Deconstructing Postmodernism - The Myth of Secular Transcendence

One of the more irritating aspects of Postmodernism is the tone of smug certainty, even inevitability, used to describe our supposedly random, fragmented, technologically-mediated culture. It is not only the high-minded theorists and critics that pretend our highly legislated, debt-bloated system, with its endemic corruption and increasingly transparent legacy media propagandists, is some sort of natural endpoint in human social evolution. Consider how some will attempt to wish away biological or material reality by invoking the current year, as if the genome is carefully watching the Gregorian calendar. Or the breezy condescension with which we were told to just accept the predations of a slanted global economic system, since the old jobs aren’t coming back. Yet one president, who many actually consider unfit for the office, has sent manufacturing job creation and brick and mortar investment soaring with simple changes to tax and trade policy. If this was all it took, how inevitable was it? 

Giovanni Battista Gaulli, The Triumph of the Name of Jesus and Fall of the Damned 1672-85, fresco with stucco figures, Il Gesù, Rome

Illusionism refers to the art of making something appear to be real that isn't. In the past, it was done with optical effects like the ones in Gaulli's ceiling, which make it appear as if the heavens are opening into the interior of a church. Modern illusionism is more subtle; deceptions promulgated through nodes of institutional control and repeated until they are accepted as natural. However, were they natural, the illusionism would not be necessary. Gaulli believed in a vision of heaven that lay beyond ordinary sight. Do the prophets of Postmodern inevitability share similar supernatural beliefs?

The term “Progressive” associates simplified Postmodern politics with perpetual, positive forward movement, but given that our Postmodern existence is supposed to be a decentered web of arbitrary signifiers, how is progress possible? What does it even mean to progress in a world without some sort of transcendent value system to serve as a guide? Postmodernism, as its academic champions are wont to trumpet, is based on theory, but if that is the case, we should be able to evaluate how well these theories conform to the reality they purport to theorize. A theory is merely an abstraction of a pre-existing set of phenomena, and is only valuable to the extent that it enables understanding. In other words, we determine the value of a theory by how well it relates to reality. Given how misaligned it is with human nature and how poorly it correlates to actual events, one suspects that Postmodern "theory" takes a slightly different approach. 

Theseus fighting Prokrustes, tondo surround of Attic red-figured kylix, ca. 440-430 BC, London, British Museum

Procrustes was a monster who murdered travelers by stretching or chopping them to fit his bed before Theseus gave him a taste of his own medicine. I suppose he was an early progressive, willing to go to any lengths to smash human diversity into his vicious little box.

There is an inherent contradiction at the philosophical heart of Postmodernism that comes from its distant roots in the philosophical idealism of the early nineteenth century and serves as a cautionary tale about what happens when highly speculative academic formulations become accepted as fact by an uncritical mainstream. The problem has Marx’ bloody fingerprints all over it, but the origins go back at least to Hegel’s philosophy of history, which  foreshadows Postmodernism in its familiar desire to wish things true that aren’t. His famous process of dialectic, by which new ideas emerge from the synthesis of opposites, is hopelessly naïve in its binary thinking and doesn’t actually apply to any known process of creation. How does one even identify and isolate the constitute opposites in a multivalent, moving entity like the world? 

The appeal of Hegel's formula is easy to understand, because it allows you to believe two opposite things true at the same time, which is basically formalized cognitive dissonance. But  reality is somewhat less forgiving of incoherent desires. Let’s try some domains where some clearly definable dialectic relationships might be identifiable. 

RGB illumination, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License

Secondary and tertiary colours can be thought of as syntheses, but the constituent hues are not opposites, nor are they limited to pairs. 

Math deals with abstract values that are ideally precise in their identities and relationships; what happens if we try and synthesize opposites here?

  

The opposites may be synthesizing, but the new syntheses don't seem producing much in the way of new knowledge.

Maybe scientific analogies are unfair. What about a broad historical structure like the Western Tradition? There are actually three main pillars here - Greek philosophy, Roman Law, and Christianity – plus Germanic cultural traditions and countless internal developments and external influences through trade, exploration, conflict, etc. It doesn't seem all that dialectical in Hegelian terms either.

Music? It is unclear how Hegelian dialectic accounts of the emergence of symphonic music out of the Renaissance or the subsequent Baroque – Classical – Romantic progression. The same holds for literature and the visual arts. 

I suppose the exchange of genetic material in sexual reproduction would serve as an example of synthesis, but even this falls apart, since the one place where the two parents are "opposites" - their biological sex - is the one place where the offspring follows one or the other.  You get more accurate historiography from a Ouija board.

There are doubtless countless incidents in the flow of human history where differences are split and compromises found, but these clearly don’t rise to any kind of larger heuristic value. On a broad scale, there are no instances where Hegel’s formation even remotely resembles processes of human development and understanding. There is nothing wrong with this in itself, but it poses an enormous problem for any attempt to use it in a meaningful, predictive way. It is an annoying commonplace in philosophy and criticism to preserve an obviously flawed or erroneous structure by qualifying it with the creator’s name, as if that were a talisman that magically compensates for inaccuracy. Suddenly it’s “Hegelian Dialectic” – loaded with all the authority that accrues when no one reads the source material. 

Alchemical Map to the Philosopher’s Stone from Heinrich Khunrath, Amphitheatrum sapientiae aeternae, circa 1595

The Philosopher's Stone was an alchemical fantasy of a substance that could transform base, valueless materials into gold. Formations like Hegelian dialectic and Marxist economics suggest that "The Philosopher's Name" has similar powers in the world of ideas. 

Hegel’s other great toxic fantasy was his “spirit/ghost of history” or zeitgeist; the notion that the flow of history followed a set direction, or teleology, on the broadest scale. Teleology is simply a term that refers to a predetermined end or pattern of development, as in plant growth – we don’t know exactly what a seedling will look like as an adult, but we can be sure of some parameters, because those are genetically determined by species. That pre-set developmental path is what makes plant growth a teleological process, while random motion, like spinning a roulette wheel or flipping a coin, is not. The most common teleological histories are religious in nature, moving from a fixed point of creation to a final culminating event that gives meaning to the whole thing (eg. Genesis to Revelations). Hegel wasn’t religious in a traditional Christian sense, but did believe in a personal notion of God as a highest, perfect, ultimate reality similar in some ways to the Platonic world of forms. This enabled him to propose a direction behind what appears to be a random flow of human events, but, as is typical of Idealists, nothing approaching “evidence” for these alternative spiritualities is ever offered. Fortunately, this is not a significant obstacle. Like “Hegelian Dialectic,” “The Hegelian Spirit of History” has an appeal to authority that can counter any pesky problems of accuracy. 

Sebastiano Conca, The Genius of History, 1680–1764, National Trust, Stourhead

Conca's muse is more fetching, but the Magic 8 Ball offers a better guide to events than a dialectical spirit of history. At least it recognizes its obvious limits. 

The desire for transcendence, a superior timeless counterpart to our shifting human world, is a constant in human history. In religious terms, it is usually conflated with the afterlife, while in secular philosophy it appears as some sort of abstract, ideal super-existence. The danger in transcendence is that it imposes hierarchies where our actual lived experience is inherently inferior to some imagined other. At best, this provides a binding moral order to check human self-interest, but at worst, willingly sacrifices lives and even cultures to an impossible ideal. Because they exist beyond this world, transcendences are not falsifiable by empirical means, but assume their conclusions and retrofit any evidence to contrary. The religious tend to be honest and state openly that their belief is based in faith, but philosophers seem to want the reassuring structures of transcendence without submitting to the strictures of religion. The problem is that without faith, claims of transcendence require extraordinary proof, or they fail to rise beyond useless speculation. When someone like Marx actually imputes real value to Hegel’s phantasms, the results are cataclysmic. 

Upper part of stele inscribed with the Law Code of Hammurabi, ca. 1760 BCE, diorite, approx. 2.1 m, Louvre 

Control of the transcendent has always been the path to power. Hammurabi's is one of the oldest legal codes known, and stele like this one were used to promote it publicly. The image at the top shows the king receiving his law from a god, which not only gives it a sacred authority beyond human objection, it establishes him as a direct link to divine will. His authority, like his law, transcends the human.

Of course, if this god is unreal, the system has a problem.

The careers of Hegel and Marx unfolded at a specific time in European history, and, despite their claims of universality, are highly contextually determined. The Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution brought wholesale technological and social transformation, but the social criticism targeted the ideological and social structures of the Ancien Régime. Given the close links between monarchy and Church in early modern Europe, it was strategically necessary to undermine the supernatural basis of this authority. Abolish the sacred altogether, and the entire Ancien Régime apparatus disappears like smoke.

The crowning of Charles the Bald, flanked by Popes Gelasisus I. and Gregory I, Sacramentary of Charles the Bald, c. 869, BNF Latin 1141, fol. 2v 

Metaphysically, the image of God crowning the Carolingian emperor directly is identical to Hammurabi receiving his law from the gods. But in the context of medieval Europe, the divine power is Christian. The notion that the monarch divinely supported was known as the Divine Right of Kings in the Middle Ages, and tied the power of throne and Church together in a precursor to the Deep State. Therefore, to overthrow the social order, both had to go.

But that species-old desire for something bigger, something that gives purpose to the world, remains. Hegel’s non-Christian teleology attempts to have it both ways, before collapsing under the illogic of the spirit of history. The problem becomes critical for Marxism, however, since, as a materialist philosophy, it allows for no sacred or transcendent dimension. Dialectical materialism, or the self-detonating marriage of a transcendental, Idealist teleology and a materialist history is not a “synthesis’ in any realm but the imagination. It is not sufficient to state that opposites coexist; it is necessary to explain how this can serve as the basis of a philosophical system once is becomes apparent that neither history, nor any other process or generation, creation, or evolution, conforms to this structure. The appeal, of course, is that is allows those of limited intelligence to assuage their resentment by believing impossible things, at least until the sociopaths actually attempt to implement it...

Big fun in the Peoples' Paradise, Cambodia style

So to recap, Marx:

• believes opposites can be wished into coexistence despite all evidence to the contrary, because... Hegel
• fails to correctly characterize the historical development of the modern world
• fails to grasp experience-based learning
• fails to correctly identify the fault lines in society
• fails to acknowledge the biological realities of human social evolution
• proposes "solutions" that better suited to a different species on a distant world
• achieves statistically impressive 100% failure rate

And yet, no sooner does one dehumanizing Marxist dystopia collapse under the weight of collected atrocities, there is no shortage of mental deficients crying that next time will be different, and reality will finally conform to their wishes. Despite their professed materialism, these people exhibit a cultic belief in some sort of "True Marxism," separate from any historical manifestion or error. The system is empirically wrong to the point of not even offering a useful metaphor for historical pattern recognition, but has endured in ways that other historical errors, such as phlogiston and Piltdown Man, have not. There must be more to this than another discredited philosophy. 

M&M ad by Clemenger BBDO, Melbourne, Australia

The persistence of propagandistic imagery from the blood-drenched Marxist past is strange. Are people so stupid that they overlook a grinding, dehumanizing nightmare of shattered spirits and mass graves because of a cool visual?

A familiar pattern emerges. This isn’t philosophy, it is faith, only one where “God” is a pallid fantasy of impossible secular transcendence, and the acolytes capable of depravity unchecked by any external moral code. Philosophically, the impossibility of a fusion of teleology and materialism is a terminal error, but it is no more an obstacle to faith than problems dating the Flood in Genesis. “As Marx says” is treated with scriptural reverence, rather than the more appropriate "so what" or “who cares.”  Marxism offers the satisfying feeling of initiation into hidden wisdom by claiming to puncture a false consciousness, and the moral superiority of a catechistic adherence to a fictional equality of outcome utterly at odds with any natural process ever observed. However, unlike religion, it asks nothing of its morally preening zealots except violence and “revolution.”

Lenin's Tomb. If there was any question that Marxism is an article of faith...

There is an overt connection between Marxism and the early theorists of Postmodernism, though the latter would never openly refer to history as teleological. The term "Postmodernism" was actually coined by Jean-François Lyotard, a thinker who attempted to link social and technological changes to what is essentially a new conception of human nature. Although slightly predating the internet, Lyotard saw an increasingly electronic, connected, and media-filtered culture as transforming the individual human subject into a  sort of decentered information packet potentially existing anywhere, but nowhere in particular. On a general level, this is not that different from Guy De Bord’s Society of the Spectacle or Jean Baudrillard’s notion of the simulacrum; both of which posit societal transformation from an authentic world of organic, hands on experience to a technologically mediated world of inauthentic interchangeable impressions. Insofar as they provide insight into the fabric of contemporary culture, these works are valuable, although many of their revelations had been anticipated by visual artists. 

Andy Warhol, Marilyn Diptych, 1962, oil, acrylic, and silkscreen on enamel on canvas, two panels 2.05 × 1.44 m Tate Gallery, London

Warhol's genius was to predict the nature of celebrity in a mass media age. "Marilyn" is nothing more than a an image, replicated over and over until her moment passes and she fades into memory. His notion of "15 minutes of fame" seems especially prescient in an era of reality television and YouTube stars. The conception of identity as an empty, replicated image is fundamentally Postmodern.

The problem with Postmodern theory is that the contemporary cultural environment is presented as an inevitable transformation in  basic human nature that seems almost metaphysical, rather than an artificial and rather fragile electronic web orchestrated by humans. And somehow all the theorists presume the same endpoint: the dissolution of the human individuation, responsibility, and agency for a superficial system of flickering signs with no connection to anything beyond themselves. The appeal of these "thinkers" despite the fact that what they describe isn't happening, suggests that we are drifting into the realm of wishful thinking and faith. If the development of communications technology is transforming us into disembodied memes, why are basic human instincts like primate dominance and in-grouping so prevalent on the internet? If a Postmodern state is inevitable, how is the US economy adding tens of thousands of manufacturing jobs per month? It’s a pretty feeble zeitgeist that can be exorcised with a tax cut and trade policy. Could it be that the Postmodern world isn’t inevitable, but the result of control of central nodes of key cultural institutions and decades of terrible politics?

https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2017/04/fewer-lobbyists-more-money-whats-going-on/

The idea that government and big business represent adversarial interests is a canard that is long past its sell-by date. 






Although Lyotard included Marxism among the Modernist grand narratives rejected by Postmodernism, the two "systems" actually mirror each other structurally and are historically linked. Both dissolve the integrity and dignity of the human individual by subordinating it to some inexorable substructure (to use Marx's term) of existence, be that economic relations or technological mediation. Both are incoherent in treating an evolving system created and maintained by human effort as something that transcends human agency rather than proves it. Culture is a vast web of interlocking decisions, some free, some coerced, that exceeds the ability of an individual to fully grasp, but the unpredictability of countless interlacing butterfly effects is the opposite of the inevitability of transcendence. In fact, inevitabilities do not require fierce, orchestrated institutional pressure or fake news.

Steve Jobs' remarkable stream of innovations, and Apple's relatively scanty product development record since his passing suggests that the individual consciousness remains essential in an information age.







Beyond structural similarities, there are direct links between Postmodernism and the Marxist culture critiques that proliferated in the wake of the Frankfurt School. Postmodern theorists routinely  describe the transformation of authentic experience into superficial sign systems in terms of commodification, or economic equivalency, which is exactly how Marx described the transformation of traditional labor in the factories of the Industrial Revolution. The idea is that converting something into a common measure of personal valuation robs it of "authenticity," a transformation so implausible that even countless evocations of The Philosopher's Name can't make it so. Evaluating something through an agreed-upon mechanism of exchange does not eliminate differences between things; if it did, there would be no desire to make an exchange in the first place. Likewise, the idea that a digital world is somehow undifferentiated requires almost willful blindness to the highly individuated behavior patterns in the on-line world. Even the vaunted Postmodern "cyborg", the transformative merger of human and technology is just a machine user.

Leonardo da Vinci, Design for a Flying Machine, c. 1488

Humans have used technological means to enhance their abilities since the first hominid picked up a stick. 








The lure of an imaginary order beyond individual human existence is the age-old desire for transcendence. Whether God, the Forms, the Spirit of History, nineteenth-century economics, technological mediation, the one constant is the prioritization of some absolute above human self-determination, or even suffering. Where Marxism and Postmodernism profess to be different is in their rejection of higher meaning or values beyond material reality; their transcendences identify as secular. That secular transcendence is self-contradictory matters little when you can stand on the authority of a Marx or Baudrillard.

In all seriousness, the problem lies in Marx's uncritical adoption of Hegelian dialectic and teleology, while rejecting the quasi-religious idealism that they were based upon. At that point, the logic self-detonated, and the historical model became self-evidently wrong. When Postmodernism adopted a Marxist notion of inevitable historical progress towards some end state, it also imported a trace of Hegelian idealism that is diametrically opposed to its stated understanding of the nature of reality as atheistic and “scientifically” determined. Something can’t be inevitable and purely materialistic; either history is driven by a higher power that you can access and understand, or else there is no fixed endpoint. Postmodernity literally requires believing in contradictory things at the same time.

Exposing the delusional faith in secular transcendence that floats through history on the imaginary authority of “Hegel and Marx” is an example of applied deconstructive criticism. Deconstruction examines texts and other forms of discourse for internal contradictions but also offers a way to identify how impossible beliefs persist through time. Derrida proposed something called the Trace, an illusion of meaning that derives from past usage but was never actually possible, which fits the echo of Hegelian teleology and dialectic in the Marxist aspects of Postmodern theory like a glove. For Derrida, the Trace is the collective fantasy that allows us to act as if language means something outside of itself, which is itself an article of faith, though he hides it better than most. Yet one need not accept that all communication is fundamentally meaningless to see that Postmodernism as a historical concept certainly is; a house of mirrors atop a non-existent foundation that requires propagandistic deception and acts of faith to maintain. The question is not whether Postmodernity is inevitable, but why  intelligent people would go to such lengths to promote dehumanizing, civilization-destroying falsehoods?

Structuralism and Poststructuralism: Secular Transcendence and False Consciousness

Postmodernism is often confused with poststructuralism, a roughly contemporary development in linguistic and literary studies that overlaps with it in significant ways. It would be incomplete, but not inaccurate, to call poststructuralism a postmodern linguistic philosophy, and sometimes the two terms appear to be used interchangeably. While this is not the place to attempt a full accounting of the murky details of their differences, it is possible to sketch out a rough distinction that is suitable for our purposes, so long as it is not taken as more definitive than it is. Postmodernism carries an implicit historical dimension within its name, as the period or era that comes after modernity, although this raises problems of its own that will be addressed in a later entry. Poststructuralism also contains the temporal adjective “post”, but what is being followed in this case is a system of thought or theoretical approach rather than a specific historical period. The former is connected in  significant ways to the particular conditions of contemporary life, while the latter is development of what was presented as a universally applicable model of knowledge and communication.

Thomas Cole, The Dream of the Architect, 1840, oil on canvas, Toledo Museum of Art

Cole depicts architecture as a succession of historical period styles. Postmodernism fits uncomfortably at the end of historical timelines such as this. Poststructuralism, on the other hand, is universal in its claims about language and representation.

Poststructuralism, as the name implies, developed in reaction to structuralism, a twentieth-century intellectual movement in linguistics, the social sciences, and philosophy, and it shares important assumptions with its predecessor. Structuralists viewed all human action and understanding as products of broad patterns or structures rather than collections of random, individualized activities. For example, pioneering figures in structuralist anthropology such as Claude Levi-Strauss and James Frazier, observed similar myths and rituals in very different cultures. The obvious problem with this approach – promoting broad, hopelessly oversimplified “structural interpretations” that ignore meaningful distinctions – meant little next to the siren song of hidden insights. Because structuralism was not simply pattern recognition, but a claim to grasp the true nature of human experience beneath the appearances of everyday life. The structures are what constitute the fundamental level of reality, while what we take for the real world, including our existences as autonomous, free-willed individuals, are merely an illusion. Ironically, this places structuralism within a larger “structure” of intellectual movements peddling secret knowledge into “the true nature of things” that stretches back to the dawn of history.

The craving for a deeper meaning behind the random and chaotic world of appearances seems as old as humanity. It is certainly at the heart of any religious system that posits a divine order behind our own, and can likewise be seen in the contemporary notion of biological determinism, which holds that our genes are the true source of our natures. While you can’t get much further apart than the inner depths of the genome and the outer reaches of the heavens, both postulate a relationship in which our conscious impression of the world is merely a flawed expression of an invisible primal substructure. Western philosophy began with the Pre-socratics offering up various `candidates for ultimate reality before Plato devised his concept of the Forms, timeless, ideal essential versions of the shoddy, superficial world that our bodies inhabit. Plato’s philosophy is dualistic, meaning that is considers the human to be made up of two parts: body and soul, matter and spirit, with the latter being the source of knowledge. The notion of the soul striving to escape the bonds of the material world and rejoin its divine source is an essentially religious perspective, and Plato’s ideas became the foundation of a mystical philosophy known as Neoplatonism in late antiquity, before profoundly influencing the development of Christianity. Eastern philosophy began with sages such as Gautama Buddha and Mahavira abandoning worldly attachments for meditative unity with the infinite oneness behind visible reality. Desire for some higher meaning or purpose behind the chaos and decay of the everyday life is so ubiquitous throughout human history that it seems reasonable to assume some sort of innate human drive for transcendence. Structuralism would appear to be one answer to the question of what happens to this impulse in a culture where metaphysical beliefs such as religion or mystical enlightenment have become unfashionable. 

Seated Buddha, 1st to mid-2nd century AD, Gandhara, bronze with traces of gold leaf, 16.8 cm high, New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art

The affinities between ancient Greek and Buddhist thought are apparent in the remarkable Greco-Buddhist artworks that appeared in Gandhara on the border of the Indian and Hellenistic worlds.

The idea of secular transcendence, of a higher order behind experience that is entirely material in nature is paradoxical, but its appeal reaches far beyond the structuralists. Higher, “special” understanding without the humility of subordinating the ego to a greater power, or the grinding years of hard mental work and self-abnegation, is intoxicating to the poseurs and careerists in our intellectually diminished institutions. Spiritual matters fall outside the scope of empirical evidence and logical interpretation, which is why this blog will leave specifically religious questions to the realm of faith. It does, however, require an almost pathological degree of narcissism to seriously think that the clever insight of a single, finite, historically limited human subject could provide a precise, actionable summary of the fundamental nature of reality. 

The Flammarion engraving, from Camille Flammarion's L'atmosphère météorologie populaire, 1888.

This famous anonymous print captures the seductive allure of secret knowledge. Unfortunately, structuralist "transcendence" is relatively lacking in splendor.

No system of thought more closely resembles pathology than Marxism, a blood-drenched abattoir of a philosophy that has claimed more lives than any other ideology and is an important precursor to both structuralism and Postmodernism. On its face, its enduring popularity is difficult to believe. Marx allowed for no transcendence or divinity in his materialist world view yet saw no problem with positing a comically oversimplified economic relationship as the deepest substructure of human society on the basis of no evidence whatsoever. One would think the fact that he was simply mistaken would have dampened his popularity, but the opposite is true. His followers have continually attempted to implement his absurd misconceptions of human reality with two universally consistent outcomes: inevitable failures, and increasingly murderous frenzy as the failures mount.

Big fun in the People's Paradise, Soviet style.

There are actually several reasons that account for the sanguinary appeal of Marxism, beyond innate human depravity. Superficially, it aligns with a naïve impression of fairness, while tapping into the understandable anger and resentment of the disadvantaged. The childish simplicity of its basic precepts is within the grasp of the most ignorant, while the loathsome notion of false consciousness – the accusation that those rejecting the dismal, dishonest, two-dimensional characterizations are deluded – offers the dopamine rush of secret wisdom to those who submit. There is a similarity between the acceptance of Marxist fantasy and the way in which cults require their members to affirm obvious falsehoods as a sign of surrendering the self. Observing the behavior of these fantasists supports the hypothesis that they are disengaged from reality in ways that makes them especially vulnerable to manipulation and potentially prone to atrocities. Marxism is also a centrally planned and administrated system, which creates nodes of control that are easily leveraged by sociopaths who steer the useful idiots to their destruction with false blandishments and propaganda. The true danger in such a system is in the application it to real lived experience. The facile "theorizings" of a Marx or a Marcuse are easily ignored when confined to the world of philosophical thought experiment. But when the full force of state power imposes their barbarous “solutions” on the complexities and compromises on human society? 

Big fun in the People's Paradise, Venezuela style. 

It's almost like there's a pattern lying beneath the surface...

Structuralism follows Marxism in positing a deeper, though still purely material, level of reality beneath a false consciousness but recognizes that the structures of the former are much more complex than Marx’s foolish “means of production”. In other words, it maintains the form of secular transcendence while refining the quality of analysis. Whereas Marx proposed a crude economic relationship as the ultimate basis of reality, structuralism grew out of linguistic theory; particularly the speculations of Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913). Saussure devised a new characterization of language as a self-contained system or structure, rather than an accumulation of individual symbols that are paired with and signify some concept(s) or thing(s). In both cases signs are arbitrary – tree and δέντρο appear different but refer to more or less the same thing – but the latter is essentially positive in that it treats each word as pointing to something or things other than itself. Saussure, on the other hand, sees language as a structuralist system, complete in itself and not pointing to anything external. This is not a surprising leap; language has rules of grammar and syntax and a network of informal conventions around connotation and figurative language that all suggest a systematic rule set. Even the assemblage of linguistic communications from letters to words to sentences and beyond reflects a structural operation. Yet for Saussure, these operations represent the sole ground upon which linguistic meaning happens.

Consider the following two sentences:

One is clearly literal and the other figurative, but the important question is how we determine in what sense the word is being used.  

He actually isn't wrong here.

In each case, we judge the meaning of the word on the basis of their role in the larger sentence. One pairing is literally incorrect and the other is not, so it is the role in a larger structure rather than anything inherent in the words themselves that determines how they are working in each instance. While it is true that this distinction is based on the truth-value of references to something outside the system, this can be set aside for the moment while we consider the primary enduring legacy of structuralist thought: If linguistic signs are arbitrary elements within a closed system, then the only sources of meaning are the operations of the system itself, or whatever it is that distinguishes one particular sign from all the other elements in the structure. In other words, meaning is transformed, on an essential level, from a positive association into an expression of difference. At heart, it is merely a void, or lack of similarity to anything else (within the system), rather than any sort of identifiable quality or essence. Any concept of “meaning” based on a positive identity is therefore illusory, a false consciousness masking a fundamental state of separation. 

  

Structural linguistics are like a spherical maze: a nearly endless array of structured paths and choices leading nowhere.

While there is value in systematic analyses of linguistic function, structuralism, like “theory” in general, manages to transform interesting observations into ossified, simplistic formulae that fail to capture the complexity and nuance of that they purport to theorize. It is simply not smart enough to account for the fullness of human reality, which is why in invariably fails miserably whenever implemented in real life. The world is infinitely complex, an aggregate of countless unpredictable actions and reactions, and yet patterns are visible within this chaos that enable understanding and even prediction. Structuralist thought, like secular transcendence in general, is sensitive to patterns (or, more accurately, a pattern) but is incapable of accounting for the complexity that necessarily limits the applicability of any theoretical abstraction. It's not a square peg that it is trying to jam into a round hole, as much as a flock of butterflies. Nevertheless, these structures were awarded the unearned truth value and almost totemic reverence that is given to any system of secular transcendence. In fact, slavish adherence to the structuralist model actually led educated individuals to claim, straight faced, that works of literature do not originate in an author but are aspects of the structure expressing themselves through a certain person. Were this the case, perhaps I would be the system expressing an antidote to shoddy thinking.  

  

Giotto, The Exorcism of the Demons at Arezzo, 1297-99, fresco, 270 x 230 cm, from the Legend of St Francis series, Upper Church, San Francesco, Assisi

History is replete with dishonest peddlers of secret knowledge into the true nature of things. The forms vary, but the cure remains constant. 

This detour through structuralism is necessary to properly contextualize poststructuralism, an approach most often connected to Jacques Derrida, who is a legitimate handful to deal with, and the subject of more than one future post. Unlike many Postmodern heroes, Derrida is devilishly clever and very hard to pin down, but the structuralist notion that meaning is fundamentally an absence/void/aporia defined only by difference, is one unifying theme throughout his work. One problem with structuralism is that is cannot account for change, and it is well known historically that language evolves rather than remaining in fixed structures. Derrida imagines a system that remains essentially cut off from any external reference but is fluid and evolving. A philosophical oversimplification, though not an unfair one, would be to say he marries Saussure to Heidegger's notion of being as something constantly unfolding, rather than a fixed state, in our time-bound world. However, where Heidegger imagines some sort of transcendence or ultimate reality beyond the range of our understanding or representation (in the later stages of his career, Heidegger recalls Plotinus, or even Eckhart, for the mystical cast to his thought), for Derrida, the recursive, structuralist notion of language is all there is. It is not transcendence hiding behind our flawed apprehension, but an endless, self-referential chain that ultimately leads to nowhere.   

Luca Signorelli, Sermon and Deeds of the Antichrist, detail, 1499-1504, S. Brixio Chapel, Orvieto Cathedral

There is something diabolical in the way Derrida weaves complicated textual webs that hint at meaning, but are, at the end of the day, purely self-referential. The jury is out on whether or not he invalidated "meaning" in general, but it is clear that his work at least manages to remain resolutely solipsistic.

By setting structuralism in motion, Derrida was able to account for some of other shortcomings in the older system. Returning, for a moment, to the comparison between the two sentences made earlier, we will recall that we differentiated between literal and figurative language on the basis of their references to things or subjects outside the system. This is a problem, since the very concept of structuralist difference depends on the complete lack of external associations. Derrida maneuvered around this with something he called “the Trace,” a ghostly hint of positive reference based on previous associations and usages, despite those earlier references being no more than false assumptions or illusions. While there is no outside the text in reality, as he famously remarked,  the Trace preserves the illusion of external meaning to enable the functional interactions that make up society. 

There is a sinister genius in this formation, since it accounts for the sense of meaning we feel in lived experience, while retaining the notion that reality as we assume it to be is fundamentally empty. This right here is a primary root of all the attacks on culture and knowledge associated with poststructuralist thought, which differ wildly in detail but a common form:

A closer glance reveals a familiar pattern: a false consciousness of the way things are that masks and interacts with the hidden true nature of reality. In other words, a secular transcendence; a top down system where highly speculative, and quite often spurious readings of various phenomena enjoy a toxic, unearned reverence. Derrida’s obsessive insistence on the primacy of language in human communication alone ought to disqualify his speculations from serious consideration for real world guidance. 

Wall Painting With Horses, Rhinoceroses, and Aurochs, c. 32,000-30,000 BC, Chauvet Cave. Vallon-Pont-d’Arc, Ardèche Gorge, France

This painting is over 32,000 years old and greatly predates complex language development. Historical and archaeological indicate that mimetic representation, or imitative associations with external objects, is the primary human basis for interacting with the world. This is exactly the sort of developing factual picture that totalizing ideologies ignore. It is true that this knowledge post-dates Saussure, but any modern thinker who proposes a linguistic foundation for understanding without addressing human cognition is deliberately dishonest. 

At the same time, Derridean thought has spawned some useful critical tools that are highly effective in the appropriate circumstances. The most famous of these is commonly known as deconstruction for its use of internal contradictions within a text to undermine its assertions, rather than attacking it from the outside with competing facts and arguments. The next post will adapt a  deconstructive method to lay bare the fundamental incoherence and hypocrisy at the heart of Postmodern theory.