Tag Archive for: Jean-François Lyotard

MONTHLY BLOG 179, IDENTIFYING DIFFERENT ERAS OF TIME: POTENTIAL & PITFALLS …

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If citing, please kindly acknowledge copyright © Penelope J. Corfield1 (2025)

Dandelion in the wind @ Shutterstock 2025

There is a perennial conflict between, on the one hand, looking at history in terms of specific periods (for example: ‘ancient’, ‘medieval’, ‘modern’) and, on the other, trying to interpret past events without using any of these pre-set concepts. To lump or to split?

The advantage of pre-set periods is partly descriptive. It is much more economical to write ‘in medieval England’ than it is to write ‘in England during the years from the fifth century AD to the later fifteenth century’.

But, once the deed is done, and centuries of history are clumped together, questions instantly multiply: Was there one medieval period? (Scholars disagree). If so, are those the right dates for it? Why is it sometimes divided into the ‘Low Middle Ages’ and the ‘High Middle Ages’? Is the concept basically fractured?

Moreover, if it is one period, then what are its major characteristics? Is the medieval era one of chronic ignorance and backwardness? Or it is a vanished era of romance and chivalry? Or, perhaps, neither of those options? What other alternatives are there??2 And did the wider sequence of stages within which it is allegedly embedded really exist either?3

Yet without any aggregative terms for big periods of time, then historical accounts risk becoming an undifferentiated list of ‘one damned thing after another’ – with the emphasis on the adjective ‘damned’.

Attitudes among historians often shift between doubt and grand certainties. In the nineteenth century, at least for many in the West, history was seen as an unstoppable ‘March of Progress’.4 And some still cling to that vision today.

Meanwhile, for Marxists, history proceeded not by slow evolution but by dramatic leaps. The inevitable class struggle generated many stormy internal tensions that each time led to a revolutionary breakdown, after which a new stage of history emerged, only to be followed by a further revolutionary breakdown, and the advent of a ‘higher’ stage of history. Thus ‘feudalism’ would be followed by ‘capitalism’, to be followed by ‘communism’.5 But neither ‘Progress’ nor the ‘Marxist dialectic’ has worked out precisely as foretold.

In Western intellectual circles in the 1980s and 1990s, doubt rather than certainty became the new mood-music (although of course, there were always dissentient voices). Above all, theorists of ‘postmodernism’ became influential among many disillusioned left-wingers. This viewpoint extended the stages of history from ‘feudal’ to ‘modern’ to ‘postmodern’. And the postmodern stance stressed the problematic nature of all knowledge about the past.

One central tenet of this attitude was an ‘incredulity towards meta-narratives’, as proclaimed by the French social philosopher Jean-François Lyotard.6 Grand sweeping stories about the march of history were at a discount. Time’s arrow did not point in any specific direction, it seemed. It was not sure where it was going.

Taking scepticism yet further, the French philosopher and literary destructionist, Jacques Derrida, asserted that temporality itself has no independent reality. For him, time is a concept which ‘belongs entirely to metaphysics’. (And, clearly, that formulation was not meant as a compliment). Instead, an a-temporal spatiality prevails throughout the cosmos.7

Postmodernist super-scepticism, however, was closely followed by a justified intellectual recoil. Historians, while these days tending to reject schematic grand narratives, have not gone to the other extreme. They do not accept that the past has no meaning, or that studies of history are purely subjective.8

Paradoxically, the postmodernists’ claim – that an old era of so-called confident ‘modernity’ has been superseded by a new age of sceptical ‘postmodernity’ –  does in itself assert that the course of history can be deciphered. In other words, their critique of meta-narratives did not inhibit them from producing an alternative meta-narrative of their own.

Times have moved on. Some writers boldly assert the ‘end of postmodernism’ and define the new era as ‘Post-Postmodern’.9 Others ask sceptically whether such an era was ever really there at all?10

Belief in the heresy of ‘time denial’ was never espoused by more than a tiny minority of philosophers and physicists. History as a subject of study remains immensely popular and important.

Therefore historians around the world continue these research and debates. They seek long-term interpretations that avoid over-simplification and embrace complexity – but that are, simultaneously, not so complex that no meaning can be extracted from the torrent of detail. There are specific periods of history that have a distinctive identity – but there are also long-term evolutionary trends as well as deep continuities, that extend through millennia. The whole mix is as complex as life. It’s also important and endlessly instructive. As a result, it’s fascinating and sometimes infuriating! Come and research the past (choosing any time-period, long or short) and join the non-stop debates! Time-space: it’s what we all live in!

ENDNOTES:

1 Contributing to PJC’s year of Time-BLOGS (2025). For more, see too P.J. Corfield, Time and the Shape of History (2007); and idem, Time-Space: We Are All in it Together (2025).

2 See N. Cantor, Inventing the Middle Ages: The Lives, Works and Ideas of the Great Medievalists of the Twentieth Century (1991); and A. Murray, ‘Should the Middle Ages be Abolished?’ in Essays in Medieval Studies, 21 (2004), pp. 1–22.

3 See esp. P.J. Corfield, ‘POST-Medievalism/Modernity/Postmodernity?’ Rethinking History, Vol. 14 (2010), pp. 379-404. Also available via PJC website, www.penelopejcorfield.co.uk/what_is_history?/Pdf20.

4 See J.B. Bury, The Idea of Progress: An Enquiry into its Origin and Growth (1921); C. Lasch, The True and Only Heaven: Progress and its Critics (1991); G.A. Almond and others, Progress and its Discontents (2022).

5 See variously T.B. Bottomore, Karl Marx (1956); idem (ed.), Modern Interpretations of Marx (1981); D. Conway, A Farewell to Marx: An Outline and Appraisal of his Theories (1987); J.H. Moore (ed.), Legacies of the Collapse of Marxism (1995); G. Therborn, From Marxism to Post-Marxism? (2010).

6 See J-F. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, transl. by G. Bennington and B. Massumi (1979); M. Drolet (ed.), The Postmodernism Reader: Foundational Texts (2004); and popularisation of these arguments in D. Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (1989); F. Jameson, Postmodernism: The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991); and H. Bertens, The Idea of the Postmodern: A History (1995).

7 See J. Hodge, Derrida on Time (2007); and, as an example of the debates, J.M. Lehmann, Deconstructing Derrida: A Post-Poststructuralist Critique (1993).

8 For a variety of historians’ responses, see R. Evans, In Defence of History (1997); F. Spier, Big History and the Future of Humanity (2010); D. Armitage and J. Guldi, The History Manifesto (2014).

9 For examples, see A. Kirby, ‘The Death of Postmodernism and Beyond’, Philosophy Now, Vol. 58 (2006); J.T. Nealon, Post-Postmodernism: Or, the Cultural Logic of Just-in-Time Capitalism (2012); B. Kuzniarz, Farewell to Postmodernism: Social Theories of the Late Left (2015); A. Gibbons, ‘Postmodernism is Dead. What Comes Next?’ Times Literary Supplement, 14 June 2017.

10 See e.g. S. Redhead, We Have Never Been Postmodern: Theory at the Speed of Light (2011); R. Kramer, Are we Postmodern Yet? And Were We Ever? (2019).

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MONTHLY BLOG 163, DO PARTISAN IDENTITIES ADD A PLEASANT FLAVOUR TO DAILY LIVING – OR DO THEY REALLY CONSTITUTE A TRAP THAT UNDERMINES TRUE HUMAN SOLIDARITY?

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If citing, please kindly acknowledge copyright © Penelope J. Corfield (2024)

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This BLOG is copy of my review, published in The Political Quarterly, Vol. 95/2 (April-June 2024), pp. 376-77, under the title ‘Uniting the Human Race’.

The book under review = Yascha Mounk, The Identity Trap:A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time (Allen Lane, London, 2023), pp. 401. See link = http://doi.org/10.1111/1467-923X.13393.

Note: I was invited by the journal to contribute this review, since I have already written on the subject of ‘Identities’ in one of my most widely read and quoted BLOGs to date.1

The truth is that all individuals have more than one identity. They can be classified under many headings – whether by age, citizenship, class, education, ethnicity, gender, intelligence, language, region, religion, or sexuality … to name some commonly invoked criteria. If an identity is chosen voluntarily – for example as fan of a football club or pop group – it can be a delightful thing to own and to share with fellow fans. How much importance to attach to this identity then becomes a matter of choice.

Yet, if one special aspect of an individual’s existence is singled out and harshly attacked, then that one identity can quickly become all-preoccupying – whether in defiant pride or fearful resentment. Subjective emotions quickly overtake dispassionate analysis. Little wonder that political campaigners often appeal to simplified sectoral identities – and stoke the stereotypes, to keep the polemical fires burning. Human solidarity is undermined.

That danger is the core message of Yascha Mounk’s new book on The Identity Trap. He himself is of Polish parentage, born and reared in Germany, educated in Britain and the USA, and currently working in the USA. As a result, he lives with the complexities of identity. He has described himself, for example, as a native German-speaker who never felt at home in Germany. And in this book, he takes up his pen to warn the world against crude over-simplifications.

Mounk’s writing style is chatty and accessible. Each chapter ends with a useful list of key points. At the same time, his arguments are buttressed by ample documentation. His purpose is deadly serious.

An opening peroration explains both ‘the lure and the trap’ of identity politics (pp.1-21). The story gathers force by examining the American Civil Rights movement of the1960s. Insofar as the book has a (muted) hero, he is the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Junior. He sought to forge an ecumenical campaign, endorsed by people of all skin colours and backgrounds. In his famous speech ‘I have a Dream’ (August 1963), he expressed the hope that one day: ‘little black boys and girls will be holding hands with little white boys and girls’. A colour-blind universalism and egalitarianism will prevail.

However, some colleagues began to fear that King’s soaring idealism lacked hard-edged realism. They called instead for ‘Black Power’ to deliver a more immediate route to remedy injustices. And, over time, as progressive reforms came only slowly, others on the American political Left began to lose faith in universalist solutions to deep-rooted inequalities.

Accordingly, Part 1 of this book (pp. 23-81) examines the genesis of what Mounk calls the ‘identity synthesis’, whereby universalist/liberal values are exchanged for sectional ‘affinities’. After the Second World War – with the growing awareness of the Holocaust and the advent of the atomic bomb – faith in grand visions of the progressive unfolding of history began to falter. Thinkers like Michel Foucault (1926-84) argued that knowledge systems were nothing more (or less) than expressions of power. And Jean-François Lyotard (1924-98) proclaimed, equally firmly, that the era of ‘Modernity’ had ended. Instead, people were living in a new ‘Age of Postmodernity’, in which absolute values were yielding to relative ones.

Critics of universalism thus argued that legal systems were not benevolently impartial. They were instead ‘cloaks for privilege’. One radical maxim stated that ‘Neutrality is political’. Another declared that: ‘Racism is permanent’. Action to help society’s most disadvantaged groups (especially those defined by race, gender and sexuality) was urgently needed. Separate ‘identities’ were thus not to be denied. Instead, they were to be embraced – and each group should be helped separately, secure in the validity of its own ‘lived experience’. A ‘proud pessimism’ (pp. 69-71) had arrived.

After that, Mounk devotes Part 2 (pp. 83-126) to demonstrating how the ‘identity synthesis has swept through American Universities – and begun to influence corporate, philanthropic, and political life as well. The impact of social media simultaneously encourages the sharing of confessional narratives. In addition, Mounk notes the human capacity for ‘group think’, especially on emotive issues. Furthermore, the Presidency of Donald Trump fuelled a surge of frustration and anger amongst the American political Left. Radical zeal was channelled into immediate campaigns on the ‘identity’ frontier, where local successes could raise morale.

Having recognised the ‘lure’ of identity politics, Mounk turns in Part 3 (pp. 129-235) to refute its claims. Here he pulls no punches. The ‘identity synthesis’ has too many internal contradictions to constitute a coherent philosophy. For a start, disadvantaged people do not always agree among themselves. Then societies are not all perennially divided into mutually uncomprehending groups. There is much overlapping and sharing. Thus it is historically erroneous to think that each type of cultural output belongs exclusively to one specific group and cannot be adopted or adapted by others. Moreover, a ‘cancel’ culture that halts free discussion of such issues risks fuelling despotism rather righting injustices.

Building upon those criticisms, Mounk in Part 4 (pp. 239-90) ends with a rousing defence of liberal democratic values. With care and empathy, people can understand and help one another. Universalist programmes to provide good health care, housing, education, job opportunities, access to transport, peaceful neighbourhoods, and freedom from discrimination, can – given time and commitment – work wonders. ‘Progressive separatism’ is not actually progressive. Instead, it inculcates a negative pessimism.

These debates are likely to continue. But Mounk now detects a growing readiness among critics of the ‘identity synthesis’ to voice their objections – as he has decided to do in this admirably thoughtful book.

In that spirit, this reviewer wishes to add one further point that is not fully covered by Mounk. At one stage (p.100), he cites (disapprovingly) the case of an eminent American University where students are discouraged from stating that: ‘There is only one race, the human race’. Elsewhere, too, Mounk refers to racial classifications as ‘dubious’ (p. 262).

But let’s be franker. The attempt at establishing a so-called ‘scientific racism’ led into an intellectual blind alley. Experts could not even agree on the number of separate ‘races’. Today, geneticists confirm that all people carry variants of one biological template, known as the human genome.2 Hence individuals from all branches of the human family can inter-marry and breed fertile offspring – the fundamental test of one common species. Mounk does himself refer to the ever-growing number of so-called ‘mixed-race’ individuals (p.14), who do not fit into simple ‘racial’ classifications. But are they fully human? Of course, they are.

True, some people today maintain strongly racist attitudes. That’s an urgent problem for societies to address. Yet it’s not a good reason for endorsing the separatists. Humanity must avoid the ‘identity trap’ and walk with Martin Luther King. He sought to transform: ‘the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood’ [or: siblinghood!] King was brutally cut down in his prime. But his cause and his optimism are needed today more than ever. Can the human family get its global act together, at this time of climate crisis? That’s another huge and urgently-unfolding story … but anyone immediately seeking a measured faith in liberal human universalism should read Yascha Mounk.

ENDNOTES:

1 PJC, ‘Being Assessed as a Whole Person: A Critique of Identity Politics’, BLOG no.121 (Jan. 2021).

2 See esp. L. Cavalli-Sforza and F. Cavalli-Sforza, The Great Human Diasporas: The History of Diversity and Evolution (London, 1996).

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