Francis Wheen has got to be one of my favourite columnists. His new book
How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World looked to be a cracking read whilst nursing a bad cold and an even more severe bout of misanthropy over Christmas.
On the face of it, I was prepared to agree, gleefully and wholeheartedly, over hot Lemsip on the witty analysis Mr Wheen was about to dish up.
His central premise is that the ideals of the enlightenment have fallen victim to the critical seeds they sowed. The critique of universalism and concrete value has lead to a permanent and destructive questioning without purpose or end - chiefly because purposes and ends are the very things which must be questioned. The scourge of the post-modernist jester strikes again. Vexing questions which along with limitless applicability also have infinite scope. All of a sudden nothing is sacred and the mumbo-jumbo starts to leak into the vacuum.I could not agree more. However the devil, as they say is in the details. I could not help feel Francis Wheen threw some babies out with the copious amounts of dirty bathwater. His dismissal of Adorno and Horkheimer on page 192 I felt was pretty misguided. Sure, it's not the greatest work ever written, but he missed the point when he lumps critical theory in with the post-modern. There are concretes and absolutes for Adorno, he just has a hard time letting abstract philosophy come up with any practical experience except for the
negative. He does believe in power and his critique is about how power comes about from the identity thesis. It's not advocacy. It's pretty pessimistic and comes from a 'damaged life'. So I was annoyed that Francis Wheen had lumped in good old Theodor with the likes of Gayatri Spivak and the Mumbo-Jumbistas.
The key question for me is how the popular view of the critical question can be made less, well frankly, silly. There is a part of me the cringes when I read of the great moral equivalences that people espouse when declaring everything as text and interpretable. It seems to suffer from that most terrible of academic conceits: smugness in logic. There is a real world out there and what's more it's filled with value and that's because people lead meaningful lives (I'm not speaking personally, mind you). The worst turn in this regard was the 'deconstructive turn' - to simply defer meaning and (inter)play in a limbo-world of texts and subtexts is a denial of responsibility, oh and irony just don't cut it, sorry Richard Rorty. Francis Wheen is right to point out the excesses and absurdities here. This is possibly why I prefer the German philosophical tradition, it's possibly simply more depressed. From romanticism and notions of "Fragment" to Hegel and Marx through to Adorno and Heidegger the world is not abstract and it's a rich pre-existing context before we even enter it. Experience and criticality are the keys to understanding here, the purposes are not abstract they are about life. The social and political conditions for the possibility of power are relevant philosophical questions. There is no removing damaging power-relations by simply declaring reality to be an equal and free interplay of texts and putting on the trucker cap of irony. People die, starve and suffer in the real world. Critical questions, enlightenment questions need ends. I think there is something to be said for being critical of enlightenment hegemony, if only to keep it honest. Not least, because reason does not exist in a vacuum either, it has political and social context. To fail to be aware of that is to effectively sanction tyranny. Mumbo Jumbo may be the intellectual equaivalent of Philip K Dick's "kipplisation" but chucking out all critique of enlightenment hegemony, especially when it offers real critical questions bugged me.
I can only hope my cold abates before the new year and I'm in a better mood.
The real critical questions ought (yeah, sue me I used a moral imperative) to be focused on power-relations. If philosophy is to be about anything it is to be about life. Life is above all, a practical bloody slog through social institutions, economic conditions, cultural identities and psychological problems. Not to mention all the Lemsip and Tesco chewable vitamin C to stave off the old mortal coil shuffle at the end. It's about meaning and meanings are powerful. My bedrock here is use, what that use exactly is - now there's a question.
It's fair to say I've ranted off track there a fair bit. Overall I did laugh a great deal with the good Mr Wheen and throughly enjoyed his wit. I did find him a bit clumsy when he chucked in good ol' Theodor with the quacks. I'm glad Francis Wheen put a sharp boot up the jacksie of the left who cling to "
idee fixe" ideology and can't see beyond the abstract when they think about the practical
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