Throughout history humans have constructed grand narratives to make sense of the world around them – Christianity, the Enlightenment, and Marxism, to name just a few. But in our age of skepticism, belief in grand narratives has declined. We are left with no clear story about who we are or where we are going. In this article, Matt McManus argues that the sense of meaningless and despair caused by the decline of grand narratives has been coopted by nationalist and authoritarian movements. McManus proposes that the answer is not another grand narrative, but a communal politics to fill the void of our postmodern age.
In his classic book The Postmodern Condition the French philosopher Jean Francois Lyotard described postmodernity in terms of declining faith in “meta” or “grand” narratives. As the name suggests grand narratives are not ordinary stories. They are instead epic accounts of the world which try to encompass enormous swathes of events. Often transdisciplinary and combining moral purpose with descriptive ambition, successful grand narratives have long had an enduring grip on the imagination. They include many of the world’s religions, which account for everything from the creation of the world to the higher ends human beings are supposed to pursue. Many teleological visions of history are couched in grand narratives, including those that emerged out of the early and mature Enlightenment. This includes everything from liberal paeans to the inexorability of progress through the spread of rationality, to orthodox Marxist convictions about the inevitable triumph of the working classes and the emancipation of human potential through an ordained transition to communism. Often Lyotard and his followers conceive of grand narratives as fundamentally optimistic. But they can also take the form of more reactionary laments about decline and fall. From Nietzsche’s anxieties about the onset of the “last man” at the end of a long process of historical decadence, to Eric Voeglin’s borderline Biblical account of modernity’s descent in secular Gnosticism, reactionary grand narratives of loss are a dime a dozen.
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In the 20th century there was a transition from modernity to post-modernity defined by declining public faith in all forms of grand narratives.
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The Fall of Grand Narratives
Lyotard’s core point in The Postmodern Condition was that at some point in the 20th century there was a transition from modernity to post-modernity defined by declining public faith in all forms of grand narratives. Incredulity replaced optimism, and faith transvaluated into cynicism. This of course didn’t mean that people stopped thinking through the world in terms of narratives. Lyotard recognized that we are inherently story-telling creatures, whether we’re narrativizing the immanentization of the eschaton or our bad experiences at a family reunion. But grand narratives were no longer the kinds of stories anyone found appealing; our deepening incredulity meant that they hardly even made sense to post-modern generations except as some kind of bizarre relic. Instead, inspired by the Ludwig Wittgenstein of Philosophical Investigations, Lyotard felt that the stories we would now tell – whether about truth, morality, or the meaning of the world – would be far more small scale. Different communities and individuals would tell themselves distinct stories that reflected their forms of life. This would in turn reflect the deepening pluralism characteristic of late 20th-century society, where comparative cultural homogeneity was splintering under enormous pressures ranging from political discontent to the radical transformations enacted by capitalism. So instead of rallying around big, unifying narratives about religious salvation or secular progress, different subcultures would organize by telling themselves stories about everything from sports to who the best punk band was.
One of the ironies of Lyotard’s analysis was that, in describing an epochal transition to postmodernity as declining faith in grand narratives, he himself articulated a very new grand narrative. This irony wasn’t entirely unrecognized on Lyotard, whose painful transition from deep Marxist convictions was widely acknowledged. And appropriately, much of the best writing on postmodernity was by unreconstructed Marxists critical of the transition – a fact very frequently lost on commentators who talk manically about the dangers of “postmodern neo-Marxism.” These included the recently deceased Fredric Jameson in his classic Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Terry Eagleton in The Illusions of Postmodernism, and David Harvey in The Condition of Postmodernity.
Each of these Marxist authors claimed that the transition to postmodernity owed a great deal to the ascendance of a particularly encompassing form of neoliberal capitalism, along with the Thatcherite insistence that there was “no alternative” to their worldview. The how is quite complicated. But to give one example; neoliberal economics tended to emphasize certain forms of “choice” over others. This of course included consumer goods, but also increasingly things like lifestyle choices, professions, country of residence, and much more. Marxist critics that as this “ethic” of consumer choice came to colonize more and more parts of the culture, it induced citizens to take the same approach to morals that they did to buying ice cream: everyone had their own opinion about what was best, and who was to say which opinion was right? In his classic After Virtue the Catholic Marxist Alasdair MacIntyre described this as the triumph of “emotivism.” But crucially, while choice about values and mores was acceptable under the conditions of postmodern neoliberalism, the choice to live under a different economic and political regime was not on the table. When Mark Fisher talked about “the slow cancellation of the future” he was referring to depression that resulted from declining faith in the most important of grand narratives; that there even could be a future that was better than the past. Capitalist realism was the dreary view that it was easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. The result is that any major moral condemnations become impossible to take sincerely – they either become projected “ironically” or through nostalgic pastiches of symbols drawn from previous eras.
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One of the prevailing problems with postmodernity is the lack of “time consciousness” – the sense that we still live in history and have it in our power to remake the world. This lack of time consciousness contributes to feelings of powerlessness and the retreat into insularity so characteristic of postmodernity.
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There is an enormous amount to admire in the Marxist critics of postmodernity, but their accounts aren’t perfect. They often overstated the importance of political economic factors relative to others. Religious commentators like Charles Taylor and Alasdair MacIntyre incorporated non-material factors in their analysis of the transition from modernity to postmodernity, stressing how the decline of religious beliefs and the advent of scientism also played an important role. The view that the world is nothing more than matter in motion, with meaning subjectively ascribed to it by human subjects, seems to open the door to various forms of moral relativism. More thoughtful conservative critics of postmodernity like Peter Lawler also argued that various forms of permissive liberalism opened the door to declining faith in grand narratives. Governed by a political ethic focused on maximal tolerance without moral judgement, individuals were told to express themselves without being bound to any kind of authoritative moral traditions. Far from being liberating, conservatives argued this was experienced as a loss of sources of identity. Where once people learned who they were by submitting to the dictums of nation and church, now they had nowhere to turn but their own, shallow hedonistic preferences. In my book The Emergence of Postmodernity I argue liberalism, capitalism and secularism all played a role in breeding postmodern culture (for worse and better, since there are many positive features to liberalism and secularism). I also stress how one of the prevailing problems with postmodernity is the lack of “time consciousness” – the sense that we still live in history and have it in our power to remake the world. This lack of time consciousness contributes to feelings of powerlessness and the retreat into insularity so characteristic of postmodernity.
The Future Uncancelled?
In her 2010 book Walled States, Waning Sovereignty political theorist Wendy Brown stresses how the passive nihilism inherent in postmodernity has produced unexpected results. Some of them include the retreat into relativism, small-scale language games, irony and insularity discussed above. But some of the nihilistic feelings have become far more active and pronounced. As many people feel increasingly powerless in the face of neoliberal plutocracy and capitalism entropy, they’ve turned to the last historical refuge of security: the nation-state and its leaders. Brown anticipated the push to nationalist and chauvinistic grand politics in the early 2010s, as people sought strength and community in Völkisch identities and the strongmen leaders who claimed to speak for them. This in turn meant a restoration of the kinds of “grand” narratives Lyotard thought we’d abandoned, but often of the most reactionary sort. Instead of progressive stories of hope and improvement, 21st-century reactionaries assembled narratives of ethnic decline and cultural decay that could only be offset by rejecting liberal weakness and restoring national strength and vitality.
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What is needed for progressives to transcend postmodernity is not so much a new grand narrative, as a narrative of hope.
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In all respects these forms of nationalist chauvinism and strongman politics – what I’ve called postmodern conservatism – were a “cure” far worse than the disease. They often replicated the worst features of what they were symptoms of; Trump’s division of the world into winners and losers itself echoed the worst “Greed is Good” mentalities of the neoliberal era he emerged from. But they reflected a desire for a more communal politics and culture of empowerment which was not being met by more liberal and progressive forces. Unless this desire is met by progressive, say through a liberal socialist programme, it will continue to be co-opted by the right. What is needed for progressives to transcend postmodernity is not so much a new grand narrative, as a narrative of hope. And we should hope one arrives.
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