The basis of today’s culture wars is by and large, post modernism. Prior to modernity, political power was determined by reference to authority. The uneducated (the vast majority of the population) would defer to educated classes (priests, aristocrats etc) because of their position, which implied a better level of education and perspective than the lower classes could hope to have.
Over the course of the enlightenment era, authority was discredited for one reason or another. It was either shown its education was deficient (through the likes of Galileo or Copernicus), or incompetent (like Louis the XIV) or simply outright corrupt. Through a series of revolutions (political, scientific and cultural), the acceptance of authority as the basis of political power was outed, and in its place, the rules of reason, rationality and transparency took hold.
During this time, newspapers as a medium were flourishing. A cheap way to produce and disseminate ideas. There were no monopolies like the Murdoch empire. Just a huge array of publishers most of whom were partisan to a series of ideas or interests, fighting it out in the marketplace of ideas. Writing became the new mode of discourse and appealed to the new rules of reason, rationality and discourse perfectly, because a reading a newspaper is an act that is largely disconnected from the author’s presence and authority (beyond their name, which did not always appear).
Over time, ideas emerged about how to respond to the collapse of old regimes and to re-organize society for the betterment of mankind through logic, reason and rationality. The age of ideology was born (the term itself was coined by Antoine Destutt de Tracy, a French aristocrat imprisoned during the Reign of Terror and was later used by Napoleon).
In the wake of the second world war and revelations about the failures of communist experiments, a cadre of continental intellectuals gave up on ideology as a modernist construct. For them, Marxism and Fascism were drenched in blood. Capitalism was corrupt. Kant’s categorical imperative was flawed and Hegel’s dialectical account of human history was pushing a square peg through a round hole. The very idea of totalizing narratives that sought to explain human history and nature became futile at best and monstrous at worst, if implemented. Instead, an age of disillusionment and criticism of everything was ushered in. Chaos, relativism, criticism of all and some would argue a descent into outright solipsism and nihilism were brought about by the leading academics of the time. Welcome to post-modernity.
Today, we contend with the legacy of the post modernists. The discourse about power imbalances and oppressed and marginalized groups owe an homage to figures like Michel Foucault and later, Jean-Francoise Lyotard. The basic goal is human freedom. Foucault argued that our conceptions of rationality and reason are merely tools by which the powerful oppress the powerless and cultivate a docile society to serve their interests. Lyotard took many of Foucault’s premises and extended them by arguing that consensus building is itself oppressive, and that even concepts like truth and knowledge can and are subverted by the ruling class (in this society, capitalist interests). His solution was radical diversity of thought and dispensation against things like scientific orthodoxy, which served only to ‘terrorize’ other modes of related inquiry, oppress minority views and undermine human freedom.
A rebel emerged from this discourse and this was Alvin Gouldner. Gouldner was an odd figure as a self identifying Marxist who criticised Marxism on its own terms. He contended that the class struggle commonly talked about by Marxists as between an underclass against a ruling class should actually be conceived of as a struggle between an old ruling class and an incoming challenger class. For him, the struggle between the proletariat and bourgeois was superfluous. The real struggle was between the bourgeois (the rich owners of the means of production) and an emerging class of intelligentsia who mobilized peasants and proletariat classes against their bourgeois rivals by purporting to advance the interests of the underclass while keeping their own interests as keepers of high culture hidden, with a view for the intelligentsia to seize the levers of power and ruling over an allied proletariat who thinks they are acting in their interests.
Foucault: The voice of unreason
Foucault’s work focussed on the analysis of hospitals, prisons schools and other institutions to show that they are functions of modernity, designed to serve the powerful and subjugate and control the powerless.
If the core of Foucault’s work were to be summarised in an anecdote it would be Foucault’s attendance at a psychologist. The psychologist concluded that the root of Foucault’s problems lay in his homosexuality. Foucault concluded that the root of the psychologist’s problems was psychoanalysis.
“The doctor, as an alienating figure, remains the key to psychoanalysis. It is perhaps because it did not suppress this ultimate structure, and because it referred all the others to it, that psychoanalysis has not been able, will not be able, to hear the voices of unreason, nor to decipher in themselves the signs of the madman. Psychoanalysis can unravel some of the forms of madness; it remains a stranger to the sovereign enterprise of unreason. It can neither liberate nor transcribe, nor most certainly explain, what is essential in this enterprise.”
The panopticon
Moving to his specific works, Foucault contended that prisons for example were not a humanitarian alternative to public flogging and execution but instead a preferred means of instigating discipline in a population to accept asymmetrical power relations between the powerful and the powerless with minimal violence and maximum predictability and effectiveness, with the ultimate goal to reform prisoners (and really, society at large) with the mentality of never knowing when they are being watched, as analogised with Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon.
The very concept of madness too was, for Foucault, a concept that used to be integrated into society and even celebrated as having contact with the divine during the Renaissance, yet over time, the place of madness in society had changed toward being a moral and mental disease to be surveyed by clinicians, and segregated away from polite society and into psychiatric hospitals. Indeed, the very concepts of reason and rationality are socially constructed and used to serve the powerful so that the powerful could decide who was deemed ‘marginalised’. In this way, Foucault challenged any arguments derived from nature – the problem is not how or what a person is, but instead, how society sees that person and the manner in which society impinges on that person’s freedom – arguments from nature are mere fig leaf justifications for marginalising a person.
Foucault’s views may seem quaint and even extreme to some, but perhaps a quick review of reasons that one could be locked in a ‘mad house’ should be considered before we dismiss it:
Indeed, back then, lunatic asylums were simply prisons for people who might not have committed a crime but who were nonetheless deemed unfit for mainstream society.
It is this panopticon mentality which is designed through many of the institutions that Foucault surveyed and is oriented toward cultivating a docile population that accepts its own oppression by feeling isolated, powerless and constantly watched.
Post-modernism
Foucault argued that we are past the age of totalizing metanarratives and indeed, society’s moving from one epoch to another is not a function of necessity, but completely chaotic and arbitrary. It is not to say that there are no historical antecedents for such a move or a change in material conditions that encourages such a move, but simply that they do not necessitate anything. Material conditions change all the time and historical events always crop up without requiring a re-ordering of how human societies work or the basis of thought or knowledge, yet sometimes they seem to trigger something and there is no coherent reason for selecting one trigger over another or the solution to that trigger being one particular mode of thinking or being over others.
Accordingly, for Foucault, the Marxist view of human history being explained through class conflict or the psychoanalytic view of all human decision-making being a product of unconscious fears and desires were not necessarily true. This meant that decisions could not be legitimated by referring to one of these discourses. Those metanarratives were a function of modernist thinking – the desire to order all human history through a particular explanation and see the future. Foucault argued we were beyond that – that we were post-modern.
This idea of the rejection of modernism is the crux of Foucault’s contribution. Foucault takes very seriously that history is written by the victors. In this regard, the idea of history and knowledge as being objectively true, stationary and fixed disappear. The idea of ethics is simply a product of power relations and not a function of rationality. They become relative and constructions of society that are used to legitimate and empower the powerful. In this regard, Foucault claims that the very concept of man may be abolished, as the concept of rational, reasonable man is simply a fiction that is used to propound a certain view of ethics or history, views which for him are now outdated.
The will to power – the logical conclusion to Foucault’s reasoning
Foucault in a sense extended a reading of Nietzsche by arguing that all moral judgment and all resulting political coercion are simply functions of a particular group’s will to power and there is no discourse which justifies it in any true sense. This is the basis for why Foucault opposed the entire concept of criminality or madness, and instead, favoured human freedom. It epitomises the notion that one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter and decrying the acts of a terrorist is simply telegraphing one classes will to power to dominate the class of the ‘terrorist’. The category of crime of ‘murder’ is not something morally reprehensible, but simply something that is viewed from different perspectives.
For those interested, a more comprehensive overview of Foucault’s thought is here.
Jean-Francois Lyotard – The rebellion against language and knowledge
On consensus and diversity
Lyotard takes on knowledge itself. Like Foucault, he rejects totalizing narratives as being outmoded for serious intellectuals in determining the basis for judgment in all situations. He specifically takes aim at Habermas who proposed consensus as a potential measure for such judgment. Lyotard views consensus as oppressive because of its tendency to shut down other discourses. If for example, we accept 99% of scientists agree that climate change is man made, real etc because of ‘consensus’ then we are oppressing the scientists who disagree – we are shutting down the debate. We are oppressing climate skeptics and so forth. It is human freedom and liberty that Lyotard purports to champion. And any impingement on such freedom is an act of ‘terrorization’.
Lyotard contends that the grand totalizing narratives are to be replaced with ‘little narratives’. He uses Wittgenstinian language games to achieve this (I will leave that as a topic for another time, as it is massive), but in essence, the conclusion is that we create meaning unto ourselves, and the ‘rules’ of communication that we use when we are 5 are different when we are 30. Not only does this work on the personal level but the subjective level – the abortion debate has two sides where each frames the problem differently – one is a question about an unborn child’s right to life, the other is a question about a woman’s freedom of choice before there is any life inside of her. The two sides literally cannot communicate because the language they use is fundamentally different, as are the rules of communication. Lyotard would contend that neither one is ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ but simply different, and in fact, these differences are a good thing.
For Lyotard, there is no essence to language – language does not point to some fundamental thing in ‘absolute reality’ – there are only pragmatic language conventions which vary from person to person and over time.
Lyotard’s ultimate goal is to ensure that as many voices are heard through as many discourses as possible, with none being shut down by other discourses, as to do so would be to ‘terrorize’ them and undermine their freedom. Let one hundred flowers bloom. This is the celebration of diversity – the more of it you have, the better it is and any attempt to silence anyone with an alternate view is a is totalitarian. Does this sound familiar?
On performativity and science
Lyotard takes aim at the idea of efficiency (max output for min input), which is the basis of capitalist society. He claims that performativity is again another ideology that is justified as rational, logical and self-justifying, however, Lyotard contends there are no grounds for accepting performativity – it is just another coercive myth that silences the different.
Lyotard contends that science is also subject to performativity – research requires funding. Funding requires donors. Donors require an interest to fund and that interest is efficiency. Truth and knowledge can be bought. Look at what big tobacco or big pharma do in their clinically funded studies.
In this regard, science has no monopoly on truth – it is just another ideology. By accepting scientific method, modern society is silencing the different / the other.
It used to be that the goal of science was to describe the world – mimesis. Lyotard’s goal of science is to give us as many discourses about the world as possible.
The result
So instead of knowledge, we simply have persuasion. It undermines objectivity. Nothing is better or worse than anything else – it’s all just different.
We don’t have any objective language – we have mini language games, the rules of which change moment to moment, so Lyotard brings into question whether communication is even possible.
For those interested, a more comprehensive overview of Lyotard’s thought is here and this clip is probably Michael Sugrue throwing the most intellectual shade at another person I have ever seen.
Alvin Gouldner: The outlaw of the rebellion
The hypocrisy of the intelligentsia
Gouldner was a Marxist critic of Marxism. He observed that the ideology of Marxism which purports to represent the proletariat, was written by a person with a PhD in Aristotle and is supported first and foremost by academics. The intelligentsia.
Contrary to the predictions of Marxism that socialist revolutions would happen in advanced capitalist societies, the socialist revolutions that eventuated did not occur in advanced industrial economies between proletariat and bourgeois, rather, they occurred in backward economies with a struggle between the peasantry and the ruling class and the peasantry was mobilized by vanguard parties – Marxist intellectuals.
Gouldner’s conclusion is both succinct and perhaps most damning:
“The Communist Manifesto had held that the history of all hitherto existing society was the history of class struggles: freeman and slave, patrician and plebian, lord and serf, guildmaster and journeyman, and, then, bourgeoisie and proletariat.
In this series, however, there was one unspoken regularity: the slaves did not succeed the masters, the plebians did not vanquish the patricians, the serfs did not overthrow the lords, and the journeymen did not triumph over the guildmasters. The lowliest class never came to power. Nor does it seem likely to now.”
– Alvin Gouldner, The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class
It was always someone else. A new, rising class. For Gouldner, the real class struggle of today is the old class (the monied bourgeoisie and the technical intelligentsia (engineers, doctors, lawyers, CEOs – anyone whose income is derived from their education rather than their ownership over the means of production) and traditional humanistic intellectuals. It’s the monied vs the educated.
In this regard, Gouldner’s view is that Marxist intelligentsia (revolutionaries) mobilized peasants/workers via ideologies that served the interests of those peasants/workers while hiding the interests of the revolutionaries themselves as people who ‘own’ high culture. Marxism is an ideology of a class of intelligentsia that is using the working class to overthrow its bourgeois rival and seize state control and economic power not for the benefit of the working class (they are a mere fig leaf), but for the benefit of the New Class of the intelligentsia.
Think of actual socialist regimes that existed – who actually ran them? Lenin was a Phd in law. Trotsky published a book on revolutionary aesthetic theory. Che Guevara? Doctor. Mao Zedong? School teacher and law and economics dropout. Most of the political elite in those societies – those in actual power were educated, not factory workers!
The class struggle of the intelligentsia in the west
The class struggle in the west is not revolutionary. But even here it is apparent a class struggle is going on. The Republican party is the old class and the new class is the educated class and the underclasses they use to obtain power.
The class of intelligentsia controls technical skill. They can demand substantial incomes compared to blue collar workers and the bourgeoisie need them to run everything. In this regard, they cannot be easily done away with by the bourgeoisie.
Their educated status also gives them a superior claim to social rectitude and appeals most to rational discourse – it is better to get at ‘the truth’. This gives intelligentsia the right to conceive of themselves as platonic philosopher kings (because they know better) – here, we are basically back to argument from authority!
However, for Gouldner, while hypocritical and full of hubris, arrogance and the will to power while struggling to contain their own resentment for their impotence in society, the intelligentsia class is not all bad - it still is committed to rationality, oriented toward social justice and constant social criticism. So while flawed, this class may be the least worst class that humanity has had in a long while.
For those interested, a more comprehensive overview of Gouldner’s thought is here.
While Gouldner was not talking about the post-modernists, I think his reasoning can be applied to them perfectly. A cadre of intellectuals criticising society and holding up oppressed and marginalised groups as a human shield that they purport to protect. Rather than make a direct dash for the levers of power, they purport to seek to save the oppressed and, in a Machievellian turn ‘reluctantly accept’ the power that they are given to transform society into a better one. We see this with the Palestine protestors. Before that it was BLM. Before that it was climate change, gay marriage, aboriginal rights…the list goes on. Each of these causes no doubt has genuine believers in the crowd. But they are, as Lenin would say, полезные дураки. The rest are the class of intelligentsia to which Gouldner referred, making a cynical play for power that they claim to detest.