Post-structural theorizing precludes a positive vision for state-centered liberation

(John, “Radical Intellectuals and the Subversion of Progressive Politics,” p. 59-61)

All this said, it would be a mistake to hold that no post-structuralist has ever contributed anything valuable to the history Of ideas. Our think- ing has been improved by Foucault's insights into disciplinary appara- tuses and the epistemic preconditions for knowledge in the humanities, by Lyotard's prescient depiction of the postmodern condition of knowl- edge, and by the late Derrida critique of human violence against other animals. Yet such contributions, taken as a whole, have been quite modest. Moreover, they have come to us almost exclusively from "first wave" of post-structuralist thinkers, not their subsequent, mediocre epigones. The latter have for years "playfully" maligned truth, all the while sol- emnly discussing such weightless metaphysical conceits as the Multitude, phallologocentrism, diffrance, cyborgs, rhizomes, "the lack," etc.—the contemporary theorist's version of ectoplasm and ether. Undoubtedly, post-structuralist theorists have craved connection and a sense of rele- vance. They too have wanted to "make a difference" in a world where paths to effectual political and social struggle have been occluded or blocked. Alas, when it has come to helping the Left develop a more effectual praxis, their doctrine has been abysmally unhelpful—maddeningly vague where it ought to be most explicit—e.g., on the matter of ethical values and strategic goals 91—and exasperatingly proscriptive and confining where it should be most open-ended—e.g., on concrete matters of praxis, where perpetually warns us away from organizational and ideological unity in favor of dispersion and anti-strategicism—regardless of historical context of need. In the face of the vast social, ecological, and political problems of day, postmodernism has virtually nothing of interest to say. And here, our the doctrine truly does distinguish itself: for unlike every other political ideology of the modern era, post-structuralism offers a coherent theory neither of civil society nor of the state. The crisis of Marxist socialism after the end of the Cold War, coupled with the broad decline of left social movements in the same period, left a gaping hole in theories of praxis, one that post-structuralists were happy to fill. Confronted with the waning of the socialist tradition and work- ers' movements, on the one hand, and the rise of the political right and religious fundamentalism on the other, a generation of younger leftists understandably sought solace in theories that had at least the appearance of the new. In retrospect, though, post-structuralism may have been a form of collective psychic and affective flight from the despair and anxiety and denial generated by the loss of the dream of 1968. As Isaac Balbus observes: "Both the longing for (an idealized version of) what has been lost and the (seemingly) sober message that nothing valuable was ever really lost ward off the sorrow—and the guilt—that would inevitably accompany a fully embodied awareness Of the magnitude Of our loss. Both serve, in other words, to defend against the deeply difficult but absolutely indispensable task of mourning (what we used to call) the Movement." According to Balbus, then, "the atrophy of our imagination is a symptom of our political depression. "92 If Balbus is right, then postmodernism can perhaps be seen as a maladaptive response by critical intellectuals to their political obsolescence—an expression of what Herbert Marcuse termed "repressive desublimation," or the release of instincts that, in another con- text, would be life-affirming, but in a context of pervasive domination become socially destructive. If Marxists in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were overly con- fident about the power of thought to arrive at mastery of the totality— and they often were—the present generation of theorists committed the opposite mistake, stripping critical thought of its ability to know the world. Postmodernism is a doctrine at war with intelligibility. Conceptual confusion is both its message and its method. Knowing and not-knowing, liberation and oppression, truth and untruth—such elementary and cru- cial distinctions are treated as naive constructs by the post-structuralist. In place of intelligibility, postmodernists celebrate cognitive confusion, "paralogy," and an aesthetics of fragmentation," seeking to muddy rather than clarify history.94 Like the cruder Marxism that post-structuralism in fact developed in reaction against—but also, in part, arose out of—its doctrines have reduced complex social and historical problems to a cat- echism of predigested formulas, mechanistic banalities, and unexamined and frequently tautological propositions concerning the nature of society, power, and the subject. But theory is on the contrary at its best when it serves as a paradigm of knowing, in the Kuhnian sense of a perceptual framework providing the scientist or observer with a means to discern patterns of meaning or order amid the chaos. As Kuhn argued, "Neither scientists nor laymen learn to see the world piece-meal or item by item ... Rather both scientists and laymen sort out whole areas together from the flux of experience."" What paradigmatic theories do, then, is to provide the engaged observer with a means for discriminating between useful and unuseful data. As Antonio Gramsci wrote in his prison notebooks: Reality is teeming with the most bizarre coincidences, and it is the theo- retician's task to find in this bizarreness new evidence for his theory, to "translate" the elements of historical life into theoretical language, but not vice versa, making reality conform to an abstract schema. (Leonardo knew how to discover number in all the manifestations of cosmic life, even when the eyes of the ignorant saw only change and disorder.)96 In Gramsci's view, then, the proper role of the "critical" intellectual, the revolutionary, is to discern patterns of significance in history and culture, to identifr more or less promising lines of action, and to build the basis for an alternative form of popular consent. Effective political knowl- edge must be rooted in perception of the totality or Gestalt of historical probabilities—in the complex interplay of economic and cultural factors, class interests, and human passion and will, through time. Only by inquir- ing closely into the empirical determinations of power, are we also able to perceive active historical possibilities—lines of force, strategic openings and opportunities, and areas of contradiction in the system. It is not a question o four being able to predict the future "scientifically," but ofcom- prehending as best we can the subtle combination of forces that structure the field of meaning and give rise to social phenomena. It is meanwhile the normative commitments of the critical intellectual—the subjective will to know the world in order to change it—that enable this way of seeing. It is this ability to see the world properly, in order to transform it, that post-structuralism has stripped us of. What we need, and urgently, is not merely a repudiation of the post-structuralist canon, but a bold new theoretical project—a paradigmatic theory of action that yokes materi- alist analysis to an unabashedly moral, utopian, ecological vision. Such a project, closely interwoven with practice, would both take up and go well beyond the lost thread of Marxist—humanist and socialist—feminist thought. 'The work of our combined intellects must be to map the totality of oppression and liberation—not by seeking the Holy Grail Of a sci- entific theory of everything, but by establishing an ethical horizon for liberatory practice as such. Only by returning, in this way, to holism in theory and practice might we begin to undo the terrible damage inflicted by nihilism on our praxis, and on truth.