Histories of Postmodernism

Mark Bevir, Jill Hargis, Sara Rushing

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781135776633
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Histories of Postmodernism reexamines the history of the constellation of ideas and thinkers associated with postmodernism. The increasingly dominant historical narrative depicts a relatively smooth development of ideas from Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger, through a range of French theorists, most notably Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, to contemporary American thinkers such as Richard Rorty, Edward Said, and Judith Butler. Histories of Postmodernism challenges this narrative by highlighting the local contexts of relevant theorists and thus the crucial distinctions that divide successive articulations of the themes and concepts associated with postmodernism. As postmodern ideas traveled from nineteenth-century Germany to mid-twentieth-century France and on to the contemporary United States, so the relevant theorists transformed that heritage within the context of particular intellectual traditions and specific political and aesthetic issues.

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Introduction

Histories of Postmodernism

Mark Bevir, Jill Hargis, and Sara Rushing

The effort to historicize postmodernism will likely raise eyebrows. Historicism and postmodernism might seem to be an odd couple. Postmodernists sometimes associate historicism with the kind of grand narratives to which they are so vehemently opposed. They think of historicism as saturated with Enlightenment beliefs and values, including universality, truth, modern subjectivity, and progress. Hence they might worry that any attempt to historicize their ideas will reduce these ideas to manifestations of some putative law of development allegedly governing social processes. Perhaps they will object that any attempt to historicize postmodernism inevitably entails an imposition upon it of a repressive narrative, logic, or discourse. Equally, historicists might associate postmodernism with a vaguely delimited but obviously scorned set of beliefs and values, including relativism, nihilism, and textual free-play. Hence they might worry that to take post-modernism as seriously as we do is to flirt with (or even to embrace) ideas that preclude the very possibility of serious historical inquiry.

Part of the excitement of Histories of Postmodernism derives from the tension between its two principle concepts. Nonetheless, the primary aim of this volume is neither to delimit postmodernism so as to eradicate it, nor to delimit it so as to endorse it, but rather to narrate aspects of its history. No doubt our aim of narrating histories of postmodernism is contrary to the strand of postmodernism that argues each instance is its own interpretation, and so goes on to insist on the unrestrained play of texts. However, we would suggest that some aspects of historicism actually overlap with other strands of postmodernism. Indeed, our introduction begins by arguing that historicists often reject a view of history as linear, progressive, and determined. Historicism, as we conceive it, thus overlaps with the postmodern emphasis on particularity and contingency. After we introduce historicism, we will return to the question of how it might contribute to our understanding of postmodernism.

Varieties of Historicism

All the human sciences were dominated for much of the nineteenth century by a developmental historicism.¹ Although human scientists as diverse as James Bryce, John Burgess, and Leopold von Ranke insisted that scientific knowledge depended on inductive rigor (which they associated with the systematic, impartial, and painstaking collection and sifting of facts), they typically made sense of the facts at which they thus arrived by locating them in developmental narratives. These developmental narratives varied in the extent to which they drew, often eclectically, on sources such as Whig historiography, organic and evolutionary theories, appeals to divine providence, and philosophical idealism. But typically these developmental narratives presented the history of Europe, the west, or civilization as the unfolding of principles such as reason and liberty. They stressed continuity in the gradual triumph of these principles. They suggested that all societies evolved in accord with these principles. And they often interpreted colonialism—thereby moving toward a justification of it—by reference to the cultivation of these principles.

The developmental historicists of the nineteenth century structured their histories by reference to principles that they believed operated through time either as foundational facts or as unfolding ideals. They believed that historical eras are linked by common experiences that appear in the present conceived as a culmination of a developmental process. Hence they understood the past by locating it in relation to a larger whole, the content of which they characteristically derived from their own concepts of nation and liberty. In doing so, they often used these concepts to define a trans-historical reason by which all societies might be understood. Even when developmental historicists pointed to threats to reason or liberty, they still conceived of the triumph of these principles as somehow ensured by an immanent and evolutionary process. They built progress into the order of things—all societies were progressing toward a more complete realization of the very trans-historical reason in terms of which they were to be understood and evaluated.

Developmental historicism had been decisively undermined long before the hey-day of postmodernism. Friedrich Nietzsche and the first modern-ists had long expressed skepticism toward those principles of reason and progress that played such a prominent role in developmental narratives.² World War One eroded the wider cultural support for these principles. Although developmental historicism continued to appear throughout the first half of the twentieth century, its exponents had lost confidence in the principles that informed their narratives. Their narratives sounded like nostalgic laments. Novelists and poets such as E. M. Forster, T. S. Eliot, and Evelyn Waugh, as much as human scientists, wrote in ways that suggested the world to which they referred was somehow a thing of the past—the expansive confidence of the nineteenth century in reason and progress was no more.³ This nostalgia took various forms. It could be tempered by ironic detachment, perhaps reflecting recognition that old beliefs and ideals were markedly out of synch with modern politics: one might think here of Forster and the political theorist Ernest Barker. Alternatively, it could be an attempt to reassert old beliefs and ideals by a shrill—and often somewhat insincere—attempt to tie them to a natural or divine law independent of the process of development that suddenly appeared to be moving away from them: one might think here of Eliot and the political theorist Leo Strauss.

The conservative turn to natural or divine law exemplifies one way in which twentieth century thinkers moved away from all forms of historicism. Yet, the twentieth century rejection of historicism was perhaps most apparent in the social sciences. The rise of academic disciplines such as political science and sociology was accompanied by a widespread turn away from historical narrative as an appropriate form of explanation for human affairs. Social scientists turned instead to more atomistic and analytic modes of inquiry.⁴ They broke down social life into discrete parts, and they sought to explain these parts by comparison, classification, and correlation. Over time the social sciences has proved fertile ground for innumerable formal and ahistorical theories—functionalism, behavioralism, structuralism, and, most recently, rational choice. A similar rejection of historicism appeared in various strands of twentieth century philosophy. The founders of both analytic philosophy and phenomenology openly rejected the historicism associated with nineteenth century idealism. They concentrated on formal, atomistic and logical analyses of language and mind conceived apart from their histories.

Interestingly, the postmodernists often drew on those twentieth century traditions that opposed historicism. Most of the leading French postmodernists owed a debt to both structuralism and phenomenology, as highlighted in this volume by Robert Resch and Peter Gordon. The clear impact of these traditions on Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and other postmodernists does much to explain the tensions between postmodernism and historicism.

However, while many twentieth century theorists rejected historicism, others redefined it in ways that made it less dependent on developmental concepts of reason and progress. This new, more thoroughgoing historicism really arose only after World War One, although it drew on the heightened concern with context and change that had long characterized historicism.⁵ After World War One, historicists such as Ernst Troeltsch and Benedetto Croce rejected the developmental perspective while remaining suspicious of appeals to classifications and structures because of the way they neglected context and change.⁶ These new historicists implied that beliefs, actions, and events are radically contingent in that the moment of choice is open and indeterminate. In their view, the ubiquity of change meant that the present might have little if anything in common with the past. Their emphasis on the otherness of the past led to skeptical concerns about the very possibility of objective historical knowledge. On the one hand, skeptical concerns inspired critiques of the ways in which historians obscured the retroactive construction of stability in their narratives. On the other hand, skeptical concerns prompted attempts to avoid a disabling skepticism by appealing to some notion of history itself.

Troeltsch and Croce brought to historicism a greater emphasis on contingency, critique, and uncertainty. They inspired other exponents of a new, more thoroughgoing historicism throughout the twentieth century, including R. G. Collingwood, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and also Antonio Gramsci and the New Left. Where developmental historicists had attempted to bring particular contexts and changes together within grand historical narratives, later historicists worried that these grand narratives tamed the contingency of history. Historicists have become increasingly wary of framing historical developments in relation to any overarching category, let alone of framing them in terms of an apparently natural or progressive movement.

Skepticism toward grand narratives and framing principles raises the question: what concepts referring to what contexts might historians use today? As we have seen, historicists are quick to worry that forcing an aspect of the past into a grand narrative gives it retrospective stability only at the expense of distorting it. Hence they are concerned, on one level, to describe events, beliefs, and the like as best they can—or at least in the best way available to us. They often go painstakingly over a theorist’s work in an attempt to piece together its inner structure and its development over time; they offer synchronic and diachronic accounts of webs of belief; they explore the changing content of the ideas of a particular person. Equally, of course, historicists use aggregate concepts to cluster thinkers and, more importantly for our purpose, to provide historical insights into why people held the beliefs they did and, indeed, to ascribe beliefs to people. We suggest that historicists use aggregate concepts such as tradition and problem.⁷ Historicists conceive of beliefs, meanings, and actions as contingent in that people reach them and perform them against the background of a particular social inheritance, not on the basis of pure reason or pure experience. Hence they require a concept such as tradition or discourse to denote the inheritances against the background of which people arrive at certain beliefs, meanings, and actions. And they require a concept such as problem to pick out the local contexts within which people modified beliefs, meanings, and actions so as to generate changes within traditions. Now, while we suggest that historicists deploy concepts such as “tradition” or “local context,” we should add that such concepts act here not as natural kinds but as pragmatic constructs. Traditions, problems, and local contexts do not exist as self-contained entities with natural boundaries, and historicists should be careful not to reify them as if they did. Rather, historians slice out of an undifferentiated past those traditions, problems, or local contexts that they believe best explain that which interests them.

Collectively, the essays in this volume offer ample illustration of how such aggregate concepts illuminate historical phenomena. Because the essays operate with pragmatic concepts couched at various levels of aggregation, the traditions to which they appeal exhibit different levels of interaction and agreement among adherents to them. The scope of the traditions varies from broad characterizations of patterns of thought, such as the American poetic tradition that Simon Stow identifies as an influence on Richard Rorty, to narrower appeals to networks of scholars, such as the structuralists among whom Resch locates Louis Althusser. The dilemmas and local contexts to which these essays appeal vary similarly from discussions about the importance of social events, such as the protests of May 1968, which Richard Wolin suggests lead various French thinkers to return to human rights, to the importance of philosophical debates among networks of scholars, such as the French debate on the interpretation of Martin Heidegger, which Gordon shows to have played such a role in Derrida’s deconstruction, and even to more individual efforts to overcome a contradiction or respond to critics, as Paul Patton argues Derrida did when he expanded on his ethical and political writings.

Whatever the scope of the traditions and dilemmas historians invoke, we might be wary of attempts to equate them with a fixed core and a penumbra that varies over time. Instead we might adopt a nominalist analysis of aggregate concepts. We might replace the idea of a series of discrete and identifiable traditions with that of an undifferentiated social context of crisscrossing interactions, where historians slice a particular context or tradition out of this undifferentiated background in order to explain the set of meanings, beliefs, or actions that interests them. In this view, historians individuate their aggregate concepts in accord with their particular purposes. Once we adopt this view, we will not mistake aggregate concepts for given chunks of the past, as if those concepts alone could appear in the one proper history. Hence we might allow that the criteria for appealing to a tradition, and also for specifying the content of particular traditions, can vary with the purposes of the narrative being told. For example, Stow constructs an “American Poetic tradition” not as a general account of all American poetry but as an aggregate concept, covering Walt Whitman and others, which captures the inheritance that helps to explain Rorty’s opportunism and utopianism and so the differences between Rorty and many continental postmodernists.

Historicizing Postmodernism

The ensuing essays historicize postmodernism. They attempt to make sense of various thinkers by situating them against the background of diverse traditions and local contexts. What, readers might ask, do these essays tell us about postmodernism? Part of the answer to that question derives from historicism, with its nominalist approach to the analysis of abstract concepts such as postmodernism. Nominalists deny that abstract concepts (most notably universals) have any existence independent of us. They regard universals, and arguably abstract concepts more generally, as being composed solely of the individuals we locate under them. They deny that such concepts have any essence, although they might allow that the relevant individuals share family resemblances. Hence a nominalist analysis of postmodernism implies—as we said above about traditions and local contexts—that it does not have any fixed, self-contained content by which we might define it and demarcate its boundaries.

Nominalism has two specific consequences for our account of postmodernism. First, we do not draw strict lines of demarcation around those whom one might label postmodern. Instead we appeal to conceptual and historical links between thinkers. That is to say, we conceive of the beliefs and relationships of these thinkers as the things to which we refer when we use the word “postmodernism.” We define postmodernism by reference to a loose cluster of themes which have altered over time and none of which is necessarily common to all those thinkers whom we might call postmodern. We trace the changing nature of this loose cluster of themes from several French theorists who are most often associated with post-modernism back to philosophers and movements that influenced them and forward to American academics who have been inspired by them and the debates around them. Second, our nominalist suspicion of fixed definitions inspires an attempt to decenter postmodernism even as we so conceive of it. Hence we challenge a simple narrative in which fixed ideas passed from the precursors through French theory and on to their American disciples. We highlight differences and discontinuities between the various theorists and movements by locating them in their local contexts.

Let us begin our exploration of postmodernism by describing the loose cluster of themes that recur in many of the ensuing essays’ discussion of postmodernists. In tracing histories of postmodernism from precursors such as Nietzsche, through French thinkers such as Derrida, Foucault and Jean-François Lyotard, and on to contemporary Americans such as Drucilla Cornell and Rorty, we find that certain themes emerge. No doubt an account of postmodernism in terms of such themes could serve reductive ends. Let us reiterate, therefore, that reductionism is not our aim. To the contrary, themes link ideas through their resemblance to one another or their reasonable association with one another, not by pointing to identical beliefs or the logical consequences of subscribing to them. Hence we elaborate these themes as a prelude to decentering them. In the next section of our introduction, we will examine how local contexts—specific traditions and dilemmas—give different meanings and implications to the themes. The process by which theorists from varied traditions generated a loose cluster of overlapping themes was a contingent historical one, not a necessary one progressing inexorably toward a fixed conclusion in postmodern philosophy. When the essays in this volume explore how the themes emerged and were deployed in diverse traditions to address diverse problems, they do not distract from the task of discussing postmodernism. Rather, they constitute a discussion of postmodernism that recognizes its polyvalence.

The themes that arise out of the following essays and help to provide an account of “postmodernism,” are, in many cases, couched as oppositions to...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: Histories of Postmodernism
• 2 Honesty as the Best Policy: Nietzsche on Redlichkeit and the Contrast between Stoic and Epicurean Strategies of the Self
• 3 Escape from the Subject: Heidegger’s Das Man and Being-in-the-World
• 4 A Rock and a Hard Place: Althusser, Structuralism, Communism and the Death of the Anticapitalist Left
• 5 Hammer without a Master: French Phenomenology and the Origins of Deconstruction (Or, How Derrida Read Heidegger)
• 6 “A Kind of Radicality”: The Avant-Garde Legacy in Postmodern Ethics
• 7 Derrida’s Engagement with Political Philosophy
• 8 From the “Death of Man” to Human Rights: The Paradigm Change in French Intellectual Life
• 9 “The Democratic Literature of the Future”: Richard Rorty, Postmodernism, and the American Poetic Tradition
• 10 The Secular and the Post-Secular in the Thought of Edward Said
• 11 Longing for a “Certain Kind of Future”: Drucilla Cornell, Sexual Difference, and the Imaginary Domain
• List of Contributors
• Index