‘pomo left’

“Pomo left” or the so-called “postmodern left” or “postmodernist left”, is a descriptor used to define an influentual trend in left-wing politics, largely concentrated (or at least said to be) in academia and receptive in student politics. To put it simply, it is a term used to describe the influence of the intellectual movement known as postmodernism on the contemporary left.

As often with the parent term, “postmodernism”, what counts as a supposed “pomo left” to people who use the descriptor is often nebulous, multifaceted and contradictory. But it quite broadly seems to encompass more than the influence of the works of postmodernists and poststructuralists on the Left (eg. Judith Butler, Jacques Derrida, Gayatri Spivak, etc.) but also various schools of thought that had come into prominence from the 1970s onwards such as French theory, queer theory, postcolonialism, critical race theory, afropessimism, and more. The critique seems to sharply turn towards the influence of critical theory in general, than “merely” postmodernism, and even then, the term has been used to attack contemporary social justice concepts accused of redefining exisiting conceptions of justice and equality.

Criticisms of the “pomo left” have come from both the Left and the Right. On the Left, the charge is that it obsesses too much on language over a materialist epistemology and is a deeply solipsistic and obscurantist project that could never be emancipatory in any form, and that it is fundamentally pessimistic and reactionary. On the Right, it is yet another radical political project that seeks to subvert the existing social order where Marxism supposedly failed*, and its concern lies in the promotion of a set of social and cultural practices antithetical to anything from a liberal to a ‘traditional’ social space. Among these criticisms of postmodernism there seems to be a shared disdain for its purported nihilism and irrationalism.

Background

1968 and the rise of the skepticism of narratives

The ‘quasi-revolutions’ of 1968 provide a common starting point to describe what is the apparent emergence of this trend. Across the industrialised capitalist West, massive protests took place from organised labour, the student movements opposed to the Vietnam War, black, women’s and gay liberation; and these forces converged among each other – the assumption that more than ever – these were these conditions that not only could their respective governments could be overturned, but the spread of this reaction could bring about the end of capitalism itself. What’s more, the protests expanded to the Eastern Bloc in criticism of the bureaucratic features of the communist system. While in many instances, these protests brought about concessions from their respective governments – they ultimately failed in their anti-authoritarian and anti-bureaucratic goals. It is said that after the riots in Paris, the students who rebelled turned towards Nietzsche, Heidegger and Freud having seen at home (in the French Communist Party) and abroad (at least towards the USSR and the Eastern Bloc) what the influence of Marx had brought – in bureaucracy and repression. In particular, they felt betrayed by the leaders of the labour unions and especially regarded the PCF as too ‘conservative’ in its response to the situation, preferring instead to focus on electoralism and gaining political concessions from the Gaullist government – Charles de Gaulle had ultimately won the 1968 French general election. The events of the 1968 revolts are also identified as the period in which any existing fetters consumer capitalism had had been cleared.

It was against this backdrop, that the emerging intellectual current known as post-structuralism gained popularity with headed by thinkers such as Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Derrida, and Jean Baudrillard gaining influence in the following decade. Foucault and Baudrillard in particular had not so pleasant experiences in the PCF, and Kristeva and Derrida were involved in the literary magazine Tel Quel – the latter left as a consequence of the emerging Maoist trappings of the publication.

Let a hundred poststructuralisms bloom

Coinciding with the rise of this intellectual current in Europe, the US saw the emergence of Critical legal studies – a school of thought born out of radical law students from the New Left which investigated the development of law within the United States, and concluded that the basis of the law was to preserve the existing power structures in society, and not any notion of equality among all subjects. Among them differing solutions on how to challenge these power structures became apparent. The co-founder of CLS, Derrick Bell, and representative of the ‘realist’ tendency – was known for his deeply pessimistic conclusions on race relations in American society, and it is even believed among his critics that he felt that America was irredeemably racist, because Bell argued that desegregated schools did not substantially improve education for African-Americans, and that a separate educational system for black children is needed to address ‘the educational gap’. In contrast, Kimberlé Crenshaw – a legal theorist who coined the term “intersectionality” and represented the ‘liberal’ tendency, has asserted a more optimistic assessment of American race relations, and if anything – the moral panic around intersectionality and “critical race theory” by conservatives had emboldened her view that remedies can racial inequality and gender inequality can be addressed.

In South Asia and the Middle East, applications of post-structuralist thought in creating a genealogy of intellectual currents in “the West” as it was counterposed with the domain of “the East” and Africa, shorn off of any history of its cultural development and knowledge of the social and political trends that had occured in the regions. This intellectual trend which came to be known as “postcolonialism” critiqued the universalist assumptions that had emerged from intellectual and sociopolitical trends that emerged from Western societies, believing that at best they contributed to a Eurocentric outlook and any conclusions that could come from it would be reductive and condescending, and at worst, contributed to the project of imperialism and the exploitation of indigineous peoples. Among the most prominent figures of postcolonialism were Edward Said, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Homi K. Bhabha.

The 1980s and 1990s saw the rise of queer theory which sought to synthesize poststructuralist theory with the activism of the various radical movements from black, Latin & Chicanx, and indigenous peoples, women’s studies, and the historical and comtemporary lesbian and gay struggles. Proponents challenged the prevalence of heteronormativity – the framework placing an implicit heterosexuality as the default in all manners of social life, and critiqued the presence of a dynamic between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ sexualities. Judith Butler, Adrienne Rich and Laurent Berlant are enduring influences in this school of thought.

More emergent schools of thought appeared extolling their radical potential and claiming to defy existing power structures on which society rested. While the political Right had charged them with creating conspiratorial programs within universities to brainwash young people and set them against the sarcosanct cultural practices held in “Western society” and “finish what Marxism could not”, critics among the political Left noted that while the scholars and students of these schools often asserted radicalism and an allegiance with the Left, they were at times indifferent to and even in some cases hostile to Marxism, and downplayed or dismissed the importance of class struggle. While largely unknown even now to the Right, the relationship Marxism and postmodernism had been understood as mutually hostile, with attempts to synthesize the two having varying degree of success. With contemporary expressions of identity politics which also had fairly contentious interactions with Marxism, both identity politics and poststructuralism were conflated together under this term. In right-wing politics (and among some liberals), because these were not well understood; and either dismissed as “schools of resentment”, or feared as a new far-left iteration that was potentially totalitarian. Ironically, it was concerns around totalitarianism driving the often dense theoretical work of the early poststructuralists. Indeed, the poststructuralists emphasized anti-totalitarian, anti-authoritarian, heterogenity, and anti-essentialism in their works – and the former two reduced somewhat in its importance following the collapse of the USSR and the Eastern Bloc, they were castigated for their particularism which itself verged on fetishization and essentialism. Even so, how incisive this critique held was dependent on how broad what was now becoming a pejorative term applied to various thinkers and activists.

A brief list of people and groups accused of being part of the ‘pomo left’

The Frankfurt School (Even Jurgen Habermas, who is a critic of postmodernism**)
Michel Foucault***
Jacques Derrida
Gilles Deleuze
Judith Butler
Wendy Brown
Louis Althusser
Slavoj Zizek (Who is also critical of postmodernism)
Fredric Jameson (Another critic of postmodernism)
Edward Said
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
Stuart Hall (This is projected onto everyone else involved in the ‘New Times’ project from the Marxism Today publications in the 1980s, but Hall had also received particular ire for his forays into postcolonial theory)
Ernesto Laclau
Chantal Mouffe
Homi K. Bhabha
Mark Fisher (Was, yet again, another critic of postmodernism)
Antonio Negri (yep, you guessed it, hates pomo)
Pretty much all of the critical race theorists, but particularly Kimberle Crenshaw

A brief list of critics of the ‘pomo left’, from the Left

Noam Chomsky
Naomi Klein
Murray Bookchin (wrote a whole book excorciating what he considered to be ridiculous nonsense harming the anarchist movement he supposedly broke from)
Vivek Chibber
Adolph Reed, Jr.
Jacobin magazine is editorially opposed to the ‘pomo left’
The THIS IS REVOLUTION podcasters (Pascal Robert and Jason Myles had voiced their disdain many times on various forms of ‘racial grievance politics’, and Afropessimism particularly attracted Robert’s ire)
Alex Callinicos
Pretty much anyone still involved in an org of the Fourth and Fifth International. Trotskyists are particularly hostile towards postmodernism
Mark Fisher (Went further than “merely” critiquing postmodernism, by taking aim at what he called the ‘poststructuralist left’ in his essay, “Exiting The Vampire Castle”)
Slavoj Zizek (Like Fisher, criticized “left-postmodernism”, while himself accused of being representative of it; in his infamous debate with Jordan Peterson, he indicated that he might agree with Peterson on his sharp opposition to “postmodern neo-Marxists”…if he could clearly identify who is or was representative of this trend)
Douglas Lain
Nancy Fraser

Views of the critics of ‘pomo left’ on critical theory

While the Right is near-universal in their contempt for critical theory**** – indeed, as mentioned before, their assessment of it has been largely conspiratorial; the left-wing critics of postmodernism have diverse responses to the utility of critical theory as a method of investigation and to map out political goals. Douglas Lain and Nancy Fraser, for example, are themselves critical theorists who view the influence of postmodernism on the left as pernicious and essentially reactionary. For Lain, there is something of a lamentation that the original intent for critical theory which had served a political purpose and had a clear Marxist orientation, had become mostly reducible to the domain of literary studies. He, as well as Fraser firmly object to the anti-foundationalist framework advanced by postmodernists.

Vivek Chibber and the writers orbited around the Jacobin publication issued their criticisms of the ‘cultural turn’ that for them indicated pessimism towards the potential of class politics to radically transform for the better, and charge that it encouraged an extreme subjectivism that had been in the long run, deleterious.

The critiques employed by Gabriel Rockhill are interesting in the sense that he came up through critical theory, and that he studied under Derrida and Badiou, but now charges that much of the work undertaken under the rubric made these scholars the clearest examples of “instrumentalised intellectuals” – a group inculcated with the practice and logic of an institution in the service of the current economic system i.e. capitalism, and further, that their work was of interest to Western intelligence services as tools to demobilize revolutionary potential, and that the association of these academics with the coterie of think tanks and publications linked to the security apparatus put their valorization as radical thinkers into question. (I think this particular example requires further commentary, that can’t be done in this post)

Noam Chomsky is even more dismissive of critical theory, deriding the work produced by them as intellectually bankrupt, reeks of inaccessible jargon, and even says that its influence on the Third World has been awful. He ties its origins to “[coffee-shop frequenting] Parisian intellectuals” drawn to Stalinist and Maoist movements who suddenly switched to become the firmest of “anti-totalitarians”. He also espouses a “physics envy” narrative: That the academics in literature departments felt the need to make complicated models that mirrored what was found in the hard sciences – yet unlike the latter, you could neither make predictions or reproduce the phenomena observed in controlled experiements. Chomsky’s hostility stems from his rationalist framework, and is reflective of the “analytical vs continental” philosophy arguments. Unfortunately, the stridency of Chomsky’s arguments, in particular, have been appropriated by certain kinds of political reactionaries with bugbears around contemporary feminism and “cultural Marxism”: this out-of-context clip of his Q&A interview with Michael Albert, served as a common go-to for this ilk.

There have been objections from political liberals for largely unsurprising reasons, given that they uphold the modus vivendi of the current social order; Nick Cohen in 2007 work “What’s Left?” makes an unusual connection between the cultural (and moral) relativism that he identifies in the contemporary Left, charging Chomskyan critique of American imperialism as responsible – all the more strange given Chomsky’s known hostility towards postmodernism for its relativistic assertions. He also attacks Judith Butler for her lack of clarity in her theoretical works – taking the excerpt from the paragraph included in the 1999 “Bad Writing Contest” to lay the case that Butler and Chomsky are complicit in the cultural malaise of the Left, rather than reactive of this condition.

The “Intellectual Dark Web” (IDW) collective, themselves a heterogenous group of ‘thinkers’ who see themselves as the line of defense of “Western values” against “oppositional schools of thought” that seek to undermine it, charge critical theory for its hostile reaction to the Enlightenment which they believe had led to the improvement of the standard of living from its beginnings to today, undermines the free exchange of ideas, is responsible for everything from identity politics, political correctness, to ‘cancel culture’ and regards critical theory as potentially totalitarian. The formation of the IDW runs the gamut from ‘STEMlords’ like Bret Weinstein and Steven Pinker to the more ‘esoteric’ interests of thinking represented by Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson. What they share is the (supposed) need to defend and uphold the “Western canon”, and as the late Michael Brooks noted, they all share an uncritical and devotion to affirming capitalism.

A left (un)worthy of the name?

There is, to be sure, a sociological link— though its magnitude is often exaggerated— between the “postmodernist” intellectual currents we are criticizing, and some sectors of the American academic left.
Fashionable Nonsense pg. xxii, Alan Sokal & Jean Bricmont

There is a overarching assumption in all of this that the “academic left” is largely unmoored and isolated from social events as we understand them, even as they come to hear about it. The panic around postmodernist academics functions as the logical conclusion of a stereotypical “ivory tower” scholar forever pontificating over problems that have no relevance to the external world. The lack of specificity or even coherence around the term “pomo left” betrays an intellectual hostility towards unfamiliar knowledge practices.

All that said, as shown in the previous two sections, in the middle of all the hysterics it does describe something that is real, and was and still is of great concern to many academics even and especially of the political Left. The compound term, “postmodernist left”, implies a tendency that already undermines the common allegation that postmodernism is unrelentingly pessimistic and nihilistic, and indeed: there are many postmodernists (though not all) who identify in some form with left-wing or progressive politics. On this question, what is being evaluated is the question of what the legacy of this intellectual current has had to the Left, in light of the provocative declaration of skepticism towards all grand narratives?

Actual postmodern theorists who identify with left-wing politics have by and large engaged in its more moderate expressions, or at least engaged in a “micro-politics” concerned with difference and supporting the power of socially marginalised groups. This, in many ways, makes a lot of sense given their concerns around subjectivity and the historical context which the current emerged from engendering their suspicion towards totalizing and universalist frameworks.

However, the engagements with politics have not led to a unified or sustained, let alone emancipatory political project. The heterogenity of thought among postmodernist theorists is probably why a political project on a set of agreed principles does not and likely, cannot exist. Even so, the political interventions made affected a reserved, cautious and even at times mercurial range of stances on various issues involving imperialism, war, inequalities, freedoms and so on. Because many of the stances adopted by left-wing postmodernists were and very much are moderate and qualified in their support for various sites of struggle, many of them had come under the accusation that they were merely posturing as radicals, and promoted a politics that offered no breach or answer to overcoming capitalist relations, and serves to narrow possibilities and demobilise the momentum of movements.

To give an example, let’s return again to Noam Chomsky and explore why he has such vociferous reactions to postmodernism. In his 1967 essay, The Responsibility of Intellectuals, Chomsky expressed the view that public intellectuals should be accountable to the people, be committed to truth, and resolutely expose the machinations of the powerful. He picked as an example – the esteemed historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. – as an intellectual utterly and shamelessly in the service of U.S. political elites, in that he admitted to lying to the press about the details that he gave about the invasion of the Bay of Pigs plot to depose Castro was American-backed, lied about the number of the anti-Castro forces, and even praised New York Times for suppressing information on the planned invasion in accordance to “the national interest”. What alarmed him even more was that the American intelligentsia didn’t seem to care that Schlesinger did this, in spite of his own principles, and for his loyalty to the Kennedy administration, he was offered a prestigious position as the professor of humanities the City University of New York. What was an individual decision to lie on behalf of JFK, had now made them complicit – because they were also in the service of power as well.

However, one of his most infamous intellectual opponents Michel Foucault, the issue for him would not simply lie with the intellectuals in service to state power. For him, power is diffused everywhere: hospitals, schools, even in communities and at home – because knowledge is bound up with power, ‘truths’ are as well, and a ‘legitimized’ truth are in contest with another set of discourses opposing the hegemonic, political, social, cultural practices reinforcing this ‘legitimized’ truth. Foucault also questioned the privileged role of intellectuals in offering truth, even truth to liberate people. According to him, intellectuals function as agents of the “regimes of truth” that provide legitimacy of the current social order. A ‘radical’ intellectual to Foucault, would therefore not make any set of recommendations for political struggle; Referring to himself, he said that his role was not so much to tell people what he thought the best course of action was, but to allow for the possibility of a different framework which could be useful in struggle. For Foucault, the role or ‘responsibility’ of the radical intellectual was to ignore “the call to prophetism” and respond with silence.

A Chomskyan interpretation faced with Foucault’s description of power would conclude that it is far too removed from any structure or sense of agency by which to frame any grounding to challenge institutional power or indeed, any impetus to do so, even if Foucault allows for that possibility; and would also conclude that Foucault’s ideal intellectual is simply one that refuses to take any sense of responsibility for their actions or held to their statements. Even putting aside how Chomsky or anyone professing to follow in his thinking, it’s hard not to as a leftist, to look at this and not see it as either kind of a call to inaction, or to be not bothered with questions around resistance. Maybe a “i’m just throwing it out there” kind of affect – which would be fine, but seems like an inordinate amount of effort was spent writing books to display that mood. Again, this only complicates – not simplifies how resistance is built, and ignores that asking for guidance is not the same thing as looking for orders.

Another example to consider is that while the postmodernists may be skeptical of grand narratives and proclaim their exhaustion, it is quite clear that not only are these ‘metanarratives’ still relevant to our age, but recent ‘totalizing’ narratives masking a certain globalised political project have received no postmodernist ‘counter-narrative’ that had been successful in interrupting, much less subverting or destabilising. At the end of the Cold War, the political scientist Francis Fukuyama declared “The End of History”: What he meant was following the collapse of the USSR and the Eastern Bloc, liberal democracy had defeated all ideological opponents and had proven itself to be the ultimate form of human government. Fukuyama asserted that regardless of the makeup of the society, it will eventually come to be understood that a society with strong institutions, liberal freedoms, representative democracy and that allowed free-market capitalism to flourish, will be the ones that can best overcome its internal contradictions and resolve questions of human need better than any other.

In 1993, Jacques Derrida addressed Fukuyama’s assertions in a conference in the University of California, titling his speech, “Spectres of Marx: The State of the Mourning, and the Spirit of the New International”. For Derrida, Fukuyama’s proclamation was yet another as a “grand narrative”, but also said that as a man of a certain age, “endism” is not a novel notion that he’s come across nor had Fukuyama really said anything that was persuasive of liberalism’s ability to resolve human need effectively. Indeed, rather than the triumphalism that Fukuyama and his allies thought the end of the Cold War heralded, Derrida believed that this was an even more sobering period to look on:

“For it must be cried out, at a time when some have the audacity to neo-evangelize in the name of the ideal of a liberal democracy that has finally realized itself as the ideal of human history: never have violence, inequality, exclusion, famine, and thus economic oppression affected as many human beings in the history of the Earth and of humanity. Instead of singing the advent of the ideal of liberal democracy and of the capitalist market in the euphoria of the end of history, instead of celebrating the “end of ideologies” and the end of the great emancipatory discourses, let us never neglect this obvious macroscopic fact, made up of innumerable singular sites of suffering: no degree of progress allows one to ignore that never before, in absolute figures, have so many men, women and children been subjugated, starved or exterminated on the Earth.”

The main crux of Derrida’s talk was a call for a revival of the spirit of Marxism, in the revolutionary impulse it had; a “Marxism without Marxism” or even a “Marx without Marxism”. The ‘spectre’ of Marx should continue to haunt the hegemony entailed in Western liberal democracy. A ‘new international’ should push back against the capitalist global order. As far as general statements to political commitments go, Derrida was surprisingly clear and frank about what he believed that the situation demanded. It also marked for the first time, a definitive statement from on how “deconstruction” can be used for political purposes. That said, what was largely unattended to was that the “end of history” thesis was an ideological cover for an ascending political project known as neoconservatism.

Neoconservatism declared that the world can be made over to “expand” liberal democracies, permitted so-called “humanitarian interventions” to countries deemed hostile or even “unfree”, and were almost completely transparent in explaining that the purpose was to secure American global hegemony. And what did Derrida’s “New Internationalism”: an unusually universalist conception by the standards of his generation of poststructuralist thinkers, which nevertheless demanded a transnational alliance or ‘friendship’ without any form of institutional framework binding it – do in response to this neoconservative march to the former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, and Iraq, with hard power backing their ideological weight? The answer is nothing, and it could not do more than nothing. And this embarassing fact is only made less bruising when you consider that Derrida had at most a few years of thinking about it, when faced with a new formulation of American imperialism which had twenty years to develop. At least Derrida had made a declaration that he held responsibility for. The point is not that Fukuyama was right, and Derrida wrong. The point is, Fukuyama was an ideologue for an existing political project that stood to violently reshape the world in its image – even if his thesis wasn’t anything more apparent than a jiggle and dance over a crumbled Lenin statue, it was faced with what was – at best – an emphemeral concept based on cosmopolitan principles that were never actualised by any organisation or even action.

Conclusion – events but not as they choose

The central problem animating discussions, whether overblown or not, around a ‘pomo left’ is about the role of academia as a public space. Throughout history, participation in academic life – or indeed, even getting a formal education, was part of the privileges offered to the elite in society, and so the knowledge production in academic practices legitimised the political system in which they existed in. Scholars who became social critics of a particular system, or even just criticising a leader, were often subject to political persecution, or at least loss of favour, with efforts made that that they and their works were subject to proscription.

Shifts in knowledge production came as a consequence of wars, revolutions or even simply contact with other civilisations and their practices were adopted and incorporated to the academic institutions. The expansion of access to higher education came as a result of the expansion of political rights; the emergence of liberal democracy supplanted monarchical absolutism and introduced new conceptions and practices of citizenship. In addition, internal academic debates and discussions came to encompass the critique of the political system itself and its representatives, and focus on the ability of society to realise existing principles as universal notions that bind the society. E.g. justice, freedom, liberty, fraternity, etc. These events came to to codify the purpose and role of critique both within the academy, and also within civil society, and indeed – the political sphere as well. Academia was still intimately tied to power, and academic institutions functioned as nodes of power and legitimacy as sites of accumlated knowledge to provide justification for the human exploitation seen in colonialism and in slavery for example.

Coming to terms with the way knowledge is constructed and produced meant acknowledging that it is never value-neutral, that it never came at the benefit for humanity as a whole and that knowledge production always comes to serve wider social and political projects, even ones that come with the potential to oppress other people, and even lead to wide-scale destruction. The members of the Frankfurt School were among the foremost critiques of the positivist trend pervading in natural and social sciences; Adorno and Horkheimer took the concept “instrumental rationality”, a concept developed by Max Weber, and used it to critique the Enlightment for encouraging an ethos which applied rationality to see things around it as a means to an end, rather than as the end in of itself, and it was used to dominate and consume the natural world and other human beings, in accordance to the imperatives dictated by capitalist society. For the Frankfurt School, instrumental rationality was totalizing, affected every aspect of social life, and did not liberate people, but surbordinated them.

The events of 1968, at least in Paris, was this instrumental rationality applied to the function of universities coming to a head with the interests of the radical students who participated in the protests. While the number of students attending universities rapidly expanded from 60,000 before World War II to 500,000 in 1968, the students had several concerns such as their post-university prospects in the job market; the hierarchical, regimented form of education that minimized essential interaction between students and professors; edicts from visiting opposite-sex dorms after hours; and the harshness of university exams. Their interests converged with the train and factory workers also subject to instrumental rationality, experiencing wage restraint as France’s economy grew. The protests which ballooned into general strikes brought with it the possibility of creating a definitive rupture with the capitalist order, and opening up new ways of organising various aspects of social life. But the uprisings failed, and consumer capitalism not only continued unabetted, but subsumed various aspects of social life.

The rise of postmodernism reflected the beginnings of a turn towards financialisation and unfettered marketisation practices known as neoliberalism. The political right interpreted the events and the subsequent activities of the disillusioned French radical intelligentsia as part of the consequences of the seduction of revolutionary politics towards a class whose primary purpose was simply to interpret the world and reproduce subjects in the service of society. The irony is, is that while something of their former revolutionary spirit remained, revolutionary politics was treated with the same contempt as bourgeois politics, and the poststructuralists endeavored to complete what the academy was stated to perform in spite of its actual function: to rigorously interpret the world and produce knowledge for the sake of it, not (supposedly) for any political program.

It is interesting though, in that in spite of the often provocative assessments around History not having any driving force, and statements around Christianity, science, and Marxism (different practices primarily addressing different concerns in the observable world) all being similar in their absolutist yet unsustainable frameworks, various poststructuralists / postmodernists did and do identify with some form of leftism, if cautiously. This adherence to progressive politics challenges any supposed notion of nihilism, although there persists criticism on its limited ability to challenge the existing bourgeois order in any serious capacity. What was (and arguably still is) important about the intervention of postmodern thought is in its pursuit of problematising the formation of identity (useful in historicising minoritarian identities and disrupting the essentialist character imbued upon them), which in turn was extended to the revolutionary subject in the proletariat in Marxism – and questioned the character of class as an essential formation. The emphasis on differential practices and knowledge systems presented further challenge to an ‘Enlightenment project’ claimeing to guarantee a maturation to the human condition – leading to the study of how this system of knowledge and methodology deployed were in the service of imperialism and contributed to the erasure of the colonised people’s own cultural and scientific legacy, encouraging the importance of rediscovering, reclaiming and reintroducing the important forms of knowledge production in the Global South.

But in terms of practical action against their concerns around globalisation, ‘techno-scientific domination’ and the dominance of referential sign-systems over our social world – overreaching, even totalising as they might say – has led to ineffectual political resistance tackling these problems so far, and perhaps even indefinitely, and are perhaps indicative of the unmooring of academics – particularly atomised academics in neoliberalism from active political engagement – particularly in the class struggle they denounced as passe. Conservative assaults on the “pomo left” could mostly do so in the terrain of the university, and to be perfectly frank – there’s not other terrain in which this conflict could look like or take the form of but an academic culture war. In turn, a new generation of theorists, familiar with poststructuralist thought yet critical of postmodernism – representing a kind of post-postmodernist/metamodernist thought such Slavoj Zizek, Mark Fisher, Wendy Brown and even Cornel West for the political impotence it represented.

After the Great Reccession of 2007-9, amidst austerity measures held in place across the globe, the people of that generation once more turned towards the class struggle – identifying their opponent clearly as capital itself. The so-called “pomo left” as it exists today in spite of their various attempts to problematise the certainty in the centrality of this struggle, have never opposed, dismissed, or declared the efforts of the anti-austerity protesters to be foolish or misguided – though it is in part due to the latter being constituent of the new social movements they placed their faith in. Perhaps, on some level this is what Foucault was insistent on in declaring ‘silence’ in sites of struggle. Nevertheless, we must remind ourselves that in times of capitalist crisis, people will turn to socialism for the solution, and the demand for socialism will continue to weigh on capitalism until it finally ceases to exist.

The postmodern theorists may on some level continue the goal set out for critical theory to resolve, and as the shift from pessimistic to optimistic conclusions in its intellectual trajectory reflect a greater self-confidence in working-class organisation and mobilisation, we must remind ourselves that while for some of those theorists, communism plays the role of an ideal we may never meet, yet struggle towards, that it is under these conditions that the movement to abolish the present state of things springs forth.

Notes

*- This ‘failure’ is mostly predicated on the collapse of the USSR and the Eastern Bloc, the communist systems in China, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Cuba and North Korea are at best, regarded as outposts in this view. For some, China is viewed as on the cusp of “growing out” of communism due to the way it implemented its market reforms, and its prominent position in the global market; leading to an almost enthusiastic support /grudging praise of its ‘neoconservative’ elements.

**- The first generation of the Frankfurt School had mostly died before postmodernism became influential, and indeed Habermas is the only surviving member. In fact, Habermas became critical of much of the work of the first Frankfurt School for its Nietzschean influence on their thought and their pessimistic assessment of the Enlightenment. The first generation of the Frankfurt School did problematise various assumptions in bourgeois society regarding freedom, desire, autonomy, reason and so-on; as well as various tenets of Orthodox Marxist thought, and stood opposed particularly to Marxism-Leninism, questioning the validity of historical materialism, to even challenging the notion of a revolutionary subject – with some concluding that the alienation experienced by man is too great to truly overcome. It is for these reasons that they are considered foundational to “post-Marxist” thought, and are influential in the thought of many postmodern theorists.

***- Michel Foucault’s position on the Left is contested and highly controversial, as he constantly denied political affiliation to any party or tendency for the most part. On one hand, he was associated with various Maoist groupings (even as he dissed some of its members in anecdotes) and he was involved in the Prison Information Group (PIG) with Gilles Deleuze, Jean Genet, Pierre-Vidal Naquet et al. producing essential work for the prison abolitionist movement, and in his infamous debate with Noam Chomsky, he placed his rejection of the concept of a human essence in terms of class struggle. On the other, in the 1960s before his reputation as a radical, he was believed to be a Gaullist technocrat, and sat on the very education body that produced conditions for university students that led to the May 1968 student protests in the first place (although he was not in France during the uprising), he also offered support to the Shia Islamist clerics seizing power in the Iranian Revolution in 1979 – claiming that the Islamists’ victory represented a revival of spirituality unseen in the West for centuries and appeared to admire it for lacking precisely the “rationalism” involved in liberal or Marxist politics that made it special, and then there was his approval of neoliberal economics and friendship with Austrian school economist Friedrich Hayek – now described in terms of him being “seduced” by its potential as an apparently autonomous system which didn’t exhibit the bureaucratic statism represented by (post-war) social democracy or communism. For myself, i’d put him as some sort of weird “meta-libertarian”, but for some left-wing critics of postmodernists, Foucault is emblematic of the dangerous naivete (at best) or an obnoxious and narcissistic sophism displayed by these theorists in their political analyses.

**** As far as the Right goes, the NRx (Neoreactionary)/Dark Enlightenment movement are probably the closest thing to their own set of critical theorists, complete with accusations of political impotence in comparison to the radicals in the promixity of their political position – in this case: the alt-right.

Good stuff to go over

This interview with Michel Foucault in which he explains structuralism, and goes over his academic career, and activism
Jonas Ceika (formerly known as “Cuck Philosophy”) provides an alternative assessment of the infamous 1996 “Sokal hoax” academic controversy
Judith Butler’s response to the “Bad Writing Award” she received (which Nick Cohen neglected to take up in his book “What’s Left?”)
Cornel West’s “The Dillemma of the Black Intellectual” (pdf)
The political import of deconstruction: Derrida’s limits? a forum on Derrida’s specters of Marx after 25 years (pdf link)

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