In defence of postmodernism
It has grow to be widespread in charge wokeness on its supposed philosophical guardian: postmodernism. As the usual narrative goes, postmodernism is the ideology that entrenched itself in Anglophone universities within the Eighties and Nineteen Nineties. It talked of relativism, of the absence of goal fact, of the spectre of a pervasive, invisible energy, and it was usually anti-Western. A complete technology of professors, writers, journalists and a good few activists have subsequently been raised on this eating regimen of postmodern considering. And the result’s a cultural elite that’s wedded to wokeness.
As Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay put it in Cynical Theories (2020): ‘Utilized postmodernism has come into its personal, been reified – taken as actual, as The Reality in accordance with social justice – and extensively unfold by activists and (satirically) become a dominant narrative of its personal.’ Within the Telegraph final month, Zoe Strimpel repeated this accusation, writing witheringly of ‘the postmodern mockery of fact that underpins wokeness’.
Many right-wing critics of wokeness may also discuss of postmodernism as a species of what they name ‘cultural Marxism’, a time period that they hint again to the early Twentieth-century Italian Marxist, Antonio Gramsci. Two postmodern thinkers typically are available for specific vilification on this regard. First, there’s Jacques Derrida (1930-2004), who professed that the meanings of phrases are without end unstable and elusive. After which, above all, there’s Michel Foucault (1926-1984), whose thought of oppressive energy ideologies being invisible and ubiquitous has seemingly grow to be central to wokeness, with its ‘secure areas’, ‘microaggressions’ and its discuss of ‘unwitting’, ‘unconscious’ and ‘perceived’ discrimination.
As Douglas Murray writes in The Battle on The West (2022), ‘Foucault’s obsessive evaluation of every part by means of a quasi-Marxist lens of energy relations diminished nearly every part in society right into a transactional, punitive and meaningless dystopia’. Elsewhere, Jordan Peterson has spoken of Derrida as ‘a trickster’ whose ‘postmodern and neo-Marxist theories’ threaten free speech. He has additionally talked of the ‘particular contempt’ he reserves for Foucault.
For these critics of woke, Foucault’s affect, specifically, is seemingly in every single place. In keeping with Murray, it’s by means of the ‘anti-colonial’ philosophy popularised by the Foucault-inspired scholar, Edward Stated, that Foucault and subsequently postmodernism have filtered down into woke philosophy, which holds that Western society is uniquely racist and in charge for all of at this time’s ills. Equally, right-wing critics of wokeness will declare that the trans motion has sprung from the postmodern rivalry that sexuality and gender are totally socially constructed and subsequently plastic and malleable.
If Foucault is considered the daddy of wokeness then Nineteenth-century thinker Friedrich Nietzsche tends to be considered the grandfather. In any case, Foucault was profoundly influenced by Nietzsche and even proudly declared himself to be ‘Nietzchean’. Nietzsche, like Foucault, additionally noticed all human behaviour stemming from the will for energy. And he conceived of morality – good and evil, proper and incorrect – because the mere manifestation of the desire to energy. As he wrote of the ‘origin of data’, in The Joyous Science (1883): ‘Steadily, the human mind turned filled with such judgements and convictions, and a ferment, a battle, and lust for energy developed on this tangle. Not solely utility and delight however each form of impulse took sides on this combat about “truths”.’ One can see this Nietzschean sentiment at work in Foucault’s Self-discipline and Punish (1975): ‘Energy produces data… energy and data immediately suggest each other.’
So, in accordance with this largely right-wing narrative, wokeness is the product of a Twentieth-century philosophical assault on fact, objectivity and the West. And it was impressed by Nietzsche and led by a number of ‘cultural Marxist’ thinkers.
Michel Foucault (1926-1984).
Misunderstanding postmodernism
There are a number of issues with this fairly neat story. The primary error is to make use of the phrase ‘cultural Marxism’ to speak of postmodernism or wokeness. This time period doesn’t actually make sense. Marx himself conceived of his work as a historic materialism. It was focussed on class and the technique of manufacturing, not on tradition. Sure, within the Nineteen Forties and Nineteen Fifties, some Frankfurt College thinkers, who generally offered themselves as Marxist, did concentrate on tradition fairly than class. However as Joanna Williams writes in How Woke Gained (2022), their considering ‘represented much less a continuation of Marxism and extra a break with Marx’.
Furthermore, postmodern thinkers had been broadly against Marxism. Many might have been signed-up Communists of their youth (the French Communist Get together dominated left-wing politics on the time), however by the Sixties they’d grow to be extremely important of Marxist politics. They rejected the concept that historical past was progressing ‘dialectically’ in direction of a communist future, or ‘telos’. And so they had been typically hostile to the scientific objectivity and ‘Enlightenment’ values so central to Marxism. Foucault wrote that historical past was not the story of progress; it was however a collection of non-linear discontinuities and contingencies. And Jean-François Lyotard (1924-1998), in his highly-influential The Postmodern Situation (1979), introduced and celebrated the top of ‘grand narratives’, and with it the top of the Marxist ‘grand narrative’ of progress. Lyotard’s writings from the Nineteen Seventies onwards had been violently antithetical to Marxism, particularly its claims to goal fact.
As for wokeness itself, it has nothing to do with Marxism. With their myopic concentrate on race and gender, woke activists are totally blind to the fabric, class-structure of society. At this time, bizarrely, it’s typically conservatives who’re extra attuned to the plight of the working class than woke ‘radicals’. As Williams writes, ‘critics who insist that woke is solely Marxism in disguise are large of the mark’.
Extra importantly, these blaming wokeness on the postmodernists overplay the affect of the likes of Derrida or Foucault. And so they achieve this as a result of they underplay the extent to which the woke have misappropriated postmodern thought. The nice thinkers who we will moderately name postmodern, from Nietzsche to Foucault, had not one of the glib certitude, or punitive, dissent-crushing zeal that characterises wokeness. The truth is, it’s doubtless they’d reject the intolerance and puritanism of wokeness.
Take Foucault. His thought and activism was marked above all by its emphasis on freedom. As JG Merquior concluded of the Frenchman: ‘libertarianism… is the perfect label for Foucault’s outlook as a social theorist. Extra exactly, he was (although he didn’t use the phrase) a contemporary anarchist’ (1). As Foucault confirmed in his well-known 1971 tv debate with Noam Chomsky, he firmly believed in liberty: ‘Irrespective of how terrifying a given system could also be, there all the time stay the chances of resistance, disobedience and oppositional groupings.’ He would doubtless have rebelled in opposition to the strictures and enforced conformism of wokeness, not endorsed them.
Foucault’s idea of energy, particularly ‘invisible energy’, might have been seized upon by many woke and identitarian thinkers at this time. It definitely appears to tell their concepts of ‘systemic racism’ or ‘heteronormative’ energy relations. But it surely’s a much more helpful and illuminating thought than its up to date woke misappropriation suggests.
Foucault’s idea of ‘panopticism’, which he develops in Self-discipline and Punish (1975), is price inspecting right here. This concept was named after Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon, a round constructing with a tower on the centre from which each and every room, and subsequently each inhabitant, is totally seen. Bentham, a Nineteenth-century thinker and social reformer, envisaged the panopticon as a design for a jail, however in Foucault’s arms it turned a metaphor for contemporary society – a society wherein everybody, seen to everybody else, feels a stress to evolve, to behave as one feels others anticipate one to behave. ‘The panoptic schema’, wrote Foucault, ‘was destined to unfold all through the social physique’. On this respect, the parable of the panopticon will be learn at this time as a warning, maybe much more chilling than that of Orwell’s totalitarian nightmare, Nineteen Eighty-4. Foucault reminds us that oppression doesn’t should be brutal and apparent. It may be silent, unseen and finally self-imposed.
If something, Foucault’s thought lends itself to a critique of the invisible energy wielded by our woke elites. Consider the way in which wherein individuals really feel compelled to behave within the age of social media, wherein everyone seems to be all too seen to everybody else. Individuals worry admonition, ostracism or cancellation for not exhibiting the ‘right’ views. And they also self-censor their honest opinions and virtue-signal insincere opinions as a substitute. This reveals that the Foucauldian thought of an invisible energy could be very actual.
Jacques Derrida (1930-2004).
Postmodernism vs wokeness
Relatively than blame the postmodernists for wokeness, we should always maybe look to them for a way to withstand wokeness. Certainly, we would even look to them for inspiration, for a way to treatment our civilisation’s discontents.
If Foucault speaks to us at this time, so too does Nietzsche. He warned of the perils of groupthink on the behest of the herd and cautioned in opposition to man’s insatiable lust for energy, typically imposed with gleeful cruelty upon others. He would have definitely been important of the conspicuous compassion of the woke, of their claims to be kinder and extra caring than everybody else. Nietzsche effectively understood that those that discuss like this are pushed by delight and energy. As he put it in The Will to Energy: ‘For those who do good merely out of compassion, you do good for your self and never to your neighbour.’ Centuries earlier than social media got here round, Nietzsche knew why those that say ‘Be Sort’ on Twitter typically behave in probably the most vile method: these certain of their righteousness and goodness are all the time probably the most illiberal.
Derrida shouldn’t be derided as a nonsense-merchant, both. He reminds us of a truism that any considerate particular person is aware of: that the which means of phrases and texts is unstable, indeterminate, open to alter. Anybody who has re-read one in all their favorite books, and skilled a barely completely different e book the second time round, will recognise this. No two readings are ever the identical. And no two individuals learn the identical textual content in the identical means.
Derrida was merely urging us by no means to take a textual content superficially or actually. He was exhorting us as a substitute to query and interrogate language, to ask what it doesn’t say. At this time’s literal-minded cancel-culture zealots, who search to ban phrases and texts for being offensive, who imbue phrases with demonic, supernatural, voodoo powers, would do effectively to take heed to Derrida. He reminds us that the which means of phrases is usually elusive, contingent, ironic, sarcastic, allegorical, hyperbolic, metaphorical and context-bound.
Even that the majority outlandish of postmodern thinkers, Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007), has one thing to show us at this time. As an illustration, he appreciated like few others the function of the digital display screen in creating actuality. He recognised that, within the up to date media-saturated world, what’s actual and what’s represented have began to grow to be one, caught in a loop. Baudrillard would have been fascinated by social media and the way in which the web has modified the way in which we predict, communicate and write – radically reshaping actuality itself.
Even postmodern relativism can serve a helpful function at this time. Postmodernist thinkers did certainly forged doubt on objectivity and fact. However they did so so as to ask questions. Wokeness has no real interest in asking questions of goal fact. It solely needs to impose solutions. It needs to speak, as Prince Harry does, of ‘my fact’. Nietzsche, for one, would have ruthlessly criticised this growth. In any case, he deplored Christianity exactly as a result of it preached certitudes. He exalted doubt. As he wrote in Human, All Too Human (1878): ‘Convictions are extra harmful enemies of fact than lies.’ The woke at this time are illiberal as a result of they’re too filled with convictions. They aren’t self-questioning sufficient. These pious, censorious morality-enforcers epitomise ‘the herd’ that Nietzsche so vehemently deprecated all through his work. He would recognise their ‘bitter envy, bitter vindictiveness, mob delight’.
Foucault would have been deeply unimpressed by the woke obsession with id. He stated that the identities we ostensibly assume by ourselves are literally decided from exterior. He referred to as this ‘subjectification’ – ‘the way in which a human being turns him or herself right into a topic’. Those that boast at this time of being ‘genderfluid’ or ‘pansexual’ are imposing ideas, classes and phrases of others’ devising on themselves. To these demanding state recognition of their id or that others use their chosen pronouns, Foucault affords a rejoinder in The Archaeology of Information (1969): ‘Don’t ask me who I’m and… to stay the identical: depart it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are so as.’
Foucault’s rejection of the politics of id is hardly a shock. In any case, he rejected the concept of mounted, steady classes. As did different postmodern thinkers. They might be higher described as Foucault himself was, as ‘libertarian’ or ‘anarchist’. And even ‘libertines’. In any case, no matter you consider Foucault or Derrida, they had been free thinkers. The identical can’t be stated of at this time’s bovine, unforgiving, cult-like devotees of woke, who Andrew Doyle has rightly described because the ‘New Puritans’.
The postmodernists exhorted us to query orthodoxies. They preached scepticism, autonomy, anti-authoritarianism and liberation. At this time’s woke warriors preach obedience. Relating to dissenters, they search solely to self-discipline and punish.
(1) Foucault, by J G Merquior, Fontana, 1991, p154
Patrick West is a spiked columnist. His newest e book, Get Over Your self: Nietzsche For Our Instances, is revealed by Societas.
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