By Jack Sparrow
Joseph Dietzgen once said that official philosophy was not a science, but a safeguard against socialism. Indeed, ever since Marxism emerged as a significant force, not only are Marx and Engels personae non grata in the hallowed halls of the philosophy departments, but Hegel is subjected to a quite shameful conspiracy of silence.
The history of philosophy has known a vast array of schools, sub-schools and trends, encompassing a diverse range of world outlooks and guiding principles. But within this myriad of trends, some of them rational and materialist, others idealist and wildly mystical, Postmodernism is an amorphous philosophical school of thought that rose to become one of the dominant schools of bourgeois philosophy, permeating large parts, if not the majority, of academia today. It embodies the utter dead-end and pessimism of bourgeois philosophy given the senile decay of capitalist society, slowly spreading like a virus throughout the world, jumping from country to country, constantly mutating into new and ever-more-bizarre variants. Spinning off an industry of sub-schools and trends such as post-colonialism, queer theory, several forms of feminism and many more.
The postmodernists put forward the most laughably absurd claims and propositions. Jean Baudrillard [pictured above], for example, claimed that reality has now disappeared, and all meaning along with it. To illustrate his point, he paraphrases (and exaggerates) the words of Elias Canetti with apparent approval:“
Beyond a certain precise moment in time, history is no longer real. Without realising it, the whole human race suddenly left reality behind. Nothing that has occurred since then has been true, but we are unable to realise it. Our task and our duty now is to discover this point or, so long as we fail to grasp it, we are condemned to continue on our present destructive course.” Since reality has now disappeared, and all meaning along with it, there is no point in asking for any meaning at all. This is a method that has the undoubted advantage of ruling out any awkward questions in advance. It silences all possible criticism and, in fact, liquidates the basis of rational thought in general. This line of thinking is merely a regurgitation of the old argument of Tertullian in the third century, who justified the absurdities of Christian dogma by asserting: “I believe it because it is absurd.”Deleuze and Guattari, often portrayed as the “left wing” of postmodernism, take these absurdities to a whole new level:“…the human essence of nature and the natural essence of man become one within nature in the form of production or industry, just as they do within the life of man as a species. Industry is then no longer considered from the extrinsic point of view of utility, but rather from the point of view of its fundamental identity with nature as production of man and by man. Not man as the king of creation, but rather as the being who is in intimate contact with the profound life of all forms or all types of beings, who is responsible for even the stars and animal life, and who ceaselessly plugs an organ-machine into an energy-machine, a tree into his body, a breast into his mouth, the sun into his asshole: the eternal custodian of the machines of the universe. This is the second meaning of process as we use the term: man and nature are not like two opposite…” The whole of postmodernist literature is replete with this pompous, self-important tripe that provides a cover for its ill-thought-out theories.
The term “postmodernism” was first coined by Jean-François Lyotard [pictured above] which he defined as “incredulity toward the meta-narratives”. The Oxford English Dictionary defines ‘meta-narratives’ as, “An overarching account or interpretation of events and circumstances that provides a pattern or structure for people’s beliefs and gives meaning to their experiences.” When he informs us that we must at all costs avoid thinking in certain ways of which he disapproves, does he not provide us with a general theory – an “overarching account or interpretation of events and circumstances”? And, in telling us that certain ideas are to be shunned, does he not also provide us with “a pattern or structure for people’s beliefs, giving meaning to their experiences”?
Postmodernists are also known for their rejection of the notion of progress in history. They claim that the development of science and philosophy knows no progress, and that there are only different ways of interpreting the world. At no point has humanity’s understanding of nature and society taken a single step forward – indeed there is no ‘forward’ for the postmodernist. Nothing is progressive, except, of course, postmodernism, which has only now emerged, triumphant, to expose this age-old sham of a belief in progress!It is certainly true that under the capitalist system in its period of senile decay, no serious progress is possible for the human race. But are we entitled to draw the conclusion from this that progress in general does not exist, or that history has not experienced times when it took giant steps forward? No, we are entitled to do no such thing. Anyone who studies the past will immediately see that human society has known periods of great advance, characterised by the rapid development of the productive forces, science and technology, and the flowering of art and culture.It also knows other periods characterised by stagnation, the fall of the Roman Empire gave way to the Dark Ages, the Dark Ages gave way to the Renaissance, the age of the rise of the bourgeoise, the bourgeoise gave way to the Enlightenment. As its name implies, postmodernism believes that something called modernism is now at an end. Modernism is the set of ideas that emerged from the Enlightenment. That was the heroic epoch of capitalism, when the bourgeoisie was still capable of playing a progressive role. But the present epoch presents a picture of social, economic, political and ideological decay. Human progress has indeed stalled. The productive forces are paralysed by the deepest crisis in three hundred years. Culture stagnates, and the fruits of science, far from liberating mankind, threaten mass unemployment and environmental catastrophe. The capitalist class has become a colossal obstacle to progress.
In an interview from 1977, published under the title Prison Talk, Michel Foucault [pictured above] was confronted with an awkwardly straightforward question about his rejection of the concept of ‘progress’, that we must ‘free historical chronologies and successive orderings from all forms of progressivist perspective’.”
Foucault answered in the following way: “This is something I owe to the historians of science. I adopt the methodical precaution and the radical but unaggressive scepticism which makes it a principle not to regard the point in time where we are now standing as the outcome of a teleological progression which it would be one’s business to reconstruct historically: that scepticism regarding ourselves and what we are, our here and now, which prevents one from assuming that what we have is better than – or more than – in the past. This doesn’t mean not attempting to reconstruct generative processes, but that we must do this without imposing on them a positivity or a valorisation.” “I don’t say that humanity doesn’t progress. I say that it is a bad method to pose the problem as: ‘How is it that we have progressed?’ The problem is: how do things happen? And what happens now is not necessarily better or more advanced, or better understood, than what happened in the past.”
We see his rejection of the imposition of ‘valorisation’ on the ‘generative processes’ of history is nothing but a rejection of progress. In an act of cynical deceit, he drags in by the hair the term ‘teleological’ as a means of confusing the issue. Anyone with the slightest knowledge about philosophy would know that there is a world of difference between teleology – a word with religious connotations, which means preordained purpose, which Marx never supported – and the idea that human history is not a series of meaningless accidents but is governed by certain laws that assert themselves independently of the subjective will of individual men and women.Intellectual dishonesty and cowardice is an essential component of postmodernism. It adopts a whole host of manoeuvres to confuse and disorient the reader, in order to distract them from its real reactionary character.Postmodernism proposes that the only truth lies in individual experience, ‘lived experience’, and that can only ever be a personal truth. Not content with consigning all rational thought and “meta-narratives” to the dustbin, some postmodernists go so far as to inform us that, since language is an oppressive construct, grammar itself must be abolished as it is oppressive to human freedom. But language is not a construct. It has evolved gradually as a result of the development of society. We may like or dislike the rules of grammar and syntax, whether it be the grammar of official language taught in schools or unofficial grammar such as dialects. However, without these rules, speech becomes completely unintelligible, or at least, extremely incoherent.
Judith Butler, a postmodernist True Believer, denounces the “[l]earning [of] the rules that govern intelligible speech”. Learning such rules are “an inculcation into normalised language, where the price of not conforming is the loss of intelligibility itself.” She goes on to say that “there is nothing radical about common sense. It would be a mistake to think that received grammar is the best vehicle for expressing radical views, given the constraints that grammar imposes upon thought, indeed, upon the thinkable itself.”Jacques Derrida famously said that “there is nothing outside the text.” By this he means that meaning – and thereby knowledge – is not related to objective reality, but to itself alone. The words that we use are not in any way related to the things we want to signify. Rather, any single word, according to Derrida, is only defined by its relationship to other words. Thus, in order to understand anything, we first have to understand all the words that give our words context, and then all the words that give those words context, and so on. Of course, this is impossible and hence, we are told, this fleeting thing called ‘meaning’ will forever be ‘deferred’ and never fully grasped.It is commonly known that an idea that is true, is an idea that corresponds to reality. A small child might think that it is fun to play with fire. It will soon come to realise that this is not a correct idea. From painful trial and error, over time it will form the idea that approached in the right way, a fire might after all be very useful and, in some situations, perhaps even fun. The postmodernists however, reject this notion. They entirely reject the proposition that ideas can be true or false. They deride categorical statements (although not always, as we will see) because that would imply that some statements are more true than others.
According to Foucault, the most prominent postmodernist, we cannot aspire to objective truth. That is, we cannot aspire to ideas, the content of which does not depend on human beings. He maintains that ultimately the truthfulness of ideas – knowledge, in other words – is not derived from our experience of material reality, but rather from what he calls ‘power’. This is not power in the sense that we normally understand it, such as state power, or the power of one class over another. ‘Power’ in Foucault’s vocabulary essentially merely means knowledge in general. Thus, ‘power’ produces knowledge and knowledge produces ‘power’.
Foucault then goes on to tell us that truth is not something we can attain by testing our ideas in the real world. Instead, truth is “produced” by ‘power’. And “regimes of truth” are imposed on society by ‘power’. ‘Power’ tells us what is true and what is false. However, according to Foucault, in reality these categories of true and false do not exist. Consequently nothing is true and nothing is false. One of the ways we can discover this, he informs us, is by taking LSD: “We can easily see how LSD inverts the relationships of ill humor, stupidity, and thought: it no sooner eliminates the supremacy of cat¬egories than it tears away the ground of its indifference and disinte¬grates the gloomy dumbshow of stupidity; and it presents this univocal and acategorical mass not only as variegated, mobile, asym-metrical, decentered, spiraloid, and reverberating but causes it to rise, at each instant, as a swarming of phantasm-events.” As opposed to faith, all of science is based on the proposition that a natural world exists independently of our ideas, and that our ideas are capable of reflecting natural phenomena. Truth therefore exists objectively, that is independently of the minds of individual human beings. Postmodernism elevates subjectivity to an absolute principle. From this it deduces that thinking in general is limited and partial, therefore it cannot reach objective truth. For the narrow-minded academic, the world stops at the tip of their noses, or at least at the door of the seminar room. The university professor produces only words. These are the sum total of his or her world, their natural environment – the only environment they know. It is true that each individual human being by nature has a partial and limited outlook. But taken as a whole, humanity can overcome the limitations of the individual by collectively testing the objectivity of each proposition from a myriad of angles and by applying it in real life. Human beings transform the world through collective labour, and thereby transform themselves. It is this ceaseless process of creation that finds its highest expression in the onward march of science, which the postmodernists wish to deny, but which is a self-evident fact.
Since the postmodernists reject the notion of truth, they identify the number one enemy as those who accept truth. Let us return for a moment to The Postmodern Condition, where Jean-Francois Lyotard attempts to define the meaning of “postmodern”:“
I will use the term modern to designate any science that legitimates itself with reference to a metadiscourse of this kind making explicit appeal to some grand narrative, such as the dialectics of Spirit, the hermeneutics of meaning, the emancipation of the rational or working subject, or the creation of wealth.“
Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity toward the meta-narratives. This incredulity is undoubtedly a product of progress in the sciences; but that progress in turn presupposes it. To the obsolescence of the meta-narratives apparatus of legitimation corresponds, most notably, the crisis of metaphysical philosophy and of the university function, which in part relied on it. The narrative function is losing its functors, its great hero, its great voyages, its great goal.”Here, we have an absolutely priceless example of the unintelligible jargon of postmodernism. Please bear in mind that, for our benefit, Lyotard is “simplifying to the extreme”. That is just as well, because otherwise we would be running a serious risk of actually understanding what he’s trying to say, which is that postmodernism rejects all schools of thought that attempt to develop a single, coherent worldview.
Postmodernists blame Marxists for not being “open minded” towards other schools of thought. But in reality, the exact opposite is true! These ladies and gentlemen are obsessed with being new and original (although that is far from the case). They act as if history starts and ends with themselves. Marxism, on the other hand, makes no claim to stand out as something completely unrelated to previous philosophies. We do not claim that the ideas of scientific socialism sprang into being purely from the particular creative genius of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.In opposing meta-narratives, it is precisely this systematic investigation and science in general that the postmodernists oppose. Listen to how Foucault sneeringly decries “the tyranny of globalising discourses with their hierarchy and all their privileges of a theoretical avant-garde’’, and how he calls for a “…struggle against the coercion of a theoretical, unitary, formal and scientific discourse”.
Luce Irigaray for instance, is notable for her rejection of Einstein’s theory of relativity, on the ground that it is “sexist”, presumably because Albert Einstein had the misfortune to be a man. Her 1987 essay is titled Is the Subject of Science Sexed?. “Perhaps it is. Let us make the hypothesis that it is insofar as it privileges the speed of light over other speeds that are vitally necessary to us. What seems to me to indicate the possible sexed nature of the equation is not directly its use by nuclear weapons, rather it is having privileged what goes the fastest… But what does the mighty theory of relativity do for us except establish nuclear power plants and question our bodily inertia, that necessary condition of life?”According to the convoluted reasoning of Irigaray, speed is a predominantly male characteristic and therefore Einstein’s “fixation” with speed in his equation is “sexist”. Postmodernism has set up a true global anti-scientific and anti-cultural inquisition. Discredited mystical ideas are promoted, whereas the greatest theories and minds humanity has ever known are condemned without blinking. On the other hand, Marxism is the highest form of scientific thought, which is why it draws the ire of the postmodernists. It is interesting to note that Foucault’s principal objection to Marxism is that it is scientific. Here is what he writes: “If we have any objection against Marxism, it lies in the fact that it could effectively be a science.” In Summary, Marxism stands in irreconcilable opposition to postmodernism. We are materialists and we stand firmly on the basis of truth and science. We believe that there is only one single interconnected material world, which has always existed and which is neither the creation of a god nor of Monsieur Foucault’s ‘power’. The consistent materialist theory of knowledge maintains that knowledge is ultimately derived from sense experience. To reject the notion of objective reality and objective truth ultimately leads to nothing but a whitewashing and a defence of the status quo. Because if progress is impossible, it is futile to strive for a better society.