Chapter 6. Postmodern Strategy

Having toured the history of the collectivist Left and all its schisms, how did postmodernism eventually take hold as its guiding framework with its skeptical and relativist epistemology? Was it out of desperation, since all other avenues had failed, or was it by design and conviction that postmodernism be the logical and necessary end?

The status of language became a strategic focus. The epistemological position one advances necessarily renders consequences for language, not only in its content, but also its methods. In postmodernism, language merely expresses opinion and persuasion rather than facts and logical argument. This is why deconstruction, a concept of postmodernism, is an endless process of unpacking what words mean, for there is no bottom or foundation to meaning. To the realist modernist, words are concepts that are tied to reality in some fashion, either by a perception about reality or another concept. Rhetoric becomes a method of best revealing the cognitive connections one makes to reality, i.e., the facts.

Rorty articulated the postmodern position on language. In The Contingency of Language, he wrote, “the world does not tell us what language games to play” and as a result, “human languages are human creations.” Rorty is actually the least extreme of the postmodernists; he acknowledges that language can be used in resolving social conflict, although he insists, as many postmodernists have adopted from the collectivist Right, that we may only be able to socially interact empathically with our own ethnicity, and “we must, in practice, privilege our own group.” Most postmodernists,

however, see language more negatively, as basically a weapon used to claim power and be deployed in the service of progress.

However, having lost confidence in a step-by-step guide to progress as outlined by Marx, faith became desperately needed to uphold the dream of socialist progress. In this fashion, the postmodern strategy evolved to share affinities with religion. Both had been exhausted when battling in the arena of reason, and so the arena itself needed to be abolished. Once we remove reason and reality, a foundation in which to find the superior argument, nothing is left but opinion, and here postmodernism has an equal footing and can advance its agenda by any means necessary.

Succinctly put, and now returning to the first thesis given by Hicks in Explaining Postmodernism, postmodernism is a symptom of the far Left’s crisis of faith, because now it is precisely faith that is needed to continue believing in socialism. However, as we saw in the history of the far Left, faith would eventually be replaced by realpolitik as the postmodern strategy. Therefore we might term this movement a Reverse Thrasymacheanism, a revival of the Sophists of Ancient Greece. If society is now reduced to merely competing wills, words are the tool of power struggles for dominance. However, recall that Thrasymachus famously argued in Plato’s Republic that justice is the interest of the stronger. Postmodernists today, perhaps due to the influence of two millennia of Christianity and two centuries of socialist theory, simply argue the opposite, that justice is the interest of the weaker. And like the Sophists’ view that rhetoric was merely a tool to play the debating game, postmodernism, in the words of Lentricchia, “seeks not to find

the foundation and the conditions of truth but to exercise power for the purpose of social change.”

However, even with this ideal that postmodernists sell, a number of contradictions (which they don’t deny) arise that make this whole thing suspect: ● If all truth is relative, why is postmodernism the right one? ● If all cultures are equal and respectable, why is Western culture uniquely bad? ● If values are subjective, why are sexism and racism bad? ● If technology and wealth are bad, why is it unfair if some have more than others? ● If tolerance is good and dominance is bad, why should we adopt postmodern political correctness? Wouldn’t that be a new intolerance and a new dominance?

We can see a pattern here: promote subjectivism and relativism in theory but promote dogmatic absolutism in practice. We might ask, what are postmodernists more invested in? The means, relativism and subjectivism, come what may, or the ends, absolute socialism by any means necessary? Or perhaps both are part of postmodernism, but psychologically, the contradictions do not matter to supporters?

The first option seems impossible since their political advocacy is so uniform. Instead, what should follow from the premises of relativism in epistemology is relativism in politics.

What about the second option? Recall from Jameson, “everything is ‘in the last analysis’ political.” We might

understand the Machiavellian twist given to postmodernism with any means being available to them. But this would make postmodernism not relativistic at all; it would be profoundly devoted to realpolitik—politics, by any means necessary—including deceit, manipulation, and violence. And precisely these means have been used by collectivists world-wide. As an example, deconstruction is merely a means to accomplish the end.

Encountering resistance, one can simply analyze the words used in the resistance, plunge the conversation down into epistemology, and require the opposition to prove that knowledge is possible, and perception connects to reality. Most may have trouble doing this, and so the postmodernist achieves some breathing room. Postmodernists have rarely attempted to affirm their own conclusions; instead, they rely on placing doubt on their own critics. They play offense, and when in defense, they hide the ball.

They attack the Western canon of philosophy and literature as “white male” biased or Eurocentric and dismiss it out of hand to avoid competing with it. Or they use science, such as Einstein’s Relativity Theory, quantum mechanics, chaos mathematics, and Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem to cast doubt on reality. On that note, a humorous (and revealing) event occurred when physicist Alan Sokal deceived editors and published a bogus, intentionally nonsensical article in the far-Left academic journal, Social Text. He argued that the Enlightenment was thoroughly discredited, and that quantum physics supported far-Left politics. After it was published, he later admitted that his article was a parody of postmodern criticism of science, embarrassing the editors for seemingly bypassing the arguments in his article for the favorable political conclusions they offered.

Returning to our options for explaining the means and ends of postmodernism, a third option remains. There is certainly a kind of pessimism one can see in postmodernism, and perhaps this third option, leaving in the contradictions, is a psychological projection that identifies with some of postmodernism’s intellectual base. Contradiction can be likened to psychological destruction, and while it would affect most who hold logical consistency as a value, to those without a care in the world or who are desperate for the outcome, contradictions do not matter. Nihilism, then, is a likely affliction of some postmodernists, and as we have pointed out, it may explain why 20th century violence and human depravity is so often part of the consequences of collectivist politics on both the Left and Right. As well captured in the writings of Nietzsche in Daybreak, When some men fail to accomplish what they desire to do they explain angrily, “May the whole world perish!” This repulsive emotion is the pinnacle of envy, whose implication is “If I cannot have something, no one can have anything, no one is to be anything!

Nietzsche is another key to understanding postmodernism. He developed the concept of ressentiment in his Beyond Good and Evil and Genealogy of Morals. He devised diagnoses of master and slave morality. Master morality was the approach to life of the strong, the able, and the confident, having much of the qualities of the Enlightenment: command of nature, predictive abilities, knowledge, and the like. Slave morality was the approach to life of the weak, the humble, the passive. The slaves become envious of the strong, but they must rationalize their plight. They cannot

simply hate themselves and their inabilities; they must save themselves internally from guilt by blaming the outside. They must decide what they do is good: being patient, obedient, poor, etc.; and everything the strong do is evil: success, assertiveness, pride, independence, wealth, etc. Eventually the weak will want to lash out, but they cannot physically. Instead, they become clever with words.

What can be likened to this characterization is the historical failures of socialism. Weakened, they have lashed out, and having failed at that, now have the urge to destroy. If we cannot have socialism, we will have nothing; nothing will reign. Perhaps this sounds radical, but one can sample postmodernists and find precisely this ressentiment.

In philosophy: ● Man is “an invention of recent date” that will soon “be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea” — Foucault ● God is dead — Hegel and Nietzsche ● “Life is absurd” — Sartre

Or in art: ● A urinal as a piece of artwork — Marcel Duchamp ● Kunst ist Scheisse — Dadaism (Art is shit) ● Painting overtop another artist’s work and calling that achievement — Rauschenberg

Certainly, more examples exist but overall, it appears that the quest for socialism has been exhausted, and so deployed has been the postmodern strategy of destruction. We might compare this to Iago in Shakespeare’s Othello. The rogue Iago defeats the mind and heart of Othello using

only words. Nietzsche wrote on this precise strategy in the Genealogy of Morals: …when would they [the men of ressentiment] achieve the ultimate, subtlest, sublimest triumph of revenge? Undoubtedly if they succeeded in poisoning the consciences of the fortunate with their own misery, with all misery, so that one day the fortunate began to be ashamed of their good fortune and perhaps said to one another: “it is disgraceful to be fortunate”.

The insidiousness of it all is that Iago does not win the girl in the end; destroying Othello was enough.

In a final remark, what can be done to reach beyond postmodernism and enter a post-postmodernism? It would seem that, for all the great ideas of the Enlightenment, certain inconsistencies and holes in the argument have been allowed to persist over time. These serve as the hovels for postmodernists to dig and undermine the foundations of the Enlightenment. Only with a rediscovery and defense of the premises of the Enlightenment -a knowable reality, reason as the only means of knowledge, commitment to personal happiness, and respect for the same, equal rights of all people - do we have the chance to continue the Enlightenment project.

Its postmodern opponents, past and present, do not seek to enhance this project through critique, for that would make a contribution; instead, postmodernists intend only to move past the Enlightenment but not to the “null” that would seem the logical next step of anti-realism and subjectivism. We do see them use the postmodern “null” as

a method when attacking free speech, for instance, by deplatforming speakers and silencing debate. However, through the “null,” one can detect a pervasive political advocacy of collectivism, often but not exclusively of the farLeft variety, that have failed in practice every time. Experiments in socialism continue to cost human lives and perpetuate world-wide misery, especially outside the West. Instead, we might seek to rediscover, build upon, and spread across the world the Enlightenment values that prolong human life and enrich human happiness.