for Alain
Chronologically and as regards popularity, first came post-modernism. Which is apposite, for it heralded a whole splat of ‘post’-movements that saw or see themselves as representative of contemporary society, which is, after all, the affluent society. Ever since the 1970s, that society has been typified by the shift out of the traditional mode of production that revolved around heavy industry, into what many have called a “post-industrial” economy. That was the first ‘post’ and it marked a social transition, as henceforth the service sector started to play an ever larger role – and industrial production was something done elsewhere. The term ‘post-industrial’ society is a bit of a misnomer, as here the ‘post’ actually means that post has to be sent to other parts of the world with the data for the industrial production there, for example in China.
One of the next uses of the post-prefix was fittingly post-materialism, which tried to persuade us (not long after post-modernism arose) that we were switching from materialist values to a desire for new forms of autonomy and personal expression. One can assume ‘we’ could afford to do so. Then, in close third, post-humanism took the stage. According to it, in ethics, for example, it is no longer the human being around which all revolves, for this current asserts that nature has a stronger right to claim pole position. Since then, and especially since the Wall came down, we’ve been living not in a post-It but in a post-all society. Whether or not the movements believe in being hyphenated or not.
Post-modern backlash
To briefly recapitulate, post-modernism amounted to a rejection of a firm focus on function followed by form, with this refusal characterizing architecture and then design. Post-modernism in philosophy, as in the rejection of grand narratives, is similar in thrust. If, in an affluent society (whereby society invariably here means life in an industrialized nation) for most people most functions are evidently fulfilled, then there is quite literally no need to emphasize function any longer. Instead, we can have fun with the form. If the grand narratives of ‘good’ vs. ‘bad’ are no longer applicable, as most people in (Western) society have never had it so good, then it is time to move on to more varied narratives – and, since these are the opposite of their grand forbears, we can assume them to be small ones.
Ever since the Wall came down, the USA became the world hegemon in a unipolar world, the USSR reverted back to being Russia, Europe united, the BRICS got named, and globalization became a stock phrase, some commentators have brought another post-It into play: post-history. Here, form (chronology) and function (differentiation) both collapse. The champion of this post-ism, Francis Fukuyama, argued in the mid-1990s that with the victory of capitalism, and the assertion of the liberal free market economy as the be-all and end-all of social structures, humankind no longer needed to evolve any further in terms of economy or culture – we had achieved all we needed in terms of good governance, and life could now happily go on this way until the Final Judgment.
Post-democratic post-capitalism
This idea is to a certain extent at loggerheads with the next post-phase into which we have all ostensibly moved. According to British academic Peter Crouch, we are now entering or have arrived in a post-democratic society. And no this is not because our governance system is so superbly established that we can all rest on our laurels and simply enjoy the good life. It is because, or so he suggests, multinational corporations directly or through lobbyists control government. Added to which, their power is extended as only a small percentage of the electorate actually turns out to vote – presumably because they don’t believe in the representative nature of government, one could impute.
One of the later additions to this now established tradition of “after-thoughts” is perhaps post-capitalism as posited by management theorist Peter Drucker and others. And, of course, that is to ignore the fact that the one philosopher or other, perhaps influenced by cyberpunk novels, is already championing post-physicalism. One should perhaps quip that what follows on from capitalism is actually not post-capitalism, with capital being a property only of organizations, but e-mail capitalism, where capital is controlled by electronic means.
Post-It future
However, the two last ‘posts’, putting history and democracy to bed, are perhaps the ones to be taken seriously. For what they do is detract from the underlying malaise, namely that we are not ‘after’ something, but have simply forgotten that we are ‘before’ something. There was a time when the economists, philosophers, political scientists and sociologists sought to elaborate what we could be as opposed to what we are, occasionally outlining these are places that were not, u-topias. What we are now is, no, not post-utopian society, but a society post-visions. While at the same time, we as the Western world with its notion of liberal democracies lay claim to showing the way forward for the world, to having a value system superior to that of the East or the South.
We live in a post-vision world, or so the post-mortem that observers may note in a few decades’ time. Thinkers in the West have become lazy, perhaps lulled by material prosperity into focusing only on by-products of past problems and relating us now to that then – they have succumbed to the post-disease. There was a moment when climate change could have become an issue that called for a new vision of the world we live in (not post-socialist or post-capitalist, pre-over-heated). But that moment passed, at the latest in Warsaw at the Climate Change Conference, where the post-industrialized nations could not agree with the industrializing let along the pre-industrial nations, the differences in past, present and future collapsed and with them the talks.
Post history – post-future
This stalemate has infected our thinkers, and thus there are no utopias being devised, held up for our politicians to mull over. The outcome of Fukuyama’s “end of history” would seem to have been intellectual torpor. If liberal democracies and market economies are the be-all and end-all of all, then why bother thinking any further? And if liberal economies have moved into post-democracies, then the thinking would be in vain, anyway. If all has been achieved, what’s left? Or, for that matter, what’s right? The phenomenon to be noticed among the main political parties in the West certainly since Tony Blair took power has been a race for the middle as the place to garner the most votes. But in doing so the politicians have forgotten what their original role is, for the middle-ground is characterized by stasis, that is why it is in the middle. This is not consensus politics, as it is so often called, it is simply consensus. For opting for the greatest possible common denominator is to resign from trying to persuade people to accept your position. It marks the onslaught of non-politics – as it means avoiding taking a position or riding things out to avoid it being obvious you haven’t taken one. Something many Western governments seem to be good at. No doubt some smart commentator will soon start banding the term ‘post-politics’ about in an effort to describe this state of affairs. But before that happens let us hope, since hope dies last, that intellectuals, rather than thinking in tanks think outside the box and come up with a pre-something idea worth fighting for the world over.
