Postmodernism

introduction

A popular explanation of the New Age movement is that it is a form of Postmodernism. Postmodernism is a difficult to define intellectual movement which is now very popular and claims to be a radical break with previous Western ways of thinking. It is particularly difficult to characterize because there is not one kind of Postmodernism, but many variations of it. It would take too long to go through all the varieties of Postmodernism and demonstrate that the New Age is different from each of them. Instead, it will be shown that the three most important varieties of Postmodernism — Fredric Jameson’s version of Postmodernism as the counterpart of the latest stage of capitalism, Jean-Francois Lyotard and Richard Rorty’s version of Postmodernism which denies that there is any objective truth, and David Ray Griffin’s constructive Postmodernism which is a movement beyond modernity — are all significantly different from the New Age movement.

Fredric Jameson: the third stage of capitalism

The first version of Postmodernism is Fredric Jameson’s view that Postmodernism is the artistic and cultural analogue of the third stage of capitalism. As a Marxist, Jameson follows the Marxist line that a society’s economic system determines its cultural and intellectual system. In the first stage of capitalism, Jameson says, the cultural analogue was Romanticism. In the second phase of capitalism, imperialistic capitalism, the cultural analogue was Modernism. Now we are in the third phase of capitalism — global capitalism — and the third phase of cultural and artistic endeavor associated with it, which Jameson labels Postmodernism.[i] Jameson thinks that Modernism had an oppositional dynamic to popular culture, and thus it distinguished between high culture and low culture. Postmodernism, on the other hand, rejects this distinction and incorporates mass culture into high culture activities such as painting.[ii] Another element of Postmodernism is its emphasis on superficialities and entertainment, and thus television is the prime Postmodern communicative device.

The New Age movement and Jameson’s version of Postmodernism has one important similarity: both blur the distinction between high and low culture. The sociologist David Hess points out that the New Age is like Jameson’s version of Postmodernist art in that the New Age has a “fluid juxtaposition of erudite and mass culture, particularly of scientific and religious/spiritual discourses.”[iii] So Hess says that the New Agers use the work of anthropologists, philosophers, scientists and scholars to sanction crystals, channelers, astral bodies and other activities associated with popular culture. The New Age, like Postmodernism, is a pastiche of multiple discourses of religion, science, politics, medicine, ecology and other times and cultures.[iv]

problems with Jameson’s interpretation

This interpretation of the New Age has many problems with it. First, it is based on Marxist doctrines. Second, the tendency to mix mediums originated in Romanticism, not Postmodernism. Because Romanticism was no longer observing the classical rules of art which insisted that mediums be kept distinct, many early Romantics and their critics considered this tendency to be the definitive feature of Romanticism. Thus the early Romantic, A. W. Schlegel, said that “ancient art and poetry aim at a sharp division of the disparate, the romantic has a liking for perfect fusion; all the opposites: nature and art, poetry and prose, gravity and jest, recollection and presentiment, the spiritual and the sensuous, the earthly and the divine, life and death, are inextricably mingled.”[v] Third, as Hess himself points out, the New Age is different from Postmodernism because the New Age does not primarily utilize television with its emphasis on superficiality and entertainment. Instead, for the New Agers, their “primary mode of mass communications remains books, magazines, or audio cassette.”[vi] For this reason, even Hess maintains that televangelism is closer to Postmodernism than is the New Age movement.[vii] Fourth, Postmodernism differs from the New Age in that the New Age movement is not part of alienated global capitalism. Hess points out that because the New Age movement has a decentralized structure, New Age capitalism is small-scale. Thus it differs from the corporate, multinational capitalism associated with Postmodernism. This is especially true, Hess says, because New Age capitalism “produces goods with a heart” which is quite different from alienated capitalism.[viii] For these reasons, it is an inadequate explanation of the New Age movement to explain it in terms of Jameson’s Postmodernism.

there is no truth

The second version of Postmodernism maintains that there is no truth. Its major representatives are Jean-Francois Lyotard, Richard Rorty, the social constructivists, and Jacques Derrida. The French philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard defines Postmodernism as “incredulity towards metanarrative.”[ix] Lyotard’s phrase means that there is no one true reality and no one true way of describing reality. The American philosopher Richard Rorty is another prominent representative of this version of Postmodernism. Rorty denies any universal truth exists and maintains that our grasp of reality is inherently limited by our temporal and cultural situation.[x] More adherents of this version of Postmodernism are the constructivists who claim that all our beliefs about the nature of reality are a result of our social constructs. One constructivist, Walter Truett Anderson, says that the Postmodern worldview maintains that “all belief systems, all ideas about human reality — are social constructions.”[xi] Sometimes, this second version of Postmodernism even maintains that physical reality is a social construction. Thus, Alan Sokal, in his parody of Postmodernism which was unwittingly published as a serious article in the major Postmodern journal Social Text and which was based on quotes and thoughts of major Postmodernists, says that “scientific ‘knowledge,’ far from being objective, reflects and encodes the dominant ideologies and power relations of the culture that produced it.”[xii] Sokal continues by saying that, “it has become increasingly apparent that physical ‘reality,’ no less than social ‘reality’ is at bottom a social and linguistic construct.”[xiii] Derrida goes even further and says that “there is nothing outside of the text.” [Il n’y pas de hors-texte.][xiv]

Problems with this perspective

One might hear phrases like this from some New Agers who are not influential in the movement, but these phrases are a manifestation of the relativism endemic in our culture and are not related to the New Age movement itself. On the other hand, if one focuses on the writers and lecturers that set the tone of the movement, one discovers almost nothing of this kind of Postmodernism. Almost without exception, New Age thinkers maintain they have universal truth. To give some examples, the Jungians think archetypes really exist and effect everyone. So, Carl Jung says that “the essential content of all mythologies and all religions and all isms is archetypal.”[xv] Jung also says that “the collective unconscious . . . represents a psyche that is identical in all individuals.”[xvi] Werner Erhard, the founder of “est,” says that “it is a law of the mind that you become what you resist.”[xvii] Similarly, Holistic Health is based on the premise that universal truth exists. “A basic premise in the holistic field is that illness does not happen randomly,” Shealy and Myss say. “Every illness or dysfunction a person develops is an indication of a specific type of emotional, psychological or spiritual stress. Each of the characteristics of an illness, such as its location in the physical body, is symbolically important.”[xviii] Even reality creators believe in universal truth. Thus, Deepak Chopra, in his aptly titled book, The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success, emphasizes that we have to obey certain laws if we are to create our own reality.

The beliefs of New Agers are different from the beliefs of conventional Westerners. Nevertheless, the New Agers generally think their beliefs, whether these beliefs are reincarnation, the collective unconscious, or the metaphoric view of disease, are all true statements about the nature of reality. Thus, the New Age cannot be thought of as a kind of Postmodernism in Lyotard’s and Rorty’s second version of it.

beyond the paradigm of the modern world

The third version of Postmodernism says that the New Age is postmodern because it has gotten beyond the paradigm of the modern world. Andrew Ross says this,[xix] but the person who has most developed this idea is David Ray Griffin. Griffin defines Postmodernism simply as a movement beyond modernity. Griffin says modernity is based on modern science which originated in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The paradigm of modernity maintains that the individual is autonomous and isolated and thus not intrinsically connected to others, matter is hard particles, and the Earth is merely a material entity we can exploit for our benefit. According to Griffin, the modern paradigm emphasizes individualism, anthropocentrism, mechanization, consumerism, nationalism, and militarism. Griffin says that because of the new discoveries in quantum mechanics, ecology, biology and thermodynamics, the modern paradigm is no longer valid. Griffin maintains that a new paradigm of constructive Postmodernism is emerging. He calls it constructive because it is not like Derrida’s Postmodernism which emphasizes deconstructing any possible truth. In Griffin’s version of Postmodernism, unlike Lyotard, Rorty and Derrida’s Postmodernism, truth still exists, but a new view of what is true is emerging. Griffin says that in this Postmodern world we will have a new sense of self which is based on our deep connection to others instead of seeing ourselves as isolated autonomous individuals. Nature will also be seen as alive and our theology will take all this into account.[xx]

Problems with this perspective

Nevertheless, Griffin’s view has two problems. First, he does not accurately portray the paradigm that developed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The paradigm of the Enlightenment is based on trusting God and following nature, not on individualism, militarism and anthropocentrism. Second, his kind of Postmodernism is not new at all; it is merely a revival of Romanticism. All that is supposedly distinctive of Postmodernism — considering nature as alive and considering the individual as intrinsically related to others — are actually the fundamental tenets of Romanticism. Hence, there is no reason to think of the New Age as another kind of constructive Postmodernism since this kind of Postmodernism itself is just a return of Romanticism.

The German philosopher Jurgen Habermas has a suspicion that Postmodernism does not get beyond the values of modernity, and instead is merely another revolt against the values of the Enlightenment.[xxi] Richard Rorty also thinks that Postmodernism is a form of Romanticism.[xxii] They are right: Postmodernism can best be understood not as something radically new, but as just another version of Romanticism. The advocates of Posmodernism are merely reviving old Romantic ideas and dressing them up in modern terminology.

Copyrighted 2009

FOOTNOTES

[i]Fredric Jameson, “The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” in Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991).

[ii]Jameson, pp. 1-2.

[iii] David J. Hess, Science in the New Age: The Paranormal, Its Defenders and Debunkers, and American Culture (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993), p. 37.

[iv]Hess, p. 37.

[v]A. W. Schegel, Uber dramatische Kunst und Literatur, III, 14, as cited in Lilian Furst, Romanticism in Perspective: A Comparative Study of Aspects of the Romantic Movements in England, France and Germany, 2nd ed. (London: Macmillan, 1979), p. 324.

[vi]Hess, pp. 37-8.

[vii]Hess, pp. 37-8.

[viii]Hess, pp. 38-9.

[ix]Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report of Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1984), p. xxiv.

[x] Richard Rorty, introduction, Consequences of Pragmatism: (Essays: 1972-1980) (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), p. xix-xx.

[xi]Walter Truett Anderson, p. 3.

[xii]Alan Sokal as cited in Peter Berkowitz, “Science Fiction,” The New Republic July 1, 1996, p. 16.

[xiii]Ibid.

[xiv]Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, as reprinted in Walter Truett Anderson, ed., The Truth About the Truth: De-Confusing and Re-Constructing the Postmodern World (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1995), p. 89.

[xv]Carl Jung, “On the Nature of the Psyche,” in Collected Works, Vol. 8, trans. R.F.C. Hull (Routledge & Keegan Paul, 1960), p. 206.

[xvi]Carl Jung, “Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle,” in Collected Works Vol. 8, trans. R.F.C. Hull (London: Routledge and Keegan Paul, 1960), p. 436.

[xvii]Werner Erhard, as cited in William Bartley III, Werner Erhard: The Transformation of a Man: The founding of est (New York: Clarkson S. Potter, 1978), p. 44. Italics in the original.

[xviii]C. Norman Shealy and Caroline Myss, The Creation of Health: Merging Traditional Medicine with Intuitive Diagnosis (Walpole, N.H.: Stillpoint Publishing, 1988), p. 23. Italics in the original.

[xix] Andrew Ross, Strange Weather: Culture, Science and Technology in the Age of Limits (London: Verso, 1991) p. 73.

[xx]David Ray Griffin, Spirituality and Society (Albany: SUNY Press, 1988), pp. 14-5.

[xxi]Jurgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987), pp. 4-5.

[xxii]Richard Rorty, “Nineteenth-Century Idealism and Twentieth-Century Textualism,” in Consequences of Pragmatism: (Essays: 1972-1980) (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), p. 143.