YOU GOT MORE RABBIT THAN SAINSBURY’S [282]

 

This is going to be a short piece about why the name of Jordan Brent Peterson has barely appeared in my writing of the last five years, and why it probably won’t appear again.

There is certainly no point in my presenting a long analysis of what the Canadian clinical psychologist believes, and what is contained in his 2018 book “12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos,” because this has been covered exhaustively elsewhere in reviews, columns and videos. I am not planning to cover his sequel book, “Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life,” when it is published in March 2021, because that would involve having to buy a copy of it.

Most likely, anyone who has also heard his name has already formed their opinion as well, and I am not planning to change anyone’s mind, so I can focus squarely on my own reasons for not wishing to engage with his thinking.

I already own a copy of “12 Rules for Life,” the success of its release meaning I could find a paperback copy in my local supermarket for £2.99, but I tried to read it, and I don’t think it was for me. It states pretty straightforward rules such as “stand up straight with your shoulders back,” and “be precise in your speech,” symbolises order as make and chaos as female, and used lobsters to explain how human social hierarchies are formed. The analysis and reporting of the book were pointing towards addressing a crisis in young men, so I had no reason to look any further.

The section where Peterson completely lost me is on age 306 of the paperback edition, titled “Postmodernism and the Long Arm of Marx.” I had never encountered Marxism being mentioned alongside postmodernism up to then, and even though he mentions that key postmodernist figure Jacques Derrida referred to his ideas as a radicalised form of Marxism, he wasn’t precise enough.

Derrida referred to his signature “deconstruction,” understanding the relationship between text and meaning, as being a radicalised form of the spirit of Marxism. Derrida’s book “Spectres of Marx” (1993) is about how the ideas of Marxism persist almost like a ghost, haunting Western society from beyond the grave. Derrida coined the term “hauntologie” in this book, pronounced the same in French as ontology, the study of existence, being and reality, and hauntology is now used as a shorthand for when a culture cannot escape its own past.

However, Peterson has created the term “postmodern neo-Marxists,” and is popular enough to make that term stick among those that take his own words as gospel. I’m not sure why he spent as long as he did on it in the book as he did – Derrida said he didn’t like “de facto” Marxism, as in Communism, but Peterson goes on about how postmodernism is someway of resurrecting Marxism, and... isn’t one of Peterson’s rules “pursue what is meaningful (not what is expedient)”? This culminated in a debate against the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, titled “Happiness: Marxism vs. Capitalism,” where Žižek requested the names of the “cultural Marxists” Peterson had been talking about, there were no names.

The Jordan Peterson industry means there is now an ecosystem of books, videos and online content to which you can subscribe, which makes me think of Ayn Rand, another person I have little time for. There is also no shortage of people who could defend and explain his writing to me, which also makes me think of Ayn Rand. Even among professors of the University of Toronto, I would take Marshall McLuhan over Jordan Peterson.

AND YOU MAY ASK YOURSELF [276]

Memphis “Big Sur” sofa by Peter Shire

Judging from what I have read, we already appear to know how the year 2021 will unfold. A new normal is coming, and when it is unlocked, we must be ready to make up for lost time, and to take up new opportunities. As we breathe out, politics and economics can settle, as the United States gains a president that wants to do the job, and the United Kingdom trades from outside the European single market for the first time since 1973. With these long-standing conundrums solved for now, and with shops back open, the indignant heat of social media may simmer down. Why make your own New Year’s resolutions when the whole world is changing?

This year could be the latest chapter of renaissance and progress. Especially after a year blighted by disease, it is natural to embrace this hope - it is the grand narrative we all share. But for someone that has written as much as I have about postmodernism – the broad artistic social and philosophical movement that, among a large number of things, is meant to be distrustful of grand narratives – why am I thinking about the coming year in this way?

Nothing says that someone who deals in scepticism and irony can’t also be an optimist. It pays to have all your discursive tools to hand, and have a full understanding of them, but giving yourself time off from work is also nice. You can try to live your life via philosophical concepts of criticism made to use in cultural and textual analysis – Roland Barthes’ “death of the author” concept is not intended to help you read a book written by someone whose views you don’t like, unless you plan to judge only the text, and nothing else.

However, I plan to spend some time looking further into the concepts of postmodernism, in something I will be calling “Postmodernism 2021.” I have been looking into this rabbit hole for close to twenty years, with time for breaks. There is something attractive to deconstructing ideas to find new connections, or to play with different ideas and smash them together, whether that is by looking at a skyscraper that was built to resemble a grandfather clock, new music that evokes nostalgia for the 1980s, or blending genres together in a science fiction novel.

As I understand it, we are largely supposed to have moved on from postmodernity into a sort of modernity powered by the internet. But when you have people like Jordan Peterson, talking about “postmodern neo-Marxists,” and the UK Government’s Minister of Equalities, Liz Truss, blaming postmodernist thought for dominating debates on equality, in a speech made in December 2020, it is clear that postmodernism, or at least the concepts that exist at one end of a movement that has influenced art, is still very vital.

The most egregious part of Truss’s speech, later removed from the Government’s online record of it, having been placed under the title “The Failed Ideas of the Left,” read: “These ideas have their roots in post-modernist philosophy — pioneered by [Michel] Foucault — that put societal power structures and labels ahead of individuals and their endeavours. In this school of thought, there is no space for evidence, as there is no objective view — truth and morality are all relative.” Foucault’s 1966 book “The Order to Things” looked at how truth is constructed, and how this has differed through history, but that does not mean the same as “nothing is true, everything is permitted.”

With May 2021 marking five years of Leigh Spence is Dancing with the Gatekeepers, I will use the time until then to take stock of what postmodernism means to me, what it means to how I see the world, and how a movement most relevant in the 1980s and 90s continues to be so today.

As I work out where to start, I shall provide links to when I first talked about postmodernism and postmodernity back in January 2017 [link], my first touch upon its being used to blame for “alternative facts” [link], a look at the key concept of nostalgia [link], the fact that poststructuralism means you can’t say what you like [link], my trying to explain the concept of hauntology [link], and my walk around Manchester’s Trafford Centre, a shopping mall engaged entirely in postmodern architecture [link].

LET ME KNOW WHAT SPRING IS LIKE [188]

At a time when society and politics has never felt more tied to the ground, the pride and nostalgia engendered in us all by the Apollo 11 Moon landings fifty years ago was, for me, swiftly replaced with nostalgia for the world into which we thought we would step, but never really did. We are haunted by our past visions of the future we thought would come. (I have also covered “hauntology” here: link)

I am talking about everything from missions to Mars to meals in pill form, from lunar outposts to “The Jetsons.” The Space Age started in the 1950s, and appeared to be declared over when the last of NASA’s space shuttles were decommissioned in 2011, eight years after the last commercial flight on Concorde – regardless of the ticket cost, it is hard to accept that flying from London to New York in under three hours is something no longer possible. Meanwhile, space travel itself is becoming a private enterprise, under people like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, but I don’t see someone like Arthur C. Clarke, the science fiction writer that posited the idea of geostationary satellites, in their midst.

It is sobering to think that what launched humanity into space was imagination, rocket fuel and slide rules. The world was already transistorised by 1969, but the microchip had yet to open homes - the electronic pocket calculator was still a year away. Irrespective of that, and armed with rocket fuel and slide rules, humanity reached, well, Peak Humanity – it is difficult to top that sort of achievement without looking at what remains undone at home, as concerns over the state of the Earth became more important. It is hard to advocate a “Space Force” if you deny climate change at the same time.

Nationalism could also play no part, even in the space race with the Soviet Union, it was imagination that drove the United States to the Moon. In the May 1961 joint session of Congress where President John F. Kennedy stated the goal to land a man on the moon and return them safely, he said, “Space is open to us now; and our eagerness to share its meaning is not governed by the efforts of others. We go into space because whatever mankind must undertake, free men must fully share.”

I have only one recurring dream, and it’s a big one. In it, I have been invited to fly to the edge of the atmosphere, if not into space – one day, I may have the chance to fly Virgin Galactic. As the craft reaches the highest point in its journey, I look out of a window, and witness the curvature of the earth. I experience deep emotion, mixed with not a little megalophobia. My whole life flashes before my eyes, because the location of all that has ever happened to me is now within view. I close my eyes for the descent. I am quiet for the next few days, but when I eventually say something, it is to ask why we spend so much time looking down at our feet.

This dream makes far more sense that the one where someone keeps stealing my coat hangers, or when a giant spider clasps onto me as I say, “honestly, this just keeps happening.” These unconscious thoughts may even preclude me from being “the right stuff” for space travel, as if I was the only person who dreamed of going up there. However, as Kennedy had intended, we had to make preparations for the next big steps we wish to take as a race. As much as some don’t think that will be regarding climate change, it will be, but will a return to the space age be next? Perhaps, when we find a way of saying that humanity hasn’t yet peaked.

THERE’S A GHOST IN MY HOUSE [127]

Trying to take a complex philosophical concept, that I am only just beginning to understand, and trying to apply it to chocolate, to make it easier and more palatable, may well be the most literal possible example of biting off more than I can chew. However, with long-gone brands, and their tastes, still on the tips of many tongues since childhood, there may no be easier place to start.

What am I talking about? A word that has come to mind a lot recently has been “hauntology,” which was coined in 1993 by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida. It is a play on “ontology,” the philosophical study of being, of existence and reality, of how things can be said to exist – the French “ontologie” and “hauntologie” sound identical when spoken. The idea that existence can be haunted comes from Derrida, in his book “Spectres of Marx,” ruminating over how Communism can be said to have failed, with the Soviet Union having been dissolved in 1991, despite Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels opening “The Communist Manifesto” with the idea of Communism being a “spectre... haunting Europe.” If that is the case, the idea of Communism, if it is a ghost, couldn’t be dead – and if it appears in the present, it cannot be said to be of the past either.

I already feel lost, and yet that may be the point, because hauntology essentially replaces the notions of ontology, that there must be something that, well, “is,” and replaces that with something which is neither present or absent, relying on language in order to describe any of it – Derrida was already known for his work on the deconstruction of language in texts, so hauntology was seen as an extension of this work.

How do you apply this theory to chocolate, then? Consider the way chocolate is often talked about: chocolate doesn’t taste as good as it used to be, chocolate bars have become smaller, and we wonder why our favourite bars have never been brought back. The notion of chocolate, as it exists today, is literally haunted, for many people, by the notion that there is a perfect definition of chocolate that either did exist, or may have never existed, forever out of reach, but without a way of moving forward into the future to create something entirely new, you must reach back into the past to recreate something, or create a pastiche – nostalgia leads the way.

This was where I thought Cadbury was heading when their new “Darkmilk” bars were announced. When I first heard of the possibility of eating a dark milk chocolate bar – a darker kind of Dairy Milk, or a smoother-tasting Bournville – I thought, oh, they are trying the Gambit bars again. The Gambit only lasted for a few years in the 1980s, but its literal gambit was blending Dairy Milk and Bournville together, giving you all of both, rather than the best of both. From the taste tests I conducted with family and friends, Cadbury appear to have created something that some people may not have tasted before. In Australia, where Darkmilk first launched, it is also available with chips of dried raspberry – that would be the real game-changer for me.