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Postmodernism -- who needs it? The whole world, according to Charlene Spretnak. But if it's visions of decentred selves
and their signifying games that fill your mind when you hear the 'p' word, either think again or read Resurgence of
the Real. The book is an engaging attempt to reclaim the term and put it to 'reconstructive' uses. According to
Spretnak, we need a need a positive postmodernism, one that is not scared to offer liveable alternatives to modern
values. Indeed, the future of the environment, and therefore that of us sorry lot, depends on it.
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From the outset, what I liked about this book was the passionate manner in which Spretnak writes. It might seem
megalomaniacal to survey the history of Western ideas, judge it and offer a redeeming vision, but hey, it looks like
the world may be heating up a degree every twenty years thanks to our modern 'emancipatory projects', so why not let
the debate heat up a bit too? I don't agree with every printed word by any means, but cavilling alone can never
account for the force of a polemic. Resurgence of the Real is about the big picture. It unashamedly attempts to
persuade us to have not only an opinion about it, but the right one.
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Like so many historical critiques of modernity the book offers a rather snug view of the development of the
sensibility, one where cultural moments are to be found tucked up rather neatly in their rightful places. Renaissance
humanism gets the curiosity flowing, the Scientific Revolution breaks some taboos, the Enlightenment recodes the
world as machine and Romanticism bites the hand of the provider. Spretnak's main point here is the paradigmatic
post-Romantic one that all this amounts to a history of the alienation of human beings from nature and community. To her
great credit she is aware that such a position is a favourite target of deconstruction in the contemporary
humanities, and indeed, this awareness is what actually makes the book because it leads to her central arguments as
to why an ecosocialist postmodernism is superior to a social constructivist one.
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Despite my own Derridean tendencies, I agree with most of her criticisms of what she calls 'deconstructive'
postmodernism. There's a great bit in Beyond Good and Evil where Nietzsche indulges in his favourite pastime of Kant
bashing. He remarks how Kant's invention of human faculties, rather than being read as an invention, caused
generations of diligent German scholars to go off looking for faculties 'in the bushes', as he puts it. And, of
course, they dutifully found them. The same is true with post-structuralism. A generation of anglophone humanities
scholars read Saussure's (students') statement that language is comprised of 'purely negative' terms-differences -- and
went off to find difference in everything, proclaiming variously the end of the 'logic of identity'. The result was a
widespread but naïve anti-realism that denied there being any natural qualities to things preferring to see them as,
thanks to language, 'social constructs'. Yet rather than amounting to demystification as is often claimed, this ethos
remystifies relationships between humans and the world. As Spretnak recognises, post-structuralists are loath to
admit it but they profess a cosmology where the social becomes the mysterious giver of all life, the primary, even
sole agent acting in the world. All phenomena become radically contingent upon it, and are to be understood in terms
of its ideal shape, which is difference, as a matter of law.
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For Spretnak the salient feature of modern thought is an ontological dualism in which subject and object, mind and
matter, become juridically distinguished. This is the epistemological basis of the regimes of mastery which have
deemed nature a resource comprising inert matter to be worked upon by rational human agents, and society to be the
object of social engineering. Hence, the advent of technocracy, corporate dominion, ecological crisis and the
breakdown of community. Yet deconstructive postmodernism retains modernity's tendency to estrange humans from nature.
Social constructivism is not a recipe for overcoming the core modern values responsible for the dire state of the
world. Rather we have to rethink our relationship with nature more humbly, admitting that it has an agency beyond our
complete mastery or understanding.
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Sounds a bit romantic? Well, Spretnak does happily ally herself with the Romantics on this, but enjoins us not to see
romanticism in its pejorative sense of ineffectual dreaming. Instrumental exploitation of nature by specialised
expert-rational practices is having diverse consequences that we, on a collective level, can neither fully predict or
control. It and not romanticism is the problem. For her, respect for nature is integral to an ecosocialism in which
equitable use of resources becomes a key moral orientation of humans. More holistic values could ground lifestyles
that are at once socially, politically, spiritually and ecologically engaged, ones exemplified for her in the Arts
and Crafts movement of Ruskin and Morris. Theorising nature away, on the other hand, is of no help in this because we
have to fit in with the needs of both bioregions and communities, admitting that we are nested in complex,
multi-dimensional contexts and that our actions have consequences upon them. On another level we must stop rationalising
our way out of global environment change whilst still retaining a faith, whether Marxist modernist or capitalist
modernist, in history as the progressive expansion of productive forces.
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So the resurgence of the real lies in adopting an orientation which recognises the co-implication of nature and the
social. It's about taking ecosocially grounded experience rather than philosophical abstraction, as the sine qua non
of action. Conceptually Spretnak’s critique resembles that of Bruno Latour (it's surprising to find no mention of
him), as both writers are concerned to show the failure of both modern dualism and postmodern critiques of modernity
in accounting for the agency of the non-human. This makes for a challenging read for thinkers whose identities may be
staked on the 'modern' and/or 'postmodern' values she so attacks. Not being a full-time academic she is at liberty to
not have to variously tip her hat at and knife onlooking peers. She is even able to agree with her constructivist
foes that values are culture-relative and have political implications. But she also makes herself vulnerable in
crossing so many disciplinary patches without playing ball with their doyens. Her attack on technology is more
declamatory than incisive. In celebrating certain configurations of technology (such as in craft à la Morris) and
denouncing others (like new media technologies and mass production technologies) she begs the question of the
acceptable limits of techne, but provides no real answer. This is symptomatic of the book's main weakness, which is
Spretnak's general reluctance to stipulate whether, supposing we get over our general faith in modern modes of being,
certain particulars of the modern period may have lasting value or strategic value in certain ways. In short, this is
a book that could annoy lots of specialists. Yet this criticism may also play right back into Spretnak's hands. She
believes it politically imperative to risk making links between domains of knowledge, because in reality, if not
always in analysis, everything is interrelated without respect for academic boundaries.
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The Resurgence of the Real is a thought-provoking attempt to render the bigger picture in the name of an alternative
agenda. Being open to the bold challenges it lays down may well invigorate a jaded academic palate or two. It did
mine.
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Details
The Resurgence of the Real: Body, Nature, and Place in a Hypermodern World. By Charlene Spretnak. New York:
Routledge, 1999.
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Citation reference for this article
MLA style:
Guy Redden. "Postmodernism Gone Sane: 'The Resurgence of the Real'." M/C Reviews 20 Jan. 2000.
[your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/reviews/words/real.html>.
Chicago style:
Guy Redden, "Postmodernism Gone Sane: 'The Resurgence of the Real'," M/C Reviews 20 Jan. 2000,
<http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/reviews/words/real.html> ([your date of access]).
APA style:
Guy Redden. (2000) Postmodernism gone sane: 'The resurgence of the real'. M/C Reviews 20 Jan. 2000.
<http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/reviews/words/real.html> ([your date of access]).
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