For the past half-century, postmodernist thinkers have been trying to discredit truth, identity and reality. Identity is a straitjacket, and truth is just some middle-aged academic’s opinion. As for reality, it has become as obsolete as dressing for dinner. Objectivity is a myth in the service of the ruling powers. If only we could shed these illusions, we could revel in a world of infinite possibility. Instead of waking up to the same tedious old self each morning, we could flit from one identity to another as easily as David Bowie. The final liberation is that anything can mean anything else. Once you kick away fixed meanings and firm foundations, you are free to enjoy yourself. Postmodernism is meant to be fun, even if a current of nihilism runs steadily beneath it. As Stuart Jeffries suggests in this splendidly readable survey, there is something vacuous at the heart of its exuberance.
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Even so, postmodernism is intended to be subversive. Since civilisation works by order and authority, challenging these things is bound to seem disruptive. The trouble is that neoliberalism challenges them too. Nothing is more fluid and flexible than the marketplace. Nobody on Wall Street believes in absolute truth. The true anarchists are the free marketeers. So is postmodernism a critique of the status quo or a capitulation to it?
Perhaps the ultimate postmodern irony is to be both – to sell out to the system while sending it up. It becomes impossible to distinguish the boss from the bohemian. Postmodernism may be playful, witty and depthless, but so is the British prime minister. It is unashamedly populist, defiantly embracing the everyday, but so is Nigel Farage. As Jeffries points out, Steve Jobs was “selling conformity masquerading as personal liberation”. He may have thought of himself as a hippie, but the Chinese factories that made his products had suicide nets beneath the windows of its dormitories for exploited workers. Madonna is seen by some as a feminist guerrilla fighter and by others as peddling rape fantasies, along with the most successful coffee table book (Sex) of all time. Post-truth politics may have started on the left bank of the Seine, but they ended up in the White House.
Some studies of postmodernism are cultural, some are historical and a few of them are philosophical. The achievement of this book is to roll all three approaches into one. This is rare, because those who know about Sid Vicious may not be avid readers of Michel Foucault, while those who are deep in Jacques Derrida are not always fans of Chris Kraus’s I Love Dick. Jeffries packs a remarkable knowledge of postmodern culture into these pages, from punk, hip-hop, film and photography to anti-psychiatry, the Rushdie fatwa and queer theory. All this is set in the context of the neoliberalism of the 1970s, showing how a revamped capitalism gave birth to a culture of the flexible and provisional – of short-termism, endless consumption and multiple identities.
Postmodernism may be a historical fact, but it finds history itself a bore. The past is simply a collection of styles to be recycled, while the future will be just like the present only with a richer array of options. There are no more grand narratives like the idea of progress, no momentous transformation to be feared or hoped for. The point is not to change the world but to parody it. History has come to an end with Ben & Jerry’s and Grand Theft Auto.
When two aircraft slammed into the World Trade Center, a new grand narrative – the conflict between the west and Islamism – began to unfold. For some observers, this spelled the end of the postmodern era. Jeffries himself is not so sure: it may have lost some of its youthful zest, but its malign spirit still lives on. Postmodern ideas certainly survive in the current scepticism of truth. For a whole generation of young people, simply to have a conviction is to be guilty of dogmatism. When asked about his convictions, Boris Johnson replied that he had picked up a couple of them for speeding. To suggest that someone’s opinion is false is a form of discrimination. Every viewpoint should be respected, except for racism, sexism, homophobia, elitism and antisemitism, which are deeply offensive. So they are, but how do you decide this if moral objectivity is for the birds? There are writers today who rightly insist that women have been shackled and humiliated throughout history, yet who put words like truth and reality in scare quotes.
The most useless theory of knowledge is one that prevents us from saying with reasonable certainty, for example, that a great many Africans were once enslaved by the west. Yet you can find such theories of knowledge in most seminar rooms, even if those who tout them can rightly think of little more outrageous than slavery. Perhaps Jeffries’s compelling critique will help to sort them out.