From Futures 25 (8) 877-893 (October 2013).
The collapse of all belief, postulates post-modernism, has produced a profusion of
‘realities’ competing for our attention. The world is nothing but an artificially
created and maintained theatre where everything is managed and manipulated.
We live in and by simulations and nothing can be verified as ‘real’, true or
meaningful. Do these claims of post-modernism stand up to critical scrutiny?
What does all this mean for the Other-the non-Western world? Are non-Western
‘realities’ really on sale in the shopping mall of post-modernism? And who does
post-modernism actually represent? This essay attempts to answer these questions,
and finds common ground between colonialism, modernity and post-modernity,
by examining four new books: Reality Isn’t What It Used To Be by Walter Truett
Anderson;’ Uncritical Theory: Postmodernism, Intellectuals and the Gulf War by
Christopher Norris ;2 Dominating Knowledge: Development, Culture and Resistance,
edited by F. A. Marglin and S. A. Marglin;3 and Colonising Egypt by Timothy
Mitchell.4
Humanity is always on the edge of transformations. We have moved from the stone age to bronze age to iron age. We have progressed from ‘savagery’, through ‘barbarism’ to ‘civilization’. We have evolved from the ‘Dark Ages’ to the ‘Age of the Enlightenment’ and to the epoch of ‘industrial revolution’. We have changed from agricultural societies to industrial societies to information societies. And, after moving from pre-modernity to modernity, we are now set to go forward to post-modernism. Ours is a history of quantum leaps and sharp breaks from the past, raptures and discontinuities, from enslavement to freedom. Each transition heralded new promises, new opportunities, new freedoms. And the transition from modernity to post-modernism is no exception. Our epoch will see our total liberation from the shackles of the past, from the dogmas of the present, from the very anchors of our being that bind us to ourselves: it would be the culmination of ‘the ascent of man’, the zenith of our evolution, and the final triumph of the human will.
There are three major forces shaping the transition from modernity to the postmodern age. According to Walter Anderson, they are: (I) the total breakdown of old ways of belief which has been going on for the past century; (2) ‘the birth of global culture, with a worldview that is truly a worldview’; and (3) the emergence of the conflict about the nature of reality, social truth and epistemology which, like class, race and nationality, are now contested by all groups in society. These forces are so powerful that nothing can stand between them: ‘it is impossible to return to a previous culture and industrial form’, says Charles Jencks-the transition, the onward march to post-modern times, is ‘irreversible’.’
The post-modern age forces us to be free: it is, in Anderson’s words, ‘a time of incessant choosing’. It’s a period, Jencks says, when ‘not only the rich who become collectors, eclectic travellers in time with a superabundance of choice, but almost every urban dweller’; in this age ‘Everyman becomes a Cosmopolite and Everywoman a Liberated individual’.h But post-modernism does more than give us choices about lifestyles and cultures, consumer goods and technologies; it even offers us a whole array of realities to pick and cull. As Anderson puts it: ‘In the postmodern world we are all required to make choices about our realities. You may select a life of experimentation, eternal shopping in the bazaar of culture and subculture. Or you may forgo the giddy diversity of contemporary life-style swapping and fall into step with some ancient heritage: be an Orthodox Jew or fundamentalist Muslim or a Bible-toting Christian or a traditional native American.” The freedom to choose, to do and be anything and everything, makes us all into ‘consumers of reality’. In the post-modern times, the accent is squarely on cultural and traditional diversity. The byword for post-modernism, Jencks emphasizes, is ‘pluralism, the “ism” of our time’. Pluralism is both the great problem and the great opportunity of our age:
The challenge for a Post-Modern Hamlet, confronted
by an embarras de richesses, IS to
choose and combine traditions selectively, to
eclect (as the verb of eclecticism would have it)
those aspects from the past and present which
appear most relevant for the job at hand. The
resultant creation, if successful, will be a striking
synthesis of traditron; if unsuccessful, a
smorgasbord. Between inventive combination
and confused parody the Post-Modernist sails,
often getting lost and coming to grief, but
occasionally realrsing the great promise of a
plural culture with its many freedoms. Post-
Modernism is fundamentally the eclectic mixture
of any tradition with that of the immediate
past: it is both a continuation of Modernism
and its transcendence. Its best works are characteristically
doubly-coded and ironic, making
a feature of the wide choice, conflict and discontinuity
of traditions, because this heterogeneity
most clearly captures our pluralism.8
Is post-modernism really a pluralistic enterprise? Is it really going to produce a synthesis of all our traditions and cultures? And, who is this ‘we’ who must ‘choose’ to be what ‘we’ want to become? Who is this individual, ‘born out of the collapse of the medieval monolith’, that Anderson insists, ‘must choose and keep choosing, whether or not he or she knows it or wants such freedom: must determine who to be, what to believe in, how to live’?9
Pay as you enter
Let us begin with a rather banal but necessary point, since it seems to escape all champions of post-modern visions. This ‘we’, and these ‘individuals’, do not include those dying of famine in Africa: they cannot even choose to live, let alone how to live! But we need a proper perspective on who’s in and who’s out of the inescapable post-modern world of free choices. We know that at least 1 billion global citizens that’s one in fivelive in total abject poverty without shelter, clothes or food. These are smallholder farmers, landless peasants, artisans, fishermen, nomads, indigenous tribes, the bulk of whom live in rural areas. These individuals too do not suffer from richness of choice: they cannot choose not to live below the poverty line. As ldriss Jazairy and his colleagues show in the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) report, The State of World Rural Poverty, l” rural people have not only sustained themselves for thousands of years,
they also kept their societies fed and functioning. Now they have become abjectly poor because their choices-related to agricultural and pastoral practices-have been systematically removed from them. They exist in the twilight zone between life and death simply because they have no other choice.
But the ‘we’ must also exclude an estimated 3 billion traditional people on the planet, living in the larger civilizations of India, China and Islam, and numerous smaller civilizations in Asia and Africa, both urban and rural dwellers. These people cannot choose to be what they want to be, what they have always been, simply because the environment that sustained and nourished them, that allowed them to
be what they want to be, has been and is systematically being destroyed. They cannot live as they choose to live, because the sciences, the technologies, the medical systems, the architecture, and the natural habitat that sustained their lifestyles have been suppressed and systematically destroyed. They cannot buy what they choose to buy, because their mode of production, after being relegated as inferior and irrelevant, has been replaced by imports of Western consumer goods and services. They cannot even choose not to be the victims of the dominant culture: their victimization is in-built in the global economic and political system.”
There are other groups of people who cannot be part of the post-modern ‘we’: the refugees who cannot return to their homes and have no choice but to exist in squalid camps and survive on hand-outs; the asylum seekers whothanks to European immigration policies-have no choice but to turn back and face despotic regimes or ‘ethnic cleansing’; the increasing number of innercity poor in the West who have no choice but their grinding poverty; the rapidly multiplying homeless in Europe and North America who do not even have the choice of a roof over their heads let alone anything else.
All these people-the vast majority of the earth’s population-without much hope, let alone a bundle of choices, are not-cannot-be part of the postmodern ‘we’.
The post-modern ‘we’ is thus not a pluralistic, global we: it applies to those in North America and Europe who are, consciously or unconsciously, genuinely confronted by choices about lifestyles, belief systems and ‘realities’. Those enslaved by poverty and those entrapped by an oppressive modernity do not have the Iuxury of post-modern freedom and choice: circumstances dictate their lifestyles and reality. Thus post-modernism is not only an occidental challenge and a Western opportunity, it is only the privilege of a particular group within Western society.
However, the non-Western world four-fifths of the planet’s population does not even have the choice not to be victims of post-modernism. For despite its claims to be pluralistic, post-modernism is actually ravenously monolithic. Its surface pluralism veils a monolithic matrix at its core. its language, logic and analytical grammar are intrinsically Eurocentric and shamelessly cannibalistic of Others. Postmodernism does not mark a break, a discontinuity from oppressive modernity; rather it represents an underlying continuity of thought and actions about Other cultures that formed the bedrock of colonialism, was the foundation of modernity, and is now housed in postmodernism. Colonialism signified the physical occupation of Others, the non-Western cultures. Modernity signalled their mental occupation. Post-modernism now moves in to occupy their total reality.
As an example of Eurocentric logic so inherent in arguments for post-modernism, consider the three ‘global’ forces, identified by Anderson, that are making the transition from modernity to postmodernism ‘inevitable’. The alleged ‘total breakdown of old ways of belief’, if at all true, is purely a Western phenomenon. For example, in the Muslim world, the past 100 years have seen a remarkable resurgence in belief. I2 Islam has had serious problems in adjusting to modernity, but that is a far cry from the collapse of the belief system. On the contrary, Muslim fundamentalists-and here we are talking about a very small minority-are actually riding on a major upturn in belief throughout Muslim societies and cultures. If there was a collapse of belief system-among the populace as well as the intellectuals the small minority of fundamentalists would not be able to sustain themselves. Indeed, the role that belief plays in Muslim societies has become so strong that even the totally authoritarian rulers have to justify themselves in terms of Islam! The decades of communism did not lead to a collapse of belief in Central Asia as the numerous Islamic parties in the new states of the region testify. But this is not unique to Islam. Christianity and resurgence in belief played a large part in the over-throw of communism in Eastern Europe. The rise of belief is a recurrent theme among the liberation movements in Latin America.” The ‘loss of hope’ and disillusionment endangered by modernity has not led to a loss of faith but actually to a revival of belief as well as to the increasing popularity of indigenous social, cultural and political movements throughout the non-Western world. Post-modernists regularly generalize a purely Western trend (even here there are some doubts!) and present it in global terms.
The emergence of a ‘global culture’ is often presented as yet another indication of the imminent arrival of post-modernism. We are all wearing T-shirts, jeans and sneakers, and eating McDonald’s and Kentucky Fried Chicken. Memes-the cultural equivalent of genes-which replicate mental patterns, are now so firmly embedded in the cultural body of the globe that everyone is singing the same tune, discussing the same ideas, talking in the same catchphrases and expressing themselves in the same fashion. But, argues Anderson, we must not be too concerned about the monolithic nature of emerging culture:
This looks to some people lake nothing more
than the Westernisation of the world. They’re
not entirely wrong, and the spread of Western
influence is something you can vrew with
dismay or perhaps a bit of hope. It includes not
only junk food and junk bonds, but also concepts
of democracy and human nghts [But1
it is a fragment of the whole picture Every
Westerner knows about tea and Zen and the
thoughts of Chairman Mao, and every Western
businessman has heard about Japanese management.”
There are several layers of ethnocentricity in this argument and in this brief passage. It is claimed that the Westernization of the globe could actually be a good thing; that non-Western cultures do not have their own ideas of governance and notions of human dignity and need to borrow these from the West; that ‘tea’, ‘Zen’ and ‘thoughts of Mao’ are ahistorical, and that the knowledge of these products in the West has nothing to do with colonial or recent history; and that the flow of ideas between West and non-West is equal and on a par.
The Westernization of the globe is suffocating the non-Western cultures of the world: this point is so well established that it is hardly necessary for me to lahour it here.15 Suffice to say that a world dominated by a single culture will not just he a much diminished world, it will also he an endangered place. On the earth, as in nature monocultures arc doomed to extinction.
The assumption that the flow of ideas between West and non-West is equal and would lead to a richness of cultures at worst and a ‘synthesis’ of cultures and traditions at best is widespread in postmodern writings and thought. However, the flow of cultural ideas and products, as those of commodities and goods, is strictly one way-from the West to the Third World. One does not see an Indian Michael Jackson, a Chinese Madonna, a Malaysian Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Moroccan Julia Roberts, Philippino New Kids on the Block, a Brazilian Shakespeare, an Egyptian Barbara Cartland, a Tanzanian ‘Cheers’, a Nigerian ‘Dallas’, or a Chilean ‘Wheel of Fortune’, or Chinese opera, Urdu poetry, Egyptian drama etc on the global stage. The global theatre is strictly a Western theatre, a personification of Western power and prestige and Western control and domination of the planet. Those non-Western individuals who are occasionally given a walk-on part are chosen for their exotica or because they specifically subscribe to Western ideas and ideals or promote a Western cause. When non-Western cultural artefacts appear in the West they do so strictly as ethnic chic or empty symbols.
The quest for synthesis of cultures in post-modernism should be seen as a logical step in the ongoing process of Westernization of the globe, and universalization of the Western civilization itself. Having subsumed its own diversity into modernity, including its religious heritage of Judaeo-Christianity into seemingly superior principles of secular meliorism, the West now feels confident that a truly universal civilization, bereft of all confessional content, is feasible. Synthesis can only occur between two equally powerful cultures that are equally represented on the global stage. A powerful and dominant culture does not combine with a weak and dependent culture to produce synthesis-it simply absorbs it. In the Hegelian sense, synthesis requires two equal antitheses. Talk of synthesis between Western and non-Western cultures is a bit like unification of West and East Cermany-the economically and politically powerful West Germans simply walked in and bought most of East Germany, lock, stock and barrel. Most East Germans suddenly found that the houses in which they had been living for decades now belonged to someone else and the factories in which they had been working no longer needed their futile labour or outdated expertise. Similarly, post-modern synthesis is in fact a euphemism for the absorption of Other cultures into Western civilization.
Both the assertions about the breakdown of belief systems and the birth of a global culture are actually based on the third, and perhaps most important, force of transition in the post-modern armoury-the social construction of reality. All we do as humans, it seems, is to construct realities to fit our own mental pictures of the world. Everything ‘out there’ is in fact a figment of our imagination. And since we are all equal in this best of all possible post-modern worlds, all realities are on a par with each other, all truth is relative, and all objectivity is but a charade. Anderson puts the post-modern case aptly:
Reality construction is a process, and although
some constructs may be tenacious they are still
only temporary manifestations of a dynamic
flow of thought that no philosophy or science
has yet been able to map or describe in its
entirety. Cognition is a process of computing
d reality-not the reality. And it appears
that we construct not just one reality, but realities
and realities and realities and that they
overlap and enclose one another and sometimes
conflict.16
This means that the world has been transformed into a theatre where everything is artificially constructed. Politics is stagemanaged for mass consumption. Television documentaries are transformed and presented as entertainment. Journalism blurs the distinction between fact and fiction. Living individuals become characters in soap operas and fictional characters assume ‘real’ lives. Everything happens instantaneously and everybody gets a live feed on everything that is happening in the global theatre. ‘This theatricality’, writes Anderson, ‘is a natural-and inevitable-feature of our time. It is what happens when a lot of people begin to understand that reality is a social construction’, In other words, we are being constantly manipulated-and, perhaps, we in turn, are manipulating others; that is, those of us who have the choice to manipulate.
Baudrillard has the courage to take the argument about social construction of all reality to its extreme logical conclusion. The entire global theatre is in fact ‘fluctuating in indeterminacy’, he argues, so much so that all of reality is actually being absorbed by the fictionally created ‘hyperreality’. All social life is now being regulated not by reality but by simulations, models, pure images, representations. The post-modern age has unleashed a process where reality is being systematically manufactured as representation. But the process does not stop there: the representations themselves produce new simulations, totally divorced from the original reality, and the simulations themselves go on to produce pure images, sons and daughters of other images. This is how Baudrillard describes the whole process:
Representation starts from the principle that
the sign and the real are equivalent (even if this
equivalent is Utopian, it is a fundamental
axiom). Conversely, simulation starts from the
Utopia of this principle of equivalence, from
the radical negation of the sign as value, from
the sign as reversion and death sentence of
every reference. Whereas representation tries
to absorb simulation by interpreting it as false
representation, simulation envelops the whole
edifice of representation as itself a simulacrum.
These would be the successive phases of the
image:
- It IS the reflection of a basic realrty.
- It masks and perverts a basic reality.
- It masks the abrence of a basic reality.
- It bears no relation to any reality whatever: it is its own pure simulacrum.
In the first case, the image is a good appearance:
the representation is the order of sacrament.
In the second, it is an evilappearance: of
the order of malefice. In the third, it plays at
being an appearance: it is the order of ‘sorcery.
In the fourth, it is no longer in the order of
appearance at all, but of simulation.17
It is futile, Baudrillard argues, to look for ‘reality’ in a world of pure simulation. We don’t just lack a way of telling the ‘real’ from the artificial, we can never really discover the distinction. As such, we might as well accept the post-modern condition for what it is and learn to enjoy it, instead of chasing the chimeras of antiquated belief systems and outmoded paradigms whose truths possess not even an iota of credibility.
What then should a post-modern consumer, with a modicum of conscience, think about all that pain, suffering, injustice and oppression that is going on out there: is it all just a simulation, or are there real people enduring real hardship and cruelty? Baudrillard’s answer came in the form of his analysis of the Gulf war. A few days before the war, he argued in The Guardian that the war would never happen. lR It is a pure piece of theatre designed to induce mass hysteria by simulations, war-game language-play and imaginary scenarios. Since the difference between the real and the image has totally disappeared, the whole exercise was an artificial construction: the real thing was not going to be any more real than a shoot-them-up arcade game played out on the world’s TV screens. After the war, Baudrillard declared that ‘The Gulf war has not taken place’.” Despite all the deaths and devastation, it was actually a ‘virtual’ engagement and it was patently ‘idiotic’ to be for
or against it.
In many respects, the Gulf war was a post-modern phenomenon. The blanket media coverage did convey the feeling that everything was being examined and covered in minute detail and transmitted live to every household on the surface of the planet. The extensive coverage served up with simulations, computerized footage of bombings, meaningless statistics, instant press conferences, expert opinion, the ridiculous claims of ‘precision bombing’ and ‘pinpoint accuracy’ with no civilian casualities despite the massive, visual evidence of mass destruction and high civilian casualities, the eagerness of the media, European politicians and religious divines alike to accept the blatant propaganda of the US military machine-all this did blur the distinction between fact and fiction, the actual and the staged, the real and the hyperreal. But does it mean, as Baudrillard claims, that we cannot know whether war actually took place, that there is no way of knowing what actually happened and, most important, that we are in no position to take a moral stand on the issue?
For a world that claims that all reality is socially constructed, which promotes simulation as the norm, the pain, suffering and death of the Other is particularly unreal. Post-modern simulacra serve as an insulating space that isolates those who live in a world of countless choices from those whose only choice is to be their unwilling victims-the Others. The true post-modern character of the Gulf war is summed up, as Christopher Norris shows so powerfully, in the depth of complacency ‘that exists between such forms of extreme anti-realist or irrational doctrine and the crisis of moral and political nerve among those whose voices should have been raised against the actions committed in their name’.20 Unable to justify morally its ceaseless oppression, the Western world now postulates that no moral stance is actually possible. Since all moral positions are equally valid or equally absurd, none is possible, and one might as well learn to enjoy the status quo. From the patently sensible assertion that culture cannot be grasped as a true or false representation of reality-as Marxists have argued for decades-post-modernism manufactures the absurd theses that the real is no longer real, that reality is but an illlusion, that there is nothing but a perpetual and endless reconstruction of realities, as Anderson would have us believe, or truth and arguments are little more than unmoored free-floating languagegames, as Baudrillard would argue. From here, the next step of taking oppressive and imperialistic political and economic policies and actions as representation of social reality and proving them to be totally unreal is a short one. Post-modernism
is the ultimate justification, the master alibi, for the continued exploitation and oppression of non-Western cultures.
Yet there are factual and moral truths out there which are as real as the ‘smart bombs’ that (mistakenly?) landed on civilian dwellings in Baghdad. There are real truths which stand above bare disagreements between competing viewpoints, which can be argued, which are amenable to historical evidence, and which, as Norris notes, ‘involve determinate standards of veridical warrant and accountability’. Using Noam Chomsky’s work, Norris catalogues a few factual truths concerning the Gulf war:
Popular support for the Gulf war was secured
through a large scale campaign of media disinformation
that suppressed many truths-historical,
gee-political, and factual-documentary-
and whrch traded on widespread
ignorance of what was actually occurring from
day to day, in the bombing of civilian populations,
the extent of so-called ‘collateral
damage’, and the pursuit of war-aims that
greatly exceeded the official UN provisions with
regard to the Iraqi occupation of Kuwart.
Thus for instance it IS a claim borne out by
knowledge of the relevant background history
that the ‘Allied’ campaign was fought with the
object of securing Western hegemony on the
region through the survival of a client regime
(Kuwait) which could then be relied upon to
keep the oil-supplies flowing and to exert a
‘stabilizing’ influence on adjacent territories. It
is also a matter of documentary record (I) that
Saddam Hussein was brought to power and
maintained over a long period by US intelligence
and ‘long-arm’ strategic agencies; (2)
that his regime was backed up until the very
last moment by constant supplies of weapons
and resources (not to mention diplomatic support)
provided by the US and other Western
powers; (3) that this invasion of Kuwait was
prompted-or at least given what appeared to
be the green light-by indications that the US
would not intervene since it also wished to
push up the oil-prices by exerting pressure on
Kuwait; (4) that the Gulf war was fought first
andforemostas a war of retribution against the
erstwhile ally who had proved too difficult to
handle; (5) that its conduct involved not only
enormous military and civilian casualties but
also-contrary to professed ‘Allied’ waraims-
a full-scale campaign of aerial bombardment
launched against electricity generating
stations, water-supply systems, sewage disposal
plants, and other components of the urban
infrastructure whose collapse could be predicted
to cause yet further death and suffering
through the breakdown of emergency services
and the spread of infectious diseases; (6) that
the attack on the retreating Iraqi forces (along
with civilian hangers-on and hostages) continued
to the point where any justifying talk
became merely a cover for mechanized massmurder;
and (7) -still within the realm of documentary
evidence-that the war might well
have been averted had the ‘Allies’ held out
against US pressure and listened to those well
informed sources who argued that sanctions
were already (in early January) taking their toll
of Iraqi war-fighting capability. Of course all
these claims are properly subject to reasoned
argument and counter-argument, some of
them (like item 3, 4 and 7) involving a considerable
measure of interpretive hindsight. But to
treat such disputes-in the FoucauNyotard
manner-as so many rival, incommensurable
‘discourses’ beyond any hope of just and truthful
arbitration is to adopt the kind of doctrinaire
relativist outlook that leaves no room for
genuine debate.21
But the Gulf war was also very real in other terms: it was paid for in hard cash by Kuwait and Saudi Arabia and it involved the transfer of real wealth from the Middle East to the West.
‘We are controlling the horizontal, the
vertical . . .'
Despite its claims to be a revolutionary departure from the past, post-modernism is in fact a continuation and further expansion of the essential dynamic of Western culture. It is ‘revolutionary’ in that, in the Baudrillardian terminology, it has created a world of pure ‘simulacra’. As Baudrillard writes,
the transition from signs which dissimulated
something to signs which dissimulate that
there is nothing, marks the decisive turning
point. The first implies a theology of truth and
secrecv (to which the notion of ideolonv still
belongs). The second inaugurates an ige of
simulacra and simulation, in which there is no
longer any Cod to recognise his own, nor any
last judgement to separate truth from false, the
real from its artificial resurrection, since everything
is already dead and risen in advance.22
But this ‘turning point’ does not mark post-modernism as a discontinuity from the past of the Other. Far from being a ‘radical break that affects all theoretical and cultural practices, as Jameson suggests in Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,23 post-modernism takes the subjugation of the Other, that began with colonialism and expanded to encompass the sphere of the mind in modernity, to a new level of all-consuming transcendence. Western culture has continuously used five of its basic internal traits to oppress the Other-representation, duality, control, instrumentalism and the gaze. These facets of Western culture remain intact and provide a continuous link between colonialism, modernity which grew directly out of colonialism, and post-modernity which has emerged directly out of modernity. When stripped of their outer camouflage, the three are one and the same theory of domination.
Representations of reality are not a new concern particular to post-modernism. Western culture has always been obsessed with representation. During the colonial period, European visitors to the Middle East were particularly perplexed by the lack of perspective of Muslim cities. A labyrinth of narrow streets without names, a complex maze without plan, the city looked nowhere except to itself. It was there: the real thing. Visiting Cairo in 1856-57, Herman Melville complained that it had no point of view; to appreciate the city he wanted a plan. In Constantinople, he complained, there was ‘no plan to the streets. Perfect labyrinth. Narrow. Close, shut in. If one could but get up aloft . . .But no. No names to the streets. . .No numbers. No anything.‘24 Since it was not built according to a ‘plan’, a ‘picture’, the city did not represent anything: ‘nothing stood apart and addressed itself to the outsider, to the observing subject. There were no names to the streets and no street signs, no open spaces with imposing facades, and no maps. The city refused to offer itself. as a representation of something, because it had not been built as one’.25 But to colonize these cities it was necessary ‘to determine the plan’. Colonialism required the creation of a plan or a framework that would transform non-Western cities and cultures into representations, make them legible, readable like a book, and hence amenable to political and economic calculations. But representation was not simply a ‘plan’ that colonialism brought to the non-Western world; it was a process, a process of enframing non-Western cultures, constructing an image of their reality, and directing their gaze towards a particular direction.
At the 1889 World Exhibition in Paris, Muslim visitors were truly intrigued with the depth and extent of Western obsession with representation. As Timothy Mitchell relates in Colonising Egypt, the Egyptian visitors noticed that ‘on the buildings representing a Cairo street even the paint was made dirty’, the donkeys were from Cairo and the Egyptian pastries on sale tasted like the real thing. The exhibition’s perspective was that of Paris and the exhibits were arranged and illuminated so that an observer felt that he was standing at the centre of Paris, The city itself was represented as the imperial capital of the world and exhibits from the empire were laid out according to a strict hierarchy. But it was not just the exhibition that simulated reality; the real world outside appeared as though it was an extension of the exhibition. As Mitchell notes, no one realized this except the Egyptian visitors. Egyptian authors who visited the exhibition and toured Europe regularly described what they called intizam al-manzar, the organization of the view:
The Europe one reads about in Arahrc accounts
was a place of discipline and visual arrangement,
of silent gazes and strange simulations,
of the organisation of everything and everything
organised to represent, to recall lrke the
exhibition some larger meaning. Outside the
world exhibition, it follows paradoxically, one
encountered not the real world but only
further models of the representation of the real.
Beyond the exhibition and the department
store, everywhere the non-European visitors
went-the museums and the Orientalist congress,
the theatre and the zoo, the countryside
encountered typically in the form of a model
farm exhibiting new machinery and cultivation
methods, the very streets of the modern city
with their deliberate facades, even the Alps
once the funicular was built-they found the
technique and the sensation to be the same.
Everything seemed to he set up before one as
though it were the model or the picture of
something. Everything was arranged before an
observing subject into a system of signrfication
(to use the European jargon), declaring itself to
the signifier of a signified.25
There was, however, one thing-as in the case of the Gulf war-that was, beyond dispute, very real-as the Egyptian visitors discovered to their cost-about the exhibition: the donkey rides and the Egyptian pastries cost real money. The commercialism of the exhibition was just as real as the commercialism of the outside world.
Colonialism used representation to construct a particular image of the Other. This was a distinctive construct engineered to enframe non-Western cultures so that they can be ‘read’, measured, easily manipulated and controlled. It was an image that was based on knowledgeable ignorance-that is, it was constructed with the full knowledge of the reality of the Other but designed to project an ignorant image of non-Western cultures. It represented negative projections of the West’s own fears as well as a rationale for domination, offering only a choice of enduring subservience to non-Western people. The construction of a distorted image of the Other-what, in the case of Islam is known as Orientalism27- reflected the internal insecurity of the West which forces it to see everything in terms of duality. Unable to face the real Other, it had to create an artificial image, painted in terms of its own categories and concepts, with which it could relate.
Western culture divides everything into two-one superior, the other inferior. The order of the original is superior to the order of the models and representations, the impersonal is superior to the personal, the Empire is superior to the colonies, the West is superior to the non-West. The binary opposition becomes an instrument for establishing a hierarchy. The separation of reality from representation not only reflected the division of the world, it also established a hierarchy that, in turn, reflected the hierarchy within the Western society itself. Hierarchy then itself becomes an instrument for the control of the Other.
Colonialism perceived Other cultures in terms of a conceptual schema, first introduced by the anthropologist Adam Ferguson, a leading figure of the Scottish Enlightenment28 Anthropology equated the specific social and cultural features into a threefold ranking of living cultures-savagery, barbarism and civilization. From the outset, however, civilization was a unitary term; savagery and barbarism were seen as transitional phases in the progress of the emergence of real, fullblown civilization, the highest achievements of which were represented by European society. Colonialism directed the gaze of non-Western cultures towards Europe and insisted that they become like the West. Both colonialism and Christianity were seen as the instruments of this ‘civilizing mission’. The salvation of the Other lay in accepting Christianity, in accepting the superiority of Europe, and coming as close as possible to the ideal model.
Modernity extended the domain of the internal traits of Western culturerepresentation, duality, control, instrumentalism and the gaze-that enframe the Other. Taking over from where colonialism and Christianity had left the Other, it became, in the words of Ashis
Nandy, a ‘secular theory of salvation’.29 In the post-colonial world, non-Western cultures came to be described as traditional, as opposed to the modern, and naturally superior, Western culture. It was their traditionalism that made them ‘underdeveloped’, and to become like the West they had to ‘develop’. The notion that reality is socially constructed is not a discovery of post-modernism; in Western culture we can trace it to Keynes who used it to describe how belief mediates between profit and investment. In the Keynesian view, it is the ‘animal spirit’ of the capitalist class that ensured prosperity. From here it is but a short step to the conclusion that it is the traditional outlook of non-Western cultures that thwarts their development. The literature of modernization is saturated with examples of how inferior traditional lifestyles impede the growth of national economies and thwart the development of non-Western societies: ‘multistranded instead of single-stranded relationships, kinship ties, labour immobility, restrictions on the sale of land, subsistence rather than open market production, mystical or religious instead of scientific way of approaching production, and gift or reciprocity instead of commodity exchange’,jO are just a few ways the march of modernity is supposed to be blocked by traditional societies.
But modernity does not limit itself to forcing the non-Western cultures to become like the West-that was an antiquated colonial goal. Modernity presented itself as a universal aspiration and sought the absorption of the Other into the West. Here hierarchical control came in terms of history: the present of the Other was described as the past of the West; the West had already lived through the present of the Other which was merely a representation of the real history of the West. Histories of all non-Western cultures were so many tributaries and insignificant rivers which all flowed into the mighty ocean of Universal History, the History of the West.
To absorb non-Western cultures into itself modernity required a new schema of representation. Modernity not only forced an internalization of the image of the Other constructed under colonialism, it also led the West to see its own construction as the real thing. The theory of modernization was based on this construction of non-Western cultures as innately inferior; the practical programme to absorb the non-West into the West came as ‘development plans’. It was what Tariq Banuri describes as ‘hegemonic panopticism’31 -meaning centralized surveillance and control-inherent in Western liberalism’s method of binary opposition, that became the cornerstone of all theories of modernization as well as development plans. The inferior dialectical relationships so evident in non-Western cultures had to be replaced with the superior hierarchical ones: the personal emotions of the populace had to make way for impersonal ‘animal spirit’ of a certain class. This shift from ‘personal’ to ‘impersonal’ forms of understanding and acting could be justified on the basis of a host of Western social theories which, in the words of Benuri, ‘helped to legitimate this asymmetry as intrinsically desirable’ and made ‘it an important and valued aspect of Western culture’. Benuri shows how these theories have shaped and directed the discussion of valued goals in society:
- Exchange Theory: impersonal relations between buyer and seller ensure freedom of exchange. In many writings thus is seen as a primary form of freedom.
- Production Theory: impersonal relations between employers and employees ensure that resources will flow to their most efficient use.
- Jurisprudence: ‘blindness’ of justice, and the principle of natural law, ‘that no man shall be a judge in his own cause’, suggests that impersonal relatrons between the judge and the litigants are necessary to ensure justice.
- Education Theory: the separation of content of education from the personality of the participant may be necessary not only for the pursuit of efficiency, but also to maintain the myth of the equality of opportunity.
- Political Science: a bureaucratized, efficient state is seen as one which will be able to implement most effectively the will of the citizens, leading not only to effective decisionmaking, but also to the protection of freedom.
- Technology: the notion of experts, and the partitioning of knowledge that it entails, is legitimized on grounds of efficiency, as well as of innovation and growth.
- Moral Philosophy: based on abstract rather than relational principles, it is legitimized on the grounds of its being universal and objectrve- and thus fair.
- Communrcation: that a free, impersonal, and impartial press will provide true information in contrast to the tainted news supplied by politically motivated sources.”
The theories of modernization produced during the 1950s and 1960s were based on these, and other similar theories of Western social sciences. Blueprints for modernization, like Lerner’s Passing of the Traditional Society: Modernizing the Middle East,33 contain a step-by-step guide to eradication of ‘personal’ traditional, non-Western cultures and their replacement with a pale representation of ‘impersonal’ Western culture and lifestyle. Since the cities of non-Western people have no perspectives, they must be structured hierarchically; since most of the population of ‘developing countries’ lives in rural areas, urbanization must be introduced, they must be motivated to move to cities where they can have a modern lifestyle; since their subsistence agriculture is not efficient, it must be replaced with modern methods of agriculture; and, most important, they must be persuaded, by any means necessary, to think with modern categories, so that they would see basic human values such as freedom, justice, equality, creativity, and even power solely as they have been experienced and defined by the West-only then would non-Western cultures become truly Western, truly modern. Modernity sought nothing less than the replacement of the ways of knowing, being and doing of non-Western cultures.
The goals of modernity could be best achieved by separating traditional cultures from their reality. Traditional cultures approach reality not just in epistemological terms, but also experientially. As Banuri notes, such things as land, the village, the home, trees, forests, animals, stars, goods and even people are not seen simply in terms of personal gratification, as in Western culture, but in a ‘relational context: a home is not just a place where you are living at the moment, but also an integral part of your history as well as of your future’.34 It is this experiential and relational perception of reality that guides individual behaviour, in non-Western cultures, towards what the society holds as essential, valuable and desirable.
Modernity applied two basic instruments to break this experiential and relational bond-instrumental reason and an instrumental notion of a person, or ‘individualism’. Instrumental reason was the weapon that sought to transform experiential reality of non-Western cultures into an experimental one. New forms of institutionalized violence were justified in the name of such values as competition, control, production, achievement, efficiency, growth, progress, development. Everything was made subservient to a rationality that came down to a set of variables, a collection of figures, that gave primacy to statistical and laboratory reality over personal, social, communal, spiritual and cultural realities of non-Western cultures. Instrumental reason fostered the notion that the means by which social and political development is sought is separate from its ends; and it is only the ends that need to be given moral consideration. Thus freed from any moral constraints, the means of systematically separating Other cultures from their reality unleashed ruthless violence, in the shape of instrumental science, capitalist technologies, agribusiness and instrumental nation-states, at traditional societies. The emphasis on individualism was designed to generate a sense of personal identity independent of relationships, autonomous from cultural, social and communal concerns, and based on such impersonal elements as preferences, desires, fashions and professional occupations. Goals and preferences of (Westernized) individuals were presented as metaphysical entities-the only realities that actually mattered-while the desires and aspirations of communities were brushed aside as irrelevant to modernization. In this way, modernity has succeeded, to a considerable degree, in shaping traditional societies in the image of the West.
We see, then, that the internal traits of Western culture-its obsession with representation, insistence on duality and control, ruthless instrumentalism and persistent gaze-is actually a metalanguage of oppression and domination. Post-modernism exhibits the same traits;
but in as much as it is a transcendence of modernity, it gives the Western metalanguage of oppression a few new twists. The enframing of non-Western cultures continues but the process of enframing itself is now presented as an illusion, a mirage, a simulation; simultaneously simulations and mirages are constructed to make it appear as though all hierarchy and control, and hence domination and oppression, have disappeared. The object of post-modernism is not simply to absorb the non-West-that is the goal of hackneyed modernity. No: post- modernism aims at nothing less than to exhaust and consume the non-West.
Jencks sees post-modernism in terms of ‘paradoxical dualism’ or ‘double coding’.35 What this means is that the duality principle of Western culture remains intact. Listen to the terms of debate that post-modernism has imposed: either reality represents something ‘real’ or it represents nothing; either religions, Marxism and other ‘metanarratives’ will be transcendental or they will not be; ‘works of art either represent something more real than themselves which is therefore the depth beneath their surface (making them susceptible to a hermeneutic reading) or they are absolutely autonomous, indeterminate and therefore “unanalysable”; either the subject is master of itself, its own thought and actions or it has simply vanished into the pure systematicity of the historical present’.36 Moreover, as Warren Montag argues,
the first set of alternatives kranscendentality,
art as representation, the subject as origincenter),
is often placed in historical opposition
to the second set (the absence of trancendentality,
the indeterminacy of art, the death of the
subject) as a once existing past that has given
way to the present as one historical totality to
another. So, for example, the classically conceived
subject once existed but no longer
does, just as art once represented reality but
has somehow ceased to do so.37
Of course, the binary oppositions presented by post-modernism are just as much an artificial construction as the duality championed by colonialism and modernity. Anderson, for example, argues that there are ‘two faces of God’: religion thus comes in binary oppositions as ‘exoteric’ and ‘esoteric’ varieties. ‘Exoteric religions, such as institutionalized Christianity and Islam’, he tells us ‘are reified and deified belief systems that explain all reality and are capable of serving as a complete system of values and beliefs for a society’.38 Esoteric religions, such as Sufism and Zen Buddhism, ‘are primarily traditions of individual instructions’. It does not occur to him that there may be non-institutionalized forms of Christianity and Islam, which do not explain ‘all reality’, but leave the exploration of reality to their followers. Neither does it occur to him that there may be ‘esoteric religions’ which are not systems of ‘individual instructions’ but ways of experiencing ‘reality’ in a communal form. However, this neat binary categorization of religion leaves the vast majority of Christians and Muslims out of the picture altogether: 99.9% of Muslims are nonfundamentalists or Sufi mystics; 99.9% of Christians, of all denominations, are not Bible-thumping fundamentalists; 99.9% of Hindus are not fundamentalists nor do they subscribe to mystical beliefs and practices so readily available in India. Fundamentalism regularly pops up in post-modern writings as a straw man. Modernist cultural phenomena in non-Western countries are taken as a representation of the social reality of religion and then represented as the norm of Other cultures. Post-modernism is thus championed not just by projecting a fear of fundamentalism but also by showing Other cultures to be irrational and obscurantist theologies.
But there is another point here that needs consideration. Modernity limits all theoretical criticism to intra-paradigmatic (where the assumptions and propositions of theories are questioned within a given paradigm) and inter-paradigmatic (where writers in different disciplines who may share the worldview of the impugned paradigm, though not all its maintained assumptions, are examined) spheres. Postmodernity, on the other hand, first focuses criticism on ‘texts’-which could be anything from written words to cultural practices and artefacts-and then renders all criticism meaningless: once the text is ‘deconstructed’ one is left with nothing but inescapable textual predicament. However, there are other forms of criticism that are not amenable to modernist or post-modernist analysis, for example, resistance. Fundamentalism, especially Islamic fundamentalism, is not just a religious phenomenon: it is a critique of both modernity and post-modernity. Certainly, Islamic fundamentalism emerged in the Muslim world as a critique of imposed modernity.39 Similarly, some 1300 years ago, Sufism emerged in Muslim societies as a critique of the arid legalism of the dominant system.40 To understand fundamentalism
as well as Sufism one has to read them as critiques.
However, in post-modernism, critiques, debates, intellectual and critical positions, have little meaning, because its fundamental postulate is that nothing can count as an argument when all criteria for assessing reality and truth, as well as reality and truth themselves, have been deconstructed and shown to be chimeras. This is the control principle of post-modernism. At one level, this principle demolishes the hierarchy of truth established under colonialism and expanded by modernity. But on another level, it creates a new monopoly through which control of the Other is exercised. To understand how it works we need go no further then Baudrillard himself-the guru of post-modernism. To maintain control, Baudrillard tells us, monopoly tactically creates a double:
In all domarns, duopoly is the highest stage of
monopoly. It is not political will that breaks the
monopoly of the market (state intervention,
anti-trust law etc); it IS the fact that every unrtary
system, if it wants to survive, has to evolve
a binary system of regulation. This changes
nothing in the essence of monopoly; on the
contrary, power is only absolute if it knows
how to diffract itself in equivalent variations;
this is, if it knows how to redouble itself
through doubling. This goes for brands of
detergent as much as for ‘peaceful coexistence’.
You need two superpowers to maintain
a universe under control; a single empire collapses
under Its own weight. The equilibrium of
terror is what permits a strategy of regulated
opposrtrons to be established, since the strategy
is really structural rather than atomic-41
A structured strategy of control and regulation can, of course, produce an infinite number of homologous and competing differences-a universe of competing ‘realities’, ‘truths’, ‘worldviews’, ‘texts’, ‘cultures’, ‘positions’, generating a perception of thriving pluralism and diversity. But a monopoly, the moloch of Western culture, controls and directs this apparent pluralism. Pluralism has meaning only when the participants in plurality have equal representation, equal access to resources and opportunities, a modicum of equality in terms of power. Post-modernism perpetuates the monopoly of Western culture not just by producing a binary system of regulation (post-cold war, the new super-demon is Islam4L) but also by generating a simulated plurality which veils the continuity in oppression and inequality.
Post-modernism also legitimizes Western representations of the Other by a clever trick. Since there is nothing but representation, all interpretation is misinterpretation, there is no hope of rescuing the truth of non-Western cultures from the constructed images of the West. The status quo is preserved: both the historic, current and the future enframing of the Other in images of ignorance continues unabated. Of course, the representations of the Other are constructions; but the ignorance and oppression they perpetuate, like the money at the 1889 World Exhibition and the wealth transferred to the West as a result of the Gulf war, are very real! There is a corollary: the pasts of the Others are also erased by this metaphysical incantation. As all texts are embedded with narrative or story-telling interests, it is not possible to distinguish between factual and documented writing of history from fiction, imaginative and simulated events. There is thus no possibility of ever unearthing the truth about the histories of all Others, the myriad non-Western cultures that exist and have existed in history. With one con-trick, post-modernism absolves Western culture of its historic guilt while propelling its historic themes.
While colonialism and modernity sought moral justification (however facile) for its own ends, if not the means, postmodernism does away with the need even for the moral justification of its endsindeed, all ends. Pure instrumentalism becomes the norm. This is what is meant by post-modern pragmatism. As William James puts it, what we need are ‘instruments, not answers to enigmas, in which we can rest’.43 Rorty concurs. And Anderson adds: ‘to be a post-modern pragmatist is to recognize all constructs as theoriesand hence as instruments to be used where appropriate and periodically replaced’.44 In its instrumentalism, postmodernism takes a quantum leap from modernity and colonialism: here everything is an instrument towards the cultural ends of Western civilization, including human beings, and particularly non-Western individuals, communities, societies and cultures which are just so many consumables. In post-modernism, the Other becomes an instrument for the realization of the full potential of the West.
The post-modern desire to consume the Other is not just a collective cultural phenomenon: it is also an individual quest. Post-modernism takes individualism to a new level. As Anderson notes, ‘the rush of post-modern reaction from the old certainties has swept some people headlong into a [radical] worldview Many voices can now be heard declaring that what is out there is not only what we put out there. More precisely, what I put there-just little me, euphorically creating my own universe’.45 Post-modern individuals-being so many points of greed within Western civilization-are forever acquiring new identities, creating new universes of realities, consuming whatever they think would satisfy their insatiable quest for meaning, identity and belonging, largely at the expense of non-Western cultures.
In this eternally empty and meaningless universe, what is there to guide us? Baudrillard has already given up: for him, it’s Apocalypse Now! Rorty and others have opted for ‘literature’ and ‘irony’. Anderson suggests that individual conscience will become our guiding star. ‘We do not’, he asserts boldly, ‘cease to be moral animals and slide into hedonistic or savage normlessness’.46 No: we will use psychology as well as our own conscience to help us evolve into new ‘moral beings’. As an example, Anderson suggests that something like Lawrence Kohlberg’s moral development scale will become a standard instrument of personal development. This postulates six different levels of growth. At stage one people understand little more than their own needs and notions of reward and punishment. Stage two arrives when they begin to recognize that other people have needs and a few trade-offs may be in order. In stage three they move into a ‘good boy’ orientation based on getting approval for pleasing and helping others. At stage four they begin to see society as a system of rules. Stage five has them beginning to recognize that all systems of rules are arbitrary and negotiating a ‘social contract’. The post-modern individual reaches a moral apex with stage six when he/she begins to rely on personal conscience.” Here, then, is the zenith of post-modernism: after all has been said and done, we have nothing but cheap and shoddy Californian psychology to take us to the next stage of our evolution!
Reliance on individual conscience has meaning only when individuals have a conscience. All post-modernism’s traits actually work towards depriving individuals of their conscience. If neither the ends nor the means actually needs justification, then anything goes. Both thought and action are motivated by expediency: witness the Gulf war, the first trial of Rodney King, the denial of assistance to Muslims of Bosnia in the face of ‘ethnic cleansing’-it’s all so very pragmatic! Postmodernism engenders double standards. And the individual is not just trapped into a system of ambiguous morality and double standards, a perpetual and insatiable quest for consumption, the inescapable bombardment of images and representations, and constant manipulation of/by all. There is also the very real and ever present fear and internal anxiety created by the post-modern need to choose an identity wrapped in some manufactured reality: ‘when we choose to adopt one, we know-even if we are terrified by the knowledge and do all we can to repress it in ourselves and others-that we could choose an entirely different one’. What role can conscience play in a world of such fear, angst and darkness?
When it looks out from the dark enclosure of its soul, Western civilisation and culture now hears nothing but the emptiness. In its most oppressive and totalistic phase as postmodernism, it wants to drown the globe in the absolute blankness of its vision. Postmodernism continues the exponential expansion of colonialism and modernity (the relationship between, and the metalanguage used by, colonialism, modernity, and postmodernism is summurized in Table 1). It is a worldview based on that pathological condition of the West which has always defined reality and truth as its reality and truth, but now that this position cannot be sustained it seeks to maintain the status quo and continue unchecked in its trajectory of consumption of the Other by undermining all criteria of reality and truth. Post-modernism takes the ideological mystification of colonialism and modernity to a new, all-pervasive level of control and oppression of the Other while parading itself as an intellectual alibi for the West’s perpetual quest for meaning through consumption, including the consumption of all Others.
‘They identified their realities
accurately’48
Non-Western cultures have been aware both of diversities of reality as well as its and culture now hears nothing but the social construction (although they do not echo of its inner emptiness. In its most state their realizations in the jargon of oppressive and totalistic phase as post- modern sociology). For example, in Islamic modernism, it wants to drown the globe in culture reality is designated by a number the absolute blankness of its vision. Post- of technical terms. Haqiqah is reality per modernism continues the exponential se; haqiyah ahadiyah is unitary reality; expansion of colonialism and modernity haqiqah al-haqaiq is the reality of realities; (the relationship between, and the meta- haqiqah muqayyadah is determined realanguage used by, colonialism, modernity lity (as for example in science and other and post-modernism is summarized in rational inquiry); haqiqah mutlaqah is Table 1). It is a worldview based on that absolute reality; haqiqah al-insan is the reality of man (that is socially constructed reality); haqiqah al-shay is the reality of things; haqiqah wahidah is single reality; and so on. Each reality reveals its essence through a particular methodology, and while they are different realities, they could be aspects of the same reality; multiplicity can be seen as unity and unity can be seen as multiplicity. Absolute reality is the reality of God and it cannot be known: ‘God in His essence is only known to Himself’. Determined reality, the reality of the world, is acquired through sustained use of reason and physical human faculties. The reality of man is the Self he shapes through his cultural, social and communal identity. Some realities can be acquired by sustained effort, some are lived, some are experienced. Various realities can sometimes combine to produce new realities: for example, a unitary reality occurs when the determined reality gets a glimpse of the absolute.49 This is not the place to examine the universe of realities in Islam; the point is that post-modernism is not what ‘inevitably happens’ when people discover that there are many realities and many ways of knowing, as Anderson asserts-Muslims, and other non-Western people, have always known this,
Not only does post-modernism recycle notions well established in non-Western cultures with a real sense of discovery, it makes two further-and, from a non-Western perspective, totally ridiculous-assertions. The argument that, since there are many realities, there cannot be any criteria for determining their validity, becomes quite meaningless when, for example, viewed from the perspective of Hindu logic. Western logic is based on the principle of ‘valid inference’ and formulated in a content-independent ‘formal’ language that aims to translate everything into mathematical symbols. In contrast to Western logic which uses sequential techniques of quantification and negation, Indian logic uses a geometric system to demonstrate configural relationships of similarity and convergence: it is both mathematical and symbolic. Instead of a universe seen through an either/or duality, the Indian system sees the world through a fourfold logic LY is neither A, nor non-A, nor both A and non-A, nor neither A nor non-A), and Jain logic expands these categories into a sevenfold logic. Being a logic of cognition, the Indian system achieves a precise and unambiguous formulation of universal statements in terms of its technical language without recourse to quantification over an unspecified universal domain.50 Again, I do not want to launch into an exposition of Indian logic here: the point is that non-Western cultures are not only aware of the diversity of realities, but they have also developed criteria for the validation of different realities. The universe is not as meaningless as postmodernism would have us believe!
Post-modernism also posits that realities are something that we can all acquire, or buy at a cut-price sale in the ‘bazaar of realities’ like ready-to-wear designer clothes. The only reality that is amenable to purchase is the one that post-modernism already sells-consumer goods. Other realities have to be lived and experienced. Watch a craftsman in a traditional society and see how his reality shapes his craft. The craft may be for sale but the reality isn’t. Experiential realities have to be lived and experienced. They are not amenable to a culture totally submerged in instantaneity, hyperreality, false selfdelusions, anxiety and angst. The dupes of somnolent wishfulness who buy Karma Kola mysticism, quick-fix Hindu meditation schemes, and perverted Sufism are getting just what they pay for-consumer products. The realities of Other cultures are not for sale in the supermarkets of post-modern nihilism.
The totalizing and transcendental pretensions of post-modernism can be undermined by the realities-lived, experienced, thought, constructed, discovered-of non-Western cultures. In their ability to demonstrate that a universe of diverse realities does not abolish metanarratives, on the contrary, it makes certain metanarratives essential to our survival, non-Western cultures could actually offer true resistance to the consuming and globalizing tendencies of post-modernism. A meaningful world with meaningful relationships can only be based on meaningful content and meaningful worldviews.
Ashis Nandy has described progress as ‘an expansion in the awareness of oppression’.i’ Western radicals and radical movements need to realize that postmodernism perpetuates oppression by foreclosing the possibility of discovering alternative visions of society. It is designed
to instil a complete state of helplessness among those who buy its credo. Genuine progress demands that we direct our intellectual and physical energies in vanquishing the metalanguage of oppression, so deeply ingrained in Western culture, that post-modernism is now using to reconquer the world.
Notes and references
- Walter Truett Anderson, Reality Isn’t What lt Used To Be: Theatrical Politics, (San Francisco, CA, HarperSan Francisco, 1990)
- Christopher Noms, Uncritical Theory: Postmodernism, intellectuals and the Gulf War (London, Lawrence and Wishart, 1992).
- F. A. Marglin and S. A. Marglin (editors), Dominating Knowledge: Development, Culture and Resistance (Oxford, Ciarendon Press, 1990).
- Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt (Berkeley, CA, University of California Press,1991).
- Charles Jencks, What is Post-Modernism? (London, Academy Editions, 1986), page 7.
- Ibid.
- Anderson, op cit, reference 1, page 7.
- Jencks, op cit, reference 5, page 7.
- Anderson, op cit, reference 1, page 114.
- ldriss Jazairy, Mohiuddin Alamgir and Theresa Panuccio, The State of World Rural Poverty: An inquiry into Its Causes and Consequences (London, IT Publications for International Fund for Agricultural Development, 1992). The figure of 1 billion below the poverty line comes from this report.
- This was first realized in the early 1970s; see, for example, J. A. Kautsky, The Political Consequences of Modernization (New York, Wiley, 1972), and the reference cited therein. For more recent analysis see Claude Alvares, Science, Development and Violence: The Revolt Against Modernity (Delhi, Oxford Unrversity Press, 1992); and UN agency reports, eg Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP), Fourth Asian and Pacific Ministerial Conference On Social Welfare and Social Development (New York, United Nations, 1992) as well as earlier conference proceedings. Tariq Benuri’s literature review, ‘Development and the politics of knowledge: a critical interpretation of the social role of modernization’ in Marglin and Marglin, op cit, reference 3, provides an up-to-date outline of how development systematically strips traditional societies of their choices.
- See Ziauddin Sardar. Islamic Futures: The Shape of Ideas to Come (London, Mansell, 1985), particularly chapter 2, ‘The dialectics of Islamic resurgence’; see also Yusuf Ali al-Qaradawi, Islamic A wakening Between Rejection and Extremism (Herndon, VA, International Institute of Islamic Thought, 1991).
- See the evidence in Catholic Institute for International Relief (CIIR), Proceedings of the 1990 International Conference on Right Wing Religion (London, CIIR, 1992). For a general background of how, instead of collapsing, faith is actually strengthening, see Richard T. Antoun and Mary E. Hegland (editors), Religious Resurgence: Contemporarv Cases in Islam, Christianity and Judaism (New York, Syracuse University Press, 1987).
- Anderson, op cit, reference 1, page 23.
- The impact of Westernization on the Third World has been assessed from every conceivable point; the literature on the subject is vast’ and ranges (this is a totally random selection!) from Pierre Jalee’s The Pillage of the Third World (New York, Monthly Review Press, 1968), to my own Science, Technology and Development in the Muslim World (London. Croom Helm, 1977), to Jalal Ali Ahmad’s Occidentosis: A Plague from the West (Berkeley, CA, Mizan Press, 1984) to Jorge E. Hardoy et al, Environmental Problems in Third World Cities (London, Earthscan, 1992); the diversity of evidence and the plurality of arguments against Westernization are truly of post-modern proportions!
- Anderson, op cit, reference 1, page 68.
- Jean Baudrillard, ‘Simulacra and simulations’, in Selected Writings, edited by Mark Poster (Oxford, Polity Press, 1988), page 170.
- Jean Baudrillard, ‘The reality Gulf’, The Guardian, 11 January 1991.
- Jean Baudrillard, ‘La guerre du Golfe n’a pas eu lieu’, Liberation, 29 March 1991.
- Norris, op cit, reference 2, page 26.
- Ibid, pages 11 &I 11.
- Baudrillard, op cit, reference 17, page 171.
- F. Jameson, Post-modernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London, Verso, 1991).
- Quoted by Mitchell, op cit, reference 4, page 32.
- Ibid, pages 32-33.
- Ibid, page 12.
- The term is normally associated with Edward Said’s book of the same name: Orientalism (London, Routledge andKegan Paul, 1978). In fact, it has been around for much longer, and other authors analysed it in some detail before Said. See, for example, A. L. Tibawi, English Speaking Orientalists (Geneva, Islamic Centre, 1965). For a more contemporary examination of Orientalism, see Ziauddin Sardar and Merryl Wyn Davies, Distorted Imagination: Lessons from the Rushdie Affair (London, Crey Seal, 1990).
- Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society (Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 1966) (original 1767).
- See Ashis Nandy, Traditions, Tyrannies and Utopias: Essays in Politics of Awareness (Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1987).
- Tariq Banuri, ‘Modernization and its discontents: a cultural perspective on the theories of development’, in Marglin and Marglin, op tit, reference 3, page 84.
- Ibid, page 88.
- Ibid, page 87.
- D. Lerner, Passing of the Traditional Society: Modernizing the Middle East (New York, the Free Press, 1958).
- Banuri, op cit, reference 30, page 80.
- Jencks, op cit, reference 5, page 9.
- Warren Montag, ‘What is at stake in the debate about postmodernism?' in E. A. Kanlan (editor), Postmodernism and its Discontents (London, Verso, 1988) page 88.
- Ibid
- Anderson, op cit, reference 1, page 212.
- See the brilliant study by Bruce Lawrence,
Defenders of God: The Fundamentalist
Revolt Against the Modern Age (London,
I. B. Tauris, 1990). For broader perspectives
on how Islamic fundamentalism developed
as a critique of modernization, see
John Esposito, Islamic Revivalism (Washington,
‘DC, American Institute for Islamic
Affairs, 1986): Nikki Keddie and Eric Hoonlund
(editors), The kanian Revolution aid
the Islamic Republic (New York, Syracuse
University Press, 1986); and James P. Piscatori,
Islam in a World of Nation-States
‘Commentary ‘on the kjjat al-Siddiq of
Nur a/-Din al-Raniri (Kuala Lumpur, Ministry
of Culture, 1986), and numerous other
works.(Cambridge, Cambridge University Press,
1986).
Mysticism of Hamzah Fansuri (Kuala Lum- - For a systematic account of the emergence of Sufism as a critique of dominant our, Universitv of Malava Press, 1970); A modes of thought in Muslim society, see M. M. Sharif (editor), A History of Muslim Philosophy, 2 vols (Wiesbaden, Otto Harrassowitz, 1963).
- Jean Baudrillard, ‘Symbolic exchange and death, in Selected Writings, op tit, reference 17, page 143.
- See Ziauddin Sardar, ‘Editor’s introduction: Islam and the Future’, Futures, 23(3) April 1991, pages 223-230.
- Quoted by Anderson, op cit, reference 1, page 258.
- Ibid.
- Ibid, page 13.
- Ibid, page 153.
- Ibid, page 155.
- A quote from the 17th century Indian/
Malay Muslim mystic, Nur al-Din al-Raniri. - The Muslim exposition of realities is based on the monumental works of Professor Syed Muhammad Naquid al-Attas. See his Islam, Secularism and the Philosophy of the Future (London, Mansell, 1985); The debate about postmodernism?‘, in E. A. Dikontents (London, Verso, 1988), page 88.
- Ibid.
- For a more detailed exposition of Indian logic see M. D. Siriniva, ‘Logical and methodological foundations of Indian science’, in Ziauddin Sardar (editor), The Revenge of Athena: Science, Exploitation and the Third World (London, Mansell, 1988); Susantha Coonthalake, ‘The voyages of discovery and the loss and re-discovery of “other’s” knowledge’, lmoact of Science on Society, No 167y, i992: pages 241-264 and numerous references cited therein.
- Nandy, op tit, reference 29, in particular the essay ‘Towards a Third World utopia’.