Oh, oh, Steve.
> ...According to the conventional wisdom, both poststructuralism and
> postmodernism are movements of the political left. One of the goals of
> the present study is to challenge this commonplace. After all,
> historically, the left has been staunchly rationalist and universalist,
> defending democracy, egalitarianism, and human rights. One of the
> hallmarks of the political left has been a willingness to address
> questions of "social justice," systematically calling into question
> parochial definitions of liberty that sanction vast inequalities of
> wealth, demanding instead that proponents of formal equality meet the
> needs of socially disadvantaged groups. Time and again, the left has
> forced bourgeois society to live up to democratic norms, challenging
> narrowly individualistic conceptions of rights as well as the plutocratic
> ambitions of political and economic elites.27 Thus, if one examines the
> developmental trajectory of modern societies, one discerns a fitful
> progression from civic to political to social equality.
On almost all of these questions, postmodernists remain out of step with left-wing concerns. Since their approach has been resolutely "culturalist," questions of social justice, which have traditionally preoccupied the left, have remained imperceptible. Since postmodernists are self-avowed "post- Marxists," political economy plays a negligible role in their work. Yet in an age of globalization, when markets threaten to become destiny, this omission proves fatal to any theory that stakes a claim to political relevance.28
>From latter-day anti-philosophes like Nietzsche and Heidegger,
poststructuralists have inherited a distrust of reason and democracy. The
ideas they have recommended in their stead--"différance" (Derrida),
"transgression" (Foucault), "schizophrenia" (Deleuze and Guattari)--fail to
inspire confidence. Their denunciations of reason's inadequacies have an
all-too-familiar ring: since the dawn of the Counter-Enlightenment, they
have been the standard fare of European Reaction. By engaging in a neo-
Nietzschean assault on "reason" and "truth," poststructuralists' criticisms
remain pitched at a level of theoretical abstraction that lets capitalism
off the hook. Ultimately, their overarching pessimism about prospects for
progressive political change--for example, Foucault contended that the idea
of emancipation is a trap laid by the forces of "governmentality" to
inscribe the "subject" in the clutches of "power-knowledge"--seems
conducive to resignation and inaction. After all, if, as Foucault claims,
"power" is everywhere, to contest it seems pointless. Instead of
challenging domination practically, postmodernists prefer to remain on the
relatively safe terrain of "metapolitics"--the insular plane of "theory,"
where the major risks are "conceptual" and concrete politics are rendered
ethereal.
But "culturalist" approaches to power leave the structural components of domination untouched--and, ultimately, unchallenged. The complacency of this approach surfaces in Foucault's recommendation in The History of Sexuality that, in the place of traditional left-wing paradigms of social change, which he considers discredited, we seek out a "different economy of bodies and pleasures."29 One thereby runs the risk of substituting a narcissistic "lifestyle politics" for "movement politics." "Identity politics" usurps the traditional left-wing concern with social justice. To be sure, differences need to be respected--but not fetishized. An uncritical celebration of "difference" can readily result in a new "essentialism" in which questions of group identity are elevated to the rank of a first principle. Since efforts to achieve consensus are a priori viewed with derision and mistrust, it seems virtually impossible to restore a meaningful sense of political community. Historically, the end result has been the cultural left's political marginalization and fragmentation. Instead of spurring an attitude of active contestation, a narrow-minded focus on group identity has encouraged political withdrawal. As one astute commentator has pointed out, today the apostles of "cultural politics" do not even bother to pretend to be egalitarian, impartial, tolerant, or solidary with others, or even fair. In its worst guise, this politics has turned into the very opposite of egalitarian and democratic politics--as the emergence of virulent forms of nationalism, ethnocentrism, and intolerant group particularism all over the world witness. One begins to wonder whether the [new culturalist approaches] have played into the hands of the antidemocrats by depriving us of the language and conceptual resources indispensable for confronting the authoritarian assertions of difference so prevalent today.30
Identity is not an argument. It represents an appeal to "life" or brute existence as opposed to principles that presuppose argumentative give-and- take. As a European friend once put it: "identity politics--that's what they had in Germany from 1933-45." The failures of cultural politics mirrors the decline of the New Left as chronicled by Christopher Lasch and Richard Sennett: the renunciation of an oppositional, public sphere politics in favor of an inner-directed and self-absorbed "culture of narcissism."31
That postmodernists rely unwittingly on arguments and positions developed by proponents of Counter-Enlightenment does not mean they are conservative, let alone reactionary. The study that follows is not an exercise in guilt- by-association. Nevertheless, such reliance suggests that their standpoint is confused, that the disjunction between their epistemological radicalism and their political preferences (supposedly "progressive," though often difficult to pinpoint) results in a fundamental incoherence. Nor are postmodernists, as their right-wing detractors maintain, particularly "dangerous." Despite their antipathy to democracy and their radical political longings, they, too, are the beneficiaries of a modern political culture in which tolerance has been enshrined as a fundamental value.
In his History of Structuralism, François Dosse remarks that the poststructuralist aversion to democracy represents an expression of intellectual self-hatred.32 He points out how, ironically, this hostility has become pronounced in the homeland of Rousseau, modern republicanism, and the "ideas of 1789." Although it was the French Revolution that put democracy on the map of European political culture, of late it seems more a source of embarrassment than an index of national pride.33 Paradoxically, whereas a visceral rejection of political modernity (rights of man, rule of law, constitutionalism) was once standard fare among counterrevolutionary thinkers, it has now become fashionable among advocates of the cultural left. Postmodernists equate democracy with "soft totalitarianism." They argue that by privileging public reason and the common good, liberal democracy effectively suppresses otherness and difference. Of course, one could very easily make the converse argument: historically speaking, democracy and rule of law have proved the best guarantors of cultural diversity and political pluralism. During the 1980s the debate on "difference" would take an insidious turn as the European New Right, led by France's Jean-Marie Le Pen, embraced the "right to difference" as a justification for racial separatism.34 The shock of recognition resulting from Le Pen's electoral successes pushed the European left firmly back into the democratic republican camp.