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CREDITS
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Director/Founder
Dorcas Gelabert
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Contributing writers
Phillip Cary
Constantine Cavarnos
Edna Diolata
Doris Youdelman
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Contributing editor
Doris Youdelman
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Contributing photographer
Ernest Cuni
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How do we manage to be postmodern? In philosophy there are at least two ways to do it, and the same two seem to be discernible in the arts. Call them leftwing and rightwing postmodernism. Both are responses to the unraveling of ambitious modern hopes for certainty and the triumph of reason, which once undergirded expectations of progress toward freedom and enlightenment. For a long time artists calling themselves "modernist" have been suspicious of this modern optimism, but now philosophers have come along to say that the artists are not just irrational opponents of the inevitable juggernaut of progress. Modernity itself does not seem to have understood itself very well, and its progress is hardly the juggernaut it once appeared to be.
What unraveled? The story goes something like this. Modernity began in the wake of the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century, which split the medieval church and thus fractured the foundations of religious authority that held medieval society together. After the Reformation, no religious authority could simply be taken for granted, because there were always Protestants eager to criticize the pope and Catholics eager to criticize any form of Protestantism you could name. One person's religion was another person's superstition or (even worse) dogma. European culture began to look elsewhere for certainty, and hoped to find it not only in modern science but also in a new individual freedom to find certainty for oneself by relying on reason alone, not on external authorities like popes and pastors and holy books.
Thus in modernity tradition came to seem irrational and repressive. It meant obedience to authority rather than the freedom of one's own reason. And it meant a kind of enforced ignorance, as when Tevye says: "Why is there a fiddler on the roof? No one knows—it's tradition!" Whatever may be the case with Tevye, to write such a line is to inculcate a modern rather than traditionalist sensibility. According to this modern sensibility, the narrow-minded oppressiveness of tradition, its irrational fear of the strange and the new, is visible whenever you transgress its boundaries—say, by marrying outside the community. So when Tevye's daughter marries a goy she must be treated as an outcast, as if she were dead—and why? No one seems to know—it must be tradition! The project of modernity, by contrast, presents itself as both individualist and rational: it means fearlessly discovering the bounds of reality for yourself using the inner resources of your own mature thought, not dictated by external authorities as if you were a child. Modernity imagined itself, especially in that quintessentially modern movement called the Enlightenment, as a cultural, philosophical and religious coming of age.
But modernity seems to have failed. There is more than one way to describe this failure, depending on which postmodernist you ask. Both kinds of philosophical postmodernism, however, are agreed that neither modernity's individualism nor its optimism about universal reason are persuasive any more. Many non-Westerners have little trouble recognizing that what the modern West thought of as universal reason and progress is really the continuation of a distinctively Western tradition, not the embodiment of reason itself. Postmodernism as it were internalizes that recognition. It is modernity realizing it is a tradition that does not see itself as a tradition. A postmodernist is a Westerner who thinks that modernity cannot survive this self-realization.
How you respond to this self-realization depends to a large extent on what you think about tradition. If traditions are inherently oppressive and irrational, then the failure of modernity spells an inherent failure of reason, and postmodernism means something akin to scepticism, an impulse to deconstruct all traditions, especially the overreaching claims of the modernity to represent universal reason independent of particular traditions. Unknown to itself, modernity was actually a particular tradition with its particular oppressiveness: patriarchal, technological, Western, intolerant of cultural difference like a chauvinistic tribe proud of its supposedly enlightened superiority to more backward tribes. Perhaps reason itself is really a particular form of oppressiveness, "a regime of truth" in Michel Foucault's immensely suggestive phrase. The claim to be modern, progressive or enlightened begins to look like a claim of power in the guise of a claim of rationality. In the interest of justice and liberation one wants to see such claims deconstructed—to use again that favorite term of leftwing postmodernism put into circulation by Jacques Derrida, who together with Foucault is the key figure in the first generation of European postmodernists to make a big impact on American universities.
At about the same time, rightwing postmodernists such as Alasdair MacIntyre and Hans-Georg Gadamer took a different tack, affirming both tradition and reason, and indeed arguing that particular traditions are the necessary context for every viable form of rationality and freedom. What modernity got wrong (as MacIntyre in particular tells the story) is the notion that tradition was inevitably irrational, unselfcritical and oppressive. If rightwing postmodernists are correct, then reason is not as universal as modernity thought, but is always a particular practice of reasoning embedded in particular traditions. It is as if to say: you can no more be rational in general than you can speak language in general—it has to be Chinese or French or English, which you have to learn from someone else, not discover for yourself. Whenever you speak the truth it is always in some particular language; and just so, whenever you know the truth it is always as a result of a particular tradition of reasoning, which you had to learn from external authorities. But learning to reason, like learning to speak, means you acquire the ability to criticize even those who taught you to speak and reason—or for that matter to tell jokes about them and satirize them. Traditions can thus generate self-criticism—even demand it—like the modern sciences, which are fine examples of self-critical, rational traditions (though, like a typical modern tradition, they do not often recognize they are traditions).
Leftwing postmodernism is doubtless the more central impulse of the arts today in the West. In-your-face transgressiveness, trespassing boundaries, efforts to shock and provoke, appeal to a leftwing postmodernist sensibility. But there are plenty of impulses that cohere more with a rightwing postmodernism, such as artists seeking to recover traditions of folk art and to learn their craft from elderly practitioners of once-dying arts. As a rightwing postmodernist myself, I think it is well worth trying to make explicit the logic of these impulses, which are not just exercises in nostalgia, but more like attempts to recover a nearly-forgotten form of wisdom.
For a rightwing postmodernist, our thinking and artistry are formed from the outside in. Art does not begin with the expression of the inner genius of the individual but with apprenticeship to a master practitioner whose wisdom is authoritative. You learn your finger exercises from your piano teacher, your dance steps from an accomplished dancer, your brush strokes from someone who is already a painter when you are not yet. It is a process of formation, of sharpening and clarifying boundaries rather than transgressing them. As a result, the very movements of your body are different, more elegantly-formed, less at liberty to be random and for that very reason capable of doing new things, like a tongue that knows how to form words rather than merely to babble.
For a rightwing postmodernist the fact that the modern West is a tradition with roots in both Athens and Jerusalem is not a skeleton in its closet but an essential resource on which it has always been dependent, even when it denied its dependence. So for instance the very word technology reminds us of its traditional roots in art, which is techne in Greek. The Greek word originally signified a whole range of skills learned from masters of any craft, including carpentry, pottery-making, horse-training, eloquence and politics. It was much only later that a gap opened up between useful and fine arts, so that the one eventually became the realm of technology and the other the practice of art for art's sake. What both modern technology and modern art seem to have forgotten, however, is the necessity of skills learned from external authorities. The skills are still necessary—you cannot be an engineer or a sculptor without them—but they are no longer what we mean by technology or art. We are prone to think of the one as mechanical and inhuman, the other as expressive and irrational. Yet both are in fact skills learned from a rich tradition.
A skill, as the Greeks thought of it, is something akin to a virtue. It involves formation of the soul as well as the body, and it never takes us far away from the question of whether a thing is done well or badly. To be ill-formed, to transgress and violate boundaries, makes for unskillfulness as well as vice. Just as an honest person does not lie, a skillful musician does not play out of tune. These are boundaries they avoid crossing, and the boundaries give shape to their souls. Not that they are incapable of transgression, but it is the exception rather than the rule. For the well-formed soul is good at doing things well, at observing the boundary between truth and lie, harmony and disharmony, and takes no pleasure in falsehood and ugliness.
But we do not start out skillful and well-formed, and that is why art does not begin with self-expression but with heeding external authority. We cannot learn a skill without being corrected when we get it wrong. That this is true of the skill of speaking and reasoning is one of the most fundamental insights of postmodern philosophy. Modern individualism was closely tied with a kind of expressionism, the notion that words were outward expressions of private inner thoughts, as if language was a system of signs for expressing a deeper inward meaning. Perhaps the first great moment in postmodern philosophy was Ludwig Wittgenstein's argument against the possibility of a private language, which undermined this notion that meaning originated as something private and individual, then was outwardly expressed in a shared language like English or Chinese. At the heart of Wittgenstein’s argument was the insight that you cannot quite know what your words mean if there is never anyone around to correct you when we have misused them. So meaning itself, like language, is a social phenomenon inseparable from the skill of speaking well.
The point can be generalized to all the arts, both useful and beautiful: as we cannot acquire a skill without external authorities around to tell us when we get it wrong, our arts are social. We become artists by being drawn into particular traditions of making and doing things well. That means the modern split between technology and the fine arts generates a distinctive kind of crisis in modern art. To the extent the arts have no use in shared human life, modern artists are in danger of losing their sense of art as work well done. They go back and forth between expressing private meanings (despising the Philistines who don't get it) and experiments with randomness or gestures of transgression whose aim is not so much to create outrage as to get attention.
The attraction of living traditions of folk art is that they represent work well done in a setting where the difference between the useful and the beautiful has not yet become a deep gulf. The problem is that so many of these traditions are dead or dying. I recall the stained glass and hand-carved wood paneling in my cousin's Victorian-era house. Did the craftsmen who did this work pass on their skills to the next generation? Is there anybody who has these particular skills anymore? If the skills have passed out of living memory, then they can only be recovered by a kind of museum-work, not the tradition of a living art which is learned from the wisdom of master craftsmen.
The arts flourish when they are the best way of doing something well—where the word "well" indicates a kind of goodness that may include both the useful and the beautiful. To speak well is both to communicate effectively and to shape comely sentences; to tell a story well is both to instruct and to delight; to build well is to put up a structure that is both sturdy and lovely. What is lost when a tradition of artistry dies is a particular way of doing human things well.
The difficulty facing a rightwing postmodernist in the arts is that nostalgia and museums are no substitute for living traditions with master practitioners from whom one can learn. In the Cotswold region of England a handsome local style of housebuilding has been replaced by standard modern construction techniques whose products look the same everywhere. The Cotswold style was for centuries the best way of building in the area, a skillful and beautiful way to use local materials, stone and wood, to best advantage. Now of course it is cheaper to build houses in the Cotswolds the same way they are built everywhere else, using the same concrete and metal that are readily available throughout the industrialized world. In this way modern technology appears more efficient than old artistry, as if it were a better use of resources and a better way of getting things done.
It is important to see that what is lost here is not just a quaint but inefficient way of doing things (the sort of thing we like to encounter in museums) but a form of wisdom, a skill but also an articulate and self-critical knowledge about how to do things well. The art is not easily separable from a way of life. Wendell Berry reminds us of this when he describes the destruction of farming communities, their way of life and their precise local wisdom by the technology of agribusiness, which produces a higher yield of crops for market but cannot sustain a richly human life in places where farming towns and their cultures once flourished. This is efficiency only in a very narrow, market-driven sense, not to be confused with the kind of efficiency which means work well done.
Neither artists nor postmodern philosophers have an overarching solution to these problems, from which we all suffer. When a way of life passes away, its wisdom and artistry typically pass with it, often beyond recovery. It is like what happens when the last native speaker of an ancient language dies, like the Native American languages or the Celtic tongue of Cornwall (or Aramaic, the language spoken by Jesus and his disciples, which has a handful of native speakers left today): the linguists may record the grammar and vocabulary of the language, but it is no longer a living tongue, a way of speaking well and a medium for learning new things, like every living tradition.
This is not to suggest that modernity might wipe out all traditions of human artistry, any more than it might wipe out all human languages. After all, one of the key insights of postmodernism is the inevitability of tradition. We belong to some tradition or other whenever we seek to do our work well. At issue, rather, is what standards of work well done are really available to us, aside from those that measure our work in terms of market value. This is largely a matter of which particular traditions of wisdom, virtue and skill are still in place, offering us a way to learn what is good.
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Phillip Cary, PhD, is Professor of Philosophy at Eastern University (St. Davids, Pennsylvania), where he is also Scholar-in-Residence at the Templeton Honors College. He is author of Augustine's Invention of the Inner Self (Oxford, 2000) as well as audio/video lecture courses on Augustine, Luther and Philosophy of Religion with The Teaching Company.
Professor Cary may be contacted at pcary@eastern.edu
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