A Postmodern Foundation For Political Practice?

Linda Ray Pratt

Department of English
University of Nebraska, Lincoln
lpratt@unlinfo.unl.edu

 

McGowan, John. Postmodernism and Its Critics. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991.

 
John McGowan’s “postliberal democracy” sometimes sounds just like the place we’d like to be, and sometimes more like the place we’ve already been. To get there, we must dispose of the negative freedom he assigns to most of the major postmodern theorists and abandon the fantasy of the autonomous self. McGowan’s starting point is that postmodernism’s goal of disrupting hierarchical totality by empowering suppressed components circles back politically to “an underlying commitment to democracy.” Our political and moral task is to construct a society in which a social consensus protects the egalitarian procedures through which a tolerant, humanist society can make decisions in the absence of truth. The problem for McGowan is that most contemporary theorists are unable to legitimate the social authority necessary to make democracy work or to use power positively.

 

Describing his critique as “resolutely antifoundationalist,” McGowan also notes that his definition of postmodernism will not satisfy all readers. Later in the book he observes, rightly I suspect, that for disciples of Lyotard, “my discussion of postmodernism . . . will seem to have missed all the important points . . .” (181). McGowan does not miss the important points, but he redefines them into a positive postmodernism that may sound too much like a defense of Western liberal democratic values for many readers to be comfortable labeling it “postmodern.” With keen intelligence and unrelenting logic McGowan tells us what’s wrong with the postmodernism of three major schools: the poststructuralism of Derrida and Foucault; the contemporary Marxism of Jameson, Eagleton, and Said; and the neopragmatism of Lyotard and Rorty. But the most influential figure in the book is not under examination. That is Jurgen Habermas, to whom McGowan acknowledges his debt while distinguishing his own greater willingness to weave key postmodernist characteristics into the model for a postliberal democracy which he proposes at the end of his study.

 

In order to legitimate a postliberal model that can produce democratic political decisions in a non-repressive consensual society without the guarantees of truth, McGowan must expose the trap of “negative freedom” that most postmodernist thought replicates. Most postmodern theorists allow too little freedom to choose and too little consciousness to define a positive social self. Their emphasis on the ways power operates within the Cerberean forces of language/history/capitalism provides too little “play” in the space allowed for thinking and acting. For the postmodernist, the community is associated with tyranny, not freedom, and the postmodernist strategy is to disrupt and diminish power, not legitimate its use as a positive force. McGowan argues that this kind of postmodernist thinking leaves us no foundation for political action because it makes the self incommensurable and autonomous in its social relations. For him the immersion of the self in the social is how we realize its integral social and thus “semiautonomous” nature.

 

McGowan’s postmodernism embraces antifoundationalism and pluralistic democracy, but rejects in the critics under discussion the tragic sense of human life, the tyranny implicit in power, the limited space in which self or language can freely act, and the problematic nature of democracy itself within Western capitalism. One wonders if the postmodern baby has not been tossed out with the bath water. Instead of a positive postmodernism, are we not left instead with a refurbished modernism? Regardless of which label is more accurate, the real issue is the substance of the alternative model McGowan poses for a positive postmodernism.

 

McGowan’s social vision is attractive, and it is hard to counter it with a political stance as hopeful or potentially effectual. The list of principles which constitutes his “summary and a final appeal” is as sound a set of assumptions as we are likely to find in anything resembling a rationale for the feasibility of social action. He notes, among other things, that “the principle of democratic egalitarianism” is culturally and historically specific, which means that civil liberties are an historical creation and not a transcendent right, but that the social consensus in Western democracies “has proved remarkably durable in the absence of fundamental guarantees” (264). The “existence of a social consensus by no means ends social conflicts” (265); on the contrary, agreement on the legitimate social norms “is precisely what makes conflict possible [i.e., comprehensible as conflict]” (266). The “procedures of decision making that currently embody the community’s sense of how best to ensure its norms” provide the “consensual grounds,” the “conditions” which “enable politics, which is understood as the negotiations, compromises, arguments, and procedural steps taken to reach and to implement collective decisions” (267). Such collective decisions, in which philosophy is submitted to the political through democratic procedures, “return us to positive power” which can combat the tyrannical exercise of power or the domination of decision making by elite groups (269). Reform of procedures within the norms safeguards a society from violence, and “freedom from violence” secures “the freedom of participation” (270). In a participatory democracy, politics calls on “the various semiautonomous spheres” to foster the “normative goods” of the social totality in which the self has its integral relation (271).

 

In this “appeal” to accept a more positive social model in the name of postmodernism, McGowan has submitted postmodern theory to political practice. Or rather, to theoretical political practice. What is lacking is a history of political practice whose record would inspire the confidence that McGowan’s model can be trusted to work better than other hopeful visions of democracy. “Postmodernism” itself is borne out of the tragic skepticism that replaced the failed optimism of Modernism. The history of practice which embodied twentieth century political ideas–whether utopian or despotic–teaches postmodernism its distrust of the claims of power and idealistic possibility. Although I am moved by McGowan’s vision, I find myself reaching out to Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard, Said, and Rorty on just those points which McGowan wants to dispose of in their thought.

 

Like Nietzsche’s, Derrida’s thought is “marked everywhere by the tragic revelation of irresolvable contradictions” (91) and his belief that language is too embedded in a repressive Western metaphysics to affirm differences. Derrida’s “perpetual uneasiness” with political action and theory leaves in doubt whether differance offers anything better than the violence or oppression of the existing hierarchies. Given his “proclivity for tragic impasse” (113), Derrida can only anchor his ethics and his politics in some “mystical” hope; his theory can only register “a protest against a certain order without being abe to effect the transformation of that order” (119).

 

From McGowan’s perspective, Foucault’s limitation for a postmodern politics lies in his preoccupation with power as the dominant social bond and his anarchistic tendency to locate freedom in resistance. Edward Said seeks “a community of tolerance and interdependence” (172), but his insistence on keeping his distance opens him to “a residual and foundational individualism” (174) that can be a form of complicity. In short, McGowan’s dismissive “point” is “that the half-baked anarchism of the literary left is necessarily accompanied by a version of individualism that is . . . theoretically unsound and politically counterproductive” (176-77).

 

The neopragmatists generally fare worse under McGowan’s critical eye than the deconstructionists and Marxists. McGowan finds Lyotard’s rejection of “any generalizing explanation or purpose (telos) to which local action must be answerable . . . a conclusion . . . scandalous to most humanistic intellectuals . . .” (183). Lyotard’s concept of language games, his rejection of metanarratives, and his valorizing of conflict in the differend are irresolvably hostile to dialectical syntheses and any potential discourse of a holistic society. Rorty is praised for acknowledging the question of ethics, but his division of self and actions into public and private spheres leads back to the social dead-end of the autonomous individual.

 

One need not even quarrel with McGowan’s critique that postmodernism’s “inability” to endorse a positive model of society is its chief failing to be uncomfortable with the use he makes of it as prelude to his own proposed alternative. Indeed, it is just at the moment I accept his vision of how a consensual democratic procedure may legitimate authority so that power becomes a positive force that I want to recapture its negatives: the sense of tragedy and the limits of play in Derrida; the resistance to power in Foucault; the distrust of the metanarratives and the use of word games in Lyotard; and “the gentle virtue of tolerance needed to keep the conversation going” (200) espoused in Rorty. “Consensus,” “totality,” “positive power” and “normative goods” ring little alarm bells for those whom history has taught to be skeptical of political discourse. These words arrive bearing covert genealogies that need deconstructing, the specifics of which should unsettle and disrupt the ease with which we use them.

 

McGowan is no naive optimist, but his discussion of power and democracy is insufficiently problematized. He illustrates the nature of a semiautonomous self which negotiates relations between its different social spheres with the hypothetical case of the American Catholic who participates in other economic, political, and cultural domains. His point is that relations between beliefs and activities in other spheres must be, and therefore can be, we must assume, negotiated at every turn. Negotiation as procedure does not guarantee accommodation, however, and authority confident of its legitimation is less inclined to negotiate than to exercise power. The American Catholic who wants to “negotiate” between her political self and her religious self may find her church unwilling to recognize her right to do so on grounds outside the absolutes of doctrine or even local interpreters of it. Like “negotiation,” “consensus” implies the negative that is not unanimity. Political consensus may properly refuse to negotiate with its fringes. It may be used to mask or repress dissent, just as tolerance may be used to contain rather than to embrace the other. McGowan observes that non-acknowledgement is power’s best threat, but he underestimates the extent to which democracy’s processes of negotiation and consensus are themselves complicit in the exercise of negative power.

 

McGowan too readily accepts that Western democracy is basically a pluralistic tradition with great social durability. Is that Greek democracy he means? Jeffersonian democracy? Jacksonian? Paine’s or Marat’s? Clinton’s? Was it in place during Reconstruction? The Gilded Age, or World War I? All of these times embody some form of Western democracy. They are not all bad dreams with nothing to teach us; indeed, what they teach is that models are specific to history where they, too, are subject to corruption, to limits, to tragic error, to excesses of violence, to irrationality and mysticism, to rigidities and laxities of procedures for decision making. To say so is not to countenance the irresponsible withdrawal from these flawed systems or to deny that they are the ground on which the creation of an ethical society must nevertheless take place. My discomfort is that McGowan tacitly gives them more performative potential than most postmodern critics can readily accept, including those of us who lean in his direction.

 

If not McGowan’s model, then what? Can one not balance the “cheerful acceptance” of Habermasian possibilities with the resistance to power of Foucault or the cautionary sense of the tragic in Derrida? Perhaps McGowan would answer that such a balancing act results in the violent frustration of impasse, or the disabling confusion of hopeless contradictions, or the irrational resorting to a mystical hope for the social good. Perhaps sometimes he would be right, but postmodernism and its critics level the playing field of history on which the best of players on both sides have already made so many fatal errors. Even on this democratic “site of possible political action” (280), postmodern citizens may need just those characteristics that McGowan thinks are in our way.