It’s been a while since I’ve tried to get my head around Postmodernism as such. How do you define something which rejects definitions? How do you define the so-called “post-modern” attitude or condition, when its essence is in deconstructing, in a sense “destroying”, reality, and is characterized by a certain state, which seems to be “perpetual criticism” or even destructive “nihilism”? Well, Jean-Paul Lyotard comes close with his classical “incredulity towards metanarratives”. But if it is skeptical of metanarratives, than what is this broad movement/attitude/condition, if not a metanarrative itself? In a sense, I believe, postmodernism is a synthesis of liberalism and Marxism.

Prior to any further inquiry, it must be noted that these two “isms” are labels, and as such are nothing but a simplification and reductions of rich intellectual traditions. Of course, they themselves have developed in certain circumstances in a certain way and have been influenced by previous ideas (in terms of history, this poses the question of historical knowledge, and how far we need to go to explain causes and effects, if we accept that linkage at all of course). My intention here is not to give comprehensive accounts of the two traditions, neither to give a short-hand definitions, because no short hand definitions would be able to encompass and explain the synthesis between these two “strands of thinking”, paradigms if you like, which I would propose, as the key to this synthesis lies to a certain extent exactly in this richness and diverseness.

Liberalism has become the meta-ideology of our age (certainly the 21st century, especially if we discount some minor differences – the question if we can legitimately do so remains). Concepts such as “freedom”, “rational choice”, “rights” (and more controversially, “human rights”) are used all the time, predominantly legitimized as regimes of truth, to take Foucault’s term. Liberalism as such recognizes “the right of everybody to be right”, and is based on a recognition that “you are unique, but so is everyone else”, placing the individual as a value by him/herself in the center of its moral conception of the world (1). All these elements and many others (you can thank J.S. Mill, but also James Mill, Jeremy Bentham, Isaiah Berlin, Ayn Rand…) are in what we nicely label “liberalism”. In a sense, the Internet as a socio-cultural phenomenon is the ultimate culmination of liberalism – you can (or at least in principle) have a say in anything (consider the explosion in number of blogs, a form of ultimate freedom from any kinds of constraints – from audience and style up to coherence and logical progression), but so can everyone else. All says are equally legitimate, although apparently there are power/knowledge (to borrow from Foucault again) relationships in place. This, however, comes into a clash with the central value of liberalism – the individual. If the individual is a value in him/herself, then there is an implicit assumption that the individual is always right for him/herself. Naturally, humans tend to forget the last part (why exactly naturally, I plan to deal later in another post, but in a nutshell simply because people are social creatures, who communicate with other within certain hierarchies of power, and, to borrow from realist IR theory, or Hobbes, they compete for power). Thus, the internet can be taken as a perfect illustration of some of liberalism’s internal tensions. Or, on the other hand, consider the idea of luxury goods – you don’t need them, therefore they are not rational choice (2), but you still want them, not for their superior quality (consider Naomi Klein’s brands in “No Logo”), but rather because they confirm, justify, and for some (not mentioning Nicolas Sarkozy) legitimize their perceived “exceptional status” and thus reinforce it even further. Perhaps a more concrete example, such as the thin line between “freedom of speech” and “incitement of hatred”, demonstrated vividly by the recent BBC controversy over allowing BNP’s Nick Griffin on its “Question Time”, would provide an even better way to understand the argument. The essential characteristics of liberalism outlined above (and those not outlined as well), as well as the tensions mentioned so far, are key for understanding post-modernism.

My label of “Marxism”, however, requires more detailed explanation. Here, I do not refer to Marxism as the thought of Karl Marx (and certainly not in terms of what came to be known as “communism”). In a sense, I apply this term slightly eclectically, referring to a number of sources, from Rousseau, Bakunin, Proudhon, Hegel, Marx, Engels, Lenin, Lukacs, Marcuse, Adorno, Habermas, Horkheimer, to name a few. I would like to focus mainly on its “idealist” strand (that is, dealing with the power of ideas), and thus I would primarily draw on Gramsci and Barthes (who is not strictly speaking a Marxist – which only reinforces my “loose” usage of the term “Marxism”), although Marxist ideas about the power of ideas are implicitly or explicitly an essential part of the arguments of every Marxist thinker. For the purpose of this post, this particular element of Marxism with which I am concerned is neatly summarized by the following quote by Marx: “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas”. However, here I am not particularly interested the consequences of this for the structures of power and the status quo. What is of concern is how the Marxist tradition constantly highlights ideological structures, often associating them with power. Indeed, this has shown that “theory is always for somebody and for some purpose” (to quote Robert Cox), which was later developed by the power/knowledge relationship, to which Foucault has pointed.

How do these two “isms” fused together to produce a “postmodern condition”? In a nutshell, the liberal right of everybody to be right, coupled with the Marxist notion of ideational power undermined, and ultimately destroyed, any certainty people used to have before. Liberalism by itself, although filled with internal tensions, is a fairly coherent narrative, which could be sustained. Above I have noted that an amount of uncertainty and relativism is indeed part of liberalism (how can you be right and respect the fact that everyone else can be right? If you are a unique individual, how can everybody else be unique as well?), but these tensions are overcome by an appeal to individual abilities and merits (taken to the extreme in Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged”) (3). Marxism, however, deeply reinforced this tendency towards relativity by pointing out that ideas serve and promote interests, and thus taking away the psychological “feeling of being right” to which the individual was entitled under liberalism. Indeed, there are no more “right” ideas, “right” way forward, but instead everybody is allowed to (arguably) freely construct his/her ideas and identity (4). Thus, the individual was deprived of his ideational sources of certainty, and, I believe, for the first time in recorded human history every single person was faced with the question of moral relativity – indeed, there has been something of a paradigm shift. Of course, everybody is perfectly entitled to draw on religion, political convictions, football clubs, or whatever he/she might like to construct identity, image of himself, and certainty, but what Marxist ideational thought has done is to demonstrate that no identity is “innocent”, which has fused with liberalism’s belief that everybody is free (in theory) to construct his own identity to produce the realization that no identity is by itself “right”, and complicating all psychological “sleights of hand”, which pure liberalism allowed for. Thus, the end result is Lyotard’s “incredulity towards metanarratives” and Bauman’s “liquid modernity”, where there is no longer a fixed source of certainty and identity (and authority, since liberalism rejects all forms of all-imposing authority, a strand, which has been again reinforced by Marxist ideas), such as the tribe, the Church, the nation, or even the family.  Thus, in a sense, post-modernism can be regarded as a “late” form of liberalism, or dialectic between liberalism and Marxism (to borrow from Hegel) (5). So all that leaves us with, really, is to adhere to the Latin proverb – “de omnibus dubitandum”.

(1)    Have you ever noticed the close resemblance between “individual” and “indivisible”? It is certainly interesting to relate this to what we know as the metanarrative of Ancient Greece – that of the “atom”, of which everything is build.

(2)    Not within the paradigm of liberalism – Marxism and others can present them as rational choice as signifying status and class, therefore keeping in place status quo hierarchies and people in subordination. Consider Rousseau’s argument that private possessions came as a way to differentiate yourself in bigger society, which then in a sequence of events led to the fallacious social contract in his “Discourse on Inequality”.

(3)    I suppose one can argue that communism, or the policy prescriptive wing of Marxism, failed because it didn’t manage to strike such a fine balance between equality as a value-in-itself and individual egoistic tendencies as liberalism.

(4)    This led to a rethinking of the liberal conception of the state, which now is (arguably) most often viewed as an arena where different groups/individuals fight for their interests, an impartial arbiter. Dunleavy and O’Leary have presented a very good summary of the main views of the state in their “Theories of the State”.

(5)    The sociological repercussions of “living in the age of uncertainty” have been very well demonstrated and summarized by Zygmunt Bauman in his “Liquid Times”. In a further post, I plan to deal with some more philosophical/epistemological consequences of this, and to see how all this feeds in the framework of politics.