Post-modernism: Losing Philosophy
Post-structuralism leaves us in a strange position: absence, difference, fragmentation and rhetoric. None of this has anything to do with knowledge, the concern of every other philosopher and every philosophical position so far considered in this book.
David West suggests, however, that there was still some ambivalence in the work of Foucault and Derrida. They were still both connected to the traditions they criticize, and Derrida in particular was aware of the impossibility of leaving it behind. West suggests that Derrida is best summed up in an adaptation of a line from Samuel Beckett: Western philosophy ‘can't go on, must go on' (West 1996; Beckett 1965) - a paradox which would be appreciated by Adorno and which is perhaps not very far from his own position towards the end of his life.Post-modernism goes further than this and gives up altogether the attempt to found or establish bases for knowledge, and it is questionable whether we should look at it as a philosophy at all. It is arguable that it should be regarded as a contemporary sociology of knowledge since these positions are developed out of analyses of the rapid social changes that seem part and parcel of late capitalism or late modernity or post-modernity. These three different ways of characterizing contemporary Western societies carry different implications but they are not mutually exclusive. The term ‘late capitalism' draws attention to the continuities with societies of the nineteenth century, the way in which contemporary globalization can be understood as the most recent manifestation of capitalist relations of production; in fact one argument is that post-modernism can best be seen as an ideology of late capitalism (Harvey 1990; Jameson 1991), an argument to which I will return later.
There are two significant theorists of post-modernism who have something to say of philosophical import.
Both are ex-Marxists and the work of one, Jean Baudrillard, can be understood as a development from Marxism more clearly than the one I am going to deal with first - Jean-Franςois Lyotard (1984). Both work with ideas of radical social change breaking up the world of experience (remember, post-modernism has as much to do with the arts and humanities as with the social sciences), and it is often pointed out that schizophrenia and pastiche are favourite post-modernist metaphors. Nothing is certain, nothing stands still long enough to be identified, there is no such thing as knowledge in any scientific sense, philosophy in any totalizing sense; there may be rational thought but it has no priority over the irrational and it eventually merges into the irrational. As we will see, the attempt to think rationally is often equated with political oppression.For Lyotard it is the rapid growth of information that brings about this change. Power now derives from the possession of information or knowledge rather than possession of capital, and because there is so much knowledge available, we cannot any longer claim that any one is in possession of the truth. He draws on notions that we came across in the chapters on interpretive sociology - Wittgenstein's notion of language games and notions of narrative - to portray a world of overlapping games and narratives with a shifting focus in which it is not possible to find one ‘grand narrative' or ‘meta-narrative' into which all narratives and games can be translated. His main book, The Postmodern Condition (1984), portrays a fluid and linguistic reality through which we move from one language game to another, not a world of objects or structures. It is as if Marx's description of the effects of the capitalist market - ‘everything that is solid turns to air' - now describes the whole of reality. Yet as my reference to Wittgenstein and Marx should indicate, firm declarations of the end of philosophy (or anything else) bring with them a great deal of what has supposedly ended.
Baudrillard (1975) does not carry much with him at all. His roots are in Marxism and the theories of consumer capitalism (replacing production-based capitalism) that were popular in the decades after the Second World War. Now, according to Baudrillard, post-modern society has left production a long way behind. What is important now is reproduction. We have moved from copying the real object (the Renaissance period) to reproducing the real object (consumer capitalism) to reproducing the copying process itself - this brings us to the hyperreal, the post-modern proper. We live in a world of images, of copies, which leaves the real - whatever that may be - a long way behind, together with truth and anything else that might hint at stability. There is only the surface appearance left, no underlying reality. Baudrillard is famous, or notorious, for his comment that the Gulf War did not really happen. That was certainly a great comfort to those Iraqis who thought they were dead. The psychological equivalent of this is Kenneth Gergens work (Gergen 1991). He claims that post-modern identities are infinitely fluid, that we can be whatever we want to be.