Unstable universalities

Poststructuralism and radical politics

Saul Newman

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780719071294
• eBook ISBN: 9781847796288
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Unstable universalities, available for the first time in paperback, examines the theme of universality and its place in radical political theory. Saul Newman argues that both Marxist politics of class struggle and the postmodern politics of difference have reached their historical and political limits, and that what is needed is a new approach to universality, a new way of thinking about collective politics.

By exploring various themes and ideas within poststructuralist and post-Marxist theory, the book develops a new and original approach to universality – one that has important implications for politics today, particularly on questions of power, subjectivity, ethics and democracy. In so doing, it engages in debates with thinkers such as Laclau, Žižek, Badiou and Rancière over the future of radical politics. It also applies important theoretical insights to contemporary events such as the emergence of the anti-globalisation movement, the 'war on terrorism', the rise of anti-immigrant racism, and the nihilistic violence which lurks at the margins of the political.

1

The politics of postmodernity

POSTMODERNISM is something that we have heard a lot about for some time now. However its meaning remains ambiguous and open to different interpretations. Moreover, it is a term that appears in a number of different contexts: art, architecture, cultural studies, literature and social theory all bear reference to the ‘postmodern condition’. Indeed, some thinkers, like Žižek and Eagleton, see postmodernism as now the dominant discourse in many academic disciplines – although perhaps this institutionalisation indicates not the prestige of postmodernism but rather its very ossification and immanent decline. It is possible that we are now living in a post-postmodern age where, tired of the motifs of difference, heterogeneity and displacement, we cling once again to established identities and firm moral grounds. Religion, family values, neo-conservative doctrines and market fundamentalism seem to be the dominant ideological referents of today. Does this signify a turning away from the implications of postmodernity? Perhaps instead, we could say that this uncanny return of social and moral conservatism is actually symptomatic of postmodernity itself; perhaps it emerges as a reaction to the uncertainty associated with the postmodern condition.

This sense of uncertainty and dislocation is best characterised by Nietzsche’s motif of the premature death of God. The madman in Nietzsche’s The Gay Science, on hearing of God’s death, runs into the crowded market place and cries:

But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth form its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing?¹

The postmodern world is a world that seems to have lost its bearings, that is directionless, without future or past, plunging giddily in all directions. Therefore, perhaps God had to be reinvented in order to counter this unbearable sense of crisis and dislocation. It was with great surprise that we, who had believed for many years that God was dead, witnessed his sudden global reappearance: from the religious ecstasies of the suicide bomber to the fervid convictions of the powerful in our ‘secular’ Western democracies, the name of God is once again on everyone’s lips. It remains to be seen if the postmodern God – the God of Bin Laden, Bush and the televangelists – can restore the world to its proper moral position.² We might recall, however, that when Nietzsche’s madman announces the portentous event of God’s death, no one believes him anyway – they simply stare at him in astonishment and incredulity. The madman realises then that he has ‘come too early’. Postmodernism always arrives either too early or too late. Indeed, this sense of the untimely is central to the postmodern experience.

In this chapter, I shall explore and try to define the postmodern condition, as well as investigate its implications for politics in particular. I shall suggest that postmodernism has had fundamental implications for the way we think about politics, leading to a displacement of traditional narratives, identities and institutions and to the emergence of new political discourses and practices. I will then examine two major contrasting responses to the postmodern condition in the dispute between Jürgen Habermas and Jean-François Lyotard. Habermas seeks to reinvent strong foundations for political and ethical action through the idea of a universal consensus achieved through rational speech acts and established rules of communication and deliberation; whereas Lyotard denies the possibility of achieving any sort of consensus, affirming instead the heterogeneity and incommensurability of different language games and ‘genres’. I will argue that the approach taken by Habermas is untenable because it seeks to establish a firm moral and rational ground where there can be none. Taking, instead, Lyotard’s ‘poststructuralist’ approach as my starting point, I will nevertheless explore its limitations for political analysis and will suggest that we need to go beyond this thematic of incommensurability.

The collapse of the ‘metanarrative’

The postmodern condition has been most famously and succinctly summed up by Lyotard’s definition: an incredulity toward metanarratives.³ The metanarrative might be understood as a universal idea or discourse that is central to the experience of modernity. This might be found in the notion of objective truth, and the idea that the world is becoming rationally intelligible through advances in science. Or it might be seen in the Hegelian dialectic, whose unfolding determines historical developments. Here we might also think of the Marxist discourse of proletarian emancipation. All these ideas derive from the Enlightenment, and they imply a truth that is absolute and universal, and which will be rationally grasped by everyone. Moreover, the metanarrative implies a certain knowledge about society: society is understood either as an integrated whole or as internally divided, as in the Marxist imagery of class struggle. Indeed, these two opposed understandings of society are really reverse mirror images of one another; they are united by the common assumption that social reality is wholly transparent and intelligible.

So why are these metanarratives breaking down; why do we no longer believe in them? Lyotard explores the reasons for their dissolution in an examination of the condition of knowledge in contemporary post-industrial society. According to Lyotard, scientific knowledge is experiencing a crisis of legitimation. Legitimation refers to the rules of truth which determine which statements can be admitted to a ‘scientific’ body of statements – which statements are scientifically verifiable according to these rules, in other words – and which statements are to be excluded and thereby rendered illegitimate or untrue.⁴ Lyotard argues that because of certain transformations that knowledge is undergoing in the post-industrial age, this process of legitimation has become ever more questionable and unstable: the contingency and arbitrariness of its operation – the fact that it is ultimately based on acts of power and exclusion – is becoming apparent, thus producing a crisis of representation. In short, it is increasingly difficult for scientific knowledge to claim a privileged status as being the only arbiter of truth.

Knowledge in the post-industrial age is being transformed through the proliferation of new computer and information technologies.⁵ What happens to the prestige of scientific knowledge, then, when it becomes just another commodity to be bought and sold on the capitalist marketplace; or when it becomes a tool of technocratic governments or is put into the hands of the military-scientific machine or multinational companies? Does this not displace the universal position of scientific knowledge; does science not become, under the conditions of commodification and bureaucratisation, just another form of knowledge, another narrative? Moreover, Lyotard points to a breakdown of the knowledge about society: society can no longer be adequately represented by knowledge – either as a unified whole or as a class-divided body. The social bonds which gave a consistency of representation to society are themselves being redefined through the language games that constitute it. There is, according to Lyotard, an ‘“atomization” of the social into flexible networks of language games …’.⁶ This does not mean that the social bond is dissolving altogether – merely that there is no longer one dominant, coherent understanding of society but, rather, a plurality of different narratives or perspectives. Here we might think of the multiplicity of heterogeneous discourses, ideological perspectives, religious sensibilities, moral positions and social identities that make up contemporary societies.

These changes lead to the conclusion that scientific knowledge is not the only (legitimate) form of knowledge, and that alongside it we have to consider other narratives and language games which have an equal claim to legitimacy. Central to the ‘postmodern condition’, then, is the acknowledgement that all forms of knowledge have to be seen as particular narratives with their own ‘stories’ and internal structures which organise their statements and utterances. What defines the status of knowledge, then, in the condition of postmodernity, is no longer the universal position of truth, but rather a ‘pragmatics’ of storytelling – a series of specific rules for the authorisation of statements. The desire for legitimation on the basis of this universal position of truth had in the past led only to the denigration of other narratives and discourses as ‘obscurantist’, and thus to a Western cultural imperialism. Postmodernity puts paid to this illusion of a universal, absolute truth, thereby creating a crisis of legitimation for science: science is increasingly aware of its own limits, of the contingency of its language games, and of its inability to legitimate the truth of its own statements. Science, in other words, becomes increasingly aware of the shakiness of its own foundations – of the absence of any absolute bedrock of truth upon which it can ground its own statements. The only source of legitimation for science today is institutional power: science has become dependent for its legitimacy on the symbolic authority of institutions such as universities, research institutes, government bureaucracies and private corporations, which regulate and transmit scientific knowledge, and subject it to new ‘performance criteria’ of technological and economic efficiency.⁷

Postmodernity can therefore be seen as a process of unmasking the scientific and positivist discourses of the Enlightenment. This critique is not only epistemological but also ethical. The ethical argument here is that such discourses, in their desire for legitimation through universal truth, are totalising discourses. They are hostile to any form of questioning, to any difference, and they marginalise and denigrate other forms of knowledge. Indeed, as many thinkers – including Lyotard, and Adorno and Horkheimer – point out, scientific knowledge has often been placed in the service of totalitarian political regimes, with the Holocaust symbolising the murderous and barbaric ends that scientific rationality – coupled with the bureaucratic mentality – can be put towards. Moreover, totalitarian regimes have always invoked metanarratives – whether in the form of a ‘historical destiny’ or the dialectic. It is important to emphasise, of course, that science does not always put itself in the hands of the state, and that on many occasions it has provided an important critical voice against the actions of governments. However, the point here is that there is a parallel between totalising metanarratives which ruthlessly organise their statements according to universal notions of truth, and totalitarian regimes which repress differences and heterogeneities in the name of a social whole and a universal truth. Indeed, as Lyotard argues, attempts to restore this social whole lead only to terror: ‘By terror I mean the efficiency gained by eliminating, or threatening to eliminate, a player from a language game one shares with him.’⁸ Perhaps contemporary terrorism – both in its state and non-state forms – can be seen in this way, as the attempt to restore the social bond that has been ruptured and fragmented by postmodernity. Perhaps the dream of absolute commensurability can only appear today in the figures of fundamentalist Islam and the neo-conservative ‘security’ state, whose incoherent attempts to eliminate difference and heterogeneity in the name of some universal truth or rationality lead only to a paranoid and terrorist violence.

The obsessive and terroristic desire for commensurability is thus one possible response to the present crisis of legitimation and the decline of the metanarrative. Quite simply, grand narratives have lost their credibility. Postmodernity is characterised not by grand narratives, but by what Lyotard calls ‘little narratives’ (petit recit). Moreover, there is no possibility of a universal consensus being established between these narratives; rather, they are incommensurable. Postmodernity consists in the recognition of this incommensurability, and in emphasising difference, heterogeneity and dissension, rather than consensus.

Lyotard’s assessment of the ‘postmodern condition’ is somewhat ambiguous in tone. While he recognises and, to some extent, celebrates the decline of the metanarrative and the crisis in legitimation of scientific knowledge, he recognises at the same time the way that the postmodern motifs of finitude, multiplicity and differences can be co-opted by the capitalist system. Even the political system tolerates the quiet revolution that is taking place at the level of language games, because of the economic and performative efficiencies that these finite, plural language games allow. Postmodernism is caught between, on the one hand, a conservative reaction against it in the name of restoring the social bond, and on the other, the brutal realism and nihilism of the capitalist system which ruthlessly commodifies and co-opts it. Here postmodernism can function as a sort of cultural vector of capitalism:

When power is that of capital and not that of a party, the ‘trans-avantgardist’ or ‘postmodern’ solution proves to be better adapted than the antimodern solution. Eclecticism is the degree zero of contemporary general culture: one listens to reggae, watches a western, eats McDonald’s food for lunch and local cuisine for dinner, wears Paris perfume in Tokyo and ‘retro’ clothes in Hong Kong; knowledge is a matter for TV games.⁹

Thus for Lyotard, postmodernism is in danger of becoming (or indeed it has already become) a cultural index of capitalist globalisation: its central themes of fragmentation, multiplicity and heterogeneity become so many aesthetic elements, ‘tastes’, modes of subjectivity that can be marketed to and turned into commodities. Postmodernism, then, is not necessarily always subversive; or perhaps it might be more accurate to say that its very subversion – its transgression of stable identities, universal truths and grand narratives – can become part of the ‘system’, of an economic, cultural and social logic which itself thrives on the constant proliferation of differences. However, rather than conclude from this, as Žižek does, that postmodernism’s transgression is a false or pseudo transgression, or, Habermas does, that it is inherently conservative, I would suggest that it is always ambivalent and can have both radical and conservative implications.

In order to explore these implications – and it is the political implications that I am most interested in here – we must define postmodernism more precisely. Postmodernism, it must be made clear, does not refer to any historical period. Despite the glib pronouncements that we now all live in a ‘postmodern age’, postmodernity is not an actual period after modernity. While Lyotard, for instance, talks about contemporary post-industrial transformations in technology and knowledge, he sees the postmodern condition more as a critical reflection on these transformations rather than as a period that we now all live in. Indeed, he says that postmodernity is ‘undoubtably part of the modern’.¹⁰ In other words, we have not gone beyond modernity – something that would be impossible in any case, because modernity is not so much a temporal notion as a certain way of experiencing the world that builds into itself even the notion of its own overcoming. Rather, postmodernity has to be seen as a critical response to modernity itself and an interrogation of its discursive limits. In other words, postmodernism is something that, as Heller and Feher suggest, is ‘parasitic’ upon modernity itself.¹¹ It may be seen, then, as a reflection upon the limits of modernity, unmasking its inconsistencies, contradictions and aporias, rather than as a stage beyond modernity. The postmodern ‘sensibility’ would be the experience of living in the present – that is, living in the period that we call modernity – while at the same time being after or post-histoire.¹² In this sense, then, postmodernity is both inside and outside modernity at the same time, always working at the limits of modernity and exposing those elements and tendencies which, while they are spawned by modernity, do not fit into its discourses. Postmodernism thus reveals the heterogeneity of modernism itself – the multitude of different language games and possibilities inherent in it, yet disavowed by, its rationalist metanarratives.

The postmodern approach therefore reveals a split in the Enlightenment and modernity itself, and seeks to use their very tools – those of rational and critical inquiry – in order to expose their limitations and tensions. In this sense, because it is animated by the critical spirit of modernity, it remains indebted to and a part of modernity. It is incorrect to claim, as many do, that postmodernism equates with irrationalism or relativism. On the contrary, it is eminently rational in the sense that it demands that reason live up...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The politics of postmodernity
• 2 Power
• 3 The subject
• 4 Ethics
• 5 Democracy
• 6 Radical politics today
• Bibliography
• Index