, and’ objectivity’, as well as to irrationalism
is not, as I attempted to show in TID,
a ‘postmodern’ relativism which equates all traditions, either they are
based on philosophy, (which to be
true to itself has to be based not on ‘given’ truths but on constant
questioning), or to some form of closed system.
The
real alternative to positivism and irrationalism is the development of a
democratic rationalism
that transcends both, namely, a rationalism founded on democracy as a structure
and a process of social self-institution, which implies the democratic adoption
of those traditions and body of knowledge
which have their sources on (and are processed by) reason, rather than on
religious or other intuitions. This means that the only admissible ‘truths’,
including values and ethical codes
conditioning individual behaviour, are those rationally derived (i.e.
through reason and open discussion rather than through Revelation, intuition,
myth, or a closed system of ideas or ‘scientific’ truths)
and democratically decided on. In fact, if there was any progress in the
last quarter of the century this was perhaps due to the fact that it is now
widely recognised that the content of progress itself can only be determined
through a conscious choice between various
traditions. To my mind, the only tradition which could determine the content of
progress in a way that is compatible
with
freedom itslef is none other than the democratic tradition which is based on
individual and social autonomy.
Finally,
democratic rationalism also differs radically from postmodernism with respect to
the issue of how ideology can be fought today. It is of course true that
(positivist) ideology today, in the way it has moved from the pages of books
proper and expanded into everyday culture (through television, newspapers, magazines, school and college
textbooks, even academic social science), has become domination. It is also
true, as I argued above, that ideology
cannot be challenged by an appeal to ‘objective’ rationalism and
‘science’ since, as regards social reality in particular, there can never be
any ‘objective’ or ‘scientific’ way to ‘represent’ it. However this
does not mean, as postmodernists suggest, that ideology can only be challenged
by alternative ‘rhetorical versions that
acknowledge their grounding in non-logocentric language,’
on the assumption that method and science do not play a much different role
today than ideology and mythology
―or even advertising. Although it is true that positive science does play this
role in the so-called social ‘sciences’, it would be a sweeping
generalisation to extend this characterisation to all kinds of kinds of science,
if not to reason itself, as most postmodernists do. This could easily lead us
again—particularly today!— to the paths of irrationalism (religious or
otherwise) from which some parts of Humanity emerged just a couple of hundreds
of years ago.
So,
the only rational way to fight ideology is through the use of alternative
versions of reality, which, though not founded on any ‘objective’ science or
analysis, still, are not just based on a ‘non-logocentric language’ but on
an alternative view of social reality, which we grasp
through a ‘subjectively’ rational analysis of it. ‘Subjectively’,
because we use a particular criterion we have selected in advance
to do it. ‘Rational’ because our analysis uses only reason in the
processing of data and the assessment of alternative descriptions of reality
rather than intuitions or other irrational ways of thinking.
6. A Postmodern art and culture?
Similar observations to the ones made in the last section about science
could be made about ‘postmodernism’ in the arts. The fact that the label
‘postmodernism’ has been given to certain currents in architecture and that
some artists prefer to call themselves postmodernists does not of course, by
itself, establish a postmodern trend in the arts, if by this we mean a new form
of art which breaks with the past, in this case with modern art. At most, such
events may simply indicate the development of just one more art ‘school’, to
be added to the pleiad of schools which proliferated throughout the modern era
and which did not have the luck to discover the term ‘postmodern’.
So, the fact that some recent currents in various arts express different
themes than, say, the themes of liberal or statist modernity, and/or use new
styles does not justify the title of
‘postmodern’
--unless it can be shown that such currents really represent a rupture, in a
similar way that modern art could be shown that it broke with tradition both in
content and in form. And there is little doubt that modern art did represent a
huge break with traditional art. The freedom that modern artists acquired from a
stupefying tradition that, for hundreds of years, had their imagination
‘corseted’ by silly religious themes —miracles, saints and the like― led
to radical innovations, in content and in form, during the era of modernity.
Furthermore, History has repeatedly shown that significant artistic
development has invariably been related to ruptures at the broader social level:
from the artistic achievements of classical Athens up to the flourishing of the
arts in every revolutionary period since then.
No one doubts, of course, that ‘postmodern’ arts do reflect the
prevailing themes of today (anti-narrative, individualism, privacy etc) and that
sometimes use different styles from those of the modern arts. But, again, this
event, by itself, does not legitimise the use of the term ‘postmodern’. In
fact, supporters of the hypothesis of
a postmodern turn also admit this
when they state that ‘although advocates of the postmodern like to champion it
as a break from the modern, there are very few “postmodern” elements that
are completely new or innovative’.
Furthermore, the break of modern art with tradition extended much beyond
the themes and form of traditional art. Artists in the modern era, as every
other producer and creator, had, for the first time in History, to create for an
anonymous self-regulating market, whose rules had to obey,
—a fact which often
put obstacles to originality and the free expression of thought. Today, not only
the market constraints on artists that were introduced in the modern era are
still with them, but they are also reinforced
to an unprecedented degree. Art in all its forms has today been more
commercialised than ever before, as a result of the fact that social (usually
state) subsidies have been drastically reduced, in the content of the neoliberal
form of economic organisation —a development which often forces artists to
self-censor themselves in their struggle to get support from the economic
elites. As a consequence, art has become even more profit-oriented than in the
previous forms of modernity. The inevitable outcome of this development was that
the arts have now been deluged by the trivial, which
attracts ‘customers’ more easily than the avant-garde. Therefore,
what postmodernists celebrate as today’s’ ‘popular’ character of art,
the ‘sharp break from bourgeois elitism and avant-garde art’, or the
‘aesthetic pluralism and populism’ is usually nothing more than an
expression of the anguish of today’s artists in their struggle to survive by
attempting to attract customers, from every source possible.
Likewise, the internationalisation of the market economy in neoliberal
modernity made culture even more commercialised and, at the same time,
homogenised, adding further constraints to the artist’s creativity. The
internationalisation of culture is particularly obvious in consumer and computer
culture (with the internet playing a crucial role in instantaneously conveying
global culture), pop music, film and video, but also in areas like
architecture. In fact, the institutional changes effected by neoliberalism play a
crucial role in the marketisation of culture, since the recent liberalisation
and de-regulation of markets has contributed significantly to the present
cultural homogenisation, with traditional communities and their cultures
disappearing all over the world and people being converted to consumers of a
mass culture produced in the advanced capitalist countries and particularly the
USA.
In the film industry, for instance, even European countries with a strong
cultural background and developed economies face today a drastic shrinking of
their own film industry, unable to compete with the much more competitive US
film industry. In fact, the recent
emergence of a sort of “cultural” nationalism in many parts of the world
expresses a desperate attempt to keep a national cultural identity in the face
of the cultural homogenisation imposed by neoliberal modernity—a vain attempt,
within the existing institutional framework in which over 75 percent of the
international communications flow is controlled by a small number of
multinationals.
The
degradation of the film industry, which is now effectively monopolised by the US
film industry through its huge control of distribution networks, the similar
degradation of the pop music industry (no wonder old pop music hits are back in
fashion—a sure sign of stagnation), the lack of any artistic achievements
similar in importance to the earlier forms of modernity, are all sure signs of
the general retreat in the arts that one observes in what is called
‘postmodern art’,
or what I would call ‘art in the neoliberal era of modernity’.
The film industry in particular can, also,
be used as a useful example to discuss the issue whether today’s trends
in the arts represent a break with the past, or just an evolution of modern
trends. Boggs & Pollard,
in their excellent analysis of today’s’ Hollywood, put forward the case that
a ‘new’ postmodern cinema has been created in the last quarter of a century
or so, which reflects the main elements of today’s reality: i.e. the deepening
of the multidimensional crisis, particularly at the social level (films on crime
and drugs), the political level (films on the cynical manipulation of the
electorate by the political elites and the
mass depoliticization), the ecological level (films on ecological themes)
and, finally, the cultural level
(although in the latter case the crisis is –unintentionally-- reflected by the
films themselves rather than by their themes and
the emphasis they give on technique over content). However, although I
would agree with the authors’ conclusion that the ‘new’ Hollywood cinema
does express, deliberately or not, the main elements of today’s
multidimensional crisis that concern film goers and therefore represent a
potential source of profit for film makers, I would disagree with the
characterisation of this cinema as a kind of ‘new’ cinema representing some
sort of break with the past.
I would argue instead that
the
main trends of modern Hollywood
cinema are reproduced today, so that the characteristics the authors assign to
this ‘new’ cinema fit much
better to a neoliberal cinema reflecting the present form of modernity rather
than to a postmodern cinema representing a supposed break with modern cinema.
The familiar apolitical culture of Hollywood (mainly due to the direct control
that the economic elites have always exercised over its financing) is surely
reproduced in this ‘new’ cinema, even though sometimes it gives the
impression that it deals seriously with social and political issues. A closer
examination however reveals the superficial way in which such issues are treated
by Hollywood, which trivialises them and invariably emphasises the role of the
individual as against collective political action.
A comparison with the way in which some European directors (some of them still
financed by state-controlled institutions) deal with the same problems of
neoliberal modernity (fear of unemployment, homelessness, lack of safe jobs
leading to ‘unsocial’ behaviour —the Belgian film Rosetta being a
beautiful example), is revealing. It is indicative that even when the economic,
or political, or media elites are featured in Hollywood films usually it is the
‘bad guys’ within the elites who are blamed for the abuse of their power and
not the system itself (which concentrated the various forms of power at their
hands in the first instance and conditioned them to behave the way they do). It
is then left to the ‘good guys’ to fight them, so that any malfunctioning of
the system can be eliminated. The ‘heroes’ who dominated modern Hollywood
still exist in ‘postmodern’ Hollywood -- only this time they are not
gangsters or cowboys anymore but policemen, congressmen, even Presidents (Independence
Day, Air Force One)!
In fact, the distinction drawn by postmodernists between a
‘ludic postmodernism’ and a ”postmodernism of resistance”, or
oppositional postmodernisrn does accurately reflect
the deeply conservative nature of today’s Hollywood cinema. Hollywood
productions nowadays reflect both these two trends, namely that of ludic
postmodernism, which seeks just pleasure, and that of ‘postmodernism of
resistance’, which is ‘modestly’ oppositional.
To my mind, the neoliberal form of modernity today has created both the
objective and the subjective conditions for the deeply conservative nature of
today’s Hollywood cinema, which, to a significant extent, is also reflected in
other forms