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IT’S all just a matter of opinion, isn’t it? Nobody can agree on aesthetics, right? The Anglo-Swiss writer Alain de Botton demolishes these myths and others in a video on “How to Make an Attractive City.” Slate has a fascinating story on the topic, and breaks out the writer’s six criteria for urban beauty.
By the part that interests me — and speaks to this site’s concern for the overlap of culture and economics — is this bit on the way cultural relativism works out in the real world.
“We think that no one has a right to say what’s beautiful and what’s ugly,” de Botton says, noting that there are “good reasons” no one vacations in Frankfurt, Germany, or Birmingham, England. “[L]et’s stop being dangerously relativistic about this. Yes, there is such a thing as beauty. Sydney and San Francisco and Bath and Bordeaux have it, and most other places don’t. The proof lies in the tourist statistics. Let’s stop saying that beauty is just in the eye of the beholder. That’s just a gift to the next wealthy idiot who wants to put up a horrible tower.”
This can operate as a metaphor for a lot of cultural issues since the ’80s or so. (“Very, very few out of many thousands are really beautiful,” he says. “Embarrassingly, the more appealing ones tend to be old.”)
De Botton is about my age — a fellow Xer — and though he is European, he grew up in the age of postmodernism and neoliberalism, which I am increasingly convinced are the same things.
I like his point and his six observations about what makes a beautiful city. But saying that the proof is in the tourist statistics is a bit weak since there are tons of tourists in Orlando and Macao. Broadening the focus to beauty in general brings us to the same area as the earlier discussion on quality: we need a “theory of everything”. Modern pluralists do not want to go there – it means giving up the freedom to be a pluralist some of the time and then getting moralistic about various grievances at other times. We want to maintain the fact/value split except when we don’t. I like Ellis Potter’s book, “Three Theories of Everything”, to help see it from a very broad viewpoint. And it is a very short book that only takes an hour or so to read.
I’ve long argued that postmodernism has been strongly appropriated by neo-liberalism. Postmodernism was formulated by a group of post-68 French philosophers (Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard, etc.) who rebelled against the socialist perspectives of Sartre. From the outset, this anti-Socialist orientation lent itself to aspects of neoliberalism. In a search for new forms of individuality these philosophers embraced the relativism of Nietzsche, Husserl, and Heidegger. These philosophers had earlier been appropriated by far more radical forms of anti-Socialism, and even Nazism, but few people seemed concerned because postmodernism held so much promise for decentering entrenched forms of epistemology that had long been known to limit academic thought. (To say nothing of cultural and religious views….)
One of the oddest chapters in the rightist part of postmodernism’s past is Paul de Man, the Guru of the Yale deconstructionists. (One could plausibly assert that Yale gave deconstructionism its worldwide popularity.) In 1988, Ortwin de Graef, a Belgian graduate student at the University of Leuven, discovered some two hundred articles which de Man had written for Nazi publications during Belgium’s occupation. The articles were extremely anti-Semitic. Among many other things, he assigned Jewish people many negative qualities and called for their mass deportation.
For years many of de Man’s deconstructionist colleagues knew about his dark past and remained silent about it. After the revelations, Derrida came to de Man’s defense with articles such as “Like the Sound of the Sea Deep Within a Shell: Paul de Man’s War.” Derrida said that the attacks on de Man for the “mistakes” of his youth were in themselves “exterminating gestures.” Derrida’s integrity was thrown into question by the opponents of deconstructionism who said his responses only illustrated the theory’s moral weaknesses.
In 1988, Juergen Habermas expressed the anxiety that German students reading French post-structuralists were reabsorbing their own irrationalist tradition of the prewar era.
One of the principle arguments of de Man’s work is that desconstructive readings of texts tend to end in “aporias,” deadlocks of meaning, or “undecidability.” A nihilistic tendency can follow, and this is where some of the cultural problems you address seem to evolve. Where calculated decisions are needed, deconstruction has seemed able to do little more than insist on the imperative of deferring or disrupting decision. We end up with a feeling of inaction or helplessness. The aporias of postmodernism create a kind of social impotence that leaves us unable to challenge the increasing encroachment of plutocracy that neoliberalism engenders.
Largely agree w Herr Osborne here.
Will point out that a lot of people — me included — were aware of the De Man mess, but thought it was just one bad apple in the barrel, an anomaly, etc…. It’s not quite fair to entirely blame postmodernism or decon for his Nazi leanings — there are plenty of Marxists who were totalitarian, etc and it does not discredit Marx.
But by destroying or at least “critiquing” traditional humanism and democracy, the post-strucs certainly took Western thought into a scary direction.
De Mann, as I note, is just one of the oddest cases. We should not overlook that postmodernism was in many respects a rebellion against the leftist thought of Sartre. This might account, in part, for its easy appropriation by neoliberalism.
Another complicating factor is that the French authors who originated postmodern philosophies largely rejected their manifestations in the States. They felt their work was misappropriated to rationalize parochial eclecticism — an embrace of market-oriented culture that fit the ideals of neoliberalism.
They also rejected the liberal humanism of Camus
Quite true. In their resentment of Sartre’s totalizing control of the French philosophical world, they became like the Sorcerer’s Apprentice. They unleashed ideas that quickly ran out of their control and manifested in ways that actually frightened appalled them, especially in the USA. Perhaps the most poignant example was Foucault’s retreat from his concepts of sexual emancipation after he contracted HIV in the bath houses of San Francisco. He didn’t move to a neoconservative morality, but contemplated the deeper meanings of taking care of oneself, and perhaps by implication, the larger needs of society, something like a cautious return to and examination of humanistic values.
In this article, published in 2004, I discuss the conservative nature of postmodernism in classical music, and coined the term “hip-cons” to describe their embrace of commercial music and neoliberal philosophy:
http://www.osborne-conant.org/arts_funding.htm
Thought this might interest Herr Timberg….
Curious to see this… It took me a while to wake up to how dangerous postmodernism / poststruc is… If you were intellectually adventurous and politically on the left when I was in college — late Reagan/ Bush — this is what you were into…
I like dangerous ideas. It would be a sad day for the arts if they ever find themselves without them. The problem is when dangerous ideas are not subjected to lively examination and debate, when they are simply accepted as the status quo. Why have Americans become so intellectually passive?
How did postmodernism move from the left in the 80s to neoliberalism by the later 90s? Part of the problem is that there is no left in the USA. By international standards, we have a moderate-right in the Democrats and a far-right in the Republicans. This narrow political spectrum is one of many factors that led to neo-conservative postmodernism – an American cultural phenomenon that artists, scholars and journalists have been slow to address.
Yes indeed on all of the above… I think postmod also got taken over not by an ideology but simply by consumerism and “ironic” TV… it was tailor made for that.
Re “dangerous ideas” — intellectuals like the sound of that phrase, but what if the dangerous ideas really ARE dangerous — ie. the kind cooked up by Bill Kristol, Dick Cheney, Wolfowitz, etc… then it’s not so glamorous…
Dangerous is not only the society that swallows their nonsense (e.g. the New American Century,) but fails to engage with the ideas, much less challenge them. Bad ideas are not new in American society, but the intellectual and social passivity that has evolved since about 1980 is. Was this passivity carefully constructed? If so, by who and how?
We are going to have to send out scanner drones to identify those with truly dangerous ideas and segregate them from those with merely dangerous ideas.
http://russelldodds.com/#/portfolio/scanning-for-clowns/