Sunday, August 25, 2002		Books

The Troubles with Postmodernism
by Stefan Morawski Routledge, London & New York. Pages 152. $ 80

MY only cavil against this eye-opening monograph is that it does not come with a statutory warning: ‘persons with the postmodern condition must not read it.’ I say this because the postmodern condition (Lyotard’s phrase accepted by Morawski) has now assumed the nature of a syndrome with effects visible on many philosophical and literary disciplines in the West and in our own country.

Like Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, intellectuals with the postmodern syndrome fix you with their stares if you so much as dare to differ with them. You are branded an elitist, racist, essentialist, terms that immediately score you out of the community of the custom-made underprivileged on whose behalf they claim to speak. You detect a reflexive consciousness in their assertion that everything is constructed, but no irony at their own fragility.

Concepts such as unity, tradition and forms of institutional ethics are dismissed as ‘totalistic’ and ‘hegemonistic.’ The postmodern condition is the license for mass culture’s denigration of aesthetic criteria of judgment. It is a signature for an ‘everything goes’ philosophy that celebrates contingency (Rorty) over order, small narratives (whatever they mean in reality!), over all-explaining systems and disjunction over cohesion. These, says Morawski, are its genetic ‘ troubles.’

Stefan Morawski is a major figure in contemporary philosophical aesthetics. Not as widely known in the West as the other two Polish intellectuals, Jan Kott and Lezek Kolakowski, he, nevertheless, represents an astute blend of Marxist and liberal humanist thinking in Central Europe.

His Inquiry into the Fundamentals of Aesthetics, hardly ever read by our salon Marxists, is an exploration of the creative process in its sociological dimensions. In the present book, he brings to bear his extensive knowledge of architecture, painting, philosophy and literature to the question of postmodernism’s fallacies. The result is a thoroughly convincing expose of the postmodern condition. Located simultaneously in the Central European and Western traditions, his critique is weighty, and on target. Its focus on arts makes the book relevant to literary critics and art historians alike.

He begins by pointing out deficits among influential proponents of postmodernism, particularly Bauman, Baudrillard and Jameson. He calls attention to their failure to grasp the fact that their ideas led to conformity and indifference. Declaring the concept of postmodernism as ‘fuzzy,’ he deplores the confusion of terminology in its various presentations. "One cannot abstain from using the concept, but at the same time one does not know how to define it precisely…One senses intuitively that something long-dominant is collapsing or has collapsed."

What is unclear in postmodern theory is jumbled in the practice of postmodern art. Here Morawski hauls up painters, architects and writers for operating in a valueless void. For him, the modernist high culture, rejected by Jameson, Jencks and Braudillard, among others, remains a reference point of value. The absence of utopian aspiration and the preference for pastiche and parody are faults that enfeeble postmodern art and restrict its aesthetic effectiveness. "Postmodern artists…are mostly anti-intellectual or a-intellectual as their predecessors were prone to reflect on the status and sense of their activity," says Morawski. There is a tendency among postmodern artists and their eulogists to raise their practice to the position of an ultimate norm. Morawski sees the Modernist movement itself as already displacing old certainties; so he does not think there is anything new in postmodernism’s claims. On this point alone I would hand him the laurel wreath.

In spite of Ihab Hassan’s defence, we are getting increasingly aware of postmodernism’s derivativeness, its parasitism and artsy veneer. Their deconstructive strategies notwithstanding, postmodern writers and philosophers willy-nilly create their own totalising absolutes. They are as haute-bourgeois as the ideas they oppose. Their advocacy of mass culture is a flippant gesture in the chic ambience of modern technology, something akin to wearing Levi’s denims in the boardroom. It is the literary-philosophical equivalent of peacock feathers, all plumage and no muscle.

Morawski speaks across the European humanist tradition, his faith in a well-defined foundational ethic undeterred. He lets out an observation that should make the apologists for postmodernism take stock: "Under postmodernism the elites are drawn from business pundits, technocratic mandarins, and super-managers of the mass media." The complicity of postmodern artists and philosophers in the homogenisation of contemporary Western culture could arguably be its worst ‘trouble.’ The co-option of Indian pop by the West is another pointer.

The author looks askance at haphazard attempts in his own country to graft a postmodern patina on Polish culture. This should warn our own crypto-revisionists not to clutch at tatters from postmodernism’s distended ragbag. Is any one listening?