Pedro Alonso Lopez
27th February 2005, 17:15
This is an article by a college buddy of mine, he is opposed to postmodernism on one level. And although I disagree with a lot of it, it will be handy for a lot of you maybe to have a look.
can one be an ivory tower revolutionary
The article will examine the role of postmodern thought as a form of emancipation with reference to M Foucault and Baudrillard, in the end will will argue that it is a critique of a failed revolution.
‘Postmodern thought undermines any foundation for rational enquiry and human understanding’
“ It is senseless to refer to reason as the contrary entry into non reason… such a trial would trap us into playing the arbitrary and boring part of either the irrationalist or the rationalist” Foucault
The essay will firstly discuss the question of foundations to show that postmodern thought does subvert foundationist theories but this does not remove enquiry into the human condition of understanding. Any attempt at distinguishing rational from irrational underwrites the premise of postmodern analysis. Postmodern thought avoids the privileging of concepts so cannot be seen as ‘undermining rational enquiry and human understanding’. The core of the essay will focus around the thought of Michael Foucault and Jean Baudrillard, the latter being more of an embodiment of what is taken to be postmodernism. Secondly, the essay will examine the role of knowledge in Foucault, concentrating on his archaeological method in the order of things. It will be shown that the cultural hegemony of reason has been put to ‘irrational’ actions through methods of social discipline. Subsequently the emphasis will be placed on his genealogical method of analyzing and uncovering the historical relationship between truth, knowledge and power. Thirdly, the essay will focus on Baudrillards conception of the hyperreal. He will be shown to give an accurate and stimulating analysis of the social effect of consumer capitalism but in the end his inability to escape the image of capitalism justifies it. Fourthly, the essay will critically evaluate both thinkers and the so called postmodern condition. It will be argued that Postmodernism can be seen as a continuation of critical theory that began in the Frankfurt school. Foucault will be presented as maintaining emancipatory elements with his understanding of struggle and resistance but fails to accommodate a descending analysis of power in his genealogies thus under theorizes the role of agency in dominating institutions. The criticisms of Baudrillard will rest on the original conception of the spectacle in Guy Debord, the latter will be presented as a similar but more emancipatory analysis as it is a call for action. The essay will conclude that postmodern thought does remove foundations and this should be seen as a liberating call for a more creative existence but it fails to escape the theoretical prison of academia. Thus it contains the seeds for a new organic approach to confronting cultural hegemony at a local level but its appearance of radicalism is an illusory subversion.
Postmodern thought subverts all totalizing theories, metaphysical permanence, transcendental signifieds, objective truths and any claim to indubitable foundations but in the end subverts itself. The foundationist project in epistemology is the arch nemesis to postmodernism. However this critique of foundationism is simply aimed at negating the hierarchical elements in epistemological and social theory. The privileging of certain concepts be it reason or class does not remove any attempt at rational enquiry into the human condition and hence does not make them invalid. The authority of foundations are dispersed and all enquires are to be made on the basis of historical and cultural relativity. This context of interpretation cannot be transcended by appeal to any ultimate truth or human nature. The hermeneutic turn began with Nietzsche, accentuated by Heidegger was adopted by Foucault in his historical account of the conditions that gave rise to knowledge in periods of discontinuity in history. Meaning is never static and always fluid.
“There are no facts only interpretations”. Nietzsche.
To distinguish between rational and irrational is a premise that would immediately contradict postmodern thought. Equally one cannot distinguish between truth/ untruth, reality/ unreality. In this regard, postmodernism, although it undermines foundations upon which to build a theory, discourse or subject, qualifies human understanding by deepening the enquiry into the human condition. Foucault argues that there is no human nature, no predetermined sexuality or human dispositions. The subject is a product of her environment and thus the human understanding is to be found in ones social environment, in its institutions and disciplines that give rise to internalized subjects of dominant discourse i.e. competitive, self interested economic agents within capitalism. This insight is in itself liberating as it provides us with the tools to create ourselves and formulate new forms of identity. Foucault is a disciple of Nietzsche that once said “we have to create ourselves as a work of art#”. Aestheticisation over moralisation was his replacement for lost foundations. Humanity has no intrinsic identity waiting to be actualized and must create itself socially, culturally and historically. This removal of foundations is replaced with the optimism that if nothing is inevitable then everything is possible.
Postmodernism is not a movement or a fashion but a space for debate. It is a context for debate concerning truth, identity, politics and meaning. It is usually seen as a reaction to the modernist project of historical progression based on reason embodied in the enlightenment. The key term for postmodernism is difference not reference and is derived from the linguistic turn in philosophy into poststructuralism. Poststructuralism argues that there can be no free standing signifieds, one true meaning or foundational truth. If meaning is taken to mean the effect of language and discourse and not its cause then all foundations lose their status including the human essence or subject. Thus postmodernism is often referred to as the antithesis to “master narratives” that claim privileged access to certain concepts that are applicable to all circumstances and human conditions. This linguistic turn in philosophy marks the ‘episteme‘of the postmodern condition and provides a new horizon of our cultural, philosophical and political experience. The human essence or consciousness is nothing more than the product of the meanings we learn and reproduce in our social context. With this realization postmodern thought frees philosophy from the reductive authoritarian fallacies that have traditionally dominated it.
In the Order Of Things, Foucault is attempting a study of the empirical conditions under which scientific and social statements come to be counted as true or false. It is an archaeological method into the knowledge-styles as opposed to lifestyles that dominate the episteme, that is, the specific world views and discourses that are characterized by institutions and disciplines of the human sciences. His archaeology brings to light the fields of knowledge by which society has governed itself. Foucault is concentrating on that dynamism and opposition which gives rise to what is considered reasonable or unreasonable in both human behavior and scientific discourse. The episteme represents something similar to what Hegelianism and Marxism has traditionally called consciousness without the predeterminism and teleological overtones upon which false consciousness will be replaced by true consciousness.
“ I an attempting to bring to light the episteme in which knowledge… grounds its positivity and thereby manifests a history which is not that of its growing perfection, but rather that of its conditions of possibility#”.
These conditions lie in the awakening of the transcendental subject that evaluates its objects on the basis of historical progress. The ideology of progress is exemplified in the human sciences of economics, biology and philology. However Foucault wants to unmask the hidden face of such reasoned projects.
Foucault does not defend the irrational over the rational. He concentrates on what occurs in the shadow of reason. He highlights in Madness and Civilization the role of reason in formulating its hegemonic position in the classical age or the age of enlightenment. The central idea of the enlightenment is that human beings are essentially rational animals and Foucault’s archaeology highlights the effects this had on all those deemed irrational. The hegemonic position attributed to reason resulted in the great confinement of all those considered mad. The great confinement led to the creation of the Hopital General in 1656 to “put an end to unemployment or at least begging#”. The confinement took on a new role, that of forced labor. “It was no longer merely a question of confining those out of work but of giving work to those who had been confined and thus making them contribute to the prosperity of all#”. The idea of the general will and collective progress towards a scientific ideal became established. What had become a moral requirement had become an economic tactic. The birth of reason was at the same time the birth of the asylum. Reason was now able to judge people as objects in a scientific manner and produce forms of discipline for individuals to conform to this essential rational nature of man. This discipline emanated from the state and the state apparatus- university, prison, asylums etc. The practical effects of a theoretical abstraction resulted in exclusion of all those who did not conform to its ideal both morally, economically and socially. Equally the disciplinary control of the institution can be attributed to the rise of capitalism both in its need for an obedient workforce and cheap labor. Rationalism became the “bourgeois concern for putting the world of poverty in order”.
Where conformity was initially pursued by coercion it gradually became internalized in the episteme after the enlightenment. The normalization process of individuals resulted in the constant watch or what Sartre calls the look of the other, embodied in the Foucault’s ‘Panopticon‘. This gradual social conditioning to conventions at the same time decentres centres of political and economic power. What was deemed normal/ rational was the standard developed through concepts society used and the practices it pursued. A social convention or etiquette resulted in submission to the complex flow of power relations in society. Society has become a prison where constant coercion is no longer necessary as the relationship between individual and society is firmly established and internalised. This normalisation process is the result of power. “Power is not the privilege of the dominant class but the effect of its strategic positions”
Power is not something that one possesses as such but something that is exercised through institutions or individuals of knowledge. The expert, be it the physician or the state maintains a certain level of power on the basis of their privileged authority in constituting the forms of knowledge. Knowledge authorizes and legitimates the exercise of power. Power is both productive and negative. Foucault in his later work develops a method of genealogy to trace these relationships between truth, power and knowledge. Knowledge is inseperable from power and truth is the result of power/ knowledge struggles in institutions and discourses. Such truth is then established as a foundational discourse. However, power is not simply imposed but exercised from innumerable points. In line with the rest of his thought Foucault does not attribute power to a centre. Power is not the sole possession of the ruling class or physical sciences. It is what constitutes all hierarchies. His political project is arguably the decentring of centres of power and thus he cannot formulate a theory of power as institutionalised dominance. This micro-physics of power functions as micro- forms of discipline. The disciplinary society is thus firmly established at both a micro and macro level of power and exercised in individual relations as well as the factory, school, family and state. Thus, power is inescapable and Foucault argues that a society without power relations is a complete abstraction. However this does not mean that power is in its institutional forms such as the state, university, multinational are inescapable, resistance is inseparable from power and the pathos of struggle will exist as long as power does. It is this struggle that offers the key to the emancipatory Foucault which shall be examined later in the essay.
Foucault presents power as homogenous and a central and inescapable part of human existence in the same way that Badrillard presents the cyberneticization of an image saturated society that floats above and beyond society. Society in Neo Capitalist countries aims at total control through ‘coded simulations’ that command a range of individual choices, responses and behavior. The whole of social life is a reproduction of models organized by mechanisms such as advertising and any other seductive measures that prolong a desire that is never satisfied. This totalizing web of control is similar to the disciplinary society that Foucault diagnosed. The seduction of society is based on what Derrida called ‘deferral’, the open endedness of meaning in which one is ‘led on’ or seduced to an end point or gratification that does not exist. This can be seen in the proliferation of sexual images in society, a seduction that gradually determines ones desires and conditions social relations. We live in a world of the hyperreal that is ‘more than the real‘. There is no reality behind the ‘code’ of simulacra. This code of advertising signs and proliferation of communications is inescapable and any reference to an alternative or real outside them serves to reproduce this hyper-reality. Our culture has no foundations outside the proliferation of communications in consumer capitalism. The boundary between representation and reality has imploded or if I may use a Hegelian term sublated into the social and effectively removes it. This is not a new idea and once again the origin of the untruth of the true or unreality of the real can be found in Nietzsche’s reflections on the transformation of metaphysical thinking. In his ‘Twilight of the Idols’ he wrote;
How the true world at last became a fable…. We have gotten rid of the true world: which world is left over? The apparent world?…. But no! with the true world we have also gotten rid of the apparent world!
However when one deciphers the poetic language of Baudrillard there appears to be a lack of original or substantial critique. He provides us with a wonderful description of consumer logic in capitalism and then tells us that it is inescapable. It thus becomes a reduction to the doctrine that formulates the free market and its cultural impulses is the ‘end of history’. Phenomenologically his description is fine but to accept his conclusions would be an insult to the groundwork laid by his predecessors Nietzsche, Foucault, Marx and Debord. He writes about experiences, hypereality, images and the vast array of communications as if nothing else in society mattered, extrapolating a bleak view from a limited base. He totalises his theory as universal as if there is nobody immune or separate from the ‘code’ which he fails to explain. His answer to the “silent majorities” method of subversion is passivity which contradicts the groundwork to his philosophy laid by Guy Debord in the society of the spectacle. One is not to be a spectator of the image saturated world but to become a creator of a world of endless possibilities. The removal of a referent and foundation upon which one is subjected opens the way for a complete usurpation of the future. Nothing could be more tragic and ridiculous than living ones life in the image of another or a deceptive coded system one is aware of. To live vicariously is not inevitable and if it is, then Baudrillard and postmodern thought has laid its own foundations that have to be subverted. It also becomes totalitarian.
“The enlightenment is totalitarian”. This is what Adorno and Horkheimer argue in the Dialectic of enlightenment. The function of this rational essential human nature that is condemned to progression is a dangerous idea that both Foucault and Adorno identify. Adorno also recognized that “power and knowledge are synonymous”. However this is not to say that everything from the enlightenment is to be dismissed. Foucault himself recognized this when he said “we must not conclude that everything that has ever been linked to with humanism is to be neglected”. Critical Theory also anticipates postmodernisms conception of knowledge as pragmatic-discourse strategy embedded in social practice. Critical theory does not give up on the idea of emancipatory practice. The Marxist roots of critical theory that maintains the insistence that abstractions without practice cannot emancipate society can be accommodated with the Nietzschean roots of Foucault’s politics that emphasize the pathos of struggle. Foucault’s libertarian analysis of power and domination can be best realized through the social practice of critical theory. It is precisely the missing link that collective action needs.
Foucault embodies the political contradictions of postmodernism; the prison house of individualism. Foucault is epistemically local but globally skeptical. The individualism of postmodern thought spurns the possibility of collective practice. Both critical theory and Foucault avoid the crude reductivism of classical Marxism. However Foucault privileges local criticism over collective theories and creates his own reduction. It is possible to avoid teleological narratives but at the same time advocate collective resistance to a hegemonic culture. The social is under theorized in postmodern thought. Liberalism and postmodernism fail to see in others the realisation of freedom. The collective and the individual can critique domination by appeal to an undefined universal freedom rather than a defined essential self. Foucault theorizes himself into his individualist position. He argues that the so called individual is conditioned by her social and cultural environment. This environment is established by the dominant discourses and powers that be. However if he does not offer a prescription for this diagnosis then he also becomes part of the ‘end of history school’. However if he does offer a practice or if he does point to a ‘big brother’ behind the screens i.e. a ruling class, he undermines his whole philosophy. Thus, his own theory subverts its emancipatory elements. This inability of postmodernism to take more than a neutral stand puts it in a position where its focus is placed on the local and the aesthetics, a space that escapes its political contradictions.
This reduction is manifested in Foucault’s refusal to attribute power to agency. He mystifies the institutionalization of interested domination. The lack of agency results in what the free market calls ‘the invisible hand’ and appears as the ghost in the Foucaultian machine. He is correct in recognising the decentring of power particularly under free market economics; however, his failure to recognise the monopoly of power that certain institutions such as the state, media ownership, major business interests possess eliminates the powerful players in the game of dominations. Understandably he is distancing himself from class based theory but it does not mean that he has to under theorize descending power. Big Brother is missing in both Foucault and Baudrillard and thus effective action other than local struggles become impossible.
“The construction of the new society cannot be the object of theory for it is to occur as the free creation of liberated individuals” Marcuse
Foucault is arguably a Marxist without the metaphysics. His concentration on the role of power and domination is liberating and he does not remove the possibility of struggle. The point for him is to stimulate the potential creativity of struggle and not to organize it. He describes his texts as tool kits, as provocation for confronting systems of power. In this regard his writings are liberating and like Nietzsche who described his own work as “philosophizing with a hammer” will find its place in political struggle. Marxism is powerless in confronting the issues Foucault dealt with, mental illness, medicine, gender, minorities, delinquency and centres of political power. These issues combined with the emancipatory practice of critical theory escape the excesses of enlightenment progressivism while salvaging its emancipatory ideal and as Marcuse said it is only “through liberated individuals will a new society be constructed”. Foucault offers us this potential.
The hegemonic culture of consumer capitalism is firmly in place in western societies but is it really inescapable? The relevance of this cultural hegemony cannot be dismissed and was best diagnosed and theorised by Guy Debord in the Society of the Spectacle. The spectacle is the most highly developed form of society based on commodity production. The spectacle was developed by Baudrillard and undoubtedly the recognition that every part of our everyday life has been colonised by images is true. However Baudrillard argues that there is no reality behind these images and thus the image is the reality. He, like Foucault, mystifies human agency and action behind consumer capitalism and portrays it as some sort of platonic ideal with no material base. It is not unusual that because Baudrillard and most postmodern thought refuses to recognise the material production of communications technology, that it is portrayed as autonomous, inescapable and removed from human agency. However beneath this theory there is agency and production. If all workers put down tools tomorrow would the spectacle appear as an alien inescapable reality? I think not. According to the Society of the Spectacle, the degree of alienation now imposed on us is either to reject this totality in its totality or do nothing at all. Baudrillard reverses this and thinks that by doing nothing at all we reject its totality. The Situationists rejected this passivity and called for nothing short of the complete revolution of everyday life.
“We want ideas to become dangerous once again. We cannot allow people to support us on the basis of wishy- washy, fake eclecticism, along with the Derridas, the Lyotards, the Rortys and the Baudrillards.” DeBord
It seems strange that Baudrillard acknowledges the all pervading logic of consumer capitalism as a totality yet refuses to subvert it in its totality. Such a procedure would undermine postmodern thought as it would justify the Hegelian dialectic. Baudrillard is thus forced to reduce his theory to the image and cannot negate the totality in the same way that Debord did. Debord could negate the totality of capitalism because he maintained a process of dialectic negation inherited from Hegel. Once again Baudrillard and postmodern thought theorizes itself into a corner that does not allow them to prescribe an alternative to the current hegemonic culture in fear that they embrace a ‘totalising theory‘. In the end this serves to justify the prevailing economic order despite its appearance of subverting it. Baudrillards simulacrum is not a radicalised form of the spectacle but an affirmation of it. Baudrillard provides a phenomenological description of the spectacle in such a way that resistance to it becomes vain or impossible. It is a functional sociological theory that goes nowhere and part of the booming discontent industry that has seeped into academia that sells products that describe and decry the so called spectacle but never encourages you to do anything about it
In Baudrillards defense he could say that the more seductive and provocative his work the better. This provocation is arguably the embodiment of the postmodern spirit. His science fiction style of writing that proclaims no objective truth, and everything is a copy of a copy is arguably true but one does not walk away from his books with a desire to dismantle the established order. In this regard postmodernism is not a revolution but a critique of a failed revolution. The faceless masters of capitalism thus escape unscathed in the same way that the signified escapes into the image. Despite its claims to remove all foundations it creates its own foundation, a universal relativity and in the west a reduction to hyperreality that cannot be negated. Thus, in the end it subverts its own claims to anti- foundationalism but can sustain such criticisms on the basis of its relativistic grounds. A subversion of this passivity is necessary and in its place a need to create as Foucault does, a creative resistance towards a hierarchical society. Where this resistance is to be aimed is another question but for postmodern thought embodied in Foucault it is local struggle. The free market conception as natural or inherent in human nature cannot go unchallenged and the crucial terrain of struggle should be directed against this, so that societies unrealised potential can be unfolded only to be criticised again. To envisage a more creative future does not entail a teleological view of society, it is a desire to remove the non stop assault of symbolic communication, audio, visual, billboard in the wild forest of signs. It is a desire to escape a screened existence for an active one.
To conclude, the essay firstly presented postmodernism as the antithesis to theories that privilege certain concepts such as class or reason over others. Postmodern thought does undermine foundations that aim to explain the human condition universally but this does not remove enquiries into human understanding but make it all the more intriguing. It frees philosophy of the dogmatism of foundationist theories that claim to have mastered the human condition. Foucault was presented as a key thinker in highlighting all that is irrational about reason. Through his genealogical method he traced the rise of truth with the rise of knowledge which is inseparable from power. Power is an inescapable reality of the human condition but so is resistance to the hegemonic forms that it takes. Reason is used to discipline individuals for its needs. Society normalizes its citizens into social norms that serve to justify hierarchical positions in society. It was argued that Foucault’s diagnosis becomes reduced to local criticism based on global generalizations. However, the liberating aspect of his work is undisputed but better manifested through the demand that abstractions are useless without practice that is embodied in the praxis of Critical Theory. The decentring of power is inscribed in political anarchism and Foucault’s liberation is best realised through a collective expression of such anarchism. Baudrillard was seen to develop the notion of a disciplinary society by his description of consumer capitalism as ‘hyperreality’. This is arguably an attempt at developing Guy Debords notion of the spectacle. The essence of the hyperreal is that there is none and everything in the world of signs is a copy of a copy. In modern capitalism there is no original and escape from a media and image saturated world is in vain. Baudrillard who captures the so called postmodern condition was seen to justify what he set out to critique. His method of subversion is passivity and contradicts what makes worthy all attempts at socially deconstructing the spectacle through political agitation. His theory subverts itself and becomes reduced to the foundation of the image. Postmodern thought cannot escape its own theoretical privilege and removes all attempts at collective emancipatory practice. Its position in the ivory tower subverts its apparent radicalism. It removes foundations yet fails to fill the space it removes. Individualism is not a replacement. To make use of this space creatively means that one cannot be an ivory tower revolutionary. The space has been filled by the aesthetics of non- participation but what is more important is to make living an art. From the ruins of the image and its representation, communities of joy can emerge. It emergence is dependent on us not theory or any other vanguard. This is not a first principle or foundation but a simple recognition that “we have a world of pleasures to win and nothing to lose but our boredom” .
can one be an ivory tower revolutionary
The article will examine the role of postmodern thought as a form of emancipation with reference to M Foucault and Baudrillard, in the end will will argue that it is a critique of a failed revolution.
‘Postmodern thought undermines any foundation for rational enquiry and human understanding’
“ It is senseless to refer to reason as the contrary entry into non reason… such a trial would trap us into playing the arbitrary and boring part of either the irrationalist or the rationalist” Foucault
The essay will firstly discuss the question of foundations to show that postmodern thought does subvert foundationist theories but this does not remove enquiry into the human condition of understanding. Any attempt at distinguishing rational from irrational underwrites the premise of postmodern analysis. Postmodern thought avoids the privileging of concepts so cannot be seen as ‘undermining rational enquiry and human understanding’. The core of the essay will focus around the thought of Michael Foucault and Jean Baudrillard, the latter being more of an embodiment of what is taken to be postmodernism. Secondly, the essay will examine the role of knowledge in Foucault, concentrating on his archaeological method in the order of things. It will be shown that the cultural hegemony of reason has been put to ‘irrational’ actions through methods of social discipline. Subsequently the emphasis will be placed on his genealogical method of analyzing and uncovering the historical relationship between truth, knowledge and power. Thirdly, the essay will focus on Baudrillards conception of the hyperreal. He will be shown to give an accurate and stimulating analysis of the social effect of consumer capitalism but in the end his inability to escape the image of capitalism justifies it. Fourthly, the essay will critically evaluate both thinkers and the so called postmodern condition. It will be argued that Postmodernism can be seen as a continuation of critical theory that began in the Frankfurt school. Foucault will be presented as maintaining emancipatory elements with his understanding of struggle and resistance but fails to accommodate a descending analysis of power in his genealogies thus under theorizes the role of agency in dominating institutions. The criticisms of Baudrillard will rest on the original conception of the spectacle in Guy Debord, the latter will be presented as a similar but more emancipatory analysis as it is a call for action. The essay will conclude that postmodern thought does remove foundations and this should be seen as a liberating call for a more creative existence but it fails to escape the theoretical prison of academia. Thus it contains the seeds for a new organic approach to confronting cultural hegemony at a local level but its appearance of radicalism is an illusory subversion.
Postmodern thought subverts all totalizing theories, metaphysical permanence, transcendental signifieds, objective truths and any claim to indubitable foundations but in the end subverts itself. The foundationist project in epistemology is the arch nemesis to postmodernism. However this critique of foundationism is simply aimed at negating the hierarchical elements in epistemological and social theory. The privileging of certain concepts be it reason or class does not remove any attempt at rational enquiry into the human condition and hence does not make them invalid. The authority of foundations are dispersed and all enquires are to be made on the basis of historical and cultural relativity. This context of interpretation cannot be transcended by appeal to any ultimate truth or human nature. The hermeneutic turn began with Nietzsche, accentuated by Heidegger was adopted by Foucault in his historical account of the conditions that gave rise to knowledge in periods of discontinuity in history. Meaning is never static and always fluid.
“There are no facts only interpretations”. Nietzsche.
To distinguish between rational and irrational is a premise that would immediately contradict postmodern thought. Equally one cannot distinguish between truth/ untruth, reality/ unreality. In this regard, postmodernism, although it undermines foundations upon which to build a theory, discourse or subject, qualifies human understanding by deepening the enquiry into the human condition. Foucault argues that there is no human nature, no predetermined sexuality or human dispositions. The subject is a product of her environment and thus the human understanding is to be found in ones social environment, in its institutions and disciplines that give rise to internalized subjects of dominant discourse i.e. competitive, self interested economic agents within capitalism. This insight is in itself liberating as it provides us with the tools to create ourselves and formulate new forms of identity. Foucault is a disciple of Nietzsche that once said “we have to create ourselves as a work of art#”. Aestheticisation over moralisation was his replacement for lost foundations. Humanity has no intrinsic identity waiting to be actualized and must create itself socially, culturally and historically. This removal of foundations is replaced with the optimism that if nothing is inevitable then everything is possible.
Postmodernism is not a movement or a fashion but a space for debate. It is a context for debate concerning truth, identity, politics and meaning. It is usually seen as a reaction to the modernist project of historical progression based on reason embodied in the enlightenment. The key term for postmodernism is difference not reference and is derived from the linguistic turn in philosophy into poststructuralism. Poststructuralism argues that there can be no free standing signifieds, one true meaning or foundational truth. If meaning is taken to mean the effect of language and discourse and not its cause then all foundations lose their status including the human essence or subject. Thus postmodernism is often referred to as the antithesis to “master narratives” that claim privileged access to certain concepts that are applicable to all circumstances and human conditions. This linguistic turn in philosophy marks the ‘episteme‘of the postmodern condition and provides a new horizon of our cultural, philosophical and political experience. The human essence or consciousness is nothing more than the product of the meanings we learn and reproduce in our social context. With this realization postmodern thought frees philosophy from the reductive authoritarian fallacies that have traditionally dominated it.
In the Order Of Things, Foucault is attempting a study of the empirical conditions under which scientific and social statements come to be counted as true or false. It is an archaeological method into the knowledge-styles as opposed to lifestyles that dominate the episteme, that is, the specific world views and discourses that are characterized by institutions and disciplines of the human sciences. His archaeology brings to light the fields of knowledge by which society has governed itself. Foucault is concentrating on that dynamism and opposition which gives rise to what is considered reasonable or unreasonable in both human behavior and scientific discourse. The episteme represents something similar to what Hegelianism and Marxism has traditionally called consciousness without the predeterminism and teleological overtones upon which false consciousness will be replaced by true consciousness.
“ I an attempting to bring to light the episteme in which knowledge… grounds its positivity and thereby manifests a history which is not that of its growing perfection, but rather that of its conditions of possibility#”.
These conditions lie in the awakening of the transcendental subject that evaluates its objects on the basis of historical progress. The ideology of progress is exemplified in the human sciences of economics, biology and philology. However Foucault wants to unmask the hidden face of such reasoned projects.
Foucault does not defend the irrational over the rational. He concentrates on what occurs in the shadow of reason. He highlights in Madness and Civilization the role of reason in formulating its hegemonic position in the classical age or the age of enlightenment. The central idea of the enlightenment is that human beings are essentially rational animals and Foucault’s archaeology highlights the effects this had on all those deemed irrational. The hegemonic position attributed to reason resulted in the great confinement of all those considered mad. The great confinement led to the creation of the Hopital General in 1656 to “put an end to unemployment or at least begging#”. The confinement took on a new role, that of forced labor. “It was no longer merely a question of confining those out of work but of giving work to those who had been confined and thus making them contribute to the prosperity of all#”. The idea of the general will and collective progress towards a scientific ideal became established. What had become a moral requirement had become an economic tactic. The birth of reason was at the same time the birth of the asylum. Reason was now able to judge people as objects in a scientific manner and produce forms of discipline for individuals to conform to this essential rational nature of man. This discipline emanated from the state and the state apparatus- university, prison, asylums etc. The practical effects of a theoretical abstraction resulted in exclusion of all those who did not conform to its ideal both morally, economically and socially. Equally the disciplinary control of the institution can be attributed to the rise of capitalism both in its need for an obedient workforce and cheap labor. Rationalism became the “bourgeois concern for putting the world of poverty in order”.
Where conformity was initially pursued by coercion it gradually became internalized in the episteme after the enlightenment. The normalization process of individuals resulted in the constant watch or what Sartre calls the look of the other, embodied in the Foucault’s ‘Panopticon‘. This gradual social conditioning to conventions at the same time decentres centres of political and economic power. What was deemed normal/ rational was the standard developed through concepts society used and the practices it pursued. A social convention or etiquette resulted in submission to the complex flow of power relations in society. Society has become a prison where constant coercion is no longer necessary as the relationship between individual and society is firmly established and internalised. This normalisation process is the result of power. “Power is not the privilege of the dominant class but the effect of its strategic positions”
Power is not something that one possesses as such but something that is exercised through institutions or individuals of knowledge. The expert, be it the physician or the state maintains a certain level of power on the basis of their privileged authority in constituting the forms of knowledge. Knowledge authorizes and legitimates the exercise of power. Power is both productive and negative. Foucault in his later work develops a method of genealogy to trace these relationships between truth, power and knowledge. Knowledge is inseperable from power and truth is the result of power/ knowledge struggles in institutions and discourses. Such truth is then established as a foundational discourse. However, power is not simply imposed but exercised from innumerable points. In line with the rest of his thought Foucault does not attribute power to a centre. Power is not the sole possession of the ruling class or physical sciences. It is what constitutes all hierarchies. His political project is arguably the decentring of centres of power and thus he cannot formulate a theory of power as institutionalised dominance. This micro-physics of power functions as micro- forms of discipline. The disciplinary society is thus firmly established at both a micro and macro level of power and exercised in individual relations as well as the factory, school, family and state. Thus, power is inescapable and Foucault argues that a society without power relations is a complete abstraction. However this does not mean that power is in its institutional forms such as the state, university, multinational are inescapable, resistance is inseparable from power and the pathos of struggle will exist as long as power does. It is this struggle that offers the key to the emancipatory Foucault which shall be examined later in the essay.
Foucault presents power as homogenous and a central and inescapable part of human existence in the same way that Badrillard presents the cyberneticization of an image saturated society that floats above and beyond society. Society in Neo Capitalist countries aims at total control through ‘coded simulations’ that command a range of individual choices, responses and behavior. The whole of social life is a reproduction of models organized by mechanisms such as advertising and any other seductive measures that prolong a desire that is never satisfied. This totalizing web of control is similar to the disciplinary society that Foucault diagnosed. The seduction of society is based on what Derrida called ‘deferral’, the open endedness of meaning in which one is ‘led on’ or seduced to an end point or gratification that does not exist. This can be seen in the proliferation of sexual images in society, a seduction that gradually determines ones desires and conditions social relations. We live in a world of the hyperreal that is ‘more than the real‘. There is no reality behind the ‘code’ of simulacra. This code of advertising signs and proliferation of communications is inescapable and any reference to an alternative or real outside them serves to reproduce this hyper-reality. Our culture has no foundations outside the proliferation of communications in consumer capitalism. The boundary between representation and reality has imploded or if I may use a Hegelian term sublated into the social and effectively removes it. This is not a new idea and once again the origin of the untruth of the true or unreality of the real can be found in Nietzsche’s reflections on the transformation of metaphysical thinking. In his ‘Twilight of the Idols’ he wrote;
How the true world at last became a fable…. We have gotten rid of the true world: which world is left over? The apparent world?…. But no! with the true world we have also gotten rid of the apparent world!
However when one deciphers the poetic language of Baudrillard there appears to be a lack of original or substantial critique. He provides us with a wonderful description of consumer logic in capitalism and then tells us that it is inescapable. It thus becomes a reduction to the doctrine that formulates the free market and its cultural impulses is the ‘end of history’. Phenomenologically his description is fine but to accept his conclusions would be an insult to the groundwork laid by his predecessors Nietzsche, Foucault, Marx and Debord. He writes about experiences, hypereality, images and the vast array of communications as if nothing else in society mattered, extrapolating a bleak view from a limited base. He totalises his theory as universal as if there is nobody immune or separate from the ‘code’ which he fails to explain. His answer to the “silent majorities” method of subversion is passivity which contradicts the groundwork to his philosophy laid by Guy Debord in the society of the spectacle. One is not to be a spectator of the image saturated world but to become a creator of a world of endless possibilities. The removal of a referent and foundation upon which one is subjected opens the way for a complete usurpation of the future. Nothing could be more tragic and ridiculous than living ones life in the image of another or a deceptive coded system one is aware of. To live vicariously is not inevitable and if it is, then Baudrillard and postmodern thought has laid its own foundations that have to be subverted. It also becomes totalitarian.
“The enlightenment is totalitarian”. This is what Adorno and Horkheimer argue in the Dialectic of enlightenment. The function of this rational essential human nature that is condemned to progression is a dangerous idea that both Foucault and Adorno identify. Adorno also recognized that “power and knowledge are synonymous”. However this is not to say that everything from the enlightenment is to be dismissed. Foucault himself recognized this when he said “we must not conclude that everything that has ever been linked to with humanism is to be neglected”. Critical Theory also anticipates postmodernisms conception of knowledge as pragmatic-discourse strategy embedded in social practice. Critical theory does not give up on the idea of emancipatory practice. The Marxist roots of critical theory that maintains the insistence that abstractions without practice cannot emancipate society can be accommodated with the Nietzschean roots of Foucault’s politics that emphasize the pathos of struggle. Foucault’s libertarian analysis of power and domination can be best realized through the social practice of critical theory. It is precisely the missing link that collective action needs.
Foucault embodies the political contradictions of postmodernism; the prison house of individualism. Foucault is epistemically local but globally skeptical. The individualism of postmodern thought spurns the possibility of collective practice. Both critical theory and Foucault avoid the crude reductivism of classical Marxism. However Foucault privileges local criticism over collective theories and creates his own reduction. It is possible to avoid teleological narratives but at the same time advocate collective resistance to a hegemonic culture. The social is under theorized in postmodern thought. Liberalism and postmodernism fail to see in others the realisation of freedom. The collective and the individual can critique domination by appeal to an undefined universal freedom rather than a defined essential self. Foucault theorizes himself into his individualist position. He argues that the so called individual is conditioned by her social and cultural environment. This environment is established by the dominant discourses and powers that be. However if he does not offer a prescription for this diagnosis then he also becomes part of the ‘end of history school’. However if he does offer a practice or if he does point to a ‘big brother’ behind the screens i.e. a ruling class, he undermines his whole philosophy. Thus, his own theory subverts its emancipatory elements. This inability of postmodernism to take more than a neutral stand puts it in a position where its focus is placed on the local and the aesthetics, a space that escapes its political contradictions.
This reduction is manifested in Foucault’s refusal to attribute power to agency. He mystifies the institutionalization of interested domination. The lack of agency results in what the free market calls ‘the invisible hand’ and appears as the ghost in the Foucaultian machine. He is correct in recognising the decentring of power particularly under free market economics; however, his failure to recognise the monopoly of power that certain institutions such as the state, media ownership, major business interests possess eliminates the powerful players in the game of dominations. Understandably he is distancing himself from class based theory but it does not mean that he has to under theorize descending power. Big Brother is missing in both Foucault and Baudrillard and thus effective action other than local struggles become impossible.
“The construction of the new society cannot be the object of theory for it is to occur as the free creation of liberated individuals” Marcuse
Foucault is arguably a Marxist without the metaphysics. His concentration on the role of power and domination is liberating and he does not remove the possibility of struggle. The point for him is to stimulate the potential creativity of struggle and not to organize it. He describes his texts as tool kits, as provocation for confronting systems of power. In this regard his writings are liberating and like Nietzsche who described his own work as “philosophizing with a hammer” will find its place in political struggle. Marxism is powerless in confronting the issues Foucault dealt with, mental illness, medicine, gender, minorities, delinquency and centres of political power. These issues combined with the emancipatory practice of critical theory escape the excesses of enlightenment progressivism while salvaging its emancipatory ideal and as Marcuse said it is only “through liberated individuals will a new society be constructed”. Foucault offers us this potential.
The hegemonic culture of consumer capitalism is firmly in place in western societies but is it really inescapable? The relevance of this cultural hegemony cannot be dismissed and was best diagnosed and theorised by Guy Debord in the Society of the Spectacle. The spectacle is the most highly developed form of society based on commodity production. The spectacle was developed by Baudrillard and undoubtedly the recognition that every part of our everyday life has been colonised by images is true. However Baudrillard argues that there is no reality behind these images and thus the image is the reality. He, like Foucault, mystifies human agency and action behind consumer capitalism and portrays it as some sort of platonic ideal with no material base. It is not unusual that because Baudrillard and most postmodern thought refuses to recognise the material production of communications technology, that it is portrayed as autonomous, inescapable and removed from human agency. However beneath this theory there is agency and production. If all workers put down tools tomorrow would the spectacle appear as an alien inescapable reality? I think not. According to the Society of the Spectacle, the degree of alienation now imposed on us is either to reject this totality in its totality or do nothing at all. Baudrillard reverses this and thinks that by doing nothing at all we reject its totality. The Situationists rejected this passivity and called for nothing short of the complete revolution of everyday life.
“We want ideas to become dangerous once again. We cannot allow people to support us on the basis of wishy- washy, fake eclecticism, along with the Derridas, the Lyotards, the Rortys and the Baudrillards.” DeBord
It seems strange that Baudrillard acknowledges the all pervading logic of consumer capitalism as a totality yet refuses to subvert it in its totality. Such a procedure would undermine postmodern thought as it would justify the Hegelian dialectic. Baudrillard is thus forced to reduce his theory to the image and cannot negate the totality in the same way that Debord did. Debord could negate the totality of capitalism because he maintained a process of dialectic negation inherited from Hegel. Once again Baudrillard and postmodern thought theorizes itself into a corner that does not allow them to prescribe an alternative to the current hegemonic culture in fear that they embrace a ‘totalising theory‘. In the end this serves to justify the prevailing economic order despite its appearance of subverting it. Baudrillards simulacrum is not a radicalised form of the spectacle but an affirmation of it. Baudrillard provides a phenomenological description of the spectacle in such a way that resistance to it becomes vain or impossible. It is a functional sociological theory that goes nowhere and part of the booming discontent industry that has seeped into academia that sells products that describe and decry the so called spectacle but never encourages you to do anything about it
In Baudrillards defense he could say that the more seductive and provocative his work the better. This provocation is arguably the embodiment of the postmodern spirit. His science fiction style of writing that proclaims no objective truth, and everything is a copy of a copy is arguably true but one does not walk away from his books with a desire to dismantle the established order. In this regard postmodernism is not a revolution but a critique of a failed revolution. The faceless masters of capitalism thus escape unscathed in the same way that the signified escapes into the image. Despite its claims to remove all foundations it creates its own foundation, a universal relativity and in the west a reduction to hyperreality that cannot be negated. Thus, in the end it subverts its own claims to anti- foundationalism but can sustain such criticisms on the basis of its relativistic grounds. A subversion of this passivity is necessary and in its place a need to create as Foucault does, a creative resistance towards a hierarchical society. Where this resistance is to be aimed is another question but for postmodern thought embodied in Foucault it is local struggle. The free market conception as natural or inherent in human nature cannot go unchallenged and the crucial terrain of struggle should be directed against this, so that societies unrealised potential can be unfolded only to be criticised again. To envisage a more creative future does not entail a teleological view of society, it is a desire to remove the non stop assault of symbolic communication, audio, visual, billboard in the wild forest of signs. It is a desire to escape a screened existence for an active one.
To conclude, the essay firstly presented postmodernism as the antithesis to theories that privilege certain concepts such as class or reason over others. Postmodern thought does undermine foundations that aim to explain the human condition universally but this does not remove enquiries into human understanding but make it all the more intriguing. It frees philosophy of the dogmatism of foundationist theories that claim to have mastered the human condition. Foucault was presented as a key thinker in highlighting all that is irrational about reason. Through his genealogical method he traced the rise of truth with the rise of knowledge which is inseparable from power. Power is an inescapable reality of the human condition but so is resistance to the hegemonic forms that it takes. Reason is used to discipline individuals for its needs. Society normalizes its citizens into social norms that serve to justify hierarchical positions in society. It was argued that Foucault’s diagnosis becomes reduced to local criticism based on global generalizations. However, the liberating aspect of his work is undisputed but better manifested through the demand that abstractions are useless without practice that is embodied in the praxis of Critical Theory. The decentring of power is inscribed in political anarchism and Foucault’s liberation is best realised through a collective expression of such anarchism. Baudrillard was seen to develop the notion of a disciplinary society by his description of consumer capitalism as ‘hyperreality’. This is arguably an attempt at developing Guy Debords notion of the spectacle. The essence of the hyperreal is that there is none and everything in the world of signs is a copy of a copy. In modern capitalism there is no original and escape from a media and image saturated world is in vain. Baudrillard who captures the so called postmodern condition was seen to justify what he set out to critique. His method of subversion is passivity and contradicts what makes worthy all attempts at socially deconstructing the spectacle through political agitation. His theory subverts itself and becomes reduced to the foundation of the image. Postmodern thought cannot escape its own theoretical privilege and removes all attempts at collective emancipatory practice. Its position in the ivory tower subverts its apparent radicalism. It removes foundations yet fails to fill the space it removes. Individualism is not a replacement. To make use of this space creatively means that one cannot be an ivory tower revolutionary. The space has been filled by the aesthetics of non- participation but what is more important is to make living an art. From the ruins of the image and its representation, communities of joy can emerge. It emergence is dependent on us not theory or any other vanguard. This is not a first principle or foundation but a simple recognition that “we have a world of pleasures to win and nothing to lose but our boredom” .