No One Ever Chose To Be Post-Modern: The Utopian Impulse and Contemporary Philosophy as Trauma-Response

A caveat before I begin: I discuss collective trauma later on in this piece. I want to make it clear that what I am saying about that trauma is about collective trauma alone. I took some psychology classes in college. I am not a psychologist. I am not a therapist. I have thoughts on the issue, but they are uninformed, so I will not be sharing any thoughts I have on anyone's personal trauma (other than possibly my own – not in this piece, though.)

Fredric Jameson’s Twitter profile picture — it’s somewhat surreal to me that he’s on there, but I couldn’t really explain why.

So, this is at least partially a retraction, and at least partially drawing a connection – while watching a YouTube video earlier (“The Cultural Significance of Cyberpunk”; I am a predictable person) I encountered someone else using the phrase “Utopian Impulse” – it's ultimately derived from Fredric Jameson, and elaborated upon by Robert Tally.

In his call for an aesthetics of cognitive mapping, Jameson laid out two impulses that needed to be recognized: An Orienting Impulse, that placed the individual in a historical context, and a Utopian Impulse that leads towards a preferable future. So, first, to recognize where we are and then to recognize where we need to go.

Robert Tally, as quoted in the video, wrote that:

Before anything else, the Utopian Impulse must be a negative one: to identify the problem or problems that must be fixed. Far from presenting an idyllic, happy, fulfilled world, utopias initially must present the root causes of the society's ills … to act as a critique of the existing system.

I've done a little bit of reading into what Jameson called “The Aesthetics of Cognitive Mapping” and found very little about it that suggested it was a coherent or well-developed idea; he discusses it a bit in an essay called “Varieties of the Utopian”, and while it's certainly related to what I've been discussing, it's a bit narrower in expression. He opens by writing that “it has often been observed that we need to distinguish between the utopian form and the utopian wish: between the written text or genre and something like a utopian impulse detectable in daily life and its practices by a specialized hermeneutic or interpretive method.”

In this, at least, we can see that it is something that spills beyond the canvas, frame, or page, while being distinctly related to it. Much of what was most interesting in Jameson's piece, seems, to me, to be ultimately derived from the work of Ernst Bloch – a thinker that I had never before encountered, who I need to read more of. Jameson summarizes:

Yet the lifework of Ernst Bloch is there to remind us that utopia is a good deal more than the sum of its individual texts. Bloch posits a utopian impulse governing everything future-oriented in life and culture—and encompassing everything from games to patent medicines, from myths to mass entertainment, from iconography to technology, from architecture to eros, from tourism to jokes and the unconscious.

This is essentially what I meant when I discussed the Utopian Impulse as a hypothetical Third Drive, subject to neither the Pleasure Principle nor the Death Drive. If your only guides are to seek pleasure and to self-destruct, why would anyone build a cathedral that would never be complete in their lifetime? There has to be some reason to work towards a goal that you will never reach but which is worthwhile.

Of course, Jameson and Ernst are different from myself insofar as their discussion is falling more on the Eu Topia side of the equation, whereas I'm more interested in the Ou Topia side of the equation (not that I don't look for the good and don't have a utopian urging, just that I'm a fantasy and science fiction writer by inclination; I'm obviously going to gravitate towards the no-place.) And why shouldn't we be interested in places that don't, can't, or won't exist? The world is spanned and mapped and there are no horizons left to cross – much less for a smoker with bad eyes.

But there are many kinds of utopia, and perfection is the enemy of the good: if you're a slave, being a serf must seem like a sweet deal, and the peasant desires the life of the yeoman. I'm going to guess that for a prisoner, any kind of escape seems preferable to staying in a cage.

Jean Baudrillard, whose Simulacra and Simulation was my introduction to Postmodern thought. I felt it was fairly straightforward, but many people have told me that they found the theory somewhat mind-bending.

So, in the interest of framing things negatively, let's look at the metaphorical cage.

Frederic Jameson's landmark book, at least in my opinion, was Postmodernism or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. This, along with The Post-Modern Condition: a Report on Knowledge by Jean-Francois Lyotard and Jean Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation, articulated the condition of Post-Modernity that stretched from the end of World War II all the way until (at least) 9/11. A solid argument can be made that Post-Modernity has ended and we have entered some as-yet-not-officially-named period of history – Meta-modernity, Hyper-Modernity, something of the sort.

One thing that a lot of people seem unclear about is that no one actually liked Post-Modernism. It was a locus of despair for Baudrillard and Jameson – I'm a bit sketchy on Lyotard, but if he's grouped with the others, then I think it's fair to say he's not to keen on it. Unlike Modernity, which was considered a vast project in which serious people were engaged in the serious business of building a glorious future, Post-Modernity is a period that we find ourselves afflicted with.

In Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Volume 1, the mad prophets Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari write that, “It is not the slumber of reason that engenders monsters, but vigilant and insomniac rationality.” This is to say that, according to them, there is a direct line between Enlightenment rationality and the horrors of the second world war – the Shoah, the fire-bombing of Dresden, the Rape of Nan King, and the use of nuclear weapons chief among them.

Gilles Deleuze (Left) and Félix Guattari (Right).

Post-Modernity is the metaphorical fallout of this moment, and much of the philosophical project that follows it is an attempt to parse out what happened and why. It isn't for another generation or so that you have people trying to claim that the post-modern condition is a good one that we should try to enjoy (a hot take, if ever there was one.) My own interpretation of things is that the seeds of the post-modern project were sewn by the Frankfurt School, trying to understand why communism never truly took root in America or England – their critical tools were then expanded upon and became a foundation for later projects: in short, post-modern theory has a lot of Marxism in its DNA, but it lacks a Marxist project. It doesn't say “this is going to happen!”, but has shifted through “why didn't this happen?” to “why is the world like this?” – which is why post-modern and Post-Strucutral theory is often accused of being associated with that old reactionary dog-whistle of “Cultural Marxism” (an accusation that began with the Frankfurt school – a group mostly made up of ethnically Jewish Marxists and Neo-Marxists that fled the Holocaust to America.)

The two strands have since diverged, but I think it is important to understand that the history of post-modern thinking is a history of responding to traumatic events. Sometimes gracefully, sometimes less so.

The uncertainty and anomie that we find ourselves swimming in at this moment might not have begun with the Second World War, but they underwent a phase-transition and became what we recognize. All knowledge is constructed, and so all knowledge is contingent, and so none of us can find a solid footing.

The fact that this actually exists makes me feel like I’m going to have a stroke.

This, contrary to what you might think, is essential for the continued existence of capitalism. The Deleuzoguattarian analysis is that Capitalism deterritorializes with one hand and reterritorializes with the other. That is to say, that it destroys the meaning behind things that already exists (deterritorializes; possibly more accurately “de-maps”, removing the referents that allow you make sense of a given mental space) and then gives it new meaning (reterritorializes, re-mapping the now meaningless subject so that it has a new meaning) – a process that is often invisible, and only becomes visible when there's a hiccup that reveals how unnatural it is. Consider the 2017 commercial, where Kendall Jenner historically solved racism by giving a policeman a Pepsi at a Black Lives Matter protest – that was an attempt at deterritorializing Black Lives Matter, an attempt to steal the protest from the protestors. All of the other X Lives Matter projects were the same sort of effort: deterritorialization so that it could be reterritorialized.

Though I'm using the Deleuzoguattarian terminology here, it's something that was spotted much earlier on, in other theorists. Meaning has become malleable and, at least as far as I learned in graduate school, this is a direct response to the traumatic events of the early 20th century. Everything is subject to deterritorialization, because everything is contingent.

An image from 2004’s “Operation Iraqi Freedom”. Words have no inherent meaning, and everyone let them use those words to mean this.

As Jameson points out, Post-Modernism is a fundamentally nostalgic project. There are no longer any grand narratives, and so we seek, forever, to recapture the ghosts of past eras that haunt us. We are, in the parlance of Naomi Klein, shocked. In the same way, someone subjected to a regime of horrifying abuse will become shocked and regress. Unfortunately, after the end of the Second World War, we had no chance to recover – we experienced the shocks of Korea, and Viet Nam, and the counter-culture, and the Neo-liberal reforms of the 1980s, and the loss of purpose caused by the end of the Cold War, and September 11, and the Invasion of Iraq, and Hurricane Katrina, and the Financial Crisis, and Sandy Hook, and the election of the current president, and Charlottesville, and – and – and – and –

This is why Edgar and I rail against the nostalgic mode. It is a maladaptive symptom of a situation that has persisted since our Grandparents were young.

But the shock allows greater deterritorialization, our systems of meaning relinquish their hold, and the things in the world are ripe for reterritorialization. While it's a bit of a cliché to say that there is revolutionary potential in the arts, it isn't inaccurate to say that artists have more chances to work with the forces of de- and reterritorialization than most people, while not necessarily being beholden to other interests.

This is why I wax rhapsodic about the Utopian Impulse, because I feel that only by embracing mutation and difference and escape can we break the cycle. This is the cage we retreated into, because we recognized it as a locus of safety from what was outside of the cage.

Unfortunately, you can't grow healthy in a cage. You can't grow strong in a cage. You can only grow to the shape of the cage, until exit is no longer possible.

One thing is for certain, while defining the shape of the problem is essential to starting the project, Critical Theory needs to move beyond just talking about the problem. Orienting can only take you so far – you have to start moving at some point. For that, we need art, theory, and philosophy that aren't solely a trauma-response but actively wills something in the world.

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