Post-Modernism – an intellectual history

The matrix presented in the last post tells the same story as did the Indian parable of three millennia ago of the blind men who encounter an elephant

They have never come across an elephant before and learn and conceptualize what the elephant is like by touching it. Each blind man feels a different part of the elephant's body, but only one part, such as the side or the tusk. They then describe the elephant based on their limited experience and their descriptions of the elephant are different from each other. In some versions, they come to suspect that the other person is dishonest and they come to blows. 

The moral of the parable is that humans have a tendency to claim absolute truth based on their limited, subjective experience as they ignore other people's limited, subjective experiences which may be equally true

This seems to put post-modernism and its claims in its place – is it really all that new?

That’s the question which this post considers…

Some time ago I came across a reference to a short book written in 1944 which I had never heard of – The Abolition of Man – which seemed to anticipate the threat which the “anything goes” strand of post-modernism would bring (which I have taken to calling - the “whatever” response). It was penned by a very well-known figure of CS Lewis and is summarised here – the full version can actually be downloaded here.  

It seems that Lewis (father of Daniel D) took the threat so seriously that he wrote a dystopian novel about it – That Hideous Strength whose plot is summarised in great detail here; serialised here; and available (courtesy of Gutenberg) in entirety here

Rashomon was a famous Japanese film, made in 1950, which considered an event from four different perspectives – a few years before I learned this knack, operating as I have described elsewhere in the no-man’s land between classes, between different academic and professional fields and, from the age of 50, even between different countries.

And it was political scientist Graham Allison’s Essence of Decision – explaining the Cuban missile crisis (1971) which helped me appreciate the significance of what I had felt, in my youth, to be, quite simply, personal tensions.

That book set out three very different ways of understanding the events of October 1962 when the world stood on the edge of nuclear war (see the diagram at p23 of that link). His 1969 paper in the American Political Science Review rehearsed the basic argument – which outlines first a “rational model” of decision-making; then one based on “organisational behaviour”; and finally one based on “governmental politics”.

The clearest explanation of the phenomenon, however, is probably the earliest – American sociologist Peter Berger’s The social construction of reality (1966) whose significance I didn't recognise at the time

Frame analysis” – variously attributed to anthropologist Geoffrey Bateson (1972) and Erving Goffman (1974) – was the technical term given to the recognition of diverse and divergent perceptions of “reality” and one which I came across during a part-time course I was taking on policy analysis – actually the UK’s first such course in the mid 1980, run by Lewis Gunn. 

I can still remember the room I was in when we discussed the concept and the frisson experienced - although when I google the term, I can’t find a satisfactory article – all gibberish, associated with the field of communications studies.

But it was, probably, Gareth Morgan who popularised the notion that we could view organisational reality in many different ways. His Images of Organisation appeared in 1986 and pointed out that nine different metaphors (or “ways of seeing”) had developed about organisations eg as a “machine”, as a “brain”, as “cultures”, even as a “psychic prison”. And each of these have very real and distinctive effects on the way we think about organisations.

A drawing made the same point visually – see, for example, p 26 or so of Stephen Covey’s Seven Habits of really Effective People (1990) – some saw an old woman, others a young thing with a bonnet….

Like David Harvey in The Condition of Post-modernity – an enquiry into cultural change; (1989), I’m not sure when I first came across the expression “post-modern” to describe the age which has taken the celebration of diverse ways of looking at events to such extremes that “anything goes” and “fake news” flourishes.

Harvey is a geographer and better known for his exegesis of Marxism – and it’s only now I have come across this book of his on postmodernism which seems at first glance to be quite the best thing I know on the subject

Of course, the question everyone poses when the subject turns to postmodernism is – what was modernism? For which the best read is Marshall Berman’s All that is solid melts into air (1982) which was the subject of a famous exchange between Perry Anderson and the author in 1984 in the pages of the New Left Review 

Further reading

https://www.preceden.com/timelines/62885-postmodernism-timeline-1939-2001; The Preceden website is a very useful tool I didn’t know about – and this entry helps us understand PM

The Saturated Self – a collage of postmodern life; K Gergen (1991) A psychologist’s take on the matter

Self and modernity on trial – a reply to Gergen which contains a great summary of the book

https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/postmodernism

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/04/marshall-berman-living-urban-city-modernism-dissent/

https://www.dissentmagazine.org/blog/marshall-berman-archive-cities-modernism-signs-in-streets

One Dimensional Man; Herbert Marcuse (1964) which can be accessed here

http://bostonreview.net/books-ideas/ronald-aronson-herbert-marcuse-one-dimensional-man-today

Common cause (2010) a vivid example of how postmodernism now drives the marketing machine

A Lament on the impotence of democratic politics

Craig Murray’s latest post looks at the latest 2 examples of the collusion between government and commercial interests (Vodaphone and BAE systems (the giant aerospace company); notes the lack of public interest; and draws the pessimistic conclusion that "Conventional politics appears to have become irretrievably part of the malaise rather than offering any hope for a cure. But political activity outwith the mainstream is stifled by a bought media”. It’s worth giving the larger quote -
Sadly the comments on Craig’s posting (219 comments at the last count!) failed spectacularly to address the issue – descending to the religious ravings which are becoming an all too familar part of such threads. My own contribution (at the tail-end) was a rather pathetic appeal for a bit more humility in such discussions.

Instead of asserting opinions, can people not perhaps in these discussions share more quietly and analytically some of the perspectives which are out there on the possibilities of political and social action? For example, I've just finished reading the inspiring 2003 book "One No and Many Yeses" by Paul Kingsnorth. At other levels there are the writings of David Korten and Olin Wright's recent "Envisioning Realistic Utopias". Political parties and corporations remain the last protected species - and we should focus our energies on exploring why this is so; why it is so rarely investigated - and how we change it

All this gets us into the same territory I was trying to map out recently when I posed the question about

what programme elements might actually help release and sustain people power in a way which will force the corruption of modern elites to make significant and lasting concessions?

But, coincidentally, one of my other favourite blogs has produced a review of David Harvey’s The Enigma of Capital which I recently referred to as possibly offering a more solid analysis of the problems we face. Harvey’s book is not an easy read - and this review sets the book’s main arguments in the wider conext of other leftist writers who have faced the fact that there is something systemic in the latest global crisis. At this point, be warned, the langauge gets a bit heavy! All this reminds me of Ralph Miliband (father of Ed) ’s Parliamentary Socialism ((1962)which argued the basic pointlessness of the social democratic approach (The other 1,000 page book which arrived recently is in fact Donald Sassoon’s One Hundred Years of Socialism!).

Strange how few books come from political or economic academics offering broad, critical analyis of current political and economic life. David Harvey is a geographer! And the best stuff on the role of pension funds (and how they might be changed) is by a Marxist intellectual not associated with academia – Robin Blackburn. Both Paul Kingsnorth and Bill McKibben – who write on alternative systems - are campaigning journalists. Will Hutton who casts a periodic eye over the philosophical infrastructure which underpins the Anglo-saxon economic system (Them and Us is his latest 400 page blockbuster) is also a journalist.

The only UK academic I know who has written blunt analyses about the nature of our political system is the political development scientist – Colin Leys – whose time in Africa has clearly given him an important perspective his British academic colleagues lack. Sociologists are the masturbators par excellence - altough Olin Wright is an honourable exception with his recent Envisioning Realistic Utopias from the USA. In America the only challenging stuff comes form speculators like Nassim Taleb and George Soros – although Nobel-winning Joseph Stiglitz is an enfant terrible of the Economics profession and of World Bank and IMF policies there; and Paul Hawkin made us all think a decade or so ago with his Natural Capitalism.

Of course all this reflects the economic structure of the knowledge industry – with rewards going to ever-increasing specialisation (and mystification) – and, more recently, the binding of university funding to industrial needs. When I was in academia in the 1970s, I was shocked at how actively hostile academics were to inter-disciplinary activity. And the only Marxists who have managed to make a career in acadamia have generally been historians – who posed no threat since they offered only analysis or, like Edward Thompson, action against nuclear weapons. I have a feeling that the first step in bringing any sense to our political systems is a powerful attack on how social sciences are structured in the modern university – using Stanislaw's Social Sciences as Sorcery (very sadly long out of print)as the starting point. Instead of ridiculing Macburger Degrees, we should be honouring them as the logical extension of the contemporary university system.
I wonder if French and German social scientists are any different. Jacques Attali (ex-Head of the EBRD) is a prolific writer – although his latest book Sept lecons de Vie – survivre aux crises has abolutely no bibliographical refereces so it is difficult to know his reading. And has anyone really bettered the dual analysis offered in Robert Michel’s 1911 Political Parties which gave us his Iron Law of Oligarchy and Schumpeter’s (1942) Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy – and its minimalist concept of democracy as competition between the elites? And does that differ significantly from the emergent Confucian Chinese model set out in Daniel Bells’s latest book??? I realise that these last few references are a bit cryptic and will return to the theme shortly.

What I suppose I am trying to say is that change requires (a) description of what's wrong (making the case for change); (b) explaining how we got to this point (an analytical model); (c) a programme which offers a relevant and acceptable way of dealing with the problems; and (d) mechanisms for implementing these programmes in a coherent way. We have a lot of writing in the first three categories - but I find that most authors think the task is finished when they produce at page 300 the outline of their programme. Craig's started his blog with a strong assertion -

British democracy has lost its meaning. The political and economic system has come to serve the interests of a tiny elite, vastly wealthier than the run of the population, operating through corporate control. The state itself exists to serve the interests of these corporations, guided by a political class largely devoid of ideological belief and preoccupied with building their own careers and securing their own finances.
A bloated state sector is abused and mikled by a new class of massively overpaid public sector managers in every area of public provision - university, school and hospital administration, all executive branches of local government, housing associations and other arms length bodies. All provide high six figure salaries to those at the top of a bloated bureaucratic establishment. The "left", insofar as it exists, represents only these state sector vested interests. These people decide where the cuts fall, and they will not fall where they should - on them. They will fall largely on the services ordinary people need.

The 2 sentences of his with which I began this long piece strike to the heart of the issue which must be addressed -

Conventional politics appears to have become irretrievably part of the malaise rather than offering any hope for a cure. But political activity outwith the mainstream is stifled by a bought media.

The question is how (if at all) do we break out of this impasse? Or do we rather build an explicitly imperfect world on the Michels and Schumpeterian insight?
So thank you, Craig Murray, for sparking off this rant - which I have dignified in the title with a more musical Celtic word - lament!