A New Era for the Center-Left
That dreaded word - "Theory"
When postmodernism uses the word “Theory” a grown of pain comes out of the people who do not mind postmodernism, per se, but find the word when combined with Foucault, Derrida, and others to lack something for a specific: many times it is unfettered by a check that directs the theory from a being more than a onanistic masturbation. However, theory has a purpose in whatever discipline one uses it in, for example, there is a theory in physics, theory in political science, theory in the military, and so on. The problem is with postmodernism the same problem that infects its critique also affects its theory about itself. That is it does not recognize a Canon which pervades all of its field of study. This is both its primary victory because there is no canon only an agreed-upon canon, but without such a concept postmodernism is loosed from the world and has no sound footing to rest upon. Because there is only the deconstruction of deconstruction of deconstruction.
This is also part of computers, and it is called recursion. The idea of postmodern theory is also part of game theory, computer science, and a number of other fields. The problem is that in most fields that take recursion or postmodern theory or a war which has no victors, there is no bottom only a surface. This means that while the reactionaries and conservatives may worship Fox, the entertainment program that masks as news, they do not like the idea that their foundation is very much the same as Derrida’s Dissemination. This is because Derrida delves deeply into ancient Greek philosophy and specifically into Plato with an ease of using words and concepts from the Canon itself. So the next time you see an advertisement for Western Canon, you must say that they want to avoid talking about postmodernism because postmodernism itself is based on a different reading of the same books. That is, the Western Canon is not only a group of books to read but a way of reading them.
To see how Derrida uses Greek words to underline his points, let us take a random example on 115 of Barbara Johnson’s translation:
If the written word is scorned, it is not as a pharmakon coming to correct memory and truth. It is because locus is a more effective pharmakon. This is what Gorgias calls it. As a pharmakon, logos is at once good and bad; it is not at the outset governed exclusively by goodness or truth. It is only with this ambivalence and this mysterious and determination of logos, and after these have been recognized, that Gorgias determines truth as a world, a structure or order, the counterpart (kosmos) of logos.i
This is not a simple line of argument but it is comprehensible even if the reader needs to reread it many times to understand what Derrida is saying. The just of it is that logos are a more effective pharmakon and this is recognized as ambivalence. Only once that ambivalence is recognized can logos be recognized as the working out of a particular view of the cosmos. This makes sense only when one recognizes that logos is a meta-syntactical word in ancient Greek: it has many meanings is applied in many different ways and only stands with relationship to a subject as the working out of that subject. Thus biology, etymology, and ontology have different uses for logos and they differ as much as they are the same: one is a discipline, the other is a subject, and the third is a field of philosophy. It is only when one understands the subject does logos makes any sense. This means that if one is going to attack Derrida, one must understand him first even if one disagrees with the conception that he outlines. This is because Derrida is within the scope of Western philosophy and uses words from ancient Greek to underline his problem with the conception as he understands it.
And this is only one out of many that one has to understand in order to be able to critique the overall question which is at the heart of the three essays which are dissemination. It is only been that one can come to grips with the idea of deconstruction and the play with which this word is used. Because it is both a philosophy and a translation as one can see by the first words are used “This (therefore) will not have been a book.”ii This is the sort of double entendre that a fiction writer would use rather than a philosopher.
So why do we need philosophy, especially of a genre which is disliked by so many of our fellow citizens? And the first reason is that while the reactionaries and conservatives dislike the postmodern philosophy, they are addicted to it and are placed within its framework. The second reason is that to refute postmodern philosophy, one must first realize the tremendous strides that postmodernism has made because it is only by recognizing the difficulties that it has over, that one can see the difficulties with the modern that it subsumes. And thirdly only once one has and finds flaws with its argument can one go forward with a new philosophy that is both opposed and accepts what it has taught. By seeing that Derrida is firmly entrenched in the Western Canon, and is arguing at least in part from the Western Canon, we now can fully turn our attention to why he is disliked and also that his opponents actually share many of his ideas and many of the ideas more generally in postmodern philosophy. Then we can expand to Continental postmodernism, and then to postmodernism as a structure that many disciplines use, even those who disagree with the continental form of postmodernism.
The first part is to explain how organizations like Fox News are enmeshed in a version. Within there was a canonical version of the truth, one could measure the truth and compare it to what was presented as the truth. This is still the case in the courtroom, where the two sides can present their versions and have that version tested against a divergent version of the facts presented by a range of witnesses, observers, and experts. Because there is a judge and very often a jury the test of the facts relies not on what the broadcaster’s judgment is bought by a third party, and the means to select that third party have controls on them that gives a version of objectivity. But also there are levels that can test that version against a history of case law. While this is by no means perfect, it set the paradigm for the modernist framework. However once one admits that in many cases this framework is imperfect, and the test was in sexual and racial cases, one must begin again knowing that judgments from such a system are suspect, at best. This is where the postmodern enters the fray: it understands that there is no framework that measures up to the high standard of objectivity and it proceeds to frame its argument by deconstructing the modern viewpoint and resents the conclusion that there is no objective framework only subjective frameworks which can be at best understood as an inter-subjective framework that people can agree on.
One can see that this is the point of Fox News and of the rest of the reactionary system: if there is no objective framework then one can assemble any framework one likes and present it as a version of the truth. This is not to say that the reactionary postmodern framework places a high degree of objectivity. In fact reactionary postmodernism wants to cover checking facts as much as possible. This is how we descend from a very complicated test that shows that objectivity is illusory down to Joe Rogan and others. This is how we have a set of cabinet appointees who do not care if they have facts at all. The key difference is that originally the postmodern paradigm took an input which was, in the computer science version of the word, “clean” and went down to the reactionary postmodern which almost demanded that a “dirty” version of the facts would be enough.
But as anyone who has done about a year’s worth of programming knows, cleaning the data is an important step in processing the data. So by going down to dirty versions of the facts one has lost the very point that Derrida was trying to make. But we can go further than this, we can look at Foucault who compared different versions of the truth spread out over time and found that there were tremendous differences in how the facts were presented. This is the cleaning of the truth, and by doing so Foucault argued that there is no reason why a particular version of the truth is superior to all of the others. Both Foucault and Derrida had reasons which were not stated for their objection and Foucault’s was that he was a homosexual and had particular tastes which under the modern paradigm were unacceptable. Thus Foucault realized that many other people had similar predilections and strove for a different paradigm where these would be acceptable.
The reactionary postmodern had similar problems: in fact, the very nature of reaction is to set a norm that is different from the practices of the majority. Again he can see the dissent from the continental postmodern paradigm and the reactionary paradigm which is the successor: in both cases, there is a behavior that is unacceptable but that the frame makers want to be acceptable. The difference is that the original point of reference is in homosexuality or other forms of deviancy in the modern which ought to be acceptable in the postmodern to the desire to inflict pain on individuals who are unacceptable to the power makers. In other words, who is the guide to how acceptable something is? Therefore we can see the difference: originally it was the individual and at the end, it is a particular set of individuals. This is not mean that the Continental postmodern paradigm was in any sense pure: because there is no objective truth that means that things such as pederasty and in the reactionary postmodern: misogyny.
But to do this we must again expand the postmodern to include game theory and other forms of knowledge which the modern was underequipped to deal with. But how do these notions fit within the postmodern framework? The answer is that in game theory it was the idea that there were two intelligent players, at least, and there was hidden information involved in a particular game. This began in the modern but became important because of two factors that came into being as the postmodern came into its own: global thermonuclear war and the competition for fossil fuel resources. These two were also part of the postmodern in the larger sense: they were not controlled by the developed nations but by physics and location. It was no longer the case where the dominant powers had control over their own destiny and that long with the desire to de-colonialize the structure of the world meant that it was no longer the case where a few centers of power could dominate the entire globe.
This however means that as these features grow weaker, especially fossil fuel economics and global thermonuclear war as the primary threat, the condition of knowledge which we describe as postmodern becomes weaker as well. This has been happening for at least 20 years in various places such as the digitization of films, the complexity of artificial intelligence, and the decay of the modern system of working.
Which is to say be postmodern paradigm has become obsolete and a new paradigm has become dominant. For this purpose, I call it Digitality after the digitization of more and more of the information and the meta-information which is needed to find the information that one looks for. But with the possibilities of the new comes the degradation of the postmodern structure. However, the postmodern structure is still in operation, particularly with the fossil fuel economy and the ways in which people gain advantage.
If a new form of discourse is now dominant that means that we can no longer produce taxes because we are no longer in the same mode and we need to put in to place a new economy, a new discourse, and a new framework. In other words, now politics must adopt a new framework because the old one is obsolete and cannot handle the demands made by the public. Trump is not the harbinger of this but he is taking advantage of the gaps with the post-modern system.
In the next section, we will outline what a digitality looks like and how it will function.
iOr: “Si l'écrit est méprisé, ce n'est pas en tant que pharmakon venant corrrompre la mémoire et la vérité. C'est parce que le logos est un pharmakon plus efficace. Ainsi le nomme Gorgias. En tant que pharmakon, le logos est à la fois bon et mauvais ; il n'est pas commandé d'abord par le bien et la vérité. C'est seulement à l'intérieur de cette ambivalence et de cette indétermination mystérieuse du logos, et lorsqu'elle aura été reconnue, que Gorgias détermine la vérité comme monde, structure ou ordre, ajointement (kosmos) du logos.”
iiOr if one prefers the original “Ceci (donc) n'aura pas été un livre.”