Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century (125 page)

After the success of structuralism, it was no doubt inevitable that there should be a backlash.
Jacques Derrida,
the man who mounted that attack, was Algerian and Jewish. In 1962, at independence, the Jews in Algeria left
en masse:
France suddenly had the largest Jewish population on the continent, west of Russia.

Derrida began with a specific attack on a specific body of work. In France in the 1960s, Claude Lévi-Strauss was not merely an anthropologist – he had the status of a philosopher, a guru, someone whose structuralist views had extended well beyond anthropology to embrace psychology, philosophy, history, literary criticism, and even architecture.
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We also have Lévi-Strauss to thank for the new term ‘human sciences,’
sciences
of the human, which he claimed had left behind the ‘metaphysical preoccupations of traditional philosophy’ and were offering a more reliable perspective on the human condition. As a result, the traditional role of philosophy as ‘the privileged point of synthesis of human knowledge’ seemed increasingly vitiated: ‘The human sciences had no need of this kind of philosophy and could think for themselves.’
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Among the people to come under attack were Jean-Paul Sartre and the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. Lévi-Strauss belittled the ‘subjectivist bias’ of existentialism, arguing that a philosophy based on personal experience ‘can never tell us anything essential either about society or humanity.’ Being an anthropologist, he also attacked the ethnocentric nature of much European thought, saying it was too culture-bound to be truly universal.

Derrida took Lévi-Strauss to task – for being imprisoned within his own viewpoint in a much more fundamental way. In
Tristes Tropiques,
Lévi-Strauss’s autobiographical account of how and why he chose anthropology and his early fieldwork in Brazil, he had explored the link between writing and secret knowledge in primitive tribes like the Nambikwara.
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This led Lévi-Strauss to the generalisation that ‘for thousands of years,’ writing had been the privilege of a powerful elite, associated with caste and class differentiation, that ‘its primary function’ was to ‘enslave and subordinate.’ Between the invention of writing and the advent of science, Lévi-Strauss said, there was ‘no accretion of knowledge, just fluctuations up and down.’
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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.
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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).
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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 – inten- tionality.
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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.
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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.
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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.’
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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.
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‘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 U S S R. ‘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.’
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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.
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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.’
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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.’
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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.’
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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.’
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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.’
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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.
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He envisages an emancipated society in which all individuals control their own destinies ‘through a heightened understanding of the circumstances in which they live.’
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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:
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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.