Comment by Iain Aitken
Lisa Macdonald's polemic characterisation of postmodernism as another form of bourgeois individualism (GLW #139) fails to recognise the polymorphous nature of postmodernism and the potential it offers for radical politics. She refers to postmodernists as "they", as if "they" constituted some historically and individually identifiable group about which one can generalise. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Some postmodernists do retreat into formalistic textual analysis and espouse liberal individualistic ideology, but there are others who take the question of radical politics seriously indeed.
First, post-structuralists (many of whom are postmodernists) do not view the world as a set of "simply unconnected, equally significant, random occurrences". As a movement within structuralism (like postmodernism's relation to modernism — it is not after modernism, but part of it) post-structuralism holds that structuralism's strictly scientific approach and its obliteration of the individual are totalitarian and stifling. It is argued that while there may not be one set of laws governing the world, there are in fact any number of ordering systems which determine how we act and what effect our actions may have.
For example, Jean Baudrillard argues that Marxism is outdated: capitalism dominates not through the control of production per se but through the control of the production and consumption of meaning. Whether one agrees completely with this is unimportant — the fact is that it is useful politically.
Baudrillard's analysis of the media attests to this. His recent claim the that the Gulf War "never happened" is not denying that something happened in which thousands of people were slaughtered; rather he argues that our conception of the events in the Gulf as a "war" is media "hyperreality". This hyperreality obscures numerous other realities such as: the total incapability of Iraq to oppose the allies in anything resembling a "war"; the vicious exploitation, internal and external, perpetrated by Kuwait's oligarchy; the United States' vested interests in the area, which meant that it could not get rid of Iraq's ruling elite for fear of destabilising the region completely.
Obviously there is a lot more to it than this. Suffice it to say the sort of analysis that Baudrillard undertakes of information systems is just not possible if we refuse to look beyond Marx's analysis of 19th century industrial capitalism. I am not claiming that we are living in a "post-industrial" age in the sense that we no longer depend on material production, but simply that capitalism today is much more sophisticated and needs to be understood not only on the political-economic level but also on the level of its production and consumption of meaning.
Second, much of postmodernism involves rethinking the human subject in a radically different way to the liberal ideological construction of an essentially rational being making free choices. The individual as such no longer exists. It is argued that the "individual" is a construct of our social context as articulated in discourse. Thatcherism is as crude an interpretation of postmodernism as Stalinism is of Marxism.
The concepts "individual" and "society" are not rigidly opposed, as this mystifies the fact that both require and are part of one another. Notions such as collective action, class, class consciousness need not be abandoned, but rather re-conceptualised. The fact is that capitalism generally, for whatever reasons, has managed to survive so far and evolved significantly to do so. Accordingly, oppositional practices must also evolve. This means using both old and new concepts and practices.
Third, the fact that everything we articulate is a "text" does not mean there is no reality "beyond" the text. For a postmodernist there is no "real world" one can articulate purely and objectively, free from ideology, but there is very much a "real" which challenges any discourse's self- legitimating logic.
For instance, when I experienced hordes of beggars in Sri Lanka, the "real" intruded upon me in a way that challenged my representation of the people simply as "beggars". The term "beggar" has all sorts of connotations in capitalist discourse, a discourse of which we are all necessarily a part — whether we want to be or not. These include: the beggar as someone who simply has had "bad luck"; someone who "refuses/does not want to work"; someone who, because they are beggars, are "worth" less as a person and "deserve" to be where they are. But the reality of my experience of the beggars exceeded this discourse — the inadequacy of its self-legitimating strategy was exposed. Reality made itself felt.
Fourth, "theories of difference" do not necessarily lead to an absence of collectivity. Jean-Francois Lyotard's work on language games and Luce Irigaray's work on sexual difference offer ways of understanding difference which allow those silenced to speak, or at least gain recognition. Difference and collectivity are not opposed; they are integral parts of one another. Understanding differences is a step to collective action which does not alienate others and hence de-collectivise action.
I am not claiming that the above writers speak the truth or that we ought to accept everything they say. I am simply asking that they not be rejected as useless. One can never prevent others from using them, or anyone, to support capitalist ideology but this should not prevent their use, by those who wish, for radical politics.
Fifth, science is not rejected, it is re-situated. Objective reality, as a reality transparent to language, is a capitalist myth which, as "postmodernish" Marxists Adorno and Horkheimer demonstrated in the Dialectic of Enlightenment, has sustained an instrumental rationality justifying capitalism's exploitation of women, workers and the environment. They do not want to abandon science and reason, but to reconceive them in such a way that they are not just a tool of the dominant groups in society.
The idea of progress is obviously part of Enlightenment ideology. There is no final solution, no one goal, no "end of history". In practical terms, this means that one can work toward goals, but that one cannot expect that they are wholly achievable or valid in the long term. This does not mean abandoning ourselves to despair or bourgeois individualism. It simply means that we have to recognise the ephemerality of any social structure, be it one of which we approve or disapprove. Capitalism will not last forever but, likewise, nor will anything else.
Either/or logic such as Lisa Macdonald applies — either we reject postmodernism or we "capitulate" to capitalism — is self-defeating. Why not take from postmodernism what is useful and still use more orthodox methods? Why not attack on as many fronts as possible? "Unity" of all resisting groups is utopian and, if assumed as a precondition for major social change, a hindrance. Why not attempt to present an as-unified-as-possible opposition to the system without closing off possibilities for postmodern critique because of some romantic desire for unity which never has, and never will, exist?
In some forms, postmodernism is dangerous for progressive movements, but so are some forms of Marxism. These "dangerous" forms of postmodernism can be countered by a critical leftist use of postmodernism which can also be turned against more traditional capitalist ideology. After all, to use postmodernism one does not have to accept it lock, stock and barrel. By resisting capitalism solely from within its discourse of self-legitimating rationality, alternative and valuable critical perspectives and options for action are lost.
One can both criticise capitalism on its own terms and subvert the terms themselves. Labelling postmodernism tout court as reactionary and something to be avoided is as dangerous a strategy as accepting it uncritically. The last thing people on the left should be doing is closing off avenues of radical critique and resistance. Postmodernism is one of these.