The Investment State by Stoesz David;

Author:Stoesz, David;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, Incorporated
Published: 2018-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

POSTMODERNISM

Historically self-conscious with regard to their Continental counterparts, American intellectuals had long romanticized Europeans, beginning with an infatuation with Marx in the late 19th century, followed by Freud early in the 20th. While the mechanics of Marxism were susceptible to rational analysis, the central components of psychoanalysis—id, ego, and superego—defied empirical validation. However, the interpretation of Marx and Freud, whose writings were so convoluted to require diligent examination, injected a pernicious element far more consequential than the aura surrounding them: the Marxist scholar and Freudian practitioner asserted influence by virtue of his or her authority alone.

Professional power through authoritative pronouncement alone would languish for much of the 20th century as the scientifically oriented disciplines prospered, only to be reasserted by century’s end through an invasion of French philosophers who insisted that “truth claims were social constructs that were ultimately the product of ideological interests, conflict, and power.”14 Drawing on Freudian analysis, “critical theory” also borrowed heavily from the Frankfurt School of neo-Marxism in Germany. For founders of the Frankfurt School, “the social and the natural sciences [had] become tools of capitalist oppressors.” Economics, contended scholars of the Frankfurt School, distorted the correct relationship between labor and capital “by insisting that truth could only be arrived at through observation of the external world and mathematical or logical operations involving those operations, with no regard for moral or aesthetic values.”15

The liberation of European colonies in Southeast Asia, Africa, and South America, followed by the Vietnam War, which sparked a critique of American colonialism, propelled postmodernism into American universities. Postmodernists accused the developed nations and their surrogates of the derogation of the third world, including the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, through which they conspired to control the developing world. Postmodernism served as a catch-all for a wide range of critiques targeting patriarchal institutions and capitalism, which exploited the Global South (conveniently omitting Australia and New Zealand). Included in the indictment, science was depicted as a patriarchal domain of white men who used rigid logic to disempower third-world peoples. “The postmodern condition manifests itself in the multiplication of centres of power and activity and the dissolution of every kind of totalizing narrative which claims to govern the whole complex field of social activity and representation,” observed Steven Connor.16

Suddenly, the reputation of science, once burnished through disease eradication and the green revolution, was cast as a pernicious influence in social affairs. Instead of a driver of progress, science was portrayed as a male-dominated institution through which white men used esoteric methods to elevate their hegemony at the expense of the luckless, mostly female and minority, masses. In place of science, postmodernists called for authentic narratives from the marginalized, applying methods that were impressionistic, subjective, and idiosyncratic, defiantly resistant to scientific replication: “there is no final narrative to which everything is reducible, but a variety of perspectives on the world, none of which can be privileged.”17

International postmodernists soon attracted domestic adherents. Accompanying increasing social diversity, postmodernism evolved as a contemporary surrogate for Marxism,

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