The Modern Mind

by Peter Watson

  Derrida advanced a related but even more fundamental point. Throughout history, he said, writing was treated with less respect than oral speech, as somehow less reliable, less authoritative, less authentic.38 Combined with its ‘controlling’ aspects, this makes writing ‘alienating,’ doing ‘violence’ to experience. Derrida, like Lacan and Foucault especially, was struck by the ‘inexactitudes and imprecisions and contradictions of words,’ and he thought these shortcomings philosophically important. Going further into Lévi-Strauss’s text, he highlighted logical inconsistencies in the arguments, concepts that were limited or inappropriate. The Nambikwara, Derrida says, have all sorts of ‘decorations’ that, in a less ethnocentric person, might be called ‘writing.’ These include calabashes, genealogical trees, sketches in the soil, and so on, all of which undoubtedly have meaning. Lévi-Strauss’s writing can never catch these meanings, says Derrida. He has his own agenda in writing his memoir, and this leads him, more or less successfully, to write what he does. Even then, however, he makes mistakes: he contradicts himself, he makes things appear more black and white than they are, many words only describe part of the things they refer to. Again, all common sense. But again Derrida is not content with that. For him, this failure of complete representation is as important as it is inevitable. For Derrida, as with Lacan, Foucault, and Piaget, language is the most important mental construct there is, something that (perhaps) sets man apart from other organisms, the basic tool of thought and therefore essential – presumably – to reason (though also of corruption).39 For Derrida, once we doubt language, ‘doubt that it accurately represents reality, once we are conscious that all individuals are ethnocentric, inconsistent, incoherent to a point, oversimplifiers … then we have a new concept of man.’ Consciousness is no longer what it appears to be, nor reason, nor meaning, nor – even – intentionality.40 Derrida questions whether any single utterance by an individual can have one meaning even for that person. To an extent, words mean both more and less than they appear to, either to the person producing them or someone hearing or reading them.

  This gap, or ‘adjournment’ in meaning, he labelled the différance and it led on to the process Derrida called ‘deconstruction,’ which for many years proved inordinately popular, notorious even. As Christopher Johnson says, in his commentary on Derrida’s ideas, deconstruction was an important ingredient in the postmodern argument or sensibility, enabling as many readings of a text as there are readers.41 Derrida wasn’t being entirely arbitrary or perverse here. He meant to say (in itself dangerous) not only that people’s utterances have unconscious elements, but also that the words themselves have a history that is greater than any one person’s experience of those words, and so anything anyone says is almost bound to mean more than that person means. This too is no more than extended common sense. Where Derrida grows controversial, or non-commonsensical, is when he argues that the nature of language robs even the speaker of any authority over the meaning of what he or she says or writes.42 Instead, that ‘meaning resides in the structure of language itself: we think only in signs, and signs have only an arbitrary relationship to what they signify.’43 For Derrida, this undermines the very notion of philosophy as we (think we) understand it. For him there can be no progress in human affairs, no sense in which there is an accumulation of knowledge ‘where what we know today is “better,” more complete, than what was known yesterday.’ It is simply that old vocabularies are seen as dead, but ‘that too is a meaning that could change.’ On this account even philosophy is an imprecise, incoherent, and therefore hardly useful word.

  For Derrida, the chief aspect of the human condition is its ‘undecided’ quality, where we keep giving meanings to our experience but can never be sure that those meanings are the ‘true’ ones, and that in any case ‘truth’ itself is an unhelpful concept, which itself keeps changing.44 ‘Truth is plural.’ There is no progress, there is no one truth that, ‘if we read enough, or live life enough, we can finally grasp: everything is undecided and always will be.’ We can never know exactly what we mean by anything, and others will never understand us exactly as we wish to be understood, or think that we are being understood. That (maybe) is the postmodern form of anomie.

  Like Derrida, Louis Althusser was born in Algeria. Like Derrida, says Susan James, he was more Marxist than Marx, believing that not even the great revolutionary was ‘altogether aware of the significance of his own work.’ This led Althusser to question the view that the world of ideology and the empirical world are related. For example, ‘the empirical data about the horrors of the gulag do not necessarily lead one to turn against Stalin or the USSR. ‘For Althusser, thinking along the same lines as Derrida, empirical data do not carry with them any one meaning; therefore one can (and Althusser did) remain loyal to, say, Stalin and the ideology of communism despite disparate events that happened inside the territory under Stalin’s control. Althusser also took the view that history is overdetermined: so many factors contribute to one event, or phenomenon – be they economic, social, cultural, or political – that it is impossible to specify causes: ‘There is, in other words, no such thing as a capability of determining the cause of a historical event. Therefore one can decide for oneself what is at work in history, which decision then constitutes one’s ideology. Just as economic determinism cannot be proved, it cannot be disproved either. The theory of history is something the individual works out for himself; necessarily so, since it does not admit of empirical and rational démonstration.’45 In any case, Althusser says, individuals are so much the creation of the social structures they inhabit that their intentions are to be regarded as consequences, rather than causes, of social practice.46 More often than not, all societies – and especially capitalist societies – have what he calls Ideological State Apparatuses: the family, the media, schools, and churches, for example, which propagate and receive ideas, so much so that we are not really self-conscious agents. ‘We acquire our identity as a result of the actions of these apparatuses.’47 In Marxist terms, the key to Althusser is the relative autonomy of the superstructure, and he replaced the false consciousness of class, which Marx had made so much of, and ‘substituted the false consciousness of ideology and individual identity, the aim being to shake people out of their ideological smugness and create a situation where change could be entertained.’48 Unfortunately, his published ideas stopped in 1980 after he murdered his wife and was declared unfit to stand trial.

  With their scepticism about language, especially as it relates to knowledge and its links with power in the search for meaning, structuralism and deconstruction are the kin of cultural studies, as outlined by Raymond Williams, with Marx looming large in the background. Taken together they amount to a criticism of both capitalist/materialist society and the forms of knowledge produced by the natural sciences.

  The most frontal attack on the sciences also came from the continent, by Jürgen Habermas. Habermas is the latest major philosopher in the tradition of the Frankfurt School, the school of Horkheimer, Benjamin, Adorno, and Marcuse, and like theirs his aim was a modern synthesis of Marx and Freud. Habermas accepted that the social conditions that obtained when Marx was alive have changed markedly and that, for example, the working class long ago became ‘integrated into capitalist society, and is no longer a revolutionary force.’49 Anthony Giddens has drawn attention to the fact that Habermas shared with Adorno the view that Soviet society was a ‘deformed’ version of a socialist society. There are, Habermas said, two things wrong with regarding the study of human social life as a science on a par with the natural sciences. In the first place there is a tendency in modern intellectual culture to overestimate the role of science ‘as the only valid kind of knowledge that we can have about either the natural or the social world.’50 Second, science ‘produces a mistaken view of what human beings are like as capable, reasoning actors who know a great deal about why they act as they do.’ There cannot be ‘iron laws’ about people, says Habermas, criticising Marx as much as
natural scientists. Otherwise there would be no such thing as humans. Instead, he says, humans have self-reflection or reflexivity, intentions and reasons for what they do. No amount of natural science can ever explain this. His more original point was that knowledge, for him, is emancipatory: ‘The more human beings understand about the springs of their own behaviour, and the social institutions in which that behaviour is involved, the more they are likely to be able to escape from constraints to which previously they were subject.’51 A classic case of this, says Habermas, occurs in psychoanalysis. The task of the analyst is to interpret the feelings of the patient, and when this is successful, the patient gains a greater measure of rational control over his or her behaviour – meanings and intentions change, entities that cannot be represented by the natural sciences.52 He envisages an emancipated society in which all individuals control their own destinies ‘through a heightened understanding of the circumstances in which they live.’53 In fact, says Habermas, there is no single mould into which all knowledge can fit. Instead it takes three different forms – and here he produced his famous three-part argument, summed up in the following table which I have taken from Giddens:54

  The ‘hard sciences’ occupy the top row, activities like psychoanalysis and philosophy occupy the middle row, and critical theory, which we can now see really includes all the thinkers of this chapter, occupies the bottom row. As Foucault, Derrida, and the others would all agree, the understanding of the link between knowledge and power is the most emancipatory level of thinking.

  What the French thinkers (and Habermas) produced was essentially a postmodern form of Marxism. Some of the authors seem reluctant to abandon Marx, others are keen to update him, but no one seems willing to jettison him entirely. It is not so much his economic determinism or class-based motivations that are retained as his idea of ‘false consciousness,’ expressed through the idea that knowledge, and reason, must always be forged or mediated by the power relations of any society – that knowledge, hermeneutics, and understanding always serve a purpose. Just as Kant said there is no pure reason, so, we are told from the Continent, there is no pure knowledge, and understanding this is emancipatory. While it would not be true to say that these writers are anti-scientific (Piaget, Foucault, and Habermas in particular are too well-informed to be so crude), there is among them a feeling that science is by no means the only form of knowledge worth having, that it is seriously inadequate to explain much, if not most, of what we know. These authors do not exactly ignore evolution, but they show little awareness of how their theories fit – or do not fit – into the proliferation of genetic and ethological studies. It is also noticeable that almost all of them accept, and enlist as support, evidence from psychoanalysis. There is, for anglophone readers, something rather unreal about this late continental focus on Freud, as many critics have pointed out. Finally, there is also a feeling that Foucault, Lacan, and Derrida have done little more than elevate small-scale observations, the undoubted misuses of criminals or the insane in the past, or in Lacan’s case vagaries in the use of language, into entire edifices of philosophy. Ultimately, the answer here must lie in how convincing others find their arguments. None has found universal acceptance.

  At the same time, the ways in which they have subverted the idea that there is a general canon, or one way of looking at man, and telling his story, has undoubtedly had an effect. If nothing else, they have introduced a scepticism that Eliot and Trilling would have approved. In 1969, in a special issue of Yale French Studies, structuralism crossed the Atlantic. Postmodernist thought had a big influence on philosophy in America, as we shall see.

  Roland Barthes is generally considered a poststructuralist critic. Born in 1915 in Cherbourg, the son of a naval lieutenant, he grew up with a lung illness that made his childhood painful and solitary. This made him unfit for service in World War II, during which he began his career as a literature teacher. A homosexual, Barthes suffered the early death of a lover (from TB), and the amount of illness in his life even led him to begin work on a medical degree. But during his time in the sanatorium, when he did a lot of reading, he became interested in Marxism and for a time was on the edge of Sartre’s milieu. After the war he took up appointments in both Bucharest (then of course a Marxist country) and Alexandria in Egypt. He returned to a job in the cultural affairs section of the French Foreign Office. The enforced solitude, and the travel to very different countries, meant that Barthes added to his interest in literature a fascination with language, which was to make his name. Beginning in 1953, Barthes embarked on a series of short books, essays mainly, that drew attention to language in a way that gradually grew in influence until, by the 1970s, it was the prevailing orthodoxy in literary studies.55

  The Barthes phenomenon was partly a result of the late arrival of Freudianism into France, as represented by Lacan. There was also a sense in which Barthes was a French equivalent of Raymond Williams in Cambridge. Barthes’s argument was that there was more to modern culture than met the eye, that modern men and women were surrounded by all manner of signs and symbols that told them as much about the modern world as traditional writing forms. In Mythologies (1957, but not translated into English until 1972), Barthes focused his gaze on specific aspects of the contemporary world, and it was his choice of subject, as much as the content of his short essays, that attracted attention.56 He was in essence pointing to certain aspects of contemporary culture and saying that we should not just let these phenomena pass us by without inspection or reflection. For example, he had one essay on margarine, another on steak and chips, another on soap powders and detergents. He was after the ‘capillary meanings’ of these phenomena. This is how he began his essay ‘Plastic’: ‘Despite having names of Greek shepherds (Polystyrene, Polyvinyl, Polyethylene), plastic, the products of which have just been gathered in an exhibition, is in essence the stuff of alchemy … as its everyday name indicates, it is ubiquity made visible … it is less a thing than the trace of a movement…. But the price to be paid for this success is that plastic, sublimated as movement, hardly exists as a substance…. In the hierarchy of the major poetic substances, it figures as a disgraced material, lost between the effusiveness of rubber and the flat hardness of metal…. What best reveals it for what it is is the sound it gives, at once hollow and flat; its noise is its undoing, as are its colours, for it seems capable of retaining only the most chemical-looking ones. Of yellow, red and green, it keeps only the aggressive quality.’57

  Barthes’s Marxism gave him, like Sartre, a hatred of the bourgeoisie, and his very success in the analysis of the signs and symbols of everyday modern life (semiology, as it came to be called) turned him against the scientific stance of the structuralists. Fortified by Lacan’s ideas about the unconscious, Barthes came down firmly on the side of humanistic interpretation, of literature, film, music. His most celebrated essay was ‘The Death of the Author,’ published in 1968, though again not translated into English until the 1970s.58 This echoed the so-called New Criticism, in the 1940s in America in particular, where the dominant idea was ‘the intentional fallacy.’ As refined by Barthes, this view holds that the intentions of an author of a text do not matter in interpreting that text. We all read a new piece of work having read a whole range of works earlier on, which have given words particular meanings that differ subtly from one person to another. An author, therefore, simply cannot predict what meaning his work will have for others. In The Pleasures of the Text (1975), Barthes wrote, ‘On the stage of the text, no footlights: there is not, behind the text, someone active (the writer) and out front someone passive (the reader); there is not a subject and an object.’59 ‘The pleasure of the text is that moment when my body pursues its own ideas.’60 Like Raymond Wilhams, Barthes was aware that all writing, all creation, is bound by the cultural context of its production, and he wanted to help people break out of those constraints, so that reading, far from being a passive act, could be more active and, in the end, more enjoyable. He was given a rather bad
press in the Anglo-Saxon countries, although he became very influential nonetheless. At this distance, his views seem less exceptional than they did.* But he was such a vivid writer, with a gift for phrasemaking and acute observation, that he cannot be dismissed so easily by Anglo-Saxons.61 He wanted to show the possibilities within language, so that it would be liberating rather than constricting. A particularly good example of this would occur a few years later, when Susan Sontag explored the metaphors of illness, in particular cancer and AIDS.

  Among the systems of signs and symbols that Barthes drew attention to, a special place was reserved for film (Garbo, Eisenstein, Mankiewicz’s Julius Caesar), and here there was an irony, an important one. For the first three decades after World War II, Hollywood was actually not as important as it is now: the most interesting creative innovations were going on elsewhere – and they were structural. Second, and herein lies another irony, the European film business, and the French film industry in particular, which was the most creative of all, was building the idea of the director (rather than the writer, or the actor or the cameraman) as author.

  Hollywood went through several changes after the war. Box-office earnings for 1946, the first full year of peace, were the highest in U.S. film history and, allowing for inflation, may be a record that still stands. But then Hollywood’s fortunes started to wane; attendances shrank steadily, so that in the decade between 1946 and 1957, 4,000 cinemas closed. One reason was changing lifestyles, with more people moving to the suburbs, and the arrival of television. There was a revival in the 1960s, as Hollywood adjusted to TV, but it was not long-lived, and between 1962 and 1969 five of the eight major studios changed hands, losing some $500 million (more than $4 billion now) in the process. Hollywood recovered throughout the 1970s, and a new generation of ‘movie brat’ directors led the industry forward. They owed a great deal to the idea of the film director as auteur, which matured in Europe.