Post-modernism: Merely a re-formulation of subjectivity?

This thought experiment will implement Adorno’s critical self-reflective perspective[i] as a method to try a look at the ontological genesis in the conception of ideas like deconstruction[ii] and différence[iii]. The approach will be to consider these not as a critique on modernism[iv], but an ideological consequence of the realization of the failure in our human capabilities to have a ‘truly’ universal unified structure regarding reality, consciousness and the universe as whole[v]. As such this line of thinking does not consider post-modernism as a separate field of philosophy to modernism, but a correction in the way we approach philosophical problems. This statement flows from the realization that post-modernism constitution as a philosophy lies so deeply within the presumption of the existence of modernism that in relation to the latter, post-modernism relation to modernism goes beyond merely being synthesis or a critique and certainly does not meet the criteria of a paradigm shift[vi]. In this post-modernism more closely resembles a type of philosophical eclecticism in as much as it can only make any pronouncements once there is a structure to de-construct. If considered from an existential point of view one could say that if post-modernism had a character it would be based on GEM not GBM[vii] and hence inauthentic.

The mechanisms used by post-modernism to return the universal objective to that of the subjective comes from such Hermeneutic philosophies such as Gadamer idea of traces[viii]. The idea being that we cannot re-trace all the traces of thought that brings us to where we are now, so too we can claim the same of ideas promulgating ‘universal objective truths’. Subsequently, one need only point out the latter to detangle some of the trace that construct an idea and because all languages are constitutionally constructed on negative dialectics[ix] one will always be able to walk a different path, creating different traces with subsequent deferred[x] meaning since such actions put us on a different trace trajectory. This can be seen as analogist to the G?del’s formulation of non-reversibility in systems theory. As such even post-modernisms appeal to extreme subjectivity lies in modernisms attempt to complete objectivity. This is evident from the one critique on modernism by post-modernist which is the nonexistence of ‘essential universals’. This is because post-modernists simply apply a Cartesian truth to the enlightenment/ modernist task which is: just as my thoughts prove I exist, it imprisons me in solipsism[xi], so too the appeal to the essential universalizability of some ways of thinking is at essence appeal to extreme objectivity. Conversely, any appeal of the latter nature must start from the point of the subjective observer. Not only this, since the language they use to construct their modernist universals is based on negative dialectics, the demise of any such structure will always essentially lie within its own intrinsic structure.

One need only to try and revert back to the point of the subjective viewer and ask why ‘such and such’ structure is a necessity or essential to that structure or why to that structure alone. This will quickly bring the conversation into the field of axioms and other such apparent self-evident universals. At this point interpretation rather than reason becomes predominant since axioms themselves cannot be questioned and any presumption of a universal no longer applies as a prerequisite of the objective perspective is no longer at play. It’s at this instance where post-modernism enters the conversation as the acceptance that we cannot simply escape the solipsistic truth by assumption of objectivity for the sake of making axiomatic science and other such schools of thinking practically implementable. In pointing out this internal contradiction a reintroducing subjective speculation, post-modernists succeeds but at the cost of authenticity as it does not constitute any real paradigm shift or change in the Zeitgeist and does not take us much further. It leaves us more enriched in what we already know, but gives no indications as to where we may further develop including our potential future explorations into our philosophical condition.

Placing this conversation into the social context, just as some apparent ‘universal’ truths such as E=MC2 have become very useful, so too some forms of subjectivism have become uncomfortable such as the polarization and increased extremism of political youth in Europe and the USA and other places. We can no longer go back to the ostensive structured landscape of modernism, and although post-modernism may be enriching, it can only accept fluid concepts within presumption of a configured matrix and as mentioned before leaves us rudderless or at the very least very few signposts as to which direction our efforts should be moving in. post-modernist may say this is itself modernist and direction in this regard is illusionary, which in reality may be the case, but if we can use the analogy of Distributed Artificial Intelligence (DAI)[xii] , pooled minds will solve problems faster, moreover considering the potential nascent future of the latter it may be the only way we as a species could stay relevant.     

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[i] Critical self-reflection “does not merely present arguments – from the external perspective of applied ethics [...], but instead does it – from the internal perspective of a self-reflective way of thinking” (Zaolnai, 2004: 17). In other words it looks at the internal contradictions of thought, this necessitates “‘determinate negation's pointing [out] specific contradictions between what thought claims and what it actually delivers” – in other words, I will focus on how post-modernism as a concept contradicts with what it actually delivers (Adorno qtd. in Zuidervaart, 2007).

[ii] Deconstruction is considered a "double movement of simultaneous affirmation and undoing" (Holland, n.d, Available online: https://www.iep.utm.edu/deconst/). In simple terms it means to “take a text apart along the structural “fault lines” created by the ambiguities inherent in one or more of its key concepts or themes in order to reveal the equivocations or contradictions that make the text possible” (online). In a way then what we are doing here is itself a deconstruction of post-modernism since we will also look at it as  “an historicizing movement” opening it up to its “conditions of [...] production, [its] con-text in a very broad sense” , including the “historical circumstances and tradition from which [it] arose” (online). In simple terms, when looked at from its internal historical contradictions and how it would be applied in society, does it still play according to its own rules, in this case does it undo and affirm in a way that makes society or the practice of philosophy in society to more practical, or is it only good as a abstraction of thought, hence merely applying to some ‘positive’ universal identity itself and therefore self-contradictory.

[iii]Différence described “how the reduction of meaning to writing captures opposition within that concept itself” (Turner, 2016, Available online: https://criticallegalthinking.com/2016/05/27/jacques-derrida-deconstruction/)

[iv] Modernism here in the most broadest sense refers to movement that span many thinkers and cultural activities all of whom believed that they had some ideal idea which they considered as universalizible where the latter can be understood to mean “a property or relation that can be instanced, or instantiated, by a number of different particular things: each yellow thing provides an instance of the property of yellowness” (Blackburn, 1996: 386). Universals then suffer from positive identities where this denotes a process whereby “human thought, in achieving identity and unity, has imposed these upon objects, suppressing or ignoring their differences and diversity” (Zuidervaart, 2007: online). This, because of peoples’ “societal formation whose exchange principle demands the equivalence (exchange value) of what is inherently nonequivalent (use value)” (2007: online). What this means is that there is “the “application” of a priori concepts to a priori intuitions via the “schematism” of the imagination (Einbildungskraf)” (Zuidervaart, 2007: online). This is what is called the “constitutive subjectivity” (Adorno, 1973: xx). This form of giving identity assumes that a ‘thing’s’ identity is the “thing in itself” (Zuidervaart, 2007: online). This view on the identity of things is supported by the “affirmative character of Hegel’s dialectic” (Adorno: 143-161). Therefore this constitutive subjectivity causes people to give positive identity to things, which basically means assuming that a ‘thing’ has some a priori innate identity, or what Adorno refers to when he says that people have given or assumed something to have a positive identity.

[v] Examples of this are thinkers such as G?del, Derrida and Kuhn who convincingly uses such endeavours centralising tendency towards universality as critique against it, mostly by way of pointing out that the latter does not speak to the existential and nouminal world that we find ourselves in.

[vi] According to Kuhn in his work: "On scientific revolutions" he describes how most of science, or what he refers to as ordinary science, is focused on perpetuating the status-quo and very seldom does real paradigm shifts occur. He goes on to describe that only when contemporary theory competently fails to describe and understand the phenomena that it use to explain due to new insights, observations, theories or changes in conditions that are usually driven by new methods of observation and technologies and no changes or adjustment to the currently held views can accommodate these new insights is there a need or the opportunity for a paradigm shift. In psychological terms this would be akin to suffering cognitive dissonance when ones internal state of being no longer reflects the external realities within which one now finds one self, and as with the psychological condition such incongruity between these two state of being cannot merely be resolved by adjusting ones views, but necessitates a completely new perspective which usually occurs with some friction between the old and the new schools of thinking.

[vii]Good and Bad Morality refers to Nietzsche and the differentiation he makes between Good and Bad Morality (GBM) on the one hand, and Good and Evil Morality (GEM) on the other. Most basically, Good and Bad Morality and Good and Evil Morality differ “genetically in two respects: in terms of aspects of the chronological order in which the elements of the respective distinctions arose; and in terms of the motives that explain the genesis of the distinction” (Leiter, 2002: 208). Firstly, for GBM, “the term ‘good’ (“gut” [in German]) is invented first as a spontaneous celebration of “the exalted proud soul” while in turn ‘bad’ (“schlecht”) is an afterthought” which designates all those things that are not ‘good’ (2002: 208). Contrary to this, in GEM the term “evil” (“b?se” [in German]) comes first (to designate ‘precisely the ‘good man’ of the other mortality’), while in turn ‘good’ (gut) comes second,” or simply as an indicator of all that which is not evil (2002: 208). Their different motives explicate the authentic person, which for GBM “is self-affirmative and celebration of the ‘exalted, proud states of the soul’” (2002: 209). While for GEM, the motive is “reactive: it involves wanting to respond to particular ‘external stimuli’ by negating or devaluing them,” similar to the idea of introjected values (2002: 209). Introjected values refers to when an individual no longer follows their own values, but that of another entity, which it has accepted and internalized as its own.

[viii] Gadamer argued that we are historically situated creatures and our own historicity carries with it, its own prejudice since, even though there may be a common 'historical horizon' that makes interpretation of past events possible, these interpretations can only occur from within our own current historically bound context as we can never trace all the traces of thoughts, actions, behaviour etc. that brought any moment in history into being, not even our own. As such every attempt to historical interpretation is at best a miss interpretation.

[ix]Negative dialectics is the process of demystifying the process of positive identity described in foot no iv through a process of critical self-reflection and in so doing an object receives, “[t]hrough determinate negation [of] those aspects of the object which thought misidentifies [an] indirect, conceptual articulation” (Zuidvaart, 2007: online) its non-identical identity. In its most basic terms it means that nothing has an essential a priory identity due to how language is conceptualised and abstracts from the nouminal to the phenomenal, consequently the most essential definition of any can be sought by looking at everything that it is not, i.e. its non-identical identity. This is done by considering the contradictions between something like post-modernism as though versus its applicability within the current and foreseeable socio-economic realities we live in. This Adorno does to delineate which thoughts are mere thoughts or abstractions only to be entertained in our phenomenological world, and which abstractions are worth perusing since they have actual real nominal value, i.e. not merely brain farts.

[x] Se footnotes iii, iv, viii and ix.

[xi]Solipsism in brief is the view or theory that the self is all that can be known to exist. In other words, all I can prove is my own existence, not that of others and so the existence of one.

 [xii] Distributed Artificial Intelligents (DAI) is described as “a class of technologies and methods that span from swarm intelligence to multi-agent technologies and that basically concerns the development of distributed solutions for a specific problem” (Corea, F. 2019, Available online: https://medium.com) . You can then have a community of intelligent agents that who’s combined processing capacities it used to deal with tasks that require large amounts of processing power or multiple solutions. Subsequently, DAI usually has three characteristics: “It is a method for the distribution of tasks between agents; It is a method of distribution of powers; It is a method of communication of the agents” (online). Hence, its worth “highlight another bifurcation (Stone and Veloso, 2000): in a DAI context, you might either want to analyze a system where several branches work together to achieve a common goal or designing multiple independent agents and look for an emerging solution from their interactions. In the first case, you are facing a Distributed Problem Solving (DPS) type of issue, while in the latter you are dealing with Multi-Agent Systems at their best” (online). 

• Bibliography:

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