Postmodernism in History

Fear or Freedom?

Beverley Southgate

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781134405336
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire du monde

This original and thought-provoking study looks at the context of postmodernist thought in general cultural terms as well as in relation to history. Postmodernism in History traces philosophical precursors of postmodernism and identifies the roots of current concerns. Beverley Southgate describes the core constituents of postmodernism and provides a lucid and profound analysis of the current state of the debate. His main concern is to counter 'pomophobia' and to assert a positive future for historical study in a postmodern world. Postmodernism in History is a valuable guide to some of the most complex questions in historical theory for students and teachers alike.

Part 1
FEAR (THE PRESENT)

1
POSTMODERNISM AND POMOPHOBIA

1 Introduction

‘Britain is now dominated by “post modern” attitudes.’ So the British Prime Minister was advised by a Cabinet Office report early in the year 2000.¹ Significantly, that news was reported to the public under the resounding headline: ‘Warning for Blair over state of the nation’. In other words, postmodernity – or postmodernism, as denoting the intellectual attitudes associated with that condition – had well and truly arrived, but it carried a health warning: it was something to be concerned about. Or even feared. Pomophobia, too, had come of age.

Pomophobia, when defined as a fearful reaction to the sort of postmodern situation envisaged, could easily be understood. For, as the official report went on to explain, old-fashioned ‘modern’ attitudes, such as ‘respect for authority, support for the family and allegiance to large institutions’, were ‘in terminal decline’. They had been replaced by ‘a belief in self-expression, creativity and individual value systems’. And while there were clearly some advantages in those novelties, the corresponding dangers were all too obvious. People were likely to ‘become less deferential to institutions such as Parliament and the courts’, and indeed to lack any sense of national identity. And, perhaps most significantly of all, people would lack any moral framework, or any ‘clear template’; and without that, they were in danger of making ‘inappropriate choices’, or of being so ‘overwhelmed by choice’ as to ‘feel unable to cope’.

There were a number of things, then, that Prime Minister Blair’s advisers believed that the already all-pervasive ‘postmodernism’ implied for society and for individuals. But the essence was that an essentially anarchic individualism was likely to endanger social and political cohesion, while individuals themselves would be unable to cope with their new-found freedom. That was clearly cause for some concern.

But that socio-political diagnosis served only to confirm anxieties that had been expressed about postmodernism in academia for several decades. ‘The intellectual equivalent of crack’, offered to innocent young people ‘by devilish tempters’, was how the traditionalist historian Geoffrey Elton put it some ten years earlier; in the United States Allan Bloom has referred to ‘an intellectual crisis of the greatest magnitude, which constitutes [nothing less than] the crisis of our civilisation’; and Felipe Fernández-Armesto has more recently noted the ‘mood of uncertainty’ induced by postmodernism, and has urged his readers (supposedly and maybe quite properly ‘perplexed’ about the truth) not to abandon their children to be ‘victims of delusions or doubt’. It’s time, he insists, ‘to prise ourselves free’ from a pernicious intellectual movement which threatens to drag us all back to the Dark Ages. Civilisation itself is endangered: the barbarians, in the form of contemporary postmodern ‘truth vandals’, are already at the gates. In similar vein, the American historian Gertrude Himmelfarb has clarified her attitude by entitling her book on culture and society portentously as On Looking into the Abyss; and her study of America’s ‘demoralisation ... from Victorian virtues to modern values’ has been described by one critic as ‘stridently apocalyptic in tone, celebrating the past, worrying over the present, fearful of the future’. The intellectual historian John Clarke, while conceding the recent development of more constructive forms, has written of postmodernism tending ‘to exude a kind of scepticism that leads to cynicism and even despair, rather than to wisdom or spiritual growth’; and Susan Pederson has described how postmodernism has rendered academia a ‘disquieting place in which to live’.²

Postmodernism, then, is well and truly impinging on us at levels both practical and theoretical; and pomophobia is what we get – is what we suffer from – when we just can’t stand the disruption that it seems to threaten. Pomophobia indicates that our emotional balance has finally been lost, and that we can’t cope any longer. It’s what is manifested when we’re no longer able to tolerate the uncertainties, ambiguities and doubts that postmodernism reveals and provokes (or that postmodernity entails). However, the general proposition for which I argue in this book is that, while fear may well be an understandable reaction to our postmodern situation, it’s none the less an inappropriate response. While it’s natural enough, initially, to cower and seek refuge as the familiar edifices of modernity begin to crumble, it makes equally good sense thereafter to investigate the possibilities for new creations in the future. The end of one life need not imply just death, but the possibility of another and better life to come. The destruction of mediaeval certainties was the price to be paid for intellectual rebirth and subsequent enlightenment; and similarly, as modernism subsides, its new postmodern replacement can be (and should be, and perhaps must be) not so much feared as welcomed. FEAR (THE PRESENT)

In this introductory chapter I shall try to indicate a little of what I understand by the central terms ‘postmodernism’ and ‘pomophobia’.

2 Postmodernism: an attempt at diagnosis

So what is postmodernism? What is the postmodern challenge? What’s all the fuss about? And the fear?

First, ‘postmodernism’ is a notoriously elusive concept: trying to define it resembles bare-handed fishing. In this slippery predicament one potential hook (admittedly a little blunted now by over-use, but serviceable still) is offered by Jean-Francois Lyotard, who famously wrote: ‘Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives’.³ By that he meant, in short, that all those ‘grand narratives’ of modernism (narratives characterised by such words as ‘progress’, ‘secularisation’ or anything that presupposes movement in a certain direction, and so bestows some meaning and purpose) can no longer be believed in or accepted. So at least we can conclude that inbuilt meaningfulness and purpose play no part in the postmodern condition; and it’s not without some significance that Lyotard’s definition appears in a work entitled The Postmodern Condition. As theorising a condition (the condition of postmodernity), postmodernism may well be fearfully resisted, but it can’t forever be avoided.

A similar point emerges from another definition more recently proposed by Keith Jenkins, who writes of ‘the era of the raising to consciousness of the “aporia”’.⁴ ‘Aporia’ is a Greek word that can refer to both places and people. For the former, it indicates a difficulty in passing: it’s hard to get through. In relation to people it refers to a difficulty in dealing with something that results in doubt and hesitation. So it’s here perhaps best translated as ‘impasse’ – another imported word, but one that has been adopted into English to describe a road having no outlet; in the face of which we’re at a loss as to how to proceed.

Jenkins himself, of course, is referring not to any physical road, but to every intellectual one where some sort of decision is required – whenever, for instance, we need to describe or to judge, as we constantly do in life and in historical study. And, following Derrida, he makes clear that every such decision is unique: circumstances are never exactly repeated, so that there can never be a blueprint, a set of rules or again a template that can simply be applied: always the particularity of a situation demands a starting again from scratch (though that’s not possible either); there’s no existing path that we can follow through or build upon, no absolutes against which we can measure or assess ourselves and our decisions, judgements and representations. So we’re always groping in the dark – doing the best we can, but never well enough. Always, as T. S. Eliot wrote, ‘Between the idea/And the reality/Between the motion/And the act/Falls the Shadow’.⁵ Lacking foundational reference points, we are inevitably confronted by what Derrida refers to as the ‘undecidability of the decision’; and in postmodernity we’re made aware of that – made aware, in Keith Jenkins’s words again, that ‘our chosen ways of seeing things lack foundations’, so that ours is ‘an era when all the decisions we take – political, ethical, moral, interpretive, representational, etc. – are ultimately undecidable’.

Postmodernism is not, then, simply a ‘philosophy’, or a part of a subject that everyone knows has little or nothing to do with ‘real life’; it’s not just a ‘theory’ that impinges on nothing more substantial than the abstract metaphysical constructions of ‘intellectuals’. On the contrary, it impacts upon very practical issues of everyday life as experienced by fellow-travellers on the Clapham omnibus.

In doing that, it contravenes long-lived expectations of what humanities subjects are supposed to be about; and indeed there is (appropriately) a certain paradox that the effects of postmodernism are being most dramatically felt in those very disciplines that have so often been seen as safely confined within the ivory towers of academia, even priding themselves on their intrinsic uselessness and inapplicability to ‘real life’ situations. Which is to say that postmodernism exposes previously concealed aspects of academic disciplines that other philosophies have seemed unable to reach, or at least unable profoundly to affect. In particular, it has revealed the inevitably rhetorical and ideological dimensions of subjects such as history, where the repudiation of such connotations has previously seemed to constitute a vital part of what comprises that discipline. To be more specific (only briefly here), the supposed modernist ideals of detachment, objectivity, balance and even purposelessness have themselves been revealed as the ideologically freighted shams that, despite their best intentions, they have always been.

It’s not surprising, therefore, that a report on the implications of postmodernism should be submitted by advisers to the British Prime Minister. No less than scientific research into aerospace, microchips or DNA, humanist research into postmodernism can affect us all, for good or ill.

Definition, nevertheless, remains particularly difficult, not least because there is a sense in which postmodernism seems to deconstruct itself. By which I mean that, in postmodernism’s own terms, there can be no one given place from which we can finally describe or define it, and – to compound our difficulty – there can be no necessary external referent for any linguistic description or definition that we may try to impose. As with such other notoriously problematic concepts as ‘God’, it indicates a constantly developing and constantly remodified attempt to describe and theorise our own situation; and as with such other philosophies as Platonism and Epicureanism (and even, of course, ‘modernism’), it denotes an evolving body of thought that can embrace what might seem to be inconsistencies and contradictions.

But postmodernism’s refusal to be simply categorised and linguistically (and safely) netted does seem further to offend (and even frighten) the modernist. So while we may concede that the essence itself may continue to elude us, we must make a start by at least suggesting some further characteristics that seem essential to the concept; and, before proceeding to the theory, it might be as well to start with some very practical, sociopolitical issues, which may resonate with some everyday concerns that have been felt – if not always explicitly articulated – by prospective readers.

2.1 Practice

One of the most interesting commentators on the practical, public and political dimensions of postmodernism is Zygmunt Bauman, who has described, in a collection of essays and lectures published as Postmodernity and its Discontents, how ‘postmodern men and women [have] exchanged a portion of their possibilities of security for a portion of happiness’.⁶ The possibilities of security enjoyed by earlier generations consisted in such factors as a ‘job for life’ – whether that simply represented the security of a job (however menial) in an industry (such as mining, textile manufacture or motor-car production) which appeared to be as permanent as any human institution can be; or whether it more positively provided a career structure, with a steadily ascending progression within a (seemingly, again, permanently established) profession. Such securities, it is clear, have largely evaporated in the white heat of yet another (but this time permanently ongoing) technological revolution, which ensures that skills, no less than products, carry with them their own inbuilt obsolescence. What was once a coal mine has become a theme park; a full-time miner is now a casual tour guide.

As a symbol of the workforce, then, the mass crowd at the factory gate has been replaced by the solitary individual, clutching an immaculate laser-printed curriculum vitae and personal portfolio, and hireable and fireable at whim (or as changing economic circumstances, or even professional fashions, are deemed to demand). Job security and solidarity can be seen as past banalities that used to be enjoyed by boring old men in grey suits, and are now thankfully banished to make way for the greater excitements of individual enterprise and unbounded aspiration. There’s no need for an earthbound ladder when a helicopter will so much more quickly and easily take you so very much higher.

The straitjacket of an old-fashioned career structure has, then, been outgrown by a generation that repudiates any such constriction on its own unbounded possibilities; and that’s where Zygmunt Bauman’s ‘portion of happiness’ comes into play; for happiness comes with liberation – or so it is assumed. Freed from the constraints of any need for enduring commitment (in matters personal and public), postmodern men and women prefer to keep their options open, finding ‘the openendedness of their situation attractive enough to outweigh the anguish of uncertainty’. And that open-endedness applies, of course, not only to their professional or working lives, but also to their private selves – their own identities. So a definition of self, in the past so closely identified with work (with what one did in life), can now be indefinitely postponed; or rather, with the uncertainties of work’s availability, indefinitely postponed it must be.

That implies, in Bauman’s analysis, that men and women are liable in practice to ‘live perpetually with the “identity problem” unsolved’. Liberated in some senses they may be, but their liberation has been bought at the price of forgoing ‘a rightful and secure position in society’. What postmodern people are liable to miss out on is ‘a space unquestionably one’s own, where one can plan one’s life with the minimum of interference, play one’s role in a game in which the rules do not change overnight and without notice, act reasonably and hope for the better’. Forced to play in a game where the rules are constantly changed, the roles – and hence the identities – adopted by postmodern people are in danger of losing their substantiality. They ebb and flow with the tide of sartorial and ‘life-style’ fashion; and their transience exemplifies the disposability of goods (both physical and moral goods) in a consumerist society, where identity can come to mean, in Max Frisch’s formulation quoted by Bauman, ‘refusing to be what others want you to be’. It’s only by holding out against the conformities implied in other people’s expectations (a rare ability), that we can establish any sense of personal identity at all, or retain any sense of personal ‘authenticity’; and the resultant variability (even evasiveness) can be construed as a positive virtue, when ‘the hub of postmodern life strategy is not making identity stand – but the avoidance of being fixed’.⁷

That shifty oppositional stance may have its virtue, too, in encouraging a generation of Nietzschean fighters ‘against history and the power of the actual’. But confrontation itself can have its problems, especially when witnessed (as it increasingly seems to be) on a mass, rather than individual, scale. So that uncertainties of identity can have implications, not only for the happiness of the individual, but also for the stability and health of the state, or society at large. For lacking a clear and secure sense of personal identity, individuals may come to view with deeper suspicion and feelings of hostility those ‘others’ by reference to whom they need to define themselves. It’s not only images of self that fragment, but images of a host of ill-defined others who similarly defy categorisation, and are therefore potentially threatening, ill-fitting, to be feared and if possible removed.

Certainties, then, are well and truly assigned to a past, where the concept of ‘life as a pilgrimage’ seems still to have made some sense. It’s possible, of course, that we, being so conscious of their absence, may assign such certainties to past others, who did not in their own time feel their presence: the historical past contains those others against whom we measure and identify ourselves, and it suits us to assume or to impose some contrasts. But some evidence for difference does exist: Bauman cites the one-word command ‘Forward!’, engraved with other moral principles by the Victorian embellishers of Leeds Town Hall – for whom that word was evidently meaningful. That is, there were then, presumably, no doubts about what ‘forward’ implied: there was a shared understanding of what constituted forward progression through space and time; so that a purposeful life could still be lived within a moral structure that provided some meaningful sense of direction. However strait the path, there was a gate, however narrow, at the end of it, providing a goal against which movement and success could be measured (and ‘forward’ defined).

That defining space–time structure is lacking in a postmodern world that has seen both the weft and the warp of that previously closetextured structure relativised out of meaningful existence, so that ‘space and time themselves display repeatedly the absence of an orderly, intrinsically differentiated structure’, and as Ihab Hassan has observed, ‘In a world no longer linear, we must wonder: which way is forward?’⁸ We shall need, in our concluding chapters, to return to these matters as potentially positive aspects of postmodernity that liberate from modernist constraints, but we can note here already that postmodernist time has had its flow flattened, as Bauman describes, ‘into a continuous present’, where (or when) any injunction to take thought for the past or the morrow has been superseded by an insistence on the optimum utilisation of an ever-present ‘here and now’: ‘synchrony replaces diachrony, copresence takes the place of the succession, and the perpetual present replaces history’.⁹

Nor is it only history that has been replaced, but the values too that have previously been transmitted through that history – values both moral and aesthetic, which had previously been essentially unquestioned on their route through the generations. The near universal acceptance of such values, within some defining context, provided a cultural skeleton that could be fleshed out in a variety of ways: bodies of whatever kind could at least be assessed in relation to some set standards – to some accepted template. In the general context of culture ‘high’ could at least be distinguished from ‘low’, and each be assigned its proper sphere of influence and patronage. Despite some overlap, with the more daring intellectuals deigning (not always without some affectation) to confess to their love of football or the Beatles, people on the whole knew where they stood.

That knowledge is now harder to attain. Withdrawal of cultural absolut...