It is symptomatic of the sort of pseudo-radicalism that, at least for a time, was all too pervasive in the philosophical world: striking a blow against ‘Truth with a capital T’ was seen as a political act (and perhaps a tacit justification for a lifetime of de facto political quietism from academics safely ensconced in the ivory tower). This exhibition left me with the depressing feeling that the vacuity of these intellectual poses has been uncritically reproduced by some in the cultural world and, as a consequence of being divorced from their philosophically underpinnings, actually rendered more vacuous.
If it seems my dismissal is unnecessarily vitriolic it is because the underlying ethos of such work is not just wrong but politically dangerous. Far from being a radical act, calling into question the basic processes of rational thought (knowledge, truth, contradiction and evaluation) is, at heart, a reactionary acclimatisation. No doctrine better suits contemporary capitalism than postmodernism with its scepticism towards the conceptual underpinnings of critical and emancipatory thought. As Douglas Porpora puts it, consumer capitalism not only ‘thrives on avidyā’ but ‘secretes avidyā’. Turning away from questions which are universal and emancipatory in their scope, substituting them for a ‘fascination with the superficialities of life’ (the new, the shiny, the pleasurable), is not a critical or radical stance but rather a surrender and an intellectually vacuous one at that. This basic political reality doesn’t change simply because one dresses it up as an epistemological stance. When human history involves a perpetual struggle towards knowledge and the melioration of the human condition through the practical mastery such knowledge affords, the intellectually dubious celebration of ‘nonknowledge’ and ‘unlearning’ can’t help but seem like the decedent conceit of bored, as well as boring, aesthetes.
Extract from this review of this bullshit at the ICA. Applies more broadly.
Mark Carrigan 