Larvatus Prodeo

Continuing the theme and the related one of the politics of cultural studies, I love this quote from Edward Said:

To read most cultural deconstructionists, or Marxists, or new historicists is to read writers whose political horizon, whose historical location is within a society deeply enmeshed in imperial domination. Yet little notice is taken of this horizon, few acknowledgements of the setting are advanced, little realization of the imperial closure itself is allowed for. Instead, one has the impression that interpretation of other cultures, texts, and peoples - which at bottom is what all interpretation is about - occurs in a timeless vacuum, so forgiving and permissive as to deliver the interpretation directly into a universalism free from attachment, inhibition, and interest.

We live of course in a world not only of commodities but also of representation, and representations - their production, circulation, history, and interpretation - are the very element of culture. In much recent theory the problem of representation is deemed to be central, yet rarely is it put in its full political context, a context that is primarily imperial. Instead we have on one hand an isolated cultural sphere, believed to be freely and unconditionally available to weightless theoretical speculation and investigation, and on the other, a debased political sphere, where the real struggle between interests is supposed to occur. To the professional student of culture - the humanist, the critic, the scholar - only one sphere is relevant, and more to the point, it is accepted that the two spheres are separated, whereas the two are not only connected but ultimately the same.

A radical falsification has become established in this separation. Culture is exonerated of any entanglements with power, representations are considered only as apolitical images to be parsed and construed as so many grammars of exchange, and the divorce of the past and the present is assumed to be complete. And yet, far from this separation of spheres being a neutral or accidental choice, its real meaning is an act of complicity, the humanist’s choice of a disguised, denuded, systematically purged textual model over a more embattled model, whose principal features would inevitably coalesce around the continuing struggle over the question of empire itself.

Since Aristotle, anti-politics has been a continuing theme of Western thought (manifested in canonical Marxism as well as liberalism). In the 60s and 70s, the priests of the Canon were overthrown by scholars who believed that an apolitical notion of culture concealed a deep complicity with the powers that be, and a deep conservatism that mitigated against change. A number of writers have traced the later turn towards a textualist appropriation of post-structuralism and postmodernism to the disappointment of the seeming failure of the 68 events to radically change societal power structures. Another factor is disillusion with the working class as a vanguard (a probable cause as well for much left elitism) and the inevitable failure of the Marcusean dream of intellectuals as a revolutionary class. The irony, of course, is that many (though by no means all) of the left-wing postmodernists in their cultural studies redoubts have reinscribed in their texts the disdain for getting down and dirty with politics and material as opposed to symbolic struggles which such movements developed to contest. Left culturalism needs to get real.

I also like what the Sydney sociologist Bob Connell said recently:

There seems to me to be a very strong moral obligation to have contacts with groups outside academia, who often aren’t the beneficiaries of academic research, and in this neo-liberal age are going to be even less. Because we’re now being pushed very powerfully to constitute corporate capital as our audience, to do research that is commercially attractive… I’ve always thought that it’s important that full time intellectuals, especially in Universities, have some kind of contact with the grassroots, some sort of counter balance to all the tendencies to retreat, to Ivory Tower yourself, to get caught up in the internal debates.

… According to Lefty Tim. There’s a sense in which he’s right, although he probably doesn’t know it. There’s no doubt that a postmodern epistemology has some defensible aspects, but as I’ve argued before, it’s not new and it can easily slip into a sort of nominalism. Nevertheless, postmodernism has contributed to an awareness in the social sciences of the undeniable truth that there is no single truth - there is no Archimedean point from which you can view the world objectively. This point, though, is probably better captured by feminist epistemologies and weak versions of social constructionism in sociology. The problem with denying that there is any truth (coloured as our view of it may be by where we stand) is that it has the tendency to undermine argument, debate and rationality, as is well demonstrated by the Bushite view of the world as a script that Empire can write. Postmodernism, though originally an academic movement of the left, now has objectively right wing consequences.

I think what’s at stake here is nicely articulated by the British philosopher Simon Blackburn:

There are real standards. We must fight soggy nihilism, scepticism and cynicism. We must not believe that anything goes. We must not believe that all opinion is ideology, that reason is only power, that there is no truth to prevail. Without defences against postmodern irony and cynicism, and relativism, we will all go to hell in a handbasket.

The consequences of ethical relativism are clear from the “debate” over torture.

Similarly, there is no doubt that there is such a thing as cultural value, again coloured as our judgements are by factors such as social class and nationality, as well as the hierarchies of high culture. In that vein, I think Georg has made a very sound argument at Stack (perhaps in reaction to a net quiz which found that she was a postmodernist:

Surely the learning of literature should be just that, about literature. I know, I’ve done years of undergraduate pomo work, anything can be a text these days. Well, anything can be read as a text but that doesn’t actually mean it’s any good. Obviously, the criteria by which something is judged to be ‘good’ has been heavily weighted by non-literary measures in the past, but this doesn’t mean we have to put Barbara Cartland on a par with Jane Austen.

If the kids can handle the classics, give them the classics. Give them just above what they can handle, push them, but not too far that they are turned off books for life. Sometimes reading is like muesli, it might taste like shit but you just know it’s doing you good…

To accept this argument does not imply elitism, or an uncritical reading of the classics. Nor does it imply that ideology in texts ought not to be studied, or a belief that the “Western Canon” is some sort of eternal essence. It does imply that we shouldn’t sell people short by denying access to classic texts which stimulate reflection in this culture and about this culture and its relation both to its interior and exterior. The position taken by the late and much lamented and very great critic Edward Said, author of Orientalism. Said expertly analysed the books of Jane Austen and Joseph Conrad, for instance, for what they said about the ideological structures which supported Imperialism and racist hierarchies. But he also recognised their great value as literature, and the value of understanding the cultural tradition which continues to shape our social and political lifeworlds. If we turn our backs on the study of such texts, and of religious motifs at the heart of Western culture, to take another example, then we disable our own ability to change our lifeworld for the better. Because if we don’t understand the world first, we can hardly change it.

Said wrote in Secular Criticism:

“Textuality” is the somewhat mystical and disinfected subject matter of literary theory. Textuality has therefore become the exact antithesis and displacement of what might be called history. Textuality is considered to take place, yes, but by the same token it does not take place anywhere or anytime in particular. It is produced, but by no one and at no time. It can be read and interpreted, although reading and interpreting are routinely understood to occur in the form of misreading and misinterpreting. The list of examples could be extended indefinitely, but the point would remain the same. As it is practiced in the American academy today, literary theory has for the most part isolated textuality from the circumstances, the events, the physical senses that made it possible and render it intelligible as the result of human work..

That’s my kind of cultural studies.

The irony with postmodern relativism is that on the left, it acts as a depoliticising force, drawing attention away from material inequalities and focussing instead on naming identities and reifying popular culture. To the exclusion of any engagement with the single most powerful forces for inequality in the world today - Imperialism and neo-liberal capitalism. The right, by contrast, employs postmodern relativism politically - to reshape the world and rename phenomena strategically in its image. It is therefore a severe mistake for the left to abandon rationality and truth. The result will not be a utopian world where playful irony rules, but rather the prison of language where the actual factors shaping inequality and alienation can no longer be named for what they are, or contested.

Elsewhere: John Quiggin reiterates the theme developed over a long period of time by Australian left bloggers that right-wing postmodernism is extremely dangerous. Writing about the same article John discusses, where E. J. Dionne argues that “conservative activists have become the new postmodernists”, Tim Dunlop makes a powerful point:

For the left, pomo has always been of interest as a philosophical position, applicable in theoretically interesting ways across a rage of disciplines, from architecture to literature. When the logic of it began seeping into political discussions, as it did via the works of Foucault and Said for instance, there was an immediate reaction from within the left pointing out the dangers and the ultimate futility of abnadoning capital-T Truth in favour of postmodern deferment to power. The left policed itself very well in terms of pushing back against any tendency to judge political issues on the basis of anything other than the facts at hand.