Is postmodernism compatible with politics?

Politics is one of the most pervasive ideologies of the world – an incredibly manipulative power structure.  Postmodernism, if practiced as a ‘theory’ of anti-theory (or the deconstruction of theory/absolute truths), refuses compliance with an ideology (politics) based on ‘who’s right and who’s wrong’, for according to all postmodern thinkers, the ‘theory’ behind postmodernism is that what we have known as ‘truth’ is fundamentally an unstable, faulty construction.  But firstly, what exactly is Postmodernism?

Docherty plainly states the phenomena/manifestations of postmodernism:

1. historical period
2. "a desire, a mood which looks to the future to redeem the present"[1]

As the discursive postmodern texts reveal, the ‘true’ nature of postmodernism is a heated argument focused around these two concepts.  Is postmodernism really a mode, or a historical period…or is it possibly both?  The ‘answer’ to this question will be retouched upon later, but for now, let’s say consider the viability of the last option and regard Lyotard’s statement

“A work can become modern only if it is first postmodern.  Postmodernism thus understood is not modernism at its end but in the nascent state, and this state is constant.”[2]

For Baudrillard, the postmodern condition is one of hyperreality; since postmodernism reveals all forms of representation to be false, then we have always lived in a sort of hyperreal world (here he uses the concept of ‘God” as an example):

“But what if God himself can be simulated, that is to say, reduced to the signs which attest his existence? Then the whole system becomes weightless; it is no longer anything but a gigantic simulacrum: not unreal, but a simulacrum, never again exchanging for what is real, but exchanging in itself, in an uninterrupted circuit without reference or circumference…”[3]

He also makes good example of Disneyland as a ‘truer’ representation of America with its claims to being pure fantasy whilst implementing a wide variety of cultural pastiches (i.e., a mini-recreation of international cities, ‘period’ environments from America’s past).  Lyotard describes this phenomena as nostalgia for a ‘reality’, a nostalgia for a past which seemed real (a nostalgia for ‘truth’) before postmodernism shook our faiths in a belief of truth.

Lyotard argues that this phenomenon of nostalgia has always been present in human thinking – indeed, when theoreticians reconstruct philosophies of life, they are always in search of a ‘truer’ meaning (a ‘truer’ truth, if we go that far):

“Modernity, in whatever age it appears, cannot exist without a shattering of belief and without discovery of the ‘lack of reality’ reality, together with the invention of other realities.”[4]

As Docherty shows with his example of the Enlightenment (regarded as a great ‘achievement’ in the progress of human thinking), this frequent reworking and abandonment of old notions “enables the illusion of power and domination.”[5]  Science and philosophy are notorious for their reworking of concepts: ‘well, this was valid back then, but now we know these concepts to be false…let’s try a new approach.’  One only has to looks at the constant reworkings of Freud, Marxism, and politics to know this is nearly an institutionalized practice.  In the words of Luc Ferry, “the break with tradition itself becomes tradition.”[6]  Art and writing have also behaved similarly, and are, curiously enough, the subjects that post-modern thinkers love to use in their explanations of why modernism and modernism cannot be firmly separated.

While Jameson emphatically praises postmodern arts in their questioning of art as an institutionalized commercial commodity (thereby challenging the status quo of economic power), Lyotard uses plainer terms to describe how the avant-garde in art helps to create shifts in ideologies, and hence, shifts in power:

“A postmodern artist…is in the position of a philosopher: the text he writes, the work he produces are not in principle governed by pre-established rules, and they cannot be judged according to a determining judgement, by applying familiar categories to the text or to the work….The artist…then, [is] working without rules in order to formulate the rules of what will have been done.”[7]

This phenomena of a ‘disjointed time’ flux – the what is done affecting what will have been done – brings up additional aspects of postmodernism, which Peter Brooker recognizes as

1. epistemology (ways of knowing)
2. ontology (ways of being and acting in the world)[8]

Perhaps now we can better ‘answer’ the question Is postmodernism really a mode, or a historical period?  Terry Eagleton argues that “Lyotard’s desire to see modernism and postmodernism as continuous with one another is in part a refusal to confront the disturbing fact that modernism proved prey to institutionalization.”[9] Yet Eagleton at the same time admits that “history and modernity play a ceaseless cat-and-mouse game in and out of time, neither able to slay the other because they occupy different ontological sites.”[10]  Eagleton excludes the fact that the modern becomes institutionalized, that is, historical, because the postmodern pushes the modern into institution.  We cannot ‘cleanly’ separate the avant-garde, what is actually modern, from the postmodern critique of the modern (which is exactly what avant-garde does, critique)…the boundaries blur and intertwine too much, and thus modernism and postmodernism become a cyclical loop.  Even the question of using the prefix ‘post’ to separate the postmodern from the modern becomes moot.  The very heart of modernism’s wave, the postmodern, immediately takes its cues from both the past and present’s epistemology and ontology.  Further explained: as soon as the modern realizes the illusion of its rationale, this realization is simultaneously the creation of a new episteme (way of knowing) and new form of ontology (reactionary way of acting, being).  This is perhaps why postmodern thinkers argue that postmodernism can be just as much a mode of thought as it is a historical moment.  In being so new and avant-garde, human progress is constantly enacting a new period of history – a new ideological framework of beliefs and rationale.  These new frameworks are exactly what Foucault equates as ‘tools to power’; ‘knowledge is power’.

That ‘knowledge is power’ is of no surprise when it comes to politics.  The very nature of politics has to do with systems of governing, and therefore, the correct systems of governing.  However, as we have seen from studies of history and (post)modernity, we have again and again revealed that what we have known to be ‘true’ is actually a false, one-sided construct.  In the global arena, this phenomenon equates to the First World/Third World and Capitalist/Marxist dialectics.  Baudrillard discusses this phenomenon of political oppositions (also applicable to cultural oppositions) thus:

“Watergate. Same scenario as Disneyland (an imaginary effect concealing that reality no more exists outside than inside the bounds of the art)ficial perimeter): though here it is a scandal-effect concealing that there is no difference between the facts and their denunciation (identical methods are employed by the CIA and the Washington Post journalists). Same operation, though this time tending towards scandal as a means to regenerate a moral and political principle, towards the imaginary as a means to regenerate a reality principle in distress.”[11]

Thus the creation of ‘scandal’, or a demonization of the opponent – be it an economic or socio-political viewpoint – aids in the perpetuation of the battling ideologies.  In terms of politics, this means political credibility.  Baudrillard further makes note of how the West has used the ‘relation of force’ to uphold the truth of capitalist domination (i.e., ‘capitalism will always triumph because it perpetuates the spread of knowledge; power advances through technological advancement and efficiency of economy’).  In this sense, Marxism can even be seen as “a kind of inoculation, inserted within the body of capitalism [to] better sustain it.”[12]  Such a statement, however, carries a slight nuance of pro-Western (capitalist) sentiment.  As the nature of politics is so bound up in dogmatic ‘right versus wrong’, it would oppose postmodernism’s credo of ‘truth is relative’.  Critics like Peter Brooker, who accuse thinkers like Lyotard of being “romantic anarchists’ devoid of helpful guidelines for new social transformations, seem to forget that the instituting of new ideology/politics will result in the actively hypocritical constructioning of hyperreal ‘truths’.  Not only that, but postmodernism has always already, quite paradoxically (even hypocritically), enacted new ideologies and ontologies in and through the very act of questioning.  And, now realizing this nature of postmodernism, I would even dare suggest that perhaps postmodernism and politics are not so incompatible as previously thought, especially if we consider that politics may simply be alternative perceptions to other realities…

Perhaps the large ‘fuss’ around our current modern/postmodern thinking is that we believe that history has come to an end, along with philosophy, the arts, politics, etc.  Yet we are living that history right now.  As much as we think we are breaking free from the illusions of the past, we forget that we are constructing a new vision of ‘reality’ – an ‘unreal’ hyperreality of plurality and recyclable representations.  We have become, are continually living, that postmodern backlash against the modern.  We can even regard deconstruction, a key element of postmodernism, as a new ideology, a new frame of power which, instead of amplifying the voice of a few, amplifies instead (or at least attempts to) the voice of the heterogeneous masses.  If anything, we have now become empowered with the right to question the past, present, and (possibly) future status quos of power.  And then again, that is exactly what the avant-garde of the past always preached.