Stephen R. C. Hicks - Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism From Rousseau to Foucault

B y most accounts we have entered a new intellectual age. We are postmodern now. Leading intellectuals tell us that modernism has died, and that a revolutionary era is upon usan era liberated from the oppressive strictures of the past, but at the same time disquieted by its expectations for the future. Even postmodernisms oppo-nents, surveying the intellectual scene and not liking what they see, acknowledge a new cutting edge. In the intellectual world, there has been a changing of the guard.

The names of the postmodern vanguard are now familiar: Michel Foucault , Jacques Derrida , Jean-Franois Lyotard , and Richard Rorty . They are its leading strategists. They set the direction of the movement and provide it with its most potent tools. The vanguard is aided by other familiar and often infamous names: Stanley Fish and Frank Lentricchia in literary and legal criticism, Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin in feminist legal criticism, Jacques Lacan in psychology, Robert Venturi and Andreas Huyssen in architectural criticism, and Luce Irigaray in the criticism of science.

Members of this elite group set the direction and tone for the postmodern intellectual world.

Michel Foucault has identified the major targets: All my analyses are against the idea of universal necessities in human existence.

Richard Rorty has elaborated on that theme, explaining that that is not to say that postmodernism is true or that it offers knowledge. Such assertions would be self-contradictory, so postmodernists must use language ironically.

The difficulty faced by a philosopher who, like myself, is sympathetic to this suggestion [e.g., Foucaults]one who thinks of himself as auxiliary to the poet rather than to the physicistis to avoid hinting that this suggestion gets something right, that my sort of philosophy corresponds to the way things really are. For this talk of correspondence brings back just the idea my sort of philosopher wants to get rid of, the idea that the world or the self has an intrinsic nature.

If there is no world or self to understand and get right on their terms, then what is the purpose of thought or action? Having deconstructed reason, truth, and the idea of the correspondence of thought to reality, and then set them asidereason, writes Foucault , is the ultimate language of madness

Many postmodernists, though, are less often in the mood for aesthetic play than for political activism. Many deconstruct reason, truth, and reality because they believe that in the name of reason, truth, and reality Western civilization has wrought dominance, oppression, and destruction. Reason and power are one and the same, Jean-Franois Lyotard states. Both lead to and are synony-mous with prisons, prohibitions, selection process, the public good.

Postmodernism then becomes an activist strategy against the coalition of reason and power. Postmodernism , Frank Lentricchia explains, seeks not to find the foundation and the conditions of truth but to exercise power for the purpose of social change. The task of postmodern professors is to help students spot, confront, and work against the political horrors of ones time

Those horrors, according to postmodernism, are most prominent in the West, Western civilization being where reason and power have been the most developed. But the pain of those horrors is neither inflicted nor suffered equally. Males, whites, and the rich have their hands on the whip of power, and they use it cruelly at the expense of women, racial minorities, and the poor.

The conflict between men and women is brutal. The normal fuck, writes Andrea Dworkin , by a normal man is taken to be an act of invasion and ownership undertaken in a mode of predation. This special insight into the sexual psychology of males is matched and confirmed by the sexual experience of women:

Women have been chattels to men as wives, as prostitutes, as sexual and reproductive servants. Being owned and being fucked are or have been virtually synonymous experiences in the lives of women. He owns you; he fucks you. The fucking conveys the quality of ownership: he owns you inside out.

Dworkin and her colleague, Catharine MacKinnon , then call for the censorship of pornography on postmodern grounds. Our social reality is constructed by the language we use, and porn-ography is a form of language, one that constructs a violent and domineering reality for women to submit to. Pornography, therefore, is not free speech but political oppression.

The violence is also experienced by the poor at the hands of the rich and by the struggling nations at the hands of the capitalist nations. For a striking example, Lyotard asks us to consider the American attack on Iraq in the 1990s. Despite American propa-ganda, Lyotard writes, the fact is that Saddam Hussein is a victim and a spokesman for victims of American imperialism the world over.

Saddam Hussein is a product of Western departments of state and big companies, just as Hitler , Mussolini , and Franco were born of the peace imposed on their countries by the victors of the Great War . Saddam is such a product in an even more flagrant and cynical way. But the Iraqi dictatorship proceeds, as do the others, from the transfer of aporias [insoluble problems] in the capitalist system to vanquished, less developed, or simply less resistant countries.

Yet the oppressed status of women, the poor, racial minorities, and others is almost always veiled in the capitalist nations. Rhetoric about trying to put the sins of the past behind us, about progress and democracy, about freedom and equality before the lawall such self-serving rhetoric serves only to mask the brutality of capitalist civilization. Rarely do we catch an honest glimpse of its underlying essence. For that glimpse, Foucault tells us, we should look to prison.

Prison is the only place where power is manifested in its naked state, in its most excessive form, and where it is justified as moral force. What is fascinating about prisons is that, for once, power doesnt hide or mask itself; it reveals itself as tyranny pursued into the tiniest details; it is cynical and at the same time pure and entirely justified, because its practice can be totally formulated within the framework of morality. Its brutal tyranny consequently appears as the serene domination of Good over Evil, of order over disorder.