Deconstructionist W
An article in “Washington Monthly” by Joshua Micah Mitchell suggests the irony that neoconservatives are Post-Modern in their willingness to choose the truths that suit them. He writes:
In that simple, totalizing assumption [that experts can be ignored even if they are right in the particulars] we find the kernel of almost every problem the administration has faced over recent months — and a foretaste of the troubles the nation may confront in coming years. By disregarding the advice of experts, by shunting aside the cadres of career professionals with on-the-ground experience in these various countries, the administration’s hawks cut themselves off from the practical know-how which would have given them some chance of implementing their plans successfully. In a real sense, they cut themselves off from reality.
The article does a good job cataloging the administration’s lies and mistakes. I just don’t see what it has to do with Post-Modernism. Here’s what Marshall thinks it has to do with PoMo-ism:
For an administration that has been awfully hard on the French, that mindset is…well, rather French. They are like deconstructionists and post-modernists who say that everything is political or that everything is ideology. That mindset makes it easy to ignore the facts or brush them aside because “the facts” aren’t really facts, at least not as most of us understand them.
This is just so wrong under a thin veneer of being right. Pomo doesn’t say there is no truth so you can say and believe whatever you. It is worrying at something much harder: truth isn’t a direct relation between self and world. It is mediated by language and history. That raises issues about the nature of truth … issues confirmed by even the most casual acquaintance with the world’s diversity.
So, no, the Bush administration isn’t PostModern. Any administration that says the world is divided into good people and evil-doers is way out of the PoMo parade. IMO, the Bush administration’s policies are a instead based on a bracing mix of self-assertion, self-delusion, willful ignorance and lies.
Of course, I could be wrong.
(Thanks to John Erickson for the link.)
Categories: Uncategorized dw
David,
Thanks for picking this up and running with it. I saw it, and sighed, and figured that someone as smart as JMM wasn’t going to be schooled in theory by me.
W.? Post-Modern?
I have gotten into enough tangles about postmodern thought and its public image that I just winced and passed along when I read Joshua Micah Marshall’s comments from Washington Monthly about George W. Bush as a “post-modern president.”…
Maybe you can help me wake up from a dream. It seemed to me with had modernism, symbolized by the monolith. Then post-all-that we smashed the monolith into itty-bitty pieces. But now the network is the icon, and its the connections between these little bits that matter. Some have called this the Network Age, a post post modern era.
Does this make sense?
Seems Bush did a post modern thing by blowing everything into isolation, but by destroying the greatest network of interlocking relationships it is antithetical to the age we live in. All notions of truth aside.
I think the Net makes more obvious and more pressing the question/realization that drives Post Modernism: How do we share a world and the truth of the world? Pomo doesn’t just ask that question and sit back slack-jawed. It drives it home, pointing out the ways we allow ourselves to escape its force.
I don’t know that pomo has an answer to that question, but I like it for making the question so important and incessant.
Oh boy-oh boy-oh boy… a chance to say something mean about postmodernism!!! Ross Mayfield seems to have it right. We are in the Network Age, have been since prior to the the birth of the etherbunny in the early eighties. We could maybe fine this date down by successive approximations, but no need right now.
And when the Network Age was aborning, pomo was dying, and by the mid eighties certainly it was dead as a movement, as a critical period defining creative work, and as a nascent philosophy. I’m sure some of it’s tools survive and are put to good use by philosophers, epistemologists, theologians and such, but postmodernism is dead. This is true and provable with difficulty and I’ll get around to it before I die and leave my blog in AKMA’s care for $30 US per year.
Right now just let me say that I love it that the great destructionist president has been identified as a posturing pomotextual.
Of course I could be wrong, but not about the posturing pomotextual part.
So then Truth may be more than how each of us as nodes perceives our network, but the shared understanding between each node.
Nicely put, Ross, but I think you hopped over the hard part: Are you sure that the truth is in the shared understanding? What do we do about the stuff that isn’t shared?
The stuff that isn’t shared we hide behind firewalls, label it secret, and attempt to gain or retain some advantage from it, at the expense of others I think.
Probably not what you were driving at, David. The stuff that is public but remains obscured from common vision needs better elaboration.
Shifting back to the q of the *why* of Josh’s questionable pomo assertion: I think he did it purely for the pleasure and the emotional hit of comparing the administration to
*the French
*an obscure sounding intellectual/academic movement usually excoriated by the right for moral relativism
Sometimes Josh plays a little hardball.
Steve
Steve, There is a growing understanding on the left that these pomo sacred cows may well deserve the excoriation, and not for moral relativism per se (although there are issues around “truth” that deserve examination), but rather for an exercise in gamesmanship from which the academy may never recover.
Wow (slams forehead with heel of hand), I’ll bet we could get a Fulbright fellowship to cover that one in Paris next spring!
Frank, I don’t know that it’s the left in particular that finds PoMo to suffer from excessive gamesmanship. (The game, to be specific, is: I Believe Less Than You Do.) Doesn’t the right hate it at least as much since PoMo in general has attacked the status quo and elevated the socially and culturally disadvantaged?
I guess like truth, if a tree falls in the woods, but nobody is around to see or hear it, it does exist. If one person sees it, we gain trust that it is true. If two people see it, it is verified. If three people see it, differences of experiences can be mediated or at the least they can take a vote that won’t result in a tie.
Perhaps there are gradients of truth that radiates from the least shared understanding of someone keeping their thoughts and experiences to themselves.