Mmmmm . . . probably not, or at least not well. Warning: this could get really boring.
In the same way that postmodernism has always been a really problematic and contentious term, post-secular is just another attempt to fix a label on the questions that plague a particular era. For the last thirty years, most academics (at least in the humanities) have operated from the assumption that truth is a construct of cultural narratives or ideologies like religion or capitalism, and so a great deal of postmodern art has set out to expose very deliberately and self-consciously these “fictions” that control us.
This belief has not been without its critics, though. Chief among them is Frederick Jameson, a Marxist who sees the postmodern era as one marked predominately by late-capitalism, which is, in more practical terms, globalization: all of culture and life and history, the world over, has been commodified — stripped of its particular meaning, affixed with a price, and reduced to its most superficial value. All we’re left with is what Jean Baudrillard calls “simulacrum” — a copy of something for which there is no original. Think The Matrix.
For folks like Jameson, this tendency of postmodernism has serious political, social, and ethical consequences. If truth is just a construct of dominant ideologies, if history is an unknowable intertext, then what recourse do we have to making an ethical claim or critique? Postmodern thought, when taken to its logical extremes, is extremely nihilistic. We’re left with few options for improving our condition. We are, in effect, surrendering ourselves to the role of “cogs in the machine” (to borrow loosely from Marx).
Until very recently, though, academics have lacked a critical framework for offering Sacred (for lack of a better word) critiques of postmodernism. But that’s starting to change, and the move has only been accelerated by 9/11. Many in the West have found the last year to be an occasion for re-examining spiritual beliefs and, just as importantly, for exploring the social and political currency in them. Once we’ve made a blanket statement like, “America’s system of representational democracy is better than the Taliban,” we’ve been forced to make an ideological commitment founded on something like objective truth.
“Post-secular,” I think, is one way of trying to find the vocabulary for this type of stand. It’s a way of reconciling the good that was born from postmodernism, while acknowledging the value of the Sacred. As usual, the artists are a few steps ahead of the theorists on this one. In my blog entry of 11/5, I mentioned two recent plays by Patrick Marber that, like Angels in America in the 90s, dramatize this struggle in the personal journey of a representative character. I’m sure that we could come up with a list of other examples.
Hope that does at least as much good as harm.
And speaking of Marxism. . . . Have I mentioned lately that The Onion is really funny?
Marxists’ Apartment A Microcosm Of Why Marxism Doesn’t Work
AMHERST, MA—The filthy, disorganized apartment shared by three members of the Amherst College Marxist Society is a microcosm of why the social and economic utopia described in the writings of Karl Marx will never come to fruition, sources reported Monday.
“The history of society is the inexorable history of class struggle,” said sixth-year undergraduate Kirk Dorff, 23, resting his feet on a coffee table cluttered with unpaid bills, crusted cereal bowls, and bongwater-stained socialist pamphlets. “The stage is set for the final struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, the true productive class. We’re well aware of that here at 514 W. Elm Street, unlike other apartments on this supposedly intellectual campus. . . .”