Rewriting Democracy

Cultural Politics in Postmodernity

Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9780754649724
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351903226
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Illuminating and comprehensive, this excellent volume addresses the problematic relationship between democratic institutions and the current critique of enlightenment and modernity. Since at least the beginning of the twentieth century, and across the range of practice from science to politics to art, various cultural shifts have unsettled assumptions that have been fundamental to the development of democratic institutions: assumptions concerning individual identity, the nature of political systems, and the viability of egalitarian ideals. Can democracy survive these changes to the value systems upon which it has been based for over two centuries? This study does not focus on the often repeated particulars of past or current events such as 9/11 or the genocide in Darfur, but instead examines the terms and conditions under which it would be possible to prevent such events in the future.

Chapter 1
Democracy and Postmodernity: The Problem

Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth

“Everything is writing”

–Julio Cortázar

Although postmodernity has far-reaching implications for democratic institutions and societies, discussion of those implications has tended to eddy rather than flow. Partly this is due to persistently unacknowledged differences in the assumed historical framing of the postmodern, and to the terminological conflicts that result. But it is due also to broader cultural dispositions that make perception of the issues difficult: for example, the deep-dyed empiricism of Anglo-American culture, and an educational system geared to knowledge silos rather than genuinely cross-disciplinary work.

The contributors to this volume were asked to pursue in different directions the broad cultural issues posed for democracies by postmodernity. In other words, to bring cultural material to political interpretation. Presupposed throughout is the idea that politics are ultimately cultural not professional: in other words, politics can be found in the contents of People Magazine as well as in the houses of Parliament or the halls of Congress. This cultural side of politics is not susceptible to ‘science’ in the usual social scientific sense because it involves qualitative values and messy, imbricated, invisible systems of operation, in short, it involves people. At most politics is one of what Foucault called the ‘human sciences’ and involves a living context that does not fully make its way into the rationalizations of social sciences that follow the traditional empiricist approach.

This first chapter describes the basic problematic we address, beginning with the problems of terminology and historical framing. What exactly does the term ‘postmodernity’ indicate? It is relatively obvious that ‘postmodern’ indicates whatever comes after modernity; but there is less agreement about what is meant by the term ‘modern.’ To some the term gets conflated with ‘modernism’ (hence ‘postmodernism’) and as such indicates a fairly local event around the turn of the twentieth century. To others especially in the United States ‘modern’ indicates the era since the eighteenth-century Enlightenment which, for north Americans, was tantamount to Creation. To still others, especially European historians, the term modern marks what differed and departed from the Middle Ages, or the ‘post-medieval’. This volume is most consistent with the last view, that of historians who conceive of modernity in terms of a kind of humanist rationality constructed and disseminated in Renaissance and Reformation Europe. In defining this broadly historical problematic I necessarily take for granted arguments made elsewhere that cannot be repeated here; I refer to them parenthetically for those interested in pursuing a fuller case.

The modernity in question is older than the Enlightenment, but not as old as the rationalism that is traceable to the Greeks: a rationalism that has been targeted by French philosophers such as Lyotard, Irigaray and Derrida who have had so much to do with theorizing the postmodern, whether or not they used that term. Setting the historical frame of modernity at the Renaissance and Reformation allows us to encompass the fullest range of cultural development without slipping, as some deconstruction and post-structuralism have done, into an ahistorical critique of European rationalism. While that nearly ahistorical critique has been immensely creative and seminal, it obscures the profound historical uniqueness of western democracy including its ‘in-dividual’ and even its ‘self-evident’ truths. The Enlightenment does participate in that ancient tradition like so much else in western thought, but it also builds upon the many things that medieval Europe added to its ancient sources. It was Europe not ancient Greece that produced cartography and exploration, empiricism in science and philosophy, and representation based on the universal values of neutrality in science and art.

Getting the historical frame right makes it possible to understand that postmodernity marks paradigmatic change in the Culture of Representation (Ermarth 2001, 37): this entire culture that flourished from the time of Piero della Francesca right through the nineteenth century and that still informs western society. That paradigm, older than the Enlightenment and newer than the Greeks, is what postmodernity puts in question. This is big news but not necessarily bad news.

‘Postmodernity’ is the term to keep in mind, in preference to ‘postmodernism’. The difference between these two terms is not trivial. ‘Postmodernity’ trains attention on the larger historical framework and the larger challenge, not the much smaller ones implied by ‘postmodernism’. What comes after modernism comes after a movement in the arts around 1900. From usage of the term ‘postmodernism’ you might easily miss the fact that with the ‘postmodern’ you are dealing with challenges to a culture that is 600 years old and that continues to ground our definitions of personal, social and political life. ‘Postmodernism’ sounds ephemeral, maybe even like something that is a matter of choice, as if you can choose or not choose postmodernism just as you can choose Protestantism or egalitarianism. In my own writing I began by using the term ‘postmodernism’ and shifted to ‘postmodernity’ when I realized how much the gurus of ‘postmodernism’ were leaving out. The depreciation of what is at stake has succeeded in the United States to the point that, as one scholar put it to me, ‘nobody talks about postmodernism anymore’. However, the challenges presented by ‘postmodernity’ remain. The choice is whether we confront them or continue cycling in denial.

Conditions in higher education have fostered this kind of denial through its profound lack of institutional commitment to genuinely cross-disciplinary work. There is plenty of lip-service to the contrary, a lot of splicing activity that leaves disciplines pretty much intact, and a proliferation of ‘centers’ with marginal institutional support; but all in all, this amounts to very little institutional change in the defining presence of knowledge silos. Publishers and libraries collude in similar ‘field’ definitions. Unfortunately, it is difficult if not impossible fully to grasp what is at stake in postmodernity from within a single field. And this is only one case in which disciplinary narrowness occludes possible knowledge. For example, there are fascinating commonalities between the ground-breaking work of Einstein, Picasso, and Saussure all of whom worked in the early twentieth century. Those commonalities point to a cultural and paradigmatic reformation truly staggering in its implications for the settled values of modernity. But if you explain Einstein in terms of the history of physics, Picasso in terms of the history of art, and Saussure in terms of the history of linguistics you will never even know that any fascinating commonalities between them exist to be interpreted.

Instead, you will encourage the development of one myopic focus after another, no means for seeing any values shared between them, and ‘conclusions’ that are both derived from method and driven by method. For example, to some Marxist interpreters (Jameson 1984) the ‘postmodern’ has meant the arrival of the end of capitalism: a result predictable from the premises of Marxism without substantial reference to cultural evidence. On the other hand, some apologists for capitalism (Fukuyama 1989) find that the ‘postmodern’ signals the permanent arrival of capitalism as the basis of geopolitical world order: another result predictable from the premises of certain forms of market capitalism without substantial reference to cultural evidence. In both cases, we lose sight of what is potentially at stake in postmodernity conceived in broader terms culturally and historically. In the past thirty years have there have been many other discussions that have transgressed the limits set by academic knowledge silos and have branched out in different directions, just as this volume attempts to do, but they worked against the mainstream and through divergent usages of the term ‘postmodern’ (Foucault 1972, Tyler 1987, Hutcheon 1988, Harvey 1989, Poster 1990, Ermarth 1992, Elam 1994, Jenkins 1997 and 1999, Belsey 2002).

In sum, and for present purposes, the term ‘postmodernity’ is preferable to ‘postmodernism’ because it focuses on a post-medieval modernity. That modernity has enjoyed hegemony for several centuries, and the democratic societies that have flourished since the eighteenth century are late manifestations of it. Postmodernity is whatever succeeds that modernity. (Specialists will note in this account that I exclude without explanation the lunatic view that postmodernity is a universal feature of societies in all times and all places.)

Postmodernity thus marks a mutation in the entire culture of modernity – with its deeply rooted representational values, its libraries and universities, its democratic politics and its human rights, its reliance on consensus apparatuses in its art and explanatory systems, its rationality and universal laws, its new kind of descriptive notation that made possible the development of empirical science and of technology, its emphasis on development and production, its reliance on a particular definition of individuality, its faith above all in neutrality and its constructed objectivity. Some of these important founding principles seem ill suited to a technological and global environment where media can be bought and sold and do not act as universal bases for exchange; where power is distributed in oil companies, cartels and World Banks and not individual constituents and, since NAFTA and CAFTA, not even in nation states; where the relatively recent (nineteenth-century) idea of individuality has become inadequate to experience; and where political discourse is hedged around with ideological conflicts and market metaphors.

It is worth noting that the sense of being ‘post’ practically everything (post-colonial, post-Freudian, post-historical, post-feminist) is not entirely new. That anxious sense of being ‘after’ was deep throughout the nineteenth century: that sense of having crossed a watershed for which there was still no name and after which new demands would arise. Systems that once were taken for granted began to need justification, such as the exclusion of women from higher education or the exploitation of workers in an economic order changing out of all recognition. This watershed anxiety existed long before the attacks in New York on 9/11 and existed on an international scale. It would be pointless or worse to treat postmodernity as either a recent phenomenon or as one limited to a particular national corner of Eurocentric culture. Postmodernity certainly belongs at the heart of that culture and poses for it certain problems that are felt perhaps most acutely in Britain and the United States, the two cultures most devoted to empiricism and, not incidentally, the two most resistant to the critique of modernity.

It is also worth noting that challenges are not death-threats. The postmodern challenge can be met, even accommodated, and that is what this volume attempts; but first it has to be acknowledged. The only really dangerous response to a real challenge is dismissal or denial.

Challenges to modernity can be found throughout the nineteenth century, for example in the development before mid-century of a non-Euclidean geometry or in the science leading to Maxwell’s equations. The ‘ridiculous illusion of happiness and understanding’ that André Breton attributed to rationalism and found so appalling in Europe between World Wars, was something he claimed the nineteenth century had, to its everlasting credit, completely denounced. However the critique of modernity only began to reach critical mass in the early twentieth century when, in the first decade alone, new theories and practices in physics, in art, in philosophy and in language departed from settled knowledge and methods in major new directions. The profound results of that ferment have moved even popular awareness beyond the comfort zones of traditional modernity.

Some of these paradigmatic challenges have already been mentioned. Published in 1905, Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity constituted a determining step away from empiricism in science; in 1907 Picasso’s ‘Demoiselles d’Avignon’ marked developments away from representational agendas and a turning point in art history; at the same time (1906-1911) Ferdinand de Saussure was giving the lectures at Geneva that have inspired a revolutionary shift away from modern agendas in the theory of knowledge; phenomenology undermined the separation of subject and object and with it the entire tradition of western philosophy; Dada and Surrealism sought similar results in art; and in the century’s second decade, spectacular failures in representational political systems produced (and then later reproduced) world war. Since at least the turn of the twentieth century, then, these and other changes in scientific knowledge and in cultural expectation have worked together to unsettle assumptions that had been basic to the development of the Culture of Representation in Europe throughout modernity, and latterly in the United States and other colonial sites.

What assumptions, for example? Modern assumptions about the stability of individual identities, about the objectivity of the world, about the possibilities for rationalization, about the powers of citizenship, about the viability of certain common denominators, about egalitarian ideals, and above all about the neutrality of time and space enshrined in so many ways over the centuries – all these belong to the humanist culture that developed out of modernity and still defines it. This culture still functions broadly but the established challenges to it through the twentieth century have sponsored massive re-examination of this Eurocentric cultural discourse across the range of cultural practice.

We have been rethinking its rationalism, its obsession with power and knowledge, its constraint of language to primarily symbolic rather than poetic function, its categorical and dualistic modes of definition, its belief in the quantitative and objective, its neutral time and objectified world, its irreducible individual subject, its faith in consensus, and above all its common media of exchange, especially neutral time and space but also money and other currencies. Especially contested are the supposedly universal common denominators that act to guarantee the fundamentally humanist political and social systems of modernity. So in moving beyond modernity we necessarily encounter challenges to cultural assumptions that have been current in one form or another across humanist Europe for more than half a millennium and which remain fundamental to democratic politics.

Can democracy survive these changes to the value systems it inherited from the Renaissance and upon which it has been based for two centuries? If not why not? If so in what forms? Are traditional democratic values viable for emergent or re-emergent nations embroiled in internecine conflict? What are the implications for democratic institutions of the fading of old World Historical models and frames of reference which used to (and still may) justify various forms of colonial oppression at home and abroad, but which also give currency to “human” values? What does the advanced cultural critique of modernity suggest concerning these practical problems? Such questions indicate the broad cultural problems that underlie more local and technical ones. The term ‘postmodernity’ potentially implies cultural changes at this level of magnitude: changes not just in the structure of capital, or in the style of buildings, but in the whole culture that still informs most of our lives in a million unspoken and determining ways. This entire heritage of six centuries is the modernity that ‘post’modernity puts at risk.

That risk is not necessarily fatal. Postmodernity does not erase the deeply rooted culture of humanism; on the contrary, there are many ways in which postmodernity is a reformation that takes us back to philological issues in much the same way that Northern humanism did at the beginning of the 16th century (Ermarth 1998, pp. 3-33; 1992, pp. 211-14). Even the term ‘post’ modernity – the sense of being ‘after’ a watershed – invokes history, which is one of the central, perhaps the central humanist convention of modernity. Most importantly, the postmodern condition re-opens political options that the culture of modernity has increasingly suppressed by its search for unity, rationality, and non-contradiction. Postmodernity acknowledges and even features precisely the inescapability of contradiction, of unmediateable difference. It shifts emphasis from rational resolution to negotiated contradiction in ways that have profound political implications.

It is no wonder that all this creates anxiety. Although it is demonstrable that modern values have lost ground to challenges across the range of practice for more than a century and by now are deeply rooted and broadly disseminated, still the response of dismissal or denial remains common, even when it no longer make much sense. In the United States particularly, prevailing theories of ‘postmodernism’ have tended to trivialize what is at stake and such theories have been warmly welcomed by a culture with deep commitments to the empiricist and quantitative values being questioned. Europeans have on the whole been more capable of pursuing the critique of modernity, taking what is useful, leaving the rest, and moving on. Anglo-America has spent too much time translating ‘postmodern’ into ‘shallow,’ ‘bad’ or ‘immoral’ or defining it variously as a literary device or as a tendency to selfishness. Usages in influential journals such as the London Times Literary Supplement or the New York Times are generally ill-informed contributions to the increasingly dogmatic public speech sustained by the media and typical in discussions of politics and education.

Such clatter has obscured almost entirely the profound and positive possibilities that postmodernity makes available – profound because they involve paradigmatic shifts, and positive because they bring to the renewal of democratic systems new assumptions and practices. Postmodernity frees us from stock phrases, in the sense of ‘phrase’ pursued by Lyotard (1998): the unit of meaning and communication that can either be customary – already formulated and given – or created anew each moment (Ermarth 1995). Postmodernity opens the way for experimenting with new methodologies, thus opening new opportunities for renewing democratic institutions. Postmodernity enables us to avoid lapsing unthinking into habitual methods such as the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Preface
• 1 Democracy and Postmodernity: The Problem
• 2 Citizenship, Resistance, and Democracy
• 3 Democracy as Agonistic Pluralism
• 4 Post-foundationalism and Social Democracy
• 5 Re-writing Equality: Difference, Social Justice and ‘Postsocialist’ Politics
• 6 The Politics of Equality and the Media: The Example of Feminism
• 7 Universal Ideals in a Multicultural Age: Pierre Bourdieu’s Recent Theory and Politics
• 8 Self-qualifying Systems: Consensus and Dissent in Postmodernity
• Index