The system just isn't

working. Can we change

direction before it's too late?

 

Dennis Smith

 

Several SR contributors have commented recently on the coarsening of contemporary life. There have certainly been real changes in the way people behave.
     One obvious example of coarsening is in the language of politics. This has many causes (over and above the natural depravity of Calvinist man). The development of new media has created a new kind of photogenic politician schooled in body language who sends instant messages to a media-literate audience. The tweet is the epitome of communication chic. A new political profession, insulated from ordinary working life, offers lifetime employment to researchers and spin doctors as well as elected politicians.
     In the past (seen through rose-tinted glasses perhaps) politicians engaged in serious debate, seeking to persuade through reason as well as rhetoric. Now they use pre-emptive rebuttal and the dark arts of spin. Party politics has become a dog-fight where soundbites bite. Real politicians don't do nuance, and anyone foolish enough to try will be monstered. Subtle distinctions get lost in the haar. All this is bad for politics and for society in general, spreading rancour where consensus might be found.
     Somewhere behind this we may detect an amorphous shape called 'postmodernism' which involves a deep scepticism about rationality. Since I am about to be rude about a whole school of thought I should start by stating my own bias (my genealogy, as Nietzsche might say). As a student in the 1960s I studied English literature and philosophy. Both disciplines emphasised the centrality of meaning.
     In English we were taught about close reading and symbol-hunting. A key text was William Empson's 'Seven Types of Ambiguity'. In philosophy we were schooled mainly in the Anglo-American analytical tradition (though the towering figure was Ludwig Wittgenstein, an Austrian with some distinctly non-Anglo-American attitudes). A basic tool was conceptual analysis, summed up in the catchphrase of C E M Joad of BBC Brains Trust fame: 'It depends what you mean by...'.
     Some philosophers, including Wittgenstein in his later days, thought that conceptual analysis was sufficient in itself. By coming to understand the real grammar of their beliefs people can escape the pseudo-problems created by linguistic confusion. They are then free to accept life on its own terms. 'What is your aim in philosophy? – To shew the fly the way out of the fly-bottle' (Wittgenstein). Others found this approach altogether too passive and conservative. As Marx said, the point of philosophy is not merely to interpret the world but to change it. In 1963 H D Lewis edited a volume of essays attacking analytical philosophy under the title 'Clarity is not Enough'. To both Marx and Lewis the short answer is – True, but you still need clarity to start from. If you don't understand the problem, you don't have much chance of fixing it (which might be a good epitaph for communism).
     As a research student I also acquired a nodding acquaintance with structural linguistics, which reinforced the same message. Terms have no meaning in isolation, only in structured opposition to other terms, so systems have to be analysed as a whole. This generates an infinite richness of meaning to be explored, but we are still operating within two constraints. Individuals have stable identities within a language community – a shared form of life, in Wittgenstein's term; and that community is situated in a real external world which limits human inventiveness. With careful reasoning, hard work and a bit of luck we can arrive at increasingly true beliefs about our shared world.

 

     Then I had to go off and get a job in the 'real world' and my intellectual development slowed to a crawl (it happens to all of us sooner or later). So I missed the full impact of post-structuralism and its offshoots like deconstruction and 'theory' – the whole package that makes up postmodernism. To simplify radically, postmodernism abandons the constraints mentioned above – real communities situated in an objective world.
     Postmodernists take it as given (but not proved) that all our beliefs are determined by structures of power (Foucauld) or by free-floating desires (Deleuze and Guattari). There is no way out of the maze of language into a shared world of facts or objects (Il n'y a pas de hors-texte – Derrida). Worse, there are no stable standpoints within language because meanings are continually sliding off into something different. Closure is perpetually deferred (a bit like following an infinite series of hypertext links). In this context concepts like truth, reason and objectivity lose their purchase.
     My nostrils twitch when I see the word 'narrative' because I know I am being told a story (at 'metanarrative' they vibrate violently). The story may be plausible and pleasing but it cannot be true. It cannot be challenged by reference to verifiable facts, only by the creation of another (equally fictional) counter-narrative. Conspicuously, much of the media now trades in stories, not facts.
     These fashionable philosophical ideas have interacted with earlier visions – the American dream, the Hollywood fantasy. For many people identity has now become a fiction: you can always reinvent yourself, become who you desire. With new media this is easy. The problem here is not just that people live increasingly in a virtual world but that they flit constantly between different virtual worlds, often under different aliases. Online role-play games are an extreme example. Here virtual actions appear to have no real-world consequences. In this dreamscape, ideas of personal identity, moral responsibility and community lose their focus. Cyberspace is not a shared public space.
     All this produces a kind of fatalism. Narratives spin in an endless vacuum. In politics the same mantra is repeated right across the spectrum – there is no alternative. Though they strenuously deny kinship, Marxists and neoliberals are driven by very similar visions of economic determinism.
     Like many others I am unhappy with this outcome. I want to cling to some tattered humanist belief in reason, truth and human agency. But – a postmodernist might say – this merely shows how my beliefs are determined by my genealogy. To this argument at least I think there is a decisive response. The postmodernist is contradicting himself by appealing to just the kind of objective law-like determinism that – on his own premises – cannot exist.
     Postmodernist theory is not the force it once was: the juggernaut of fashion has trundled on. It cannot be defended as being true or progressive: these are concepts which postmodernists are committed to deconstructing. But its influence lingers on, aided by the dynamics of technological change.
     Time is irreversible for us humans. There is no crawling back to old comfort blankets. But the current global financial meltdown suggests that the dominant economic and intellectual paradigms of the past 30 years are in deep trouble. The system just isn't working. If postmodernism and economic determinism are locked together in a grim dance of death, we may yet be able to free ourselves from their baleful gaze and change direction before it is too late.

 

Dennis Smith was formerly curator of modern Scottish collections at the National Library of Scotland