Postmodern Theory and Progressive Politics

Toward a New Humanism

Thomas de Zengotita

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9783319906881
• eBook ISBN: 9783319906898
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Critical Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book explores the origins of the academic culture wars of the late 20th century and examines their lasting influence on the humanities and progressive politics.  It puts us in a position to ask this question: what to make now of those furious debates over postmodernism, multiculturalism, relativism, critical theory, deconstruction, post-structuralism, and all the rest? In an effort to arrive at a fair judgment on that question, the book reaches for an understanding of postmodern theorists by way of two genres they despised and hopes, for that very reason, to do them justice. It tells a story, and in the telling, advances two basic claims: first, that the phenomenological/hermeneutical tradition is the most suitable source of theory for a humanism that aspires to be universal; and, second, that the ethical and political aspect of the human condition is authentically accessible only through narrative. In conclusion, it argues that the postmodern moment was a necessary one, or will have been if we rise to the occasion and seize the opportunity it offers: a truly universal humanism might yet be realized even in—or perhaps especially in—this atavistic hour of parochial populism. 

© The Author(s) 2019

T. de ZengotitaPostmodern Theory and Progressive PoliticsPolitical Philosophy and Public Purposehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90689-8_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Phenomenology, Ideal Types, Narrative

Thomas de Zengotita¹

(1)

New York University, New York, NY, USA

Thomas de Zengotita

End Abstract

This book is for people who care about the humanities and progressive politics and want to understand the lasting influence upon them of postmodernism as it was expressed in the academic culture wars of the late twentieth century. What to make now of those furious debates over the canon versus multiculturalism, relativism, deconstruction, on and on? These are especially urgent questions for students in humanistic disciplines today, thrown as they have been into settings shaped by those battles and obliged to make their way as best they can through the debris left in their wake.

The end of postmodernism has been announced many times—but one could always wonder if the authors were stating a fact or trying to pull the plug. In recent years there has been a shift in tone. Looking ahead to the 2012 MLA conference, Stanley Fish reported that “topics that in previous years dominated the meeting and identified the avant-garde —postmodernism, deconstruction, post-colonialism, neo-colonialism, racism, racialism, feminism, Queer Theory, theory in general”—were “absent or sparsely represented” in the schedule (Fish 2011). And Warren Breckman, in an essay about French theory as an “historical object,” said that, while “there is a widespread consensus that theory’s expiry date has already arrived,” it seems that “ends are at least as complicated as beginnings” (Breckman 2010, 346). That complexity reflects the range of influence of “theory.” In some academic settings its discourses still flourish; in others, they have been displaced, squelched, mocked. But recent innovations in self-reference through personal gender pronouns (PGPs), millions of contributions to #MeToo, and continuing efforts to remove or rename historically charged symbols from the public square combine to remind us: the expressive dimension of our politics is still dominant and that is the enduring legacy of postmodernism in general. That emphasis is so thoroughly baked into our habits of thought and action that it doesn’t really matter if the people involved can cite Althusser’s concept of interpellation or have read Derrida or Judith Butler. They operate in a context shaped by the reign of the signifier and the claims of desire nonetheless. And so do Donald Trump and his cohort of followers—they too are products of the conditions that gave rise to academic postmodernism, they too feel aggrieved and are demanding their due. In them, postmodern identity politics as it arose on the “left” in the 1960s and 1970s finds a grotesque mirror image of itself. In them, we see what can happen when “truth” and “fact” actually become nothing more than social constructions.

Many defenders of the traditional humanities, passionately attached to the classic works that gave meaning to their lives, dream of a return to the day before yesterday when men like Lionel Trilling presided over the canon, secure in the knowledge that it contained what Matthew Arnold called “the best which has been thought and said in the world.”¹ Others, more concerned with an activist political tradition aimed above all at economic justice, try to accommodate identity politics by acknowledging the importance of intersectionality in various ways or, failing that, persist in polemical attacks that remain essentially the same today as they were 30 years ago. But the postmodern moment cannot be wished away or repressed. “The past is never dead. It’s not even past,” as Faulkner put it, and if the humanities are to flourish once again, if economic realities are to reclaim the center of the political stage, that moment must be incorporated, comprehended and overcome (as in, sublated).

That task does not fall to veterans of the culture wars, still clinging to their grudges. It belongs to the coming generation. But what they most need to begin with is a way to assess their inheritance as a whole and for themselves. Without that basic historical orientation, they can only drift—borne along by currents flowing from accidental encounters with particular teachers and topics that happened to catch their interest. Meanwhile the technology juggernaut assimilates everything and rolls on, offering academics spectacular solutions to “how” problems and pushing the humanities ever further to the margins of the curriculum, unable to contend with a question only the humanities can ask seriously: what next? What next for the meaning of being human in a world growing more incomprehensible and vulnerable every day? There presently exists no account of our intellectual history designed to provide that orientation. This book will supply that lack.

In After Babel (1975), George Steiner chose 1870 to mark the onset of the radical disruption of artistic intelligibility we know as “modernism.” That disruption resonated with a crisis in comprehensibility across the cultural spectrum, from the Freudian unconscious to the uncertainty principle in physics. No surprise, then, to find the term “postmodern” first used in 1870 to describe painting styles more avant-garde than impressionism. In the twentieth century, historians like Arnold Toynbee used it to mark “the next age” on their big picture timelines before it was picked up and disseminated by critics like Susan Sontag, again referencing disorienting innovations in the arts and architecture. But this book focuses on a set of intellectual strategies and a certain style that shaped academic postmodernism in anglophone universities since the 1960s, also with disruptive consequences. Postmodernism in this sense is derived largely from a particular group of French thinkers and the radical artists and German philosophers who inspired them—though, of course, as Fredric Jameson (1991) and David Harvey (1990) have demonstrated, shifts in modes of production from bricks and mortar assembly-line Fordism to instantaneous digital transactions in cyberspace ultimately conditioned the emergence of the postmodern in general, in the academy and in society at large. But this book is not principally concerned with technological causes. Its focus is on their effects, on culture, on consciousness—and especially on ethics and conceptions of politics. It tries to provide a straightforward and balanced account of certain movements of thought and value, from their origins to the present moment. In that way, it hopes to exemplify the core values of the humanism it is calling for. It shows that, while absolute objectivity may be beyond our finite powers, a good faith effort to be fair is not. We expect no more of ourselves in our lives and should ask no less of ourselves in our work.

This book tells a familiar (too familiar?) story of modernity. But it does so in a particular way, to a particular purpose—highlighting those aspects of thought and culture that conditioned the emergence of “modernism” and “postmodernism.” The first chapter, for example, aims to show how and why early modern thinkers were so captivated by the physical sciences. Their concept of knowledge, of rationality itself, was shaped by that example—by what they called “the new reason” and “natural philosophy.” From the beginning of the seventeenth century to the nineteenth century, the conviction that knowing about human nature would be analogous to knowing about the rest of nature dominated modern inquiry into the human form of life.

But this book was written under the influence of the phenomenological-hermeneutical tradition, which is characterized, first of all, by its refusal of this analogy.² That tradition does not (or should not) deny that one can study human nature in a scientific way. It does not (or should not) deny that extraordinary results follow from studying human nature in that way—as in modern medicine, most obviously, but also in psychology, genetics, and neurology. Insofar as human nature is physically determined, the scientific study of it has been successful. But insofar as human “nature” is not physical, insofar as it is ethical, say, or mental or historical or aesthetic or even spiritual—then studying it as if it were physical was bound to miss the mark.

In a nutshell, the claim is this: you cannot understand (verstehen) what it means to be human, what it is to be human, by way of science. Brain scientists of the future may someday map the brain’s activity so precisely that they may be able to tell from that map what a person is consciously experiencing. But such a map will never be that conscious experience. Such a map might help to explain a conscious experience; only a person can understand it.

Take jokes, for example. An explanation of a joke is notoriously unfunny. It may be true in every detail, but it inevitably falls short in that crucial respect. A joke is only funny when you get it—that is, understand it to begin with. The spirit of the phenomenological-hermeneutical tradition can be evoked by this requirement: any theory of humor it might produce should aspire to be funny.

All of which means that a commitment to understanding entails a willingness to sacrifice a measure of rigor for the sake of significance. Of course one strives for as much precision as the subject matter will allow, but if some things that matter to us resist perfect definition and we want to address them anyway, so be it. Once the distinction between explanation and understanding is grasped, congenial consequences emerge. There is no inherent contradiction between the analytic and continental traditions in philosophy—nor between phenomenology-hermeneutics and objectifying science-inspired studies more generally—anymore than there is between abstract expressionism and impressionism (see Derrida/Searle controversy in Chap. 9). Conflict arises when these styles of inquiry get implicated in larger, essentially political, disputes. Broadly speaking, phenomenology-hermeneutics has been suspected of inspiring fashionable nonsense in the radical and relativist discourses of its postmodern heirs, while objectifying analytic systems are thought to collaborate with political-economic and technological domination.

Be all that as it may for now—the politics is one thing, to be considered in the book itself. Conceptually, methodologically, these are simply different enterprises.

The refusal of “scientific” explanation does not eliminate the possibility of constraint on method.³ Meaningful situations entail their own kind of limits. In church, at a dinner party, people are constrained in certain ways. Methodological constraints of the same kind arise in situations of interpretation. Like the fieldworker, the historical interpreter is the (uninvited) guest. The other is the host who shows the guest about the place, the place the guest wants to know her (own) way around. A certain respect for the customs of the house is in order. Method in the humanities depends ultimately upon ethics. That is why, at the end of the day, authorial intentions matter—however compelling it has seemed at certain junctures to deny them, again for reasons to be explored in these pages.

This boo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: Phenomenology, Ideal Types, Narrative
• Part I. Essential Background
• Part II. Modernism
• Part III
• Part IV
• Correction to: Postmodern Theory and Progressive Politics
• Back Matter