Postmodernism and the Left
Barbara Epstein
[from New Politics, vol. 6, no. 2 (new series), whole no. 22, Winter 1997]
Robbins goes on to deride critics of postmodernism as "know-nothings of the
left [who] delude themselves: Capitalism is screwing people! What goes up
must come down! What else do we need to know?" Robbins continues, "It seems
likely that what is really expressed by the angry tirades against cultural
politics that have accompanied the Sokal affair is a longing for the days
when women were back in the kitchen and it was respectable to joke about
faggots and other natural objects of humor. These are not the family values
I want my children to learn." (p.59) **Presumably Robbins is referring to
people who have expressed support for Sokal, such as Ruth Rosen (a feminist
historian), Katha Pollitt (a feminist journalist), Jim Weinstein (editor of
In These Times), Michael Albert (editor of Z Magazine), myself. Robbins'
remark is self-righteous posturing, and unfortunately it is not an isolated
example.** **In the arena of postmodernism, left politics is often
expressed through striking poses, often conveying moral superiority, greater
sophistication, or both. There often seems to be a sneer built into
postmodernist discourse, a cooler-than-thou stance. This enrages the critics
of postmodernism, and it is one reason why it has been so difficult for
supporters and critics of Sokal to discuss their differences calmly.**
**THERE ARE SERIOUS PROBLEMS WITHIN THE POSTMODERNIST SUBCULTURE. There is
an intense ingroupyness, a concern with who is in and who is out, and an
obscurantist vocabulary whose main function often seems to be to mark those
on the inside and allow them to feel that they are part of an intellectual
elite. This is not to object to the use of a technical vocabulary where it
is needed to express ideas precisely. The world of postmodernism has
unfortunately come to be flooded with writing in which pretentiousness
reigns and intellectual precision appears to have ceased to be a
consideration. There is the fetishization of the new: the rapid rise and
fall of trends, the collective deference to them while they last.** For a
while it seemed that every debate in this arena entailed accusations of
essentialism. The exact definition of essentialism was never clear, but it
nevertheless seemed that essentialism was the source of all error, and the
use of the term as invective was enough to halt discussion. **There is the
inflation of language and the habit of self-congratulation: it has become
common practice in this arena to advertise one's own work as radical,
subversive, transgressive. All this really means is that one hopes one is
saying something new. There is the worship of celebrities. This is a culture
that encourages and rewards self-aggrandizement and grandiosity. There is
intellectual bullying, the use of humiliation, ridicule, implicit threats of
ostracism, to silence dissent. All of this stands in direct contrast to the
endless talk of difference that takes place in this arena.**
**Efforts to raise criticisms from within this arena have not had much
effect; those who have made such efforts have been treated with hostility or
at best ignored. Those of us who supported Sokal's hoax felt that a public
act of mockery was required to open up discussion. Now that postmodernism
has lost its aura of invincibility people have begun to laugh, and it does
not seem likely that the laughter will stop anytime soon.** For instance,
in a review of a book entitled Male Matters: Masculinity, Anxiety, and the
Male Body on the Line, by Calvin Thomas (University of Illinois Press),
reviewer Daniel Harris writes,
**In the fast-paced intellectual environment of postmodern cultural studies,
the line between ostensibly serious scholarship and outright parody is not
just thin but, in many instances, nonexistent, as became embarrassingly
evident last month to the editors of one of the house organs of contemporary
theoretical discourse, Social Text....One can only hope that Sokal's
brilliant act of intellectual terrorism...will be the first of many similar
practical jokes. If even a handful of the numerous critics of cultural
theory did their part, postmodern journals and academic presses would be
swamped with fraudulent manuscripts that would shatter the self-confidence
of the entire field. This vast industry would collapse into a state of total
disarray were its tightly-knit ranks to become infiltrated by jargon-spewing
moles posing as the real McCoy, double agents cloaked in the uniform of the
American university's elitist new brand of paper radicals.**
Harris goes on to speculate that the book under review must be another hoax.
How else, he asks, can one explain the bewildering statements that appear in
this book, such as:
The excrementalization of alterity as the site/sight of homelessness, of
utter outsideness and unsubiatable dispossession figure(s) in...Hegel's
metanarrational conception of Enlightenment modernity as the teleological
process of totalization leading to absolute knowing.
The anal penis...function(s) within a devalued metonmymic continuity,
whereas the notion of the phallomorphic turd functions within the realm of
metaphorical substitution.
If the bodily in masculinity is encountered in all its rectal gravity, the
specular mode by which others become shit is disrupted.
Harris suggests that if Thomas wants to become an academic success he should
follow Sokal's example and proclaim his book to be a prank. Only slightly
less tongue in cheek, he speculates that what he describes as the central
metaphor of this book, the comparison of writing to "productions" of the
body, especially shit, may be apt in a field in which jargon is used as an
offensive weapon, to score points against competitors in the battle for
tenure and prestige.15
**POSTMODERNISM DID NOT INVENT INTELLECTUAL BULLYING. This is not the first
instance of dogmatism on the left. In the 30s people on the left (at least
those in or close to the Communist Party) felt considerable pressure not to
admit, or even consider the possibility, that the Soviets were anything less
than angels. In the late 60s a kind of Maoist politics swept the left, in
particular the radical core of the anti-war movement. Under the aegis of
"Marxism-Leninism" a politics was put forward that revolved around the
assumption that revolution was possible in the U.S. if only people on the
left would follow the example set by revolutionaries in the Third World.
Strategies were proposed that were utterly inappropriate to the U.S.;
questioning these strategies, or for that matter suggesting that a
revolution was not very likely in the U.S., was tantamount to labelling
oneself a defector from the cause. Similar things took place in the radical
wing of the women's movement: extreme conceptions of feminism, such as the
belief that having anything to do with men amounted to fraternizing with the
enemy, took hold in many circles, and questioning these ideas was likely to
earn one a reputation as a friend of the patriarchy. The left in the U.S.
seems prone to being seized by ideas which, when recollected a few years
later, look somewhat mad. But it is worth asking why particular ideologies
take over at particular moments. After all, in the case of postmodernism, it
is not clear why culturalism, a social constructionism set in competition
with other levels of social analysis, should be equated with radicalism.**
**Terry Eagleton, in his article "Where Do Postmodernists Come From?"16
argues that left intellectuals in the U.S. have adopted postmodernism out of
a sense of having been badly defeated, a belief that the left as a political
tendency has little future. Culturalism, he argues, involves an extreme
subjectivism, a view of the intellect as all-powerful, a mindset that might
be described as taking the May '68 slogan "all power to the imagination"
literally, combined with a deep pessimism, a sense that it isn't worth the
effort to learn about the world, to analyze social systems, for instance,
because they can't be changed anyway.**
I would add two points to Eagleton's analysis. *First, postmodernism takes
many of its ideas from the 60s. To some extent it represents a
rigidification of ideas that were widespread in movements of that time,
especially the voluntarism or hubris of a generational cohort that tended to
think that it could accomplish anything. The widespread view among leftists
of the 60s that revolution was waiting in the wings, and the fact that so
few people openly challenged this, reflected a grandiosity, a loosening of
the collective grip on reality. In the heated atmosphere of the late 60s it
was possible for radicals to take fairly crazy positions without utterly
losing their audience or becoming irrelevant to politics. In the 90s there
is considerably less room for extreme voluntarism, or grandiosity, cast as a
political position.*
There was also a widespread tendency in the movements of the 60s to equate
personal and cultural change with broader social change. One of the most
important contributions of the movements of the 60s (especially feminism and
the countercultural left) was the critique of a culture that promoted
consumerism, that equated happiness with individual striving for power and
wealth. But in rejecting a politics that left this element out it was easy
to fall into the opposite problem of believing that creating communities in
which people tried to live according to different values would inevitably
move society as a whole in the same direction. This made change seem easier
than it was. The prosperity of the late 60s and early 70s allowed
alternative communities to flourish, and it seemed plausible that the more
egalitarian relationships and humane values developed in them might serve as
models. But as it turned out the egalitarian impulse that found expression
in these communities was overshadowed by the shift to the right that has
taken place in American society as a whole since the mid-to-late 70s.
Alternative communities themselves were weakened and destroyed by social
changes over which they had no control, especially the depression of the 70s
and the withdrawal of support from the public sector in the 80s and 90s. In
the 90s it would be very hard to make a convincing case that cultural change
equals social change. The equation of the personal or the cultural with the
political was a mixed blessing for the movements of the 60s. In the 90s it
tends to mean retreating into one's own community and allowing politics to
drift further and further to the right.
***POSTMODERNISM SUFFERS NOT ONLY FROM ITS RELIANCE ON a conception of
radicalism that made more sense in the 60s than it does now, but also from
the fact that it is located in academia and reflects its pressures. The
logic of the market is not a new presence in the American academy, but it
now seems to be sweeping all other values and considerations aside. There
has been a dramatic increase in the pressures toward intellectual
specialization and a frantic pace of publication.*** There is intense
competition between and within fields. In the years following World War II
there was a widespread belief, in government and business circles, that the
U.S. economy would benefit if a broad liberal higher education were widely
available. In the wake of Sputnik there was a sudden rush of support for
science education; this resulted in more government support for universities
without diminishing its commitment to the humanities. Through the 60s it was
mostly the children of the white middle class who attended universities,
public or private. Since the 60s the economy has changed, the values
governing public spending have changed, and the composition of university
student bodies has changed. In a society increasingly stratified between
haves and have-nots, an economy in which technical expertise seems more
important than familiarity with history and literature, support for liberal
education is hardly reliable.
In the 50s and 60s academics could believe that their profession was held in
high esteem. They were well paid, and at least some found their opinions
sought by the White House or by large corporations. Over the last few
decades it has become harder to believe that public esteem of the academy is
unqualified. The loss of prestige (and of resources) is felt most sharply in
the humanities. **In the 50s the social sciences tried to show that they
could be as rigorous, quantitative, and ostensibly value-free, as the
natural sciences. This encouraged huge quantities of unimaginative,
narrowly-conceived, jargon-ridden papers. Now it seems to be the turn of the
humanities to try to raise their stock within academia, though this time the
strategy is not to imitate science but to assert the supremacy of a
vocabulary and theoretical perspective nurtured in the humanities over all
fields of knowledge. But postmodernism only highlights its own weaknesses
when it overreaches its scope. I have heard many postmodernists denounce
Sokal on grounds that his hoax could lead to funds being withdrawn from
Cultural Studies or the humanities generally. It seems more useful to look
at postmodernism's internal problems. Sokal's hoax and the laughter it
generated shows that the field had become ripe for parody.17**
Contd.
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