I recently bought a copy of this book edited by Anthony Elliott and Charles Spezzano because it contained an essay about the psychoanalyst Hans Loewald which I wanted to read. I was struck when flicking through the wider book, Psychoanalysis at its Limits: Navigating the Postmodern Turn, what a glorious example this is of fin de siècle social theorising. It’s staging a dialogue between psychoanalysis and postmodernism, at a curiously non-reflexive distance from clinical practice, with the intention of understanding how identity is reconfigured under changing social conditions.
It is jarring to read work like this, published in 2000, from the vantage point of late 2023 because of how very stable that time seems in retrospect. For all its talk of radical uncertainty, rupture with the past and existential risks, it’s not clear exactly what the stakes were in these changes. I was struck with a certain sense of nostalgia for Lyotard’s incredulity towards metanarratives having read this morning about traffic cameras being blown up by improvised explosive devices on the streets of London. At what point did an (inactive) incredulity became (active) credulity? Is this a reclamation of metanarrative, now taking a pluralised form in an ironic repudiation of the more optimistic strands of postmodern cultural diagnosis? The extent to which superficially distinct elements (e.g. wellness culture, anti-vax, road protests, anti-lockdown, child protection, climate change denial) are coalescing together into a lose coalition, driven by strategic conduct on the far-right but not entirely explicable by it, seems weirdly postmodern if you revisit the terms of these debates, yet simultaneously not.
Was the whole problematic a conceptual dead-end in the first place? I suspect it was but it’s interesting to return to the diagnostic overstatements of the late 90s. My experience as a child being raised in an upwardly mobile middle-class family in the UK (born 1985) was of a sense of predictability and security, which I can see shaped my ontological assumptions about the world in quite specific ways. To be a teenager during the Blair years carries its own cultural baggage which I never quite repudiated, in spite of being actively involved in the anti-war movement in my teens. But I wonder reading Elliott’s text in particular, how much of the overstatement of postmodernity, the grand proclamations about changing which seem rather mild with the benefit of hindsight, reflected fear about what was coming?
Behind what I had previously read as the cultural decadence of the ‘end of history’, I now intuit an anticipatory anxiety concerning the shaky foundations of it all. Far from a straight forward misidentification of the present, mistaking a stable and secure time for its opposite, there is a disavowed grappling with the precarious foundations of that stability. They want to explore this but refuse to tackle it head on; to find in that present the seeds of its own eventual undoing, substituting oddly metaphysical language (e.g. ‘globalization’ is not an actor yet these texts perpetually hint at its intentionality) for economic analysis, intuiting breakdown while resisting looking too closely at the likely reasons for it. There is a peculiar abstraction to these accounts in spite of their avowed concern with the changing reality of individual experience.
What work was that abstraction doing for these theorists? I don’t think I’ll ever write the Giddens philosophical biography I’ve toyed with at points over the years. But I’m familiar enough with the public record and academic gossip about his lifecourse that it’s easy to tie his 90s turn to a specific phase of his life. Even though none of Giddens, Bauman and Beck were technically baby boomers, I’ve tended to see them as diagnosticians of a broader boomer cultural trajectory. To write in general terms about personal life in a changing world implies an understanding of one’s own life amidst those changes. As indeed does taking a meta-critical distance from the attempts which others have made, as I’m doing now.
I was reading Lippman’s Drift and Mastery last week (published in 1914 in his 20s) which begins with a proclamation of the individual’s predicament amidst declining tradition which could have been pulled from Giddens. I first noticed when reading Fromm how many of the themes of the late modernity literature could be found in post-war social analysis of various sorts. To worry about the individual unmoored, forced to navigate their own course as tradition falls away, represents a distinctive form of modern writing which long prefigures notions of postmodernism and late modernity.
We therefore need to ask what the additional element is in those later pieces of work. What, if anything, made them distinctive? I wondered this morning if the distinct aspect is the style, the peculiar combination of avowed concern for the concrete and a tendency to resort to abstract generalities, as well as the work that did for the theorist involved. Was there a particular sort of anxiety which boomer academics began to feel in the 80s and 90s? If so what does their writing reveal about it?
Mark Carrigan 