Daniel-Pascal Zorn on Postmodernism

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OAlthough they studied at elite Paris high schools such as the Lycée Louis-le-Grand and the Lycée Henri IV, Jackie, Paul-Michel, Jean-François and Gilles either fail or pass the entrance exam for the École Normale Supérieure on their first try not even allowed to take the exam. We are talking about the philosophy students Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jean-François Lyotard and Gilles Deleuze. All four struggle to cope with the rigid requirements of the French education system. The examiner judged one of them: “Should come back if he is willing to accept the rules and not invent where to find out more. Failing will benefit this candidate.”

Derrida & Co. fail – but the benefit they get from it is not reflected in catch-up adjustments, but in intellectual revolt. Now more than ever, is the motto. They soon succeed in combining “the rules of the academy” with the “creative irregularity of intellectual discourse”. The milieu of postmodern philosophy is formed from this mixture. Since the 1960s, she has shaped the intellectual debate not only in France but throughout Europe and the USA.

Only opinions instead of truth

“Postmodernism is to blame for everything” – Daniel-Pascal Zorn’s book “The Crisis of the Absolute” begins with this sentence. What Postmodernism Could Have Been. An opus magnum – both in terms of scope and the author’s claim. Postmodernism is supposedly to blame, Zorn mocks, for the fact that we no longer perceive the world as a common reality, but merely as a construction of different realities. Instead of truth, there are only opinions: “We also have postmodernism to thank for conspiracy theories and fake news, ‘political correctness’ and ‘cancel culture’, i.e. the widespread tendency to suppress unwelcome opinions.” Zorn uses this catalog of vices as a foil, to contrast his emphatic depiction of postmodernism, which in many passages resembles a heroic story.

“Postmodernism” is not the label of a historical epoch or episode defined by a beginning and an end. Rather, it is a “complete space of time and experience” which, like modernity, is characterized by a “crisis of the absolute”, as Zorn calls it. It is about the reaction to the loss of unquestionable certainties in culture, society and economy. In his book, which is strong in metaphors and sometimes also in love with metaphors, Zorn compares this story of loss, which is always accompanied by attempts to regain certainties, with “a mountain hike, a circular route through the philosophical mountains.” In its center “of course the big four are enthroned of French philosophy: the historian and psychologist Michel Foucault, the two philosophers Jacques Derrida and Gilbert Deleuze, and the theorist Jean-François Lyotard.”

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Historian Andreas Rödder

After a few hours of walking, the hiker comes across the ridge of the German philosophy, “which is distinguished as an older formation by strong weathering”. The Münster philosopher Joachim Ritter looks down on bourgeois society, while Theodor W. Adorno – of course Zorn addresses him as “Teddie” – sits down in the middle of this society “to describe its contradictions and paradoxes up close”. German philosophy forms the background for the panorama of postmodern authors. They also include Richard Rorty, her “American twin” and Heinz von Foerster, the Austrian physicist, philosopher and pioneer of cybernetics.

These eight philosophers mark the most important stages of the postmodern migration. Daniel-Pascal Zorn, the mountain guide, finds an apt metaphor to characterize his own method: he has not presented the reader with a postcard showing the postmodern mountain massif from a single perspective. Rather, he gave him a hiking map with which the changes in perspective of postmodernism and the changes in its background can be traced step by step.

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Foucault, Michel;  French philosopher, psychologist, sociologist (founder of discourse analysis);  Poitiers 10/15/1926 Paris 6/25/1984.  Foucault in his study at the Collège de France, Paris, 1970 (1970 1984 professorship for the history of systems of thought at the Collège de France).  Photo.  |

The fruitfulness of the postmodern change of perspective can be shown in two outstanding publications. They are Michel Foucault’s 1966 Les Mots et les Choses (The Order of Things) and Richard Rorty’s 1979 book Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature.

Foucault replaces the sequential nature of the traditional history of disciplines with an archeology of the simultaneous. He shows that before the emergence of philology, economics and biology, general grammar, the “analysis of riches” and natural history share the same structural features in the 17th century. They reflect the knowledge possibilities of a period of time. It is the differences that are similar, not the similarities, as Claude Lévi-Strauss put this view into a formula.

question theory formation

Richard Rorty’s stated intention is to undermine the reader’s faith in traditional philosophy. He designs a different philosophy. “Great systematic philosophers,” writes Rorty, “are constructive and argumentative. Great visual philosophers react and write satires, parodies and aphorisms”. It’s not about replacing theories with theories, but about ironically questioning the whole process of theory formation.

Rorty was himself a “great visual philosopher”, influenced by the so-called “linguistic turn” which became more and more important in his time. With Rorty, this “turn” was not only reflected in the attention to the philosophy of language, but also in the approach to literature and in a literary style of writing. It was only logical that towards the end of his career Rorty switched from philosophy to a chair in comparative literature at Stanford. The “great visual philosopher” was a clairvoyant chronicler of political events. In his 1998 book, Achieving Our Country, Rorty paid tribute to American patriotism—and foresaw developments that would see Donald Trump in the White House.

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Republican presidential candidate, Donald Trump, speaks during a campaign rally late Saturday, Nov. 5, 2016, in Denver. (AP Photo/David Zalubowski)

In a time of transition from elite education to mass universities, postmodern philosophers not only questioned the conventional ways of knowledge production. They also tried to influence the institutions of knowledge production – at a time when the human sciences were becoming increasingly important, especially in France. Michel Foucault was so busy planning university reform that the responsible minister considered offering him a post in the Ministry of Education.

Jean-François Lyotard wrote his essay Postmodern Knowledge in response to a request from the Québec University Council to write a report on “The State of Knowledge in the Most Advanced Societies”. This text became a manifesto of postmodernism. Lyotard’s thesis that the time of the “grand narratives”, of the all-encompassing historical-philosophical drafts, was over, became the standard argument for diagnosing the present. As Zorn states, postmodernism is “not a solution to a problem, it is the symptom of a transition, the expression of a crisis”.

Postmodern criticism by Habermas

Zorn’s critique of the critique of postmodernism is fierce. He railed most strongly against Jürgen Habermas, whose lectures from 1983/84 (“The philosophical discourse of modernity”) were a reckoning with postmodernism and its “irrationalism”. In contrast, Habermas defended “modern rationality and the pragmatic-liberal paradigm of communicative reason”. The fact that Anger, so aware of metaphors, dubs Habermas “discourse guardian”, “court usher” and “war correspondent” shows that Habermas’ criticism has struck a nerve.

Zorn has written a book that is as fascinating as it is sometimes tiring. It ends with a vision, a description of “what postmodernism could have been”. In a circular, transparent glass palace in Antarctica, eight men have gathered around a table to talk and exchange arguments. The “discourse guardian” Habermas would have spoken of “communication free from domination”. If you don’t immediately recognize who Jackie, Jean-François, Richard and Gilles, Teddie and Joachim, Heinz and Michel are, you have lost the hiking map on the tour through the post-modern mountains.

Daniel-Pascal Zorn: The Crisis of the Absolute. What postmodernism could have been. Klett-Cotta, 656 pages, 38 euros

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