Against Postmodernism

by Alex Callinicos

It has become an intellectual commonplace to claim that we have entered the era of 'postmodernity'. Three themes are embraced in this claim; the poststructurist critique by Foucault, Derrida and others of the philosophical heritage of the Enlightenment; the supposed impasse of High Modern art and its replacement by new artistic forms; and the alleged emergence of 'post-industrial' societies whose structures are beyond the ken of Marx and other theorists of industrial capitalism.

Against Postmodernism takes issue with all these themes. It challenges the idealist irrationalism of post-structuralism. It questions the existence of any radical break separating allegedly Postmodern from Modern art. And it denies that recent socio-economic developments represent any fundamental shift from classical patterns of capital accumulation.

Drawing on philosophy and history, Against Postmodernism takes issue also with some of the most forthright critics of postmodernism -- Jurgen Habermas and Fredric Jameson, for example. But it is most distinctive in that it offers a historical reading of the theories of such currently fashionable thinkers as Baudrillard and Lyotard.

Postmodernism, Alex Callinios argues, reflects the disappointed revolutionary generation of '68, and the incorporation of many of its members into the porfessional and managerial 'new middle class'. It is best read as a symptom of political frustration and social mobility rather than as a significant intellectual or cultural phenomenon in its own right.

Genres: Philosophy, Politics, Nonfiction, Theory

217 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1989

About the author

Alexander Theodore Callinicos, a descendant through his mother of Lord Acton, is a political theorist and Director of the Centre for European Studies at King's College London. He holds both a BA and a DPhil from Oxford University.

Reviews

[Michel · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really appreciate what Callinicos tries to achieve and restore here. One of the main problems of poststructuralist theory is that their implicit distance from Marx's texts, however this is only implicit and requires further research and discussion, something Callinicos doesn't undertake but instead accept their so called non-Marxist stance from the get-go. One of the main aims of the poststructuralist thought is to overcome the eternal problems of "ideology" and "class consciousness" in orthodox Marxism, which is an important task to enable a revolutionary framework. For that, post-structuralists, with a Nietzschean ontology, deny the problematic dichotomy of "appearance-truth" since it's an obsolete discussion, giving way to countless fractions within structuralists themselves, inhibiting any possibility of a collective action. What they do is rather a Hegelian turn which incorporates even the "appearance" (Schein) in the totality of "truth" (see Foucault's analysis of the social truth based on the everything and anything the agents "do and do not", "say and do not say", as empirical reality; or Deleuze's emphasize on the givenness of the empirical facticity, especially with the conecpt of "immanence" as opposed to Platonic "emanation"), in that sense, far from engaging themselves in endless language games, Foucault, Derrida and Deleuze all share a common commitment to the relevance of the classical theory of reality as a starting point. But what bothers Callinicos is apparently their second and third steps which seek to create zones of resistance and transformation in symbolic and cultural practices as well, (and I see nothing wrong there, since as Marx underlines it well, symbolic and cultural practices are in an organic and reciprocal relation with the factual reality of forces of production).
His only relevance may be when he is criticizing writers such as Lyotard and Baudrillard and accusing them for being apologists for the narcissistic culture of consumption with their so called "post-modernism". However, I don't agree at all with his demonization of Nietzsche since it is based on a shallow and one-sided interpretation of Nietzsche and it heavily relies on what those "decadents" have said about him. Thus, even though Callinicos is right to claim that there is not a distinct phenomenon as "post-modernism" but an intensification of 19th century modernism, some of his arguments seem to0 farfetched and shallow, that in some parts it becomes hard to distinguish him from the writers he criticizes.

[Alex Birchall · Rating 4 out of 5]

Callinicos' argument is to reject postmodernism as a 'retreat' by the intellectuals of the 1970s and 80s. The argument is presented in a series of rather disconnected essays. Chapter 1 discusses the various 'terms' that label the myriad 'shifts' we have apparently experienced from modernity to post-modernity - post-capitalism, post-bourgeois, post-collectivist, post-historical, post-traditional, post-industrial, post-liberal (or indeed 'neo-liberal') etc... to show the contradictory nature of postmodern theory and the exaggeration of those very terms. As Callinicos argues, postmodernists argue BOTH that postmodernity is a separate stage of history, and it isn't; postmodern art is a continuation of modern art, but it also isn't; postmodernism is anti-revolutionary, but holds Walter Benjamin and other revolutionary thinkers up as precursors. Nonetheless we see academics in various genres and studies claim a shift to postmodernism. Art became postmodernist in the Dadaist phase. Theatre made its shift from the Brechtian 'dialogue' to the Artaudian 'theatre of the senses' (the 'body without organs' picked up by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari). And of course, postmodern social theory from Lyotard disparaged so-called 'metanarratives' and insisted on the fragile, fragmented, fluctuating, mobile, and chaotic nature of the social reality against any kind of explanation.

This switches in Chapter 2 to an understanding of modernist art and commodification. The objective of this chapter and the shift is to continue the argument begun in Chapter 1 that no such shift to postmodernity has occurred as has been described. Firstly the concept of 'modern' is explained as the sweeping up of traditional societies by various events: the religious Reformation, the Enlightenment, in particular the Industrial Revolution, etc. Modernity was perceived to be the 'endgame' or the realised ideals of the Enlightenment. Weber's theory of 'rationalisation' and the Parsonian theory of evolutionary stabilisation are subsumed under a Marxist theory of historical materialism which is rightly considered as a 'superior' theory of historical change. The chapter then turns to the genesis of modernism in history, with some nuanced analyses that require a background in the history of art that I don't really have. An interesting reformulation of Perry Anderson's arguments regarding fin-de-siecle European society (end of 19th c.) is advanced. We also see the reactions to modernity posed by Nazism and the various responses to reactions (incl. the logical positivism of the Vienna Circle socialists) attempting to reassert Enlightenment values against irrationalism. Following that is a discussion of avant-garde and its exhaustion, which Callinicos argues "dramatized the more general exhaustion of Modernism".

Chapter 3 turns to poststructuralist theory and deconstruction. The origins of this theory are located in the philosophy of Nietzsche, specifically the 'fiction' of the subject, the plural nature of the self and the idea of 'will to power', and how thought is simply expressive of this power. These theses are to show up later in the influential work of Foucault (power/knowledge, genealogy, 'regimes of truth' etc.) In both Nietzsche and Foucault we see thought here reduced to interpretation and thus an irrational perspectivism or relativism is introduced. This is characterised accurately by Alain Badiou as "contemporary sophistry", or an enemy of thought.

Poststructuralism is either 'textualist' (Derrida, de Man and so on) or 'worldly' (Foucault, Edward Said...). In 'textualism' "there is no outside-text" as Derrida controversially puts it. This had a dramatic effect on cultural studies in particular where everything became a text to be interpreted but nothing could actually be judged according to objective standards. In the 'worldly' poststructuralism it is history and societal understanding that is deconstructed or denaturalised through genealogy.

There are three logical aporias Callinicos identifies in poststructuralism. The first is its treatment of rationality, to be found in its philosophy of language. Derrida's well known splitting of Saussurean holism is in his concept of "differance" - the 'difference' of presence and absence and the 'deferral' of presence through the operation of signifying chains. Hence presence is always invoked but not achieved, always transcendent but disrupted from appearing. This position, Callinicos argues, does not deny the existence of objects. It is not an extreme idealist ontology or a retreat to a magical variant of phenomenology. But it does entail an irrationalist epistemology in which those objects cannot be *known*. This is why Ferry and Renaut joke about Derrida's similarities to Heidegger (the "self-occultation of Being" as Callinicos puts it is similar to differance). This linguistic isolation from reality poses problems for Derrida later on. Habermas labels Derrida's position as convergent on Jewish mysticism - nothing beyond the immediate present can be known, but only alluded to. Because that which is external to the present is 'unnameable' because it is outside discourse, Derrida denies himself the means by which he can analyse the social forces behind racial apartheid, for example (which he attempts to do in his work). It seems it is simply untrue that there is only 'discourse' as means of communication that has no reference to reality.

The second aporia is 'resistance'. In contrast to Derridean textualism (in which anti-realism is manifested in the separation of discourse from reality), 'worldly' poststructuralism insists on the grounding of discourses in socio-political reality. Foucault calls this 'power/knowledge' or 'power relations', Deleuze 'the imperialism of the signifier'. The problem is that one category is reduced to another. In Foucault and in some places Deleuze, power (or sometimes 'desire') is all that knowledge is. Knowledge cannot be separated from its social context. This may or may not be ontologically anti-realist but instead we have a position of extreme epistemic relativism. The modes of resistance advocated here fall incredibly short. In Foucault we have the challenging of a 'dominant knowledge' by disparate 'local knowledges'. This relativist framework structures much of the 'new sociology of knowledge', 'alternative epistemologies' and anti-realist conceptions of the relationship between the knowledge of indigenous peoples and scientific knowledge. Not only is this relativism dangerous (basically promoting authoritarianism over and above the powers of objective judgment) but it is also politically weak against Foucault's omnipresent systems of power located in institutions. In Deleuze, the concept of power becomes mystified in his vitalist philosophy outlined in A Thousand Plateaus. Resistance is located in 'life itself' - a life that is dislocated and disunified, in contrast to the unities of 'body' and 'state'. This theme is repeated in the so-called feminist 'new materialism', specifically Rosi Braidotti's concept of "zoe" (life-force) which she derives from Deleuzian inspiration. Marxism and Foucauldianism are thus highly incompatible if one accepts the arguments made here.

The third aporia is that of the 'subject'. We see in Derrida that 'the subject' is written by the text or comes to life through discourse. Foucault argues 'the individual' is produced by power. Deleuze argues that the body as commonly understood is a reified form around organicity rather than a deterritorialised 'smooth space'. Yet this is analytically contradicted by Foucault's borrowing (from Nietzsche) of the concept of stylisation, the self as a work of art that is 'created'. How can the self be coherently organised if it is just made up of disparate discourse? This implies a principle of individuation which is denied in poststructuralism. The later works of Foucault, as Callinicos argues, essentially repudiate this 'anti-subject' subjectivism, but "does not represent an escape from the dilemmas involved in the notion of power/knowledge" (p. 91).

While Chapter 4 is a systematic critique of Habermas (his idea of communicative rationality as manifest in contemporary liberal democracy), Chapter 5 returns to the critique of tendencies of postmodernist thought. First the concept of 'post-industrial society' is totally dismantled through an analysis of misinterpretations of economic trends by the relevant theorists. Secondly, Fredric Jameson's identification of a new period of 'multinational capitalism' as concordant with the rise of postmodern art is criticised. The third shift that is criticised is the so-called move from 'Fordism' to 'post-Fordism' (with post-Fordism being rejected as an intelligible category) as well as Lash and Urry's exegesis of the move to a 'disorganised' capitalism structured around mobility and the disaggregation of national and ethnic orders. Baudrillard's concept of 'hyper-real' and his formulation of commodity fetishism is next, and contrasted with that of Adorno and Horkheimer as well as the Situationists. Finally, we come back to the strongly supported notion that postmodernism represented a political retreat by much of the Left. Callinicos' objective is to back this up with evidence. The rise of the 'new middle class' and the disparate interests of its members is analysed. Socialist revolution was seen by the radicals of the 60s and 70s as impossible and indeed undesirable. Very quickly, the ideals of the Enlightenment were rejected by those who claimed to be pluralists and democrats. Callinicos elsewhere has argued that postmodern theories served as a vehicle for the Left intelligentsia to air out their political disillusionment and newfound love for a particular kind of consumption practice (Callinicos calls it an "overconsumptionist dynamic", see p.171). But these theories often had anti-democratic implications. This was the brutal "trahison des clercs" (treason of the clerks) that continues to imperil the Left today.

The book is an essential read for students and academics across the humanities, particularly those interested in the history and periodicity of art, as well as anti-postmodernist social theorists like myself, and perhaps, a general readership of those who affiliate themselves with the political Left.

[sologdin · Rating 2 out of 5]

trot from british empire lays down what are now the standard marxist objections to postmodernism. probably should be supplemented with habermas, though.

[Domhnall · Rating 5 out of 5]

This 1989 book examines the claims of postmodernism from a Marxist perspective. The passage of time since then permits an evaluation of the book’s arguments and sure enough, it emerges with credit as a prescient and incisive analysis of the issues covered.

It's possible to read it as saying Postmodernism doesn't exist, or not in the way it claims to exist. That’s because Callinicos is scathing of the unconvincing way postmodernism appropriates Modernist and earlier themes and achievements as its own, writing for example: “The apocalyptic ‘sense of an ending’ which postmodernism supposedly articulates loses any historical specificity, becoming instead the chronic condition of Western civilisation since the fall of Rome. Here indeed is the night Hegel spoke of when criticising Schelling, in which all cows are black, in which Augustine, Kant, Marx, Nietzsche, Parsons, Foucault, Barthes and Baudrillard have all been analyzing the same postmodern scene’."

When he is not accusing them of appropriation, he dismisses their project as misconceived and poorly reasoned: “much of what is written in support of the idea that we live in a postmodern epoch seems to me of small calibre intellectually, usually superficial, often ignorant, sometimes incoherent.” What he especially attacks is the very idea that there has been some dramatic change in the material world to account for a transition into this supposedly postmodern era.

It is one thing to speak of the antecedents for postmodernism, quite a different thing to claim those antecedents as part of the postmodernist project. A running theme is the legacy of the Enlightenment, exemplified in Condorcet’s vision of human history as a progress towards the achievements of the present, and of the Romantic opposition to this idea of progress, dating from the Eighteenth Century. Callenicos suggests that Hegel and Marx, and later Freud, carry forward the optimistic Enlightenment search for a rational understanding of human nature and the possibility of progress, against which the Romantic resistance to these concepts is taken up by Nietzsche and, among his successors, by the so called poststructuralists in French philosophy of the 1970s.

Callenicos is not without respect for the postructuralists, writing, for instance: “I do not believe that the work of the philosophers now known as poststructuralists can be dismissed in this way; wrong on fundamentals Deleuze, Derrida and Foucault may be, but they develop their ideas with considerable skill and sophistication, and offer partial thoughts of great value.” He does investigate internal flaws in their work, which he traces back to Nietzsche, and the discussion is quite deep, but what is more accessible is his account of the political context to their projects, as in the following passage:

“Patton’s defence of Foucault and Deleuze does, however, highlight the political source of their ideas – the post-1968 rejection by many left intellectuals of any perspective of global social transformation, a reaction to dashed revolutionary hopes and to the rise of the ‘new social movements’ (feminists, gays, ecologists, black nationalists, etc). Patton argues that the experience of these movements shows that ‘change in existing social relations does not have to be mediated by the totality. The conditions that sustain oppression can be altered piecemeal. This political judgement sums up the evolution of many of the generation of 1968 in the course of the 1970s – from revolutionary groupuscule to single-issue campaigns and then to social democracy, a process which took an especially concentrated form in France because of the sudden and traumatic collapse of the French Communist Party under the impact of Francois Mitterand’s revived Socialist Party."

Callinicos cites the view of Lyotard that the Enlightenment initiated an era of grand narratives, epitomized in Condorcet’s vision of human progress, and that postmodernism was characterised by a disillusion with and rejection of grand narratives. This fed into Post-Marxism, whose leading names – Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe - proposed that socialists should abandon class struggle and the role of the working class as the agency of social change, because the Western world was entering a fundamentally new, postmodern epoch, quite unlike the industrial capitalism of the past.

This idea that the Western world was entering a fundamentally new stage of development was reflected in themes such as post-industrialism, post-Fordism and even post-capitalism in the sense of a transformation from manufacturing under the supervision of the nation state to the era of deregulated and globalized financial capital, and it was politicized in the administrations of Reagan and Thatcher. Of course, four years after this book came out, the same themes dominated the third way politics of Bill Clinton, followed in 1997 with the similar policies of Blair in the UK. So what is crucial to appreciate is that the final chapter of this 1989 text trashes all of those ideas and exposes their severe limitations, years before Clinton and Blair became darlings of the media by repeating the same discredited myths.

While the US and Britain certainly did reduce their traditional manufacturing bases in the era of neoliberal economics, that was due to wilful neglect by their governments and the loss of competitiveness in relation to other countries, whose industries cheerfully expanded their manufacturing to fill the space in the market. What kept their economies moving in an era of supposedly small government and radically reduced welfare spending was a combination of escalating, government funded military budgets, tax breaks for the better off and deregulated consumer credit. In the decades after this book, the Keynesian role of military and security budgets has continued and grown to a vast scale, supporting in particular the high tech industries that now dominate the manufacturing sector. But Americans did not stop driving cars – they just stopped driving quite so many American ones.

In short, Callenicos has little patience with what he calls “an apocalyptic conception of postmodernity as the final catastrophe of Western civilisation,” at least in so far as it depends on the concepts of a postindustrial, postfordist, postcapitalist, globalized world. Those ideas do not survive scrutiny, or not in the way depicted by postmodernists let alone by advocates of the neoliberal system inaugurated under Reagan and Thatcher, and intensified after this book came out by Clinton and Blair. Nor does he have much patience with the defeatism of the post 1968 generation.

Callenicos writes in his introduction: “Why is it that in the past decade so large a portion of the Western intelligentsia became convinced that both socio-economic system and cultural practices are undergoing a fundamental break from the recent past?” [A previous owner of my copy has written in spidery pen: “Are you blind?” - too amusing to ignore.] In answering this question, he says his book “rather uneasily occupies a space defined by the convergence of philosophy, social theory and historical writing. Fortunately, there is an intellectual tradition which is characterized precisely by the synthesis it effects of these genres, namely the classical historical materialism of Marx himself, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, Luxembourg and Gramsci.” ... “not least among the purposes of this book is the reaffirmation of the revolutionary socialist tradition against the [Post-Marxist] apostles of ‘New Times’.”

Comparing this to a similar book by David North [https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... ], there are common themes. In the Sixties, there were suggestions of revolutionary potential in many popular movements around the globe. France shaken by the end of the Algerian War, America by the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights movement, the culmination of the post-colonial period in many regions, all combining to generate both a revolutionary mood and a right wing reaction, of which the latter was to succeed in the guise of neoliberal ideology. The claims made for neoliberalism by Reagan, Thatcher and their diverse successors, do not stand up to scrutiny, and the philosophies to which disappointed, former radicals turned were obscurantist and internally flawed; in the language of David North, postmodernism represents a pseudo-left, a false flag. The deficiencies of this reactionary trend, so blatantly evident in the light of the 2008 crash, the presidency of Trump and the distraction of identity politics among other things, are increasingly exposed to view and the validity of a classical Marxist critique stands out clearly when the predictions of a book like this one are revisited after an interval of over thirty years. In short, we have been lied to, what we are told happened over the past fifty years is not what did happen and it is time we returned to Enlightenment values in a radical rather than reactionary form, based on a restored appeal to rational analysis and debate. Classical Marxism offers a great deal to this end.

[Roberto Yoed · Rating 3 out of 5]

Callinicos seems not know the difference between Nietzsche in his books and what other people understand about him.

Other than that, the book is a great critique to the tendencies of posmodernism.

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

A nice appraisal. At first it seemed Callinicos was going to discuss postmodern art, but the most of the book focused on philosophy and politics. Particularly politics in the last part of the book. As with most critics of postmodernism, Callinicos doesn't dismiss all pomo's claims outright, but only their inconsistencies. There's also a great, even-handed take on Habermas that's worth checking out.

[Nicole · Rating 2 out of 5]

I found this book in the street a few years ago!

[Danae · Rating 3 out of 5]

Por lo general cuando se lee teoría crítica seria pareciera que hay que sortear múltiples recursos discursivos que ordenan el texto y que le garantizan rigor: preguntas, ejemplificaciones, comparaciones. Y detrás de todo eso está la posición del autor que emerge casi como pidiendo perdón.
Lo mejor de este libro es que Alex Callinicos desde principio a fin toma una más que explícita posición marxista. Es despectivo con la flojera posmoderna e imperdonable con la falta de rigor teórico.
Es un libro que se hace largo por la interminable lista de autores que o destroza o rescata dependiendo de su posición en la batalla contra la ideología burguesa, pero todo ese contenido, una vez incorporado al análisis general, presenta un panorama claro que interconecta el arte y la política a través de la historia reciente y los principales paradigmas donde, como evidencia el título, el enemigo es el posmodernismo, corriente que define como "un significado flotante, con el cual esta inteligentzia busca articular su desilusión política y su aspiración a un estilo de vida orientado al consumo".
Callinicos rescata a los artistas conscientes y motivados por recobrar un rol público como Maiakovski y a los intelectuales como Foucault y Deleuze por la importancia que le otorgan al poder en sus análisis de formas discursivas. Porque detrás del sabroso ninguneo a autores como Baudrillard, Lyotard, Lipovetsky y un montón más, hay una conclusión clarísima y propositiva contraria a la invasión del individualismo en la vida pública y muy crítica de los consensos y de los procesos sociales donde la izquierda ha cedido, pues el resultado de esta práctica son los movimientos fugaces que no abren brechas duraderas ¿Les suena conocido?

[Joe · Rating 5 out of 5]

Best critique of post-modernism around. Takes the theory on at its level and breaks it down. Not a quick read but great.

[Jafar · Rating 4 out of 5]

You don't need to be a Marxist to agree with his critique of po'mo'ism.

[Phillip · Rating 1 out of 5]

Sloppy, crude scholarship. I'm not a huge fan of post-modernism, but Callinicos' criticisms come off as if he hasn't really read any of the main theorists he critiques. Not worth your time.

[John Kantor · Rating 1 out of 5]

Same old.... Half clueless analysis and half simplistic Marxist essentialism.

[Manolo Ferrer · Rating 1 out of 5]

The author doesn't understand Derrida at all! See Emeritus Professor Christopher Norris' work on Derrida & Deconstruction...

[Jay Rothermel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Overall, a mediocre condensation of what must have been public talks and book reviews. Callinicos does well with the period 1969 to 1989, but that period was covered with more clarity in these two works.

https://www.pathfinderpress.com/produ...

https://www.pathfinderpress.com/produ...

[William Brown · Rating 1 out of 5]

One of the most misunderstood subjects around. This book is no different and just adds to the mess of half understood fallacies. What a waste. Avoid at all costs!

[Inés Villabrille]

Me convenció, no más Foucault

[Brody Janzen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Alex Callinicos provides an intriguing contribution to the debate over what postmodernism is, namely by denying its actual existence and seeing it as an attenuated development of modernism. Starting from the general conception of postmodernism as an artistic, philosophical, and economic reality, Callinicos effectively undermines the grand claims made by postmodern theorists concerning these three fields. While the critical takedown of postmodernism is valuable, Callinicos really shines in his illuminating and informative discussions of modernism, the relation of structuralism to post-structuralism, and his serious engagement with Habermas. The historical materialist approach on display here provides a surprisingly convincing explanation of the economic and historical background that enabled the rise and fall of modernism. Unfortunately, this book had more textual errors than anything I've ever read, which provided a constant distraction and hampered understanding in some sentences.

[Dan Sharber]

this is probably a good book. the arguments seem sound to me. however, i have very limited knowledge of all the people and art and architecture that he references throughout. as such, this book made very little sense to me and gave me very little of any practical use. the fault, i believe, is my own and not the fault of the book/author. but if you are not familiar with derrida, althusser, adorno, nietzsche, habermas etc etc you might be in the same boat as me. i am refraining from rating this book because that hardly seems fair...

[A L]

A tidy book on a most untidy subject.