NavigationAnnouncementsUpcoming eventsRecent blog posts
|
Anonymous Coward, "The Conservative Praxis of Postmodernism"An anonymous coward writes: "The Conservative Praxis of Postmodernism" “That was the gift of the French. They gave Americans a language they did not need. It was like the Statue of Liberty. Nobody needs French theory.” — Jean Baudrillard (1) In the post-May 68 intellectual climate postmodernism ascended from an emergent philosophy to a mainstay in university humanities faculties. These stars of the French intellectual scene were ironically titled the ‘new philosophers’ in reference to the French enlightenment philosophers. The new philosophers though set out to critique and deconstruct the enlightenment tradition. But as Foucault informed us we should not ‘blackmail’ a thinker into being either for or against the enlightenment. Therefore following this line it is not as simply to say that because a postmodernist critiques the enlightenment that the theorist represents a revolt of unreason against Webber’s iron cage of rationality.Jacques-Benigne Bossuet and Thomas Hobbes both advocated political absolutism, but the philosophical system backed by Hobbes shifted the justification of government from divinity of the sovereign to practicality and utility for its constituents. Enlightenment philosophers took Hobbes’ naturalistic approach and built it further while removing other elements, concluding in favour of democratic and republican ideals which Hobbes had hoped to fight. The political and philosophical systems put forward by Enlightenment philosophers though were not monolithic, having contained within their ambiguous definitions many schisms of opinions. But one can assure they favoured progressive forms of political activity with their naturalistic methods and notions of evolution, truth and justice. The concept of practical criticism or critique implies two parts, negative and positive. Critical negativity finds the object of criticism deficient in some form. The negativity leads to the positive which is the affirmation of a value or attribute found deficient in the object criticised. In Praxis, negativity manifests itself in negation and the positive manifests itself in the product of transformation. Transformative politics necessarily implies criticism of current political establishment, both in its theoretical foundation and its institutions and theoretical foundations and hypothetical institutions to replace the negated. Post-modern criticism is Deconstructionist in that it seeks to critique forms of hegemony, but unlike practical criticism does not seek an alternative hegemony. Derrida defined this though not as a nihilism but rather openness to an unknown ‘other’. The absence of a signified transformative goal undermines the ability to produce practical critique in the pursuit of progressive change, a quintessential quality of left-wing politics. In all probability, deconstruction could lead to reactionary, even fascist developments in that, for example, human rights are a Universalist ideal system, and therefore a hegemonic construct. If we approach human rights from a radical subjectivist position we undermine the hegemonic concept and thus render it useless. “I have been arguing that those of us who are most critical of modern life need modernism most, to show us where we are and where we can begin to change our circumstances and ourselves. In search of a place to begin, I have gone back to one of the first and greatest of modernists, Karl Marx. I have gone to him not so much for his answers as for his questions. The great gift he can give us today, it seems to me, is not a way out of the contradictions of modern life but a surer and deeper way into these contradictions. He knew that the way beyond the contradictions would have to lead through modernity, not out of it.”(2) We cannot go to ‘post-modernity’, we can only engage in the modernist project of shaping our world, of ‘taking our epoch on our shoulders paying for it today and forever’. |
SearchAnalysisNewsReviews |