James Heartfield's potted history
Intellectual currents of the twentieth century
7 Post-structuralists and post-modernists
Algeria
Before the student revolt in France stood the world on its head, the Algerian
revolution stood the French enlightenment on its head. Even the occupation did
not wholly compromise the Rights of Man, as the resistance saved France, and
democracy's, honour. But Algeria was different. For decades the Algerian migrant
workers who made up the main nationalist party l'Etoile du Nord had hoped
to share in French liberty, by the extension of democracy to the Algerian
departments of the French Empire. In the fifties, though, Algeria's chief export
- men - was barred from French markets due to a slump. For the jobless Fellahi
now concentrated in Algeria, dreams of French beneficence disintegrated and a
bloody war against French rule ensued. It was France's response to the revolt
that disturbed the intelligentsia. Under General Massu, the French paratroopers
chose the role of SS, torturing opponents of what had palpably become a military
occupation.
The issue was one that divided French intellectuals - and disgraced those who
equivocated, like Camus, leading to something of a clear-out of the old guard.
At the same time, the Algerian war stirred the passions of many younger
thinkers, like Jean
Francois Lyotard and Pierre
Bordieu who were in Algeria at the time. Sartre
opposed the war, writing a preface to the communist newspaper editor Henri
Alleg's account of torture at the hands of the paras (1958. Years later Massu
told the Spectator that comparisons with the SS were absurd (25 June 1994), but
before applying the electric generator to him, Massu's paras boasted 'This is
the Gestapo here!', p 47. Massu said later 'I tried the la gegene on
myself: it was not so terrible.').
Sartre
was drawn to the involution of French humanism that the war represented and
found an authentic representative of the revolt of the Fellahi in Frantz
Fanon. The West Indian psychiatrist who had served in the French Army in the
Second World War was working in Algeria and began to question who was really mad
- his Algerian patients or the French occupiers. Fanon embraced the cause of the
FLN and became its chief propagandist. In the preface to Fanon's The Wretched
of the Earth Sartre drew out the consequences for liberal humanism: 'there
is nothing more consistent than a racist humanism since the European has only
been able to become a man through creating slaves' (p22). Nor did Fanon
disappoint Sartre's ambition to see the Other turn his back on 'an abstract
assumption of universality': 'The two zones are opposed', wrote Fanon 'but not
in the service of a higher unity … they both follow the logic of reciprocal
exclusivity. No conciliation is possible' (p30) Fanon announced the end of the
Rights of Man, but there were other ideologies that were to be deconstructed.
May '68
In the ferment of ideas associated with the students and workers revolts of May 1968 in Paris, it was the one alternative to mainstream liberalism - Soviet Communism - that was deconstructed. The iconoclastic mood was only superficially contained in the formulae of the revolutionary left. In content this was a intellectual revolt against all grand narratives. Many French intellectuals coming from different disciplines (Gilles Deleuze- philosophy- , Felix Guattari- Lacanian Psychoanalysis-, Claude Lefort -Philosophy and Politics- , among others) worked further on what they considered the failure of the May Revolution: instead of choosing the freedom of anarchy people had finally opted for re-establishing the pre-existing (repressive) order in every aspect of life. Deleuze and Guattari in particular strongly criticized the way in which psychoanalysis had turned into a bourgeois system of social control based on the knowledgeable authority of the analyst. Instead of having the unconscious ocassionaly slip over the Ego , they believed the It as a desiring machine replaced it. It is hard not to feel puzzled and shocked when reading the first lines of The Anti-Oedipus: "It breathes, It heats, It eats, It shits, It fucks"
Georges
Bataille's theory of an erotic exuberance The Accursed Share, drew
upon Mauss's
theory of the disruptive surplus that must be spent. In the long post war boom,
it was a plausible view that the politics of need were resolved and belonged to
the past, and that the real conflicts belonged to the realm of desire. Jean
Baudrillard drew upon the American New Deal economist JK Galbraith to
characterise a Consumer Society, in which the problem of realising a market
outstripped that of exploiting labour, and hence codes of advertising took
precendence over the Marxist 'law of value'. Guy
Debord's Society of the Spectacle, manifesto to his 'situationist
international', parodied Marx's Capital to characterise a Society that is 'an
immense accumulation of spectacles'.
The unorthodox Greek Trotskyist Cornelius
Castoriadis' small band of French followers Socialism or Barbarism included JF
Lyotard, Daniel Cohn-Bendit and Claude Lefort. It was Socialism or Barbarism
that articulated the Revolution in the Revolution that engulfed the Communist
Party in the may events - even though Castoriadis and his followers dissolved
their organisation the previous year.
The mood of iconoclasm interacted with all parts of the intellectual scene.
Revisionism was given a boost in Lacanian
and Feminist psychoanlysis
as much as the Maoist deviations in Marxism. But the most potent reaction was in
the emerging philosophical orthodoxy of structuralism. In Althusser's
hands Levi-Strauss's
structuralism
assumed a peculiarly scientistic objectivity so rigid that it was bound to
shatter under the slightest pressure. Already Althusser's 'structures' had
multiplied to the point when all objectivity seemed relative, and the 'lonely
hour of the last instance' in which economics was determinant 'never came'.
So-called 'post-structuralists', like Michel
Foucault and Jacques
Derrida, were similarly interested in symbolic codes and discourses. But
rather than seeing these as fixed, they were now seen as in flux. For Derrida,
following Bakhtin,
de Saussure's
codes were an 'endless play of difference'. Foucault moved from analysing power
relations to seeing power as distributed throughout society, so that we could
never hold simply to a 'repressive hypothesis'. Both authors drew upon German
irrationalism to disrupt what had come to be seens as the rigid schemas of
structuralism; Foucault drew upon Nietzsche's 'Geneaology' as a way of
historically overturning moral codes; Derrida reworked Heidegger's
'destruction of [traditional] ontology' as a deconstruction of orthodox
rationality.
The formula of 'post-structuralism' was broadened by JF Lyotard to embrace increduity towards 'all grand narratives', as 'post-modernism'. Where all universals, whether nationalist or liberal, Marxist or literary are understood as simply ideological discourses', they deserve only 'incredulity'. Lyotard's 'post-modernity' had an impact far wider than the specific discussions, translating readily into other philosophic and sociological idioms, either as the post-analytical philosophy of Richard Rorty or post-modern economics of Daniel Bell and Alvin and Heidi Toffler.
Amongst sociologists inspired by Jurgen Habermas there was a reaction against
the radical relativism of postmodernism. Anthony
Giddens and Ulrich
Beck developed a 'reflexive sociology' in which social relations were not
fixed but mutually impacting. This it was hoped would avoid the pitfalls both of
positivist sociology and also the anti-enlightenment thinking of the post
modernists. However, in Beck and Giddens' hands the defence of Enlightenment was
qualified by the Frankfurt School's critique of 'instrumental reason'. The
open-ended nature of risk, particularly struck them both: Industry and social
complexity brought with them 'manufactured uncertainty'. It seemed as if the
current of irrationalism represented by postmodernism had been reproduced in all
but name.
July 1997