Postmodernism will not solve China’s problems
Anglo-American historian David Christian coined the term “Big History”
In The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (La Condition postmoderne: rapport sur le savoir), the French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard proposed that the fundamental quality of postmodernism is an innate skepticism toward any meta-narrative or grand narrative. In the context of western thought, the most prominent and recurring grand narratives include scientific progress, dialectic reasoning and the emancipation of human nature emergent from classical German philosophy and the French Enlightenment. In all of these grand narratives, rationality plays a paramount role: in the Western paradigm, rationality is not only a tool to understand and perfect the individual psyche, but also an instrument with which humans can remold the natural world in a more civilized and human ideal. However, around the turn of the century, the limitations and disadvantages of rationality became prominent. Where instrumental rationality’s emphasis on ends and neglect of means resulted in the alienation and repression of the individual, progressivism led to a laissez-faire attitude of blind-following. Neither provided assuagement for ceaseless anxiety in the face of an uncertain future. Especially in the wake of the cruelties of World War II—namely, the systematic murder of Jews by the Nazis in the Holocaust epitomized by Auschwitz—intellectuals deeply questioned the nature of human existence and elegiacally declared modernism, and its promise of endless development and progress, on its deathbed.
Under this context, postmodernism swept Western Europe and North America in several decades, breaking apart and overcoming the extant systemic, structural and self-righteous modes of thought to become the most influential and critical philosophical trend. Still, postmodernism is a product of modernism, and it is hardly possible to transcend or supersede the modern foundations and infrastructure of contemporary society and create a dispersed and unordered, truly postmodern society from scratch. Textual deconstruction may have been born out of a desire for reconstruction, but despite its tremendous byzantine theoretical system, postmodernism does not offer any alternative strategies or visions for constructing a new society. Consequently, only when we reframe postmodernism in the context of modernism are we are only able to realize a potentially constructive function in the former.
In the most recent decades, the direction of Western society and the challenges it has faced have made it clear that postmodernism is an inadequate antidote for social ills, and postmodernism’s dominance in thought and culture has receded while totalizing narratives have made a comeback. The underlying reason for postmodernism’s retreat is actually traditional or classical modernism’s quiet evolution to a new stage of global modernism—a reformulation resulting from globalization. Compared with modernism, global modernism addresses much more global problems and takes on a much more worldly identity. Among the issues in its purview, global modernism is concerned with the climate, the environment, natural disasters, issues arising from human population density, ethnic conflicts and culture clashes resulting from diasporas and transnational migration, and the increasingly severe food and energy crises. Drawing from the experience of non-western societies, global modernism is accelerating the disintegration of a Eurocentric worldview’s hegemony. Non-western societies also offer insight into the problems criticized by postmodernism, which, with its inherent opposition to systems, proves ineffectual at solving these contemporary problems. These issues still demand that humankind channel its wisdom and mastery of science into a long-term, rational development strategy. In modernism’s revival as global modernism, it will again take the reins of development and push humanity unceasingly forward toward the liberation of all its constituents. In this liberation process, postmodernism and its limitations will finally be eliminated.
In history departments, postmodern thought has already lost its stronghold. Not long ago, historians’ abandonment of their discipline as a vehicle with which to delineate grand narratives in favor of a microscopic perspective which focused on very narrow research topics marked a division between old history and new history. In his 2010 article “The Return of Universal History” published in History and Theory, the Anglo-American historian David Christian coined the term “Big History” and predicted that we are on the eve of the return of universal history. Even as people were questioning the feasibility of history on such a large scale, the International Big History Association had already been established, coinciding with a Big History Plan aiming to promote the instruction of Big History. Additionally, some historians in more traditional research fields, as well as some postmodern oriented scholars have also acknowledged the importance of large-scale history. The British intellectual historian David Armitage observed in an article that history has moved from a microscopic focus to a macroscopic focus, and in his 2009 article “The Climate of History: Four Theses” for Critical Review, the famous postcolonial theorist Dipesh Chakrabarty used climate change as the inception point for his thesis that there is a discontinuity between human history and natural history. Chakrabarty argued that in order to overcome the obstacles and limitations of historical understanding, it is necessary for recorded history (i.e., the history of humans) to interface with evolutionary history (i.e., the history of the earth). From these examples, the return of grand narrative and human-orientation and retreat of de-centered fragmentation is evident.
Observing postmodernism’s direction in the West provides us with beneficial insight for examining postmodernism in China, where its history is relatively short. Postmodernism entered China in 1985, when the preeminent Marxist and postmodern theorist Fredric Jameson delivered the speech “Postmodernism and Theories of Culture” at Peking University. Objectively speaking, Chinese postmodernism not only lacks postmodernism’s original western context, but moreover, does not have the same traditions, ideas or systems as western postmodernism. Still, there are commonalities in China’s and the West’s modernization processes: power has lead to corruption, industrialization has suppressed humanity, culture has become commercialized and society has experienced a general moral decay. All of these conditions simply become fodder for the criticism of postmodernism. Compared with the radical extremes of Western postmodernism, postmodernism in China has maintained an obvious conservative tendency. It has avoided trying to supersede modernism, and rather attempts to ferret out the disadvantages of modernism with the help of tradition. This departure from the present—or repackaging the traditional as psuedomodernism—not only sterilizes Chinese culture but is also impotent to address any of China’s real problems. Furthermore, it contributes to the convergence of cultural nihilism with Chinese postmodernism, a process that begins with the denial of modern values and culminates in self-denial. In final analysis, China’s path is to follow the culture track of Marxism to achieve human liberation, not to adopt postmodernism’s apathetic attitude and in so doing undermine those goals we have yet to achieve and yet to know the value of attaining.
Zhang Xupeng is an associate researcher of Institute of World History, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.
The Chinese version appeared in Chinese Social Sciences Today, No. 400, Jan. 3, 2013.
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Translated by Zhang Mengying
Revised by Charles Horne