Postmodernism and Neo-Marxism: The Collapse of Western Civilization

Whilst the concepts of Postmodernism and Neo-Marxism deserve their own separate articles due to their inherent complexity and the far-reaching implications of each on the global stage, their relationship over the course of the late 20th century has been particularly destructive to contemporary society and its affiliated institutions.

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Postmodernism is a wide philosophy that emerged in late 20th century France, producing such notorious thinkers as Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Jean Francois Lyotard. Together these writers have managed to distort the very nature of the world and bring western culture to its knees. Whilst many may claim that Marxism has nothing to do with Postmodernism as the former is a historical ‘meta – narrative’ whilst the latter is supposedly a rejection of all ‘meta – narratives’, this perception proceeds primarily from a naïve understanding of both titanic movements and a surface level approach to philosophy in general. To put it succinctly, Marxism at its core is a philosophy that views economic power as the locus of all structural and institutional centers, which together constitute society. Marx then applied this theory (Base and Superstructure theory), where power is concentrated solely in the economic realm to a deterministic historiography that explored how ‘class antagonisms’ (which really meant the distribution of economic power) has manifested and would manifest in a communist utopia.

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Postmodernism looked at all the philosophers from Descartes to Kant and realized that underpinning the seemingly never-ending dialectic nature of philosophy, there emerged one constant; the infinitude of ways one could construe the world. This initiated a ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ on a scale that would make even Descartes roll over in his grave and leave Nietzsche in paralysis. Thinkers were quick to assert that modern society was merely a collection of normative contingent truths and that everything was a simulacrum based on function. The intellectual progress and stability brought about by Kant’s ‘transcendental idealism’, where the ‘empirico – transcendent’ man was subject to space, time, and causality, making possible the rapid emergence of the natural and social sciences collapsed as all that was ‘necessary’ evaporated in a smoke of ‘contingency’. In one fell swoop modern society was no more. The postmodern had arisen. However, what force could possibly have been strong enough to destroy the intellectual kingdom of Kant? How could modern society have possibly fallen with such ease? With what weapon did these ghouls of the night murder reality? The answer; Power.

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Almost in paternal deference to Marx did the triumvirate of madness (Lyotard, Derrida, Foucault) use power to tear down all the institutions that lay before them. Where Marx conceived of economics as constituting reality, Foucault used the example of prisons in The History of Prisons to suggest how modern society universalized the model of prisons to societal structures such as factories, hospitals, and schools in an attempt to legitimate a particular set of cultural norms and punish all those who deviate from said set of norms. (Foucault’s very own ‘Base and Superstructure’ theory) Therefore, Foucault cleverly implies that the ‘principle of the law’ dissolves at the hands of cultural norms with power structures helping keep everything in place. Another great example would be the postmodern adoption of Bentham’s Panopticon; a prison where prisoners are isolated from one another and each individually monitored by a central ‘Monitor’ to ensure compliance to discipline. However the theory suggests that even if the Monitor weren’t actually monitoring a particular prisoner that prisoner would still behave according to the disciplinary rules due to the potential ‘threat’ of monitoring. This loose allegory for the operation of cultural norms on society suggests that, far from ‘knowledge being an instrument of power’, ‘knowledge’ and ‘power’ are the same thing. Modern society subordinates individuals to cultural norms by ‘hierarchal observation’ and enforces this via power structures. However, unlike what some might picture as an Orwellian dystopia, this conception of what Foucault termed ‘power/knowledge’ is an independent manifestation of power itself rather than the product of a deterministic ideology like Marxism or the will of free agents like a government; somewhat akin to Nietzsche’s Genealogy. It magnifies power and permits for its transcendence from the synthetic to natural realm, suggestive of an imagery where power is conceived of as a deity in itself. Further Derrida’s conception of ‘deconstruction’ as a guide to survival and a critique of Platonism implies that underpinning Western society is a hierarchical structure of oppositional concepts. The presence of primacy of a particular concept over its oppositional pair; for instance, speech over writing, essence over appearance, good over evil, Derrida claims is fundamentally false. He suggests that all oppositional pairs are simultaneously true and false dependent on temporal conditions. His “differance” and “trace” imply that Descartes’ ‘foundation’ was false as there can be no ‘foundation’ in the present only in the future. There can be no ‘right’ path, no justice to be attained, no meaning to be sought, as all these are merely hierarchical structures given primacy 'presently' according to Derrida and because the 'present' is not really the 'present' but contaminated by experiences of the past according to Hume and a priori cognitive anticipations of the future according to Kant, therefore, Derrida argues, these 'goals' of justice, meaning, morality, etc are only ever possible in the future and hence impossible by virtue of the condition that human beings are temporally limited and subject to experience of the present. This reinforces Foucault’s destruction of Western society as Derrida is in effect implying that not only is modern society based on false principles of justice, morality, and sovereignty but that in fact our adoption of a Platonistic superstructure effectively subordinates human agency to the tyrannical will of oppositional hierarchies. There can be no reality for Power inevitably subsumes it all.

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Accordingly, one may observe that underpinning postmodernism is the principle that power determines everything, much comparable to the fundamental Marxist doctrine that economic power determines all else. The key difference here is that the postmodernists have managed to liberate ‘power’ from its economic chains and thus dramatically increase its destructive capabilities. The postmodernists, much in the same vein as Marx himself, utilized historiography to not merely ‘peek behind the curtain’ and attempt to glimpse at the engine underpinning everything but rather sought to burn the curtain down. They desired to lay bare all the engines, all the cogs and all the machines built by philosophers before and demonstrate some flaw in all. They connected all theories and all philosophies; built the much coveted ‘universal theory’ but rather than cementing this grand ‘foundation’ they tore it to the ground with such ferocity to the extent that no one else dared rebuild on what remains a pile of intellectual ash. Where Marxism challenged the foundations of Western philosophical thought, postmodernism obliterated it.