Why Postmodernism Was a Huge Intellectual Step Back

We're joined by Catherine Liu, professor of Film and Media Studies at UC Irvine and author of American Idyll: Academic Antielitism as Cultural Critique, to talk about what postmodernism was, where it came from, and how it represented a degenerative left response to neoliberalism and labor defeat.

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[surrealistidealist]

Postmodernism has at least one redeemable feature that no one can gainsay: it produced Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty.

[beyondaboundary]

"They love the term play." Yes! This was always one of the things that annoyed me about Joan Scott. Liu makes great points about pseudo-transgression. A lot of postmodern writing about consumption was a kind of academic counterpart to what Frank describes in The Conquest of Cool. Reed's critique of cultural studies and the celebration of small-scale acts of resistance in Class Notes is also relevant here. What it boils down to is that academics produced a massive amount of work in the 1980s and 1990s that seemed radical, but actually served the capitalist system and undermined clear strategic thinking about class, and for that matter about race and gender as well.

[henryberrylowry]

Just after 32 mins in I completely agree. This is perhaps one of the most aggravating misunderstandings of both Hegel and Marx concerning the concept of 'progress' and contradiction. Neither of them speak of this manichaen style historical development between pure good and bad. As a matter of fact, this is one of Hegel' great attacks on Kant. And really, it was Fichte who basically overturned this abstract ought, or moral agent of Kant' that stands above and beyond their time.
Thought is a reflection of its time. Post modern language like 'accessibility' and 'simplification' of theoretical endeavours is merely the logic of of neo liberalism which would have the poorer masses turn against their own intellectual progression in order to remain mindless cogs in the reproduction of Capital and their own misery.
It is inevitable that one has to struggle to accomplish anything worth while. As Marx, again borrowing from his greatest predecessor, said: there is no royal road to science. And I would add, there is no spoon fed version of the metaphysics of capitalism, history and philosophy. It requires a brutal amount of intellectual heavy lifting and it should.

[NicholasKiersey]

I love Catherine, but she always whips out this line about Jameson and it’s bonkers wrong. It’s kind of embarrassing for her, too, as Jameson’s line on postmodernity is quite similar to her own. Also, I’m no adorno fan, but WTF... Adorno hated popular culture, so she’s just got that wrong right off the bat. Finally, Foucault was not anti-Marxist. Quite the opposite. His writing is full of praise for Marx, whatever he may have says about specific sub-sects of Marxism in France during his lifetime. At the end of the day, Liu is guilty of the sane sort of deepfake methodology that Zamora depends on, in his attack on Foucault. Anyone who knows anything about Jameson or Foucault watching this will really wonder how Liu is being let away with these kinds of arguments so easily.

[mxschopendour]

Would love more videos on literary and cultural criticism. Def don't remember being exposed to arguments like Prof. Liu's in college.

[HammSamwich]

I don’t understand anything about life but this was great

[barbarajohnson]

Fantastic, I graduated in Art in 1971...you could feel this stronghold marching in! So well explained here. I have been at war with this my entire adult life. This, and EST, and continuous appropriation/ cooptation

[rararabblerouser]

I'm discussing these ideas with my 8 year old daughter and she is totally into it. Lol.

We design eco-villages in Minecraft. I use it as a way to explore leftist ideas about design, community planning, the environment, care economies, workers self-mgmt (there are villagers and stores in our world), permaculture, public interest, consumerism, non-hierarchical collectivism, participatory democracy, etc. Its something that she really enjoys doing. So, I use architecture and city planning as a jumping off point. She will sit for hours engaging me in these discussions as we play.

She is very creative and self-declared "modernist" and "minimalist". Its too adorable.

Anyhoo... I just wanted to share that.

[arturyeon]

Saw all the outrage at the title before this happened, ended up watching an hour of optimistic and thought-provoking lessons on architecture and culture. You lot had us in the beginning, I won't lie ;)

[JohnMoseley]

I really like Liu and a lot of what she's saying here, but have to say first off: come on, Jameson is a Marxist and his book was a critique of postmodernism, but also a recognition of postmodernity, which is something harder to get away from.

Liu refers to Jameson's point about modernisation being complete and points out all the ways it was not, but I think he's talking very validly not about his own view of it but of the logic that was in play in the places where postmodernism took off. It's the difference, as he says, between the era of modernisation, when modern still needs to be an ism, when you have cars passing horse-drawn carts in the street. To extrapolate a bit, once you're in a place where that is overwhelmingly gone, you can't bring it back except through artificial nostalgic gestures. Liu immediately goes on to talk about how our era has all these conservatives harking back to whatever it is their nostalgic for, but that – ironically given their own often ignorant and prejudicial hostility to the idea of postmodernism (which they often ludicly assume to be a form of Marxism) – is a form of postmodernity in itself, just as it is in their ultra-reactionary architectural equivalents, e.g. Quinlan Terry.

I'm sort of splitting hairs, though, because I agree that it sucks that the specifically social and egalitarian mission of modernism was not finished and feel absolutely that it would be better not abandoned. As an aside, when Liu was talking about Gehry's Disney building as a public-private endeavour, I suddenly thought, oh my god, all those Clinton and Blairite public-private partnerships: third way politics is the ultimate postmodern politics, the collapsing of binaries, the play of differences at work in bringing in all these vested interests and thinking you can make them contribute to the public good while still looking after their bottom lines – and if a critique of this kind of thinking is needed concretely, there could hardly be a better one.

But to the mission: unfortunately, I don't think it's just that a bunch of bad-faith actors took over and swept it away. I suspect it was flawed on grounds Marx himself would have spotted: it assumes we can democratise great design because mass production can make it cheap to produce, without taking account of capitalism's bottom line. Cheap furniture, electronics and architecture today often simply dispenses with the designers. Or, especially in the case of IKEA, somehow it turns out that cheaply mass produced furniture even when it has a designer is still flimsy trash. Or, in the case of the electronics, it turns out we get to a place where vast numbers of people can have access to quite sophisticated and well designed devices, without their overall material conditions being substantially improved at all (something Janet Malcolm brilliantly foresaw in her superb essay on the '80s NYC art scene, A Girl of the Zeitgeist). As was discovered over and over again with brilliantly designed housing projects and, here in the UK, council blocks being left to go to wrack and ruin, if the underlying society and systems weren't right, modernism's brilliant material solutions were for nought.

Liu should beware of idealising the old modernist mission nostalgically for that reason alone. But, ironically, to do so is also postmodern.

[frenchtoasty]

I have to make this correction: at 41:45 Ms. Liu claims that Foucault does not discuss the factory in Discipline and Punish. I just read this book a few months ago and he does in fact discuss this in the book. Granted, it is only for one chapter in which he tacks on the templates of disciplinary institutions to the military academy and other social institutions, but to say he didn't discuss it is untrue.

The odd thing about Foucault for me is that he appropriates Marxist terminology and adds it to his own vocabulary palette for describing society. I think this is maybe more problematic.

[erikdolnack]

Post-Modernism has been a colossal failure and the Left needs to completely abandon Post-Modernism moving forward. Culture, as Marx understood, is not the determinate factor of society; the economic base is. Post-Modernism aids and abets neoliberalism, knowingly or unknowingly. This is why all corporations today fully embrace "woke culture" and Intersectionalism. During the 1960s, the New Left divorced itself from Labor, and that was a tragic mistake that allowed neoliberalism to take over. Being deliberately soft and weak is not a wise strategy for victory.

[atwarwithdust]

Catherine Liu: “By the nineteenth century in Europe, one of the most powerful sites of bodily discipline is the factory, and **Foucault does not write about the factory**.”

That’s glaringly false.

The last sentence of his famous chapter on Panopticism in ‘Discipline and Punish’ asked, “Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?”

‪He expected readers not to be surprised given that he’d recurringly referred to factory discipline throughout the preceding two chapters. Some examples: ‬

_ “As the machinery of production became larger and more complex, as the number of workers and the division of labour increased, supervision became ever more necessary and more difficult. It became a special function, which had nevertheless to form an integral part of the production process, to run parallel to it throughout its entire length. A specialized personnel became indispensable, constantly present and distinct from the workers: ‘In the large factory, everything is regulated by the clock. The workers are treated strictly and harshly. The clerks, who are used to treating them with an air of superiority and command, which is really necessary with the multitude, treat them with severity or contempt; hence these workers either cost more or leave the factory soon after arrival’. But, although the workers preferred a framework of a guild type to this new regime of surveillance, the employers saw that it was indissociable from the system of industrial production, private property and profit. At the scale of a factory, a great iron-works or a mine, ‘the objects of expenditure are so multiplied, that the slightest dishonesty on each object would add up to an immense fraud, which would not only absorb the profits, but would lead to a loss of capital … the slightest incompetence, if left unnoticed and therefore repeated each day, may prove fatal to the enterprise to the extent of destroying it in a very short time’; hence the fact that only agents, directly dependent on the owner, and entrusted with this task alone would be able to see ‘that not a sou is spent uselessly, that not a moment of the day is lost’, their role would be ‘to supervise the workers, to inspect all the places of work, ' to inform the directors of everything that takes place. Surveillance thus becomes a decisive economic operator both as an internal part of the production machinery and as a specific mechanism in the disciplinary power. ‘The work of directing, superintending and adjusting becomes one of the functions of capital, from the moment that the labour under the control of capital, becomes cooperative. Once a function of capital, it requires special characteristics’ (Marx, Capital, vol. i, 313).”

_ Discussing the functioning of Bentham’s Panopticon, “Each individual, in his place, is securely confined to a cell from which he is seen from the front by the supervisor; but the side walls prevent him from coming into contact with his compan­ions. He is seen, but he does not see; he is the object of information, never a subject in communication. The arrangement of his room, opposite the central tower, imposes on him an axial visibility; but the divisions of the ring, those separated cells, imply a lateral invisibility. And this invisibility is a guarantee of order. If the in­mates are convicts, there is no danger of a plot, an attempt at collective escape, the planning of new crimes for the future, bad reciprocal influences; if they are patients, there is no danger of contagion; if they are madmen there is no risk of their committing violence upon one another; if they are schoolchildren, there is no copying, no noise, no chatter, no waste of time; **if they are workers, there are no disorders, no theft, no coalitions, none of those distractions that slow down the rate of work, make it less perfect or cause accidents**.”

_ “The discipline of the work­shop, while remaining a way of enforcing respect for the regulations and authorities, of preventing thefts or losses, tends to increase aptitudes, speeds, output and therefore profits; it still exerts a moral influence over behaviour, but more and more it treats actions in terms of their results, introduces bodies into a machinery, forces into an economy.”

_ “If the economic take-off of the West began with the techniques that made possible the accumulation of capital, it might perhaps be said that the methods for administering the accumulation of men made possible a political take-off in relation to the traditional, ritual, costly, violent forms of power, which soon fell into disuse and were superseded by a subtle, calculated technology of subjection. In fact, the two processes - the accumulation of men and the accumulation of capital - cannot be separated; it would not have been possible to solve the problem of the accumulation of men without the growth of an apparatus of production capable of both sustaining them and using them; conversely, the techniques that made the cumulative multiplicity of men useful accelerated the accumulation of capital. At a less general level, the technological mutations of the apparatus of production, the division of labour and the elaboration of the disciplinary techniques sustained an ensemble of very close relations (cf. Marx, Capital, vol. i, chapter XIII). Each makes the other possible and necessary; each provides a model for the other. The disciplinary pyramid constituted the small cell of power within which the separation, coordination and supervision of tasks was imposed and made efficient; and analytical partitioning of time, gestures and bodily forces constituted an operational schema that could easily be transferred from the groups to be subjected to the mechanisms of production; the massive projection of military methods onto industrial organization was an example of this modelling of the division of labour following the model laid down by the schemata of power. But, on the other hand, the technical analysis of the process of production, its ‘mechanical’ breaking-down, were projected onto the labour force whose task it was to implement it: the constitution of those disciplinary machines in which the individual forces that they bring together are composed into a whole and therefore increased is the effect of this projection. Let us say that discipline is the unitary technique by which the body is reduced as a ‘political’ force at the least cost and maximized as a useful force. The growth of a capitalist economy gave rise to the specific modality of disciplinary power, whose general formulas, techniques of submitting forces and bodies, in short, ‘political anatomy’, could be operated in the most diverse political regimes, apparatuses or institutions.”

‪And this is well-noted in Foucauldian scholarship - as Toni Negri and Michael Hardt wrote in ‘Empire’ twenty years ago:

“Foucault argued in several works in the mid-1970s that one cannot understand the passage from the ‘sovereign’ state of the ancien regime to the modern ‘disciplinary’ state without taking into account how the biopolitical context was progressively put at the service of capitalist accumulation: ‘The control of society over individuals is not conducted only through consciousness or ideology, but also in the body and with the body. For capitalist society biopolitics is what is most important, the biological, the somatic, the corporeal’. ... A disciplinary society is thus a factory-society.”

[VorosMedve]

I think Foucault gets a bad rep from both left and right and his arguments are frequently mischaracterised. A key argument being that we cannot escape power; ergo even in a socialist utopia there will be power relations...they may more ‘horizontal’ but they’ll still exist. Power will still help create subjects either in-line with or resistant to dominant institutions.
Further, I think his notion of the episteme is useful as a critique of capitalism as relying upon the rationalisation of dualist thought. I hear echos of Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment within it.

[arturodesimone]

Bizzarre to hear her conflation of F Jameson (the major critic of postmodernity) with the problem of postmodernism. She reads his diagnoses of what he sees as a breakdown of modern culture as if he were an advocate of postmodernity.

[Tracy]

You are my new role model, Ms. Catherine Liu! You are an inspiration to young women academicians. Thank you for the discussion.

[CH-kehq]

Bizarre, bad-faith mischaracterizations of Jameson on almost every level. Not all "theory" is a distraction! Ask Lenin of all people.

[discogodfather]

Excellent lecture. I have never had a post modern analysis that included architecture and fashion. Always from a political / philosophical point of view. I've been trying to convince people for years that Leftism took the worst possible turn during this time period.

[ybrt]

She seems to conflate architectural postmodernism with postmodernism in cultural theory, which is like saying architecture and cultural theory are basically the same thing. It ignores the very specific material conditions in architecture.
Also, saying modernism was dominated by left-wing intellectuals is a gross misrepresentation. Because when modernism wanted to redefine what it means to be human and mold a new mankind, you have a non-conservative agenda, yes, and lots of leftist will jump to it. Also, so do fascists. The iternational uprising of fascism in the 1930 cannot be explained without recognizing the prevalence of modernist thinking in that era. The sentiment of postmodernism being a wrong step away from the good modernism is not just anti-historical, it is ill-informed.
Finally, let's note the irony of her arguing in a non-academic way, from a rather personal perspective, saying things like "I feel", "as I understand it", "as it was taught to me", and such. Subjective experience is valued in a postmodern discourse, but in a modernist discourse, what some random person thinks, particularly about history, does not matter event the slightest. Either you build towards the new, or you can fuck right off.

[ronrice]

Fred Jameson "hailing" postmodernism? That is simply a grossly inaccurate characterization of his work.