The
postmodernist critique of modernity at this
writing, in 2003, has acquired a time-bound niche
in recent intellectual history. I date the
critical moment of that niche for convenience at
1984. That was the date when Fredric Jameson presented his essay
on the cultural logic of late capitalism. Others
may choose other dates--associated perhaps with
seminal works by Baudrillard, Foucault, Derrida,
Perry Anderson, Richard Rorty, or others. But the
Jameson pronouncement seems as useful as any to
me.
"Postmodernism"
now, therefore, has a datedness that makes it
vulnerable to easy put-downs. These are coming
especially from the neoconservative right, which
for the moment seems to dominate public if not
academic discourse on the directions of American
politics and society. Postmodern voices have been
unwilling to acknowledge anything like final
foundations or permanent grounds for modern
reality and for knowledge of that reality in
Western culture. That disavowal has spawned the
defensive reaction from those who believe it is
possible to re-legitimize a tradition of
permanence, thought to be discoverable in the
modernist thought of the first two-thirds of the
twentieth century. But the postmodernist
rejection of such a tradition has remained the
central argument and the central issue, even in
the face of this reaction--even as the West has
undertaken a newly urgent cultural engagement
with the Islamic world in the aftermath of 9-11.
While the
term "postmodernism" now may have a
dated sound and while it may be the target of a
special kind of cultural backlash from the right,
especially in the America of George W. Bush, the
fluidity and uncertainty of life in the West
continue to intensify. This perpetuates and,
indeed, sharpens the problematic character of
high modernism as we knew it when the critical
turning point came in, say, 1984. If the
modernist West needed to re-think itself in the
mid-1980s, the tensions since then--both in
thought and in the playing out of politics and
society on the global stage--have made such a
re-thinking even more desirable. Who am I? What
are we? Where are we going? The basic questions
of individual and social (national) identity
haunt the people of the "post-" (fill
in your preferred suffix) period with increasing
urgency. Easy denials, facile recalls of old
virtues and verities, clarify little and hardly
help us look in a meaningful direction.
***
Reading a
book such as David Kolb's has a special value for
someone trying to understand what has been
happening. Kolb wrote it at about that moment
when postmodernist critique matured, in the
mid-1980s. It has about it the spirit of fresh
discovery that radiates from many of the works of
that period, particularly Jameson's. Kolb's
thinking about the problematic nature of
modernity's categories continues to be fresh
after nearly two decades. He did not succumb to
the more fashionable and fleeting discourses of
postmodernism. He remained firmly focused in this
book on the issues of self-identity, tradition,
and change through the optic of two major
philosophical analyses of modernism, that of
Hegel and that of Heidegger. He showed the
analytical strategies of both philosophers as
they sought to theorize the internal dilemmas of
modernity and thus overcome them. This enabled
him not only to measure their strengths and
limits but also to conclude with a view of his
own. While he did not produce a synthetic product
of Hegel-Heidegger, he offered us a useful
reflection on the non-grounded world that
postmodernism opened up for us.
Kolb devoted
his first chapter to a description of the modern
world upon which Hegel and Heidegger
concentrated. This provides a valuable baseline
for anyone seeking to understand the nature of
the modern self and its milieu. Kolb gathered
clichés about our age, social science
discussions of it, and "the basic categories
and distinctions behind standard beliefs and
attitudes about the modern world." (1)
The
commonplace clichés about the modern age, Kolb
decided, are in some conflict. Modern life,
according to one viewpoint, is "liberation
from the dead weight of tradition." From
another viewpoint it is in itself "a
particularly streamlined tradition." (6) His
important insight on these contradictory views,
however, revealed something they share:
in modernity, we define human identity
"without reference to history, set values,
or God; let alone race, creed, or national
origin." (6) The
process by which an individual chooses identity
stands apart from the content that he chooses.
(This is why in the intensified atmosphere of
"postmodernity," people think they can
signal identities and changes of identity by
choosing external piercings and tattoos. Such
choices, however, seem to emerge from
"traditional" congeries of signs and
symbols, as we see in the "Goth" style,
for example.)
When he
turned to social science for workable
descriptions of modernity, Kolb found, among
other sources, Max Weber's theory of "methodological
individualism." (9)
"The creator of all meaning is the
individual self." (9) It is the basis of
social constructions. In modernity, the choices
made by individuals are the key to social
meaning. This contrasts with "the
traditional belief that there was some pattern in
the nature of things that society and individuals
should follow." (9) Kolb believed that this
Weberian notion is basic to understanding
modernity. It means that "we have at last
achieved self-consciousness" that is
"final because it is formal." (10) That
is, we see an "empty" self,
"free" of historically determined
content. (10) Weber envisioned this fully
transparent self coming to fruition through
"increasing rationalization," (10)
which meant rule against randomness, consistency
in moving from premise to conclusion, and the
efficient linking of means and ends. (10)
Through
rational practice by individual selves, moderns
could increase their control of the world. They
could systematize meaning and value "into an
overall consistent ethical view." They could
make daily life more methodical. (11)
But as a
consequence, moderns must separate formal process
from its content. (14) Second, "universal
rules have become quite formal and do not specify
any content to the particular case."
Individuals seek their own particular good
"and let the invisible hand care for the
universal good." (15) This separates the
individual from any particular social pursuit in
a presumed universal system; he or she is free to
choose. (15)
The
characteristic institutional structure found in
modernity--"the free market and its
associated minimal state"--aims to
facilitate and protect individual choices; it
lacks any substantive values that would give it a
cultural texture. In Weber's view, "modern
society...is a process waiting for content to
come from the choices of its citizens." (16)
But Weber feared that this process would lead to
"dull uniformity." Weber thus exposed a
basic modern conflict: "rootless
freedom versus oppressive tradition."
(17)
***
Kolb's
desire to confront this conflict led to his
studies of Hegel and Heidegger and to his final
attempt at an answer beyond both of them. The
nub of his project was to "question the
ultimacy of the distinction between formal
process and its content."
By challenging that ultimacy, he believed, we
might escape the Weberian conflict and find
"other alternatives for modern man."
(17) We might thus overcome the problematique
that modernity created when it challenged
traditional society but failed to supplant it
with a social system that would satisfactorily
serve and fulfill the free self.
Kolb turned
to his interrogations of Hegel and Heidegger to
sharpen his attempt, at the end, to overcome the
failing of modernity. His chapters on each thus
were warm-ups for expressing what was on his
mind. My interest here is not to give an adequate
summary of Kolb's summaries of Hegel and
Heidegger; it is to capture the nub of his
insight into the postmodern moment as it was
coming to fruition as he wrote. In neither
philosopher did he find satisfactory responses to
modernity's shortcomings.
True, they
both opposed the instrumental subjectivity
expounded by Max Weber: "How the world is
revealed is not to be explained in terms of
subjects confronting neutral objects." (130)
To that extent, Kolb found himself resonating
with their respective criticisms of modernity.
***
In the dialectical
moment, he found Hegel
offering a "justification and self-grounding
expressed in the overall architectonic" of
Hegel's logic. (95) The all-inclusiveness of
Hegel's "concept" allowed him to
believe that modernity would dialectically yield
its own overcoming. (96) Hegel thought that the
newly freed citizen in modernity would move from
civil society, where contingent desires and
external pressures kept him beholden, to the
fulfilled life of the patriot in a modern state.
Living in the national state, he would find
rational validation for his desires. (97)
***
Hegel
resolved the dilemma of modernity from within
itself by embedding the modern subject in the
particularity of life in civil society and the
state. Heidegger took a different tack in trying
to see beyond Weber's instrumental subjectivity,
with its power to order neutral objects. He saw
the central subject being "removed from the
world." (146) This left a "universal
imposition" (146) in which "everything
faces everything else as ready for ordering and
use." (147) Kolb suggested a similarity
between Heidegger's idea of universal imposition
and Foucault's idea of the "disciplinary
society." (149) The generative force in both
cases does not come from "first actors"
or instrumental subjects; it is a ubiquitous
force. Heidegger, said Kolb, tries to rethink the
modern situation by revealing its
"historical and finite nature." This
presumably dethrones the instrumental subject. It
allows everything then to be totally revealed,
with no hidden dimensions--with no necessary
"grounds and foundations." (154)
It comes
down to this for Heidegger: "To
be aware that modern subjectivity is not the only
possibility for historical man is to abandon the
idea that distanced subjectivity is the constant
essence of human selfhood throughout
history." (151) Epochs
can have a particular keynote of their own.
***
So,
Heidegger took a different path from that of
Hegel in his search for a strategy to overcome
the problem of modernity. Heidegger rejected the
idea of instrumental subject-object relations
that in modernity underpinned the ambition for
infinity and total domination. (166-176) Hegel
satisfied his search by locating the subject in
the concrete life of the state. Heidegger drove
onward into the borders of mysticism in his
never-completed effort. (176)
Kolb could
not synthesize the thought of his two
philosophers into a coherent system for the
modern world. However, he could see a common
thread in their search that would lead to a view
of his own. Both Hegel and Heidegger, he
believed, were looking for a non-traditional way
to recognize "the happening of the world
without basing it on an ultimate ground."
(214) The bugaboo throughout for both of
them--and for Kolb--was the presumption of the
modern rational subject to universalize the world
in total transparency.
(220)
In different
ways, Hegel and Heidegger were trying to show
that this presumption could not stand. Modernity
as we think of it in its classic form therefore
could not stand. Kolb agreed with this broad
consequence of the thought of both Hegel and
Heidegger. He ended by having his own look at the
modern world, informed but not determined by
Hegel and Heidegger. (237)
***
As he
compared Hegel's system of thought with
Heidegger's, Kolb understood that total
transparency, the universally grounded revelation
of form and content, was the elusive, false
promise of modernity against which they--and
he--were vying. (221) Hegel, to be sure, failed
to "achieve his overarching totality."
(237) Heidegger, to be sure, limited his project
by remaining fixed on an implicit
transcendentalism--"the unity and immediacy
of what is granted as a clear space." (238)
Yet, Kolb acknowledged their (flawed) efforts and
sought a better understanding of his own,
pointing toward an answer as follows:
Could
we make sense of a multiplicity
of understandings
of what it means to be that happen by
interacting and being together and so
hold open the space for the appearance of
the world rather than themselves emerging
against the background of one unified
horizon in one dominant event? [my
emphasis] (221)
And,
importantly, he added:
...we
will be wary of attempting to overcome
modernity's problems by / enfolding the
modern world within a larger context that
is itself a totality we can become aware
of. (221-222)
With these
words we see Kolb entering the frame of mind of
postmodernity. Multiculturalism, just starting to
flourish in the academy as he wrote, could have
found in Kolb an ally.
His basic
objection to both Hegel and Heidegger was that
they believed that the respective conditions that
they elucidated were "prior to anything
ordinary." (239) Kolb rebelled against this
preemptive posture. Perhaps, he suggested,
"nothing is first." (239)
...there
are no unitary deep conditions--where
history is not the deployment of some
initial or final granting of presence. (239)
Kolb
objected to one "deep or totalizing
story"--whether it was Hegel's "overall
teleology" or Heidegger's "unified
epochs." (240) He faced again toward the
postmodernist insight into a world that was
"not a unified totality on any level,
preconceptual or conceptual." Let's suppose
that multiplicity went "all the way
down." (240)
***
Kolb
understood that this by-now-familiar
postmodernist turn challenged our entrenched
modernist grasp of an instrumental self. How
could the self survive in a world that it could
never objectively survey or systematize in its
totality? His short answer was that the
self-subject existed as an
appropriation of the
world-object. It could never exist apart.
"They need each other; the event of their
happening is not a relation of two entities each
complete in itself." (244)
Multiplicity
"all the way down" applies to selves as
to all else. Kolb offered consolation at the
diminishing of the unitary self. We are free to
strive for unity or totalization, he said, but
the result will not be unity or totalization--it
will be at best "another element in the
multiplicity." (249) This seems to be a loss
from the standard modernist viewpoint. But the
self in a multiple context gains from the
disappearance of any "final unifying
condition or horizon." (249) It is in and of
context always and thus can interact in ways that
are "reminiscent of dialectic"
unavailable to the unitary modernist self. (250)
Revisiting
the modern world at the end of his study, Kolb
projected a tone of careful acceptance. It was a
mistake of modernity to confer on the
instrumental self an absolute freedom, apart from
the world it surveyed. By rejecting that
Promethean vision, however, Kolb did not reject
the authenticity of a self that, from the first,
embeds in history, language, and culture.
Kolb did
reject the notion of a unique modern age,
periodized and walled off from a traditional age
that preceded it. He rejected--in familiar
postmodern fashion--the possibility of creating
totalizing historical periods at all. "There
can be no change in the world as a whole."
(261) There always will be "the travail of
the negative and the tearing apart of differences
that are never reconciled." (262) Kolb was
not denying that a modern age exists; he was
denying that it is what we have thought it
was--single and unifying. (263)
Finally,
what happens to individual human freedom if the
self no longer enjoys the "purity" of
instrumental independence in the standard modern
mode? It survives, Kolb thought. Now, however,
instead of operating on a unifying "ultimate
ground," it operates in "many
spaces." It seeks to understand "many
conditions and histories." In short,
"to be aware of the multiplicity we inhabit
increases our freedom" rather than
diminishing it. (267-268)
***
Kolb's look
at the world in the mid-1980s by now, of course,
yields the familiar excursion from modern to what
many feel comfortable calling postmodern
conditions. To get the full benefit of his use of
Hegel and Heidegger as blocking backs, as it
were, one would have to go to their texts and
read along with him--a mission I am not about to
undertake in any systematic way for now.
It suffices
for me to take from his study that the theory of
modernity never enjoyed a full and adequate
formulation. It helps to reflect again on the
problematic nature of rationality and the idea of
progress. It helps, especially as we in the West
try to engage with traditional Islam, to see that
the universal pretensions of modernity exhibit
increasingly evident flaws. From Kolb I take a
new understanding that the formulation of
modernity dissatisfied Hegel and that he was busy
long ago trying to think his way through its
limits.
***
While
reading Kolb, I was thinking about the
neoconservative revolution in American politics
and culture brought on by the Bush
administration. In their style and in some of
their objectives, the Bush revolutionaries seem
to rise out of the modernity that Kolb sought to
overcome. Their drive to solidify the population
in a national endeavor that marginalizes debate
and difference seems to have roots in Hegel. When
Bush goes on about "moral clarity" and
"honor and dignity," he seems to be
saying that there is an ultimate and unifying
ground that we ought to seek and live by.
On the other
hand, the sheer brilliance of the White House's
program of media manipulation and message
mongering has the earmarks of the new
"multiple" modernity described by Kolb.
Bush is unfazed by fundamental contradictions and
conflicts in policy and execution. He overcame
the incoherence of his rationale for preemptively
invading Iraq by using impressionistic phrases,
photos, and news ops. He was able successfully to
defy modernist logic and persuade without the
benefit of clearly drawn causes and effects such
as rationality would demand. This appears to be
true also about his case for the tax cut
successfully passed by Congress.
I end on
these glances at our national political drama not
to pursue them here but to remind myself. Thought
matters. The way we think the world is tends to
make us behave accordingly. Kolb was in the
growing army of thinkers in the last years of the
twentieth century who could not support the
old-time notions of universal purpose and the
possibility that rationality might reveal
everything. I can imagine a time in the future
when thinkers yet unborn will see Kolb's
allegiance to the idea of multiplicity "all
the way down" as in some way flawed or
perhaps quaint. For now, though, it is the
dominant note. But it is not the only note.
Residual notions of modernity also survive. And
they produce cross-currents and tensions that
promise no clear-cut resolution. In other words,
multiplicity reigns even over systems and sages
that contradict it. What this will mean for the
fate of the neoconservative revolution in America
is unclear. We will have to live through it to
see whether the theory of multiplicity holds up
under the weight of our experience..
