What started out in the 1960s and 70s as a critique of Marxism had ended up in the 80s and 90s as a rejection of the very idea of global politics. As the transnational corporations spread from one end of the earth to the other, the intellectuals loudly insisted that universality was an illusion. Michel Foucault thought that Marxist concepts of power were limited and that conflict was actually everywhere; the postmodern philosopher Jean Baudrillard, by contrast, doubted that the Gulf War even took place. Meanwhile, the former socialist militant Jean-Francois Lyotard continued his inquiries into intergalactic travel, cosmic entropy and the mass exodus of the human race from the earth after the extinction of the sun in four billion years’ time. For a philosopher with a distaste for grand narratives, this seemed a remarkably broad perspective. Such had been the gradual darkening of the dissident mind. In some quarters, radical combat had given way to radical chic. On every side, erstwhile radical thinkers were trimming their sails, shaving their sideburns and drawing in their horns.
The militant politicos of the 60s had been largely optimistic: if you desired intensely enough, you could achieve what you wanted. Utopia lay just beneath the cobblestones of Paris. Cultural thinkers like Barthes, Lacan, Foucault and Derrida still felt the backwash of this Utopian impulse; it was just that they no longer believed that it could be realized in practice. It was fatally compromised by the emptiness of desire, the impossibility of truth, the fragility of the subject, the lie of progress, the pervasiveness of power. As Perry Anderson writes with an agreeable flourish: these thinkers ‘strafed meaning, over-ran truth, outflanked ethics and politics, and wiped out history’.2 After the débâcle of the late 1960s, the only feasible politics seemed to lie in piecemeal resistance to a system which was here to stay. The system could be disrupted but not dismantled.
Meanwhile, you could find a kind of substitute Utopia in erotic intensities, the suave pleasures of art, the delectable sensuousness of signs. All of these things promised a more general happiness. The only problem was that it would never actually arrive. The mood was what might paradoxically be called one of libertarian pessimism. The yearning for Utopia was not to be given up on, but nothing was more fatal to its well-being than trying to realize it. The status quo was to be implacably resisted, but not in the name of alternative values – a logically impossible manoeuvre. This disenchantment, in turn, was to yield to the full-blown pessimism of some later postmodern thought. In a few years’ time, the very suggestion that there had ever been the faintest glimmer of progress in human history would be greeted with withering scorn by those regularly availing themselves of anaesthetics and water closets.
Traditionally, it had been the political left which thought in universal terms, and the conservative right which preferred to be modestly piecemeal. Now, these roles have been reversed with a vengeance. At the very time when a triumphalist right has been boldly reimagining the shape of the earth, the cultural left has retreated by and large into a dispirited pragmatism. Not long after some cultural thinkers proclaimed that the grand narratives of history had finally run out of steam, a peculiarly ugly such narrative was launched in the war between capital and the Koran – or a travesty of that text. It was now the intention of the West’s enemies to exterminate it rather than expropriate it. Some Western leaders, not least those with offices rather high off the ground, could be forgiven for looking back on the age of socialism with a furtive twinge of nostalgia. If only they had not battered it so full-bloodedly at the time, it might have eradicated some of the very injustices which breed suicide bombers.
Of course, this retreat of the cultural left was not chiefly its own fault. It was exactly because the political right was so ambitious that the left had grown so timorous. It had had the ground – including its own internationalist ground – cut from beneath it, leaving it with only a few precarious clumps and tufts of ideas to stand on. This, however, became a less plausible defence of the cultural left once the anti-capitalist movement came along. What that remarkable campaign demonstrated, for all its confusions and ambiguities, was that thinking globally was not the same thing as being totalitarian. One could combine local action with planetary perspectives. Whereas many on the cultural left had long given up even mentioning capitalism, let alone trying to figure out what might be put in its place. Speaking of gender or ethnicity was fine; speaking of capitalism was ‘totalizing’ or ‘economistic’. This was especially the line of those US theorists who lived in the belly of the beast, and so had some difficulty in actually seeing it straight. It did not help that they had few recent socialist memories to draw upon.
In one sense, the shift from the 1960s to the 1990s brought theory closer to the bone. The heady abstractions of structuralism, hermeneutics and the like had given way to the more palpable realities of postmodernism and post-colonialism. Post-structuralism was a current of ideas, but postmodernism and post-colonialism were real-life formations. There was a difference, at least for those tiresome theoretical dinosaurs who believed that there was more to the world than discourse, between studying the floating signifier on the one hand, and investigating Hindu nationalism or the culture of the shopping mall on the other. Yet while this return to the concrete was a homecoming to be welcomed, it was, like almost all human phenomena, not entirely positive. For one thing, it was typical of a society which believed only in what it could touch, taste and sell. For another thing, many of the more recbercbé ideas of earlier days were only apparently remote from social and political life. Hermeneutics, as the art of deciphering language, taught us to be suspicious of the glaringly self-evident. Structuralism gave us insight into the hidden codes and conventions which governed social behaviour, thus making that behaviour appear less natural and spontaneous. Phenomenology integrated high theory with everyday experience. Reception theory examined the role of the reader in literature, but was really part of a wider political concern with popular participation. The passive consumer of literature had to make way for the active co-creator. The secret was finally out that readers were quite as vital to the existence of writing as authors, and this downtrodden, long-despised class of men and women were finally girding their political loins. If ‘All power to the Soviets!’ had something of a musty ring to it, it could at least be rewritten as ‘All power to the readers!’
What has recently grown up, especially in the United States, is a kind of anti-theory. At the very moment when the United States government is flexing its muscles more insolently than ever, some cultural theory has begun to find the very word ‘theory’ objectionable. This had always been the case with some so-called radical feminists, who distrusted theory as an imperious assertion of the male intellect. Theory was just a lot of callow, emotionally arrested men comparing the length of their polysyllables. Anti-theory, however, means more than wanting nothing to do with theory. In that case, Brad Pitt and Barbra Streisand would qualify as anti-theorists. It means the kind of scepticism of theory which is theoretically interesting. The anti-theorist is like a doctor who gives you sophisticated medical reasons for eating as much junk food as you can swallow, or a theologian who provides you with unbeatable arguments for committing adultery.
For anti-theorists like Richard Rorty and Stanley Fish, theory is how you try to justify your way of life.3 It gives you some fundamental reasons for what you do. But this, for anti-theorists, is neither possible nor necessary. You cannot justify your way of life by theory because theory is part of that way of life, not something set apart from it. What counts as a legitimate reason or a valid idea will be determined for you by your way of life itself. So cultures have no foundation in reason. They just do what they do. You can justify this or that bit of your behaviour, but you cannot give reasons for your way of life or set of beliefs as a whole. It would be like saying that Peru is a bad thing.
This is the latest form of what the middle ages knew as the heresy of fideism. Your life is based on certain beliefs which are immune to rational scrutiny. Faith moves in a different sphere from reason. Yo
u did not choose your beliefs on any rational grounds; instead, like chicken-pox, they chose you. They are now so much part of you that you could not even get a fix on them if you tried. Culture is just not the kind of thing that could be or needs to be justified, any more than you need to back up why you have just clipped your toe-nails with a string of intricately metaphysical explanations, each one more baroque than the other. And this also means that there are no rational grounds for judging between cultures. I cannot judge between my culture and yours, because my judgement is bound to be made from within my own culture, not from some disinterested point outside it. There is no such place to stand. So either we are inside or complicit, or outside and irrelevant.
It is gratifying that we do not need to back what we do with theoretical explanations, because this would be impossible anyway. Since our culture is what we are made out of, it would mean that we would have to leap out of our skins, see ourselves seeing something, reflect on the very forces which make us human subjects in the first place. We would have to scrutinize ourselves as though we were not there. But it is impossible to haul ourselves up by our cultural bootstraps in this way. We could never launch a total, full-blooded critique of our way of life, because we would not be around to do it. Anyway, since we only work as human beings within the terms of our particular culture, such a total criticism would be unintelligible to us. It would have to spring from somewhere utterly beyond the categories of our experience, as though from some unusually literate zebra who had been assiduously taking notes on our cultural habits. A fundamental criticism of what we are would be bound to pass us by. It simply could not intersect with our everyday language.
This whole case is alarming in one sense and consoling in another. It is alarming because it suggests that our culture has no solid basis. The fact that we value Pushkin or free speech is purely contingent. We just happened to be born into the sort of set-up which admires those kinds of thing. It could easily have been otherwise, and elsewhere in the world it is otherwise. Whether grief, compassion, right-angled triangles or the concept of something being the case are equally culturally contingent is perhaps harder to establish. When we get down to such things as not toasting each other’s health in sulphuric acid, the picture begins to blur a little. There are a lot of things that we do because we are the kind of animals we are, not because we are nuns or Macedonians. The idea, anyway, is that nothing needs to be the way it is, and that therefore the way things are does not need to be justified at the deepest level.
If this thought is consoling, it is partly because it saves us having to engage in a lot of strenuous mental labour, and partly because there are rather a lot of things in our culture which would be pretty hard to justify. It is not clear whether on this viewpoint torture is just something we happen to do, rather like playing tennis. Even if it is something we shouldn’t do, as the anti-theorists would surely agree, the reasons why we shouldn’t do it are themselves contingent ones. They have nothing to do with the way human beings are, since human beings are no way in particular. We just happen to belong to a culture which disapproves of forcing confessions out of people by holding their heads down in water for long periods of time. And of course we think our culture is right to hold this view – but that is also because we belong to it.
Not many thinkers are bold-faced enough to go entirely relativist on such issues and claim that if torture happens to be in your tradition, then more power to your elbow. Most of them would claim, with varying degrees of reluctance and liberal guilt, that torture is wrong for such people, too. Most people, if they had to choose, would rather be seen as cultural imperialists than champions of cruelty. It is just that for the anti-theorists, reality itself has no views about whether torture is admirable or repulsive. In fact, reality has no views about anything. Moral values, like everything else, are a matter of random, free-floating cultural traditions.
There is no need to be alarmed about this, however, since human culture is not really free-floating. Which is not to say that it is firmly anchored either. That would be just the flipside of the same misleading metaphor. Only something which was capable of being anchored could be described as having floated loose. We would not call a cup ‘floating loose’ just because it wasn’t clamped to the table with bands of steel. Culture only seems free-floating because we once thought we were riveted in something solid, like God or Nature or Reason. But that was an illusion. It is not that it was once true but now is not, but that it was false all along. We are like someone crossing a high bridge and suddenly being seized by panic on realizing that there is a thousand-foot drop below them. It is as though the ground beneath their feet is no longer solid. But in fact it is.
This is one difference between modernism and postmodernism. Modernism, or so it imagined, was old enough to remember a time when there were firm foundations to human existence, and was still reeling from the shock of their being kicked rudely away. This is one reason why so much modernism is of a tragic temper. The drama of Samuel Beckett, for example, has no faith whatsoever in redemption, but presents a world which still looks as though it is in dire need of it. It refuses to turn its gaze from the intolerableness of things, even if there is no transcendent consolation at hand. After a while, however, you can ease the strain of this by portraying a world in which there is indeed no salvation, but on the other hand nothing to be saved. This is the post-tragic realm of postmodernism. Postmodernism is too young to remember a time when there was (so it was rumoured) truth, identity and reality, and so feels no dizzying abyss beneath its feet. It is used to treading clear air, and has no sense of giddiness. In a reverse of the phantom limb syndrome, there seems to be something missing but there is not. We are simply the prisoners of a deceptive metaphor here, imagining as we do that the world has to stand on something in the way that we stand on the world. It is not that the pure ice beneath our feet has yielded to rough ground; the ground was rough all along.
We are like toddlers who still insist that they need their comforters, and need to be dragged kicking and screaming to the recognition that they do not. To relinquish our metaphysical comforters would be to make the momentous discovery that doing so has changed absolutely nothing. If only we could accept this we would be thoroughly post-metaphysical, and hence free. As Nietzsche admonished us, however, we have killed God but hidden the body, insisting as we do on behaving as though he is still alive. Postmodernism exhorts us to recognize that we will lose nothing by the crumbling of the foundations except our chains. We can now do what we want, without carting around a lot of cumbersome metaphysical baggage in order to justify it. Having checked in our baggage, we have freed our hands.
It seems, however, that anti-theorists like Fish and Rorty may simply have replaced one kind of anchoring with another. It is now culture, not God or Nature, which is the foundation of the world. It is not, to be sure, all that stable a foundation, since cultures change, and there are many varieties of them. But while we are actually inside a culture we cannot peer outside it, so that it feels like as much of a foundation as Reason did to Hegel. Indeed, what we would see if we could peer beyond it would itself be determined by the culture. Culture, then, is a bumpy kind of bottom line, but it is a bottom line all the same. It goes all the way down. Instead of doing what comes naturally, we do what comes culturally. Instead of following Nature, we follow Culture. Culture is a set of spontaneous habits so deep that we can’t even examine them. And this, among other things, conveniently insulates them from criticism.
We can, perhaps, be ironic about our deepest commitments, acknowledging their arbitrariness, but this does not really slacken their grip upon us. Irony does not go as far down as belief. Culture thus becomes the new Nature, which can no more be called into question than a waterfall. Naturalizing things gives way to culturalizing them. Either way, they come to appear inevitable. Since everyone in a hard-nosed, streetwise age has now seen through the strategy of ‘naturalizing’, you need a different, more fashionable way of lending your way of
life legitimacy. And this is the concept of culture. If cultures are contingent, they can always be changed; but they cannot be changed as a whole, and the reasons we have for changing them are also contingent.
What are we to make of this argument? It may well be that cultural habits like imagining time as flowing forward, or perceiving other human bodies as persons, run so deep in us that we could not possibly think ourselves outside them. But the same can scarcely be said for cultural habits like banning customers who are not wearing evening dress from hot-dog stalls, or refusing to forgive the debt of impoverished nations. The trick of some anti-theorists is to make these two kinds of case appear the same. And this makes it seem that we could no more get out of NATO than we could get out of our bodies. Another anti-theoretical stratagem is to claim that in order to launch some fundamental critique of our culture, we would need to be standing at some impossible Archimedean point beyond it. What this fails to see is that reflecting critically on our situation is part of our situation. It is a feature of the peculiar way we belong to the world. It is not some impossible light-in-the-refrigerator attempt to scrutinize ourselves when we are not there. Curving back upon ourselves is as natural to us as it is to cosmic space or a wave of the sea. It does not entail jumping out of our own skin. Without such self-monitoring, we would not have survived as a species.
After Theory Page 6