Postmodern Culture as Uniquely French, Arising from French Catholicism

 

Postmodernism is often presented as a universal condition.  But I want to suggest an unrecognized cultural specificity, that postmodern culture is marked by a certain undeniable Frenchness.  As much as it would attempt to deny any cultural influence, the mark of Frenchness is there.  The trace remains.

I'm not writing about postmodern theory here.  I've written elsewhere about Wittgenstein as the most important source of postmodern theory, and he was obviously Austrian-British.  Nor am I talking about postmodern architecture, or postmodern art, or postmodern television, etc., etc..  I'm writing about postmodern culture, in the sense of a set of social relations and practices and institutions based on shared cultural values and narratives.  Culture, in this sense, is a pervasive, yet elusive thing - it is something you feel in your bones.  Postmodern culture has obviously spread throughout much of the world, and has particularly taken hold in specific areas.  It has been said, with some justification, that Japan is the perfect postmodern society, i.e., that postmodernism exists and thrives there largely without the friction and distrust that often accompanies postmodernism elsewhere.  And, of course, the United States of America fits in here somewhere - we will get to that in a moment.

In a sense, the very concept of a "postmodern culture" is an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms.  If postmodernism is defined, as Jean-François Lyotard defines it, as being characterized by "incredulity towards metanarratives," then a postmodern culture would be a group of people in some sense unified by the shared narrative of a lack of narrative.  And yet, that is exactly what we have.  Why?  I'd like to suggest that postmodernism arose out of a specific cultural experience, a unique history in which we can highlight three historical periods - namely:

1. The deep historical roots of postmodern culture, which are all religious: the Avignon Papacy, the Western Schism, the establishment and preeminence of the French university, France's paradoxical relation to the Protestant Reformation, Calvinism, the plight of the Huguenots, etc.,

2. The occupation of France by Nazi Germany and the establishment of the État Français, the collaborating government headquartered in Vichy, under the leadership of Henri-Phillippe Pétain, as well as the emergence of the French Resistance, etc., and

3. The occupation, or quasi-occupation, of France by the United States of America.  Initially, the American government sought to occupy France outright.  According to this plan, France would be a protectorate under the auspices of Amgot, the Allied Military Government of the Occupied Territories - these were the terms of the agreement of November 1942 between Admiral Jean-François Darlan and US General Mark Clark.  Under this plan, France would explicitly be the "vassal" of the U.S.A..  This plan was later modified and moderated, so that the United States became a kind of benevolent guide and influence over the French Fourth Republic, donating $2.3 billion as part of the Marshall Plan and later even more money, totaling something like $4.9 billion, as well as sending in advisors for the rebuilding of France, while maintaining the military bases the United States had established in France during this period.  France became a consumer of American goods and a partner in free trade with the other European countries under the Marshall Plan, notably Germany, a member of NATO and an ally in America's leadership of the "free world" during the Cold War.

Each of these historical periods can be considered an occupation of sorts, an accommodation as well as a resistance to an external power.  In short, I'd like to suggest that postmodern culture arose when French people, confronted by an occupying power - first Germany and then the United States - developed a set of cultural practices, relying on previous practices they had developed in their centuries-old, conflicted relationship with the Vatican.  We can say that over the centuries, for various reasons in response to various political configurations, the French developed the cultural tactic of denarrativising - but we must immediately add that every act of denarrativising is at once an act of renarrativising.

The essence is difference without difference.  Is French Catholicism different from Roman Catholicism?  Maybe Polish Catholicism is different from Mexican Catholicism, which is different from Subsaharan African Catholicism, which is different from Irish Catholicism.  I wouldn't know. But French Catholicism has a unique and fascinating history.  We can begin in the late 8th and early 9th century, with the ascendancy of Charlemagne and the Carolingian Dynasty.  During a period of instability and division in Italy, the Frankish King Charlemagne conquered in 773, establishing the Kingdom of Italy and the Papal States.  He would of course go on to unify much of Europe under the Holy Roman Empire.  For the next several centuries, France would have enormous influence over the Italian peninsula - perhaps, from a Platonic perspective, we could say that history was in a timocratic phase, in which military honor superseded spiritual philosophy.  But perhaps for that very reason, France, out of a peculiar kind of ressentiment, would strive for philosophy like no other power.  And centuries later, stars of spirituality and intellect shone there, like Hugh of St. Victor and Peter Lombard, who became the Bishop of Paris.  Under the Capetian Kings in the 12th century, Paris was transformed - it was not only the seat of their government, but in 1163 they began construction of Notre-Dame Cathedral, and soon after, people like Pierre Abelard were starting to establish what would eventually become the University of Paris.  The University of Bologna came first, but Paris soon established preeminence.  Over the centuries that followed, Paris was not only the largest city in continental Europe, a center of finance and commerce as well as the political center of a uniquely centralized and well-administered state in Europe, a flower of art and architecture, it was also, above all, the center of learning.  The University of Paris was, first and foremost, an organ of the Catholic Church, a school of theology for the training of the most influential priests and monks.  It was here, in 1245, that Thomas Aquinas met Albertus Magnus.  It was here that he obtained his Master's degree in theology in the 1250s, writing a commentary on Peter Lombard's Sentences as his thesis.  It was here that he wrote On Being and Essence.  Paris became the center of the most perfect doctrine, the envy of all Europe and indeed, eventually, the world.  Anyone who strove to be Pope knew they were best served by studying there.

But in 1296, a long-brewing conflict emerged into the open.  This began, as most forms of social antagonism do, in economics.  A decline in silver production, combined as usual with the costs of various wars, caused the French government to go into deficit.  As a result, King Philip IV of France, the "Iron King," levied new taxes on the Catholic Church.  Pope Boniface VIII was furious - how dare the King of France assert authority above that of the Church? - and so he wrote Claricos Laicos, denying the King the power to raise taxes without Papal approval.  But Philip simply sent in a party to raid the Vatican.  The Pope retreated temporarily on the tax question, but the conflict reignited in 1301 when Philip arrested the French Bishop, Bernard Saisset as a suspected traitor.  Boniface struck back in 1302 with the famous Unam Sanctum which declared the Pope the supreme sovereign temporal authority on Earth.  He excommunicated Phillip and any monarch who dared question his supremacy.  The French King, in turn, declared the Pope a heretic and rumors swirled in France that the Pope did not believe in the immortality of the soul and that he had murdered his predecessor.  (Dante would insist in his Inferno that there was a spot in Hell waiting for this still-living Pope.)  France once again invaded the Vatican, attempting to arrest the Pope.  The Pope managed to escape, but died a few months later.

In 1305, the Iron King Philip IV, like a later-day Constantine, used his influence to manipulate a conclave to elect the French Bishop Raymond Bertrand de Got as the new Pope, whereupon he assumed the name Clement V.  Clement moved the center of the Catholic Church from Rome to Avignon, thus initiating the Avignon papacy.  For almost 70 years, 7 successive popes would reside in, and reign from, Avignon rather than Rome.  All 7 of these popes were French.  Avignon was, at that time, not in France but in the Kingdom of Arles (Burgundy), simultaneously one of Charlemagne's Papal States and a part of the Holy Roman Empire.  Nonetheless, France had enormous influence over Avignon and the Avignon Popes became effectively puppets of the French regime.  Under the tutelage of France when it came to politics and foreign policy, the Avignon Papacy was free to concentrate on questions of abstract theology.  The leadership of the Church at this point therefore tended to see themselves as more sophisticated, genteel, and intellectual than their predecessors in Rome, who had concerned themselves with grubby issues of state.  They became thoroughgoing Thomists, establishing perhaps the strongest tradition of theology that has ever existed.  Especially of note here is Clement VI, who reigned from 1342 to 1352, during the period when the Black Death came to Europe.  A scholar capable of abstruse philosophical arguments, he was also a patron of the fine arts, who used appointments strategically to bring wealth and beauty under Church control.  Urban V (r. 1362-1370) was a college professor and a strict Benedictine monk, who as Pope established other schools such as the University of Krakow, all while continuing to wear his monastic vestments.  (After his death, he was canonized as a saint.)  That said, the Avignon Popes were not completely above politics - several of them served France in political opposition to the Holy Roman Empire, particularly under the leadership of Emperor Louis IV.

In 1377, Pope Gregory XI moved the Papal See back to Rome.  But the next year, he died, and the resulting conclave, under pressure from a rioting Italian mob, elected an Italian Pope, Urban VI.  Of course, this was unacceptable to the French, and they declared the conclave null and void, and immediately held their own conclave and elected another French pope, back in Avignon.  For the next 39 years, there would be competing popes, one in Rome and one in Avignon.  The Council of Pisa in 1409 attempted to resolve this dispute by offering a compromise leader, but this was rejected by both sides, so for a few years there were actually 3 competing popes.  After an extended and complex series of maneuvers and negotiations that we needn't get into here, this dispute was finally officially settled by the Council of Constance, from 1414 to 1418.

That from which the tactic of denarrativising emerged could be seen as the confrontation between two universals.  The first of the two universals was, of course, the Catholic Church: "catholic" literally means "universal."  And the other was, equally obviously, the university, whose claim to universality was equally displayed in its very name.  The very function of the university was to rationalize the universal claim of the church, to render it into something with a kind of undeniable elegance and parsimony resembling a mathematical proof.  But precisely to the extent that it succeeded at this task, it rendered the actual political institution of the Church, as well as itself, unnecessary - and thus it could only appear as a threat to the Church's power.  Inevitably came the irony of the universality of reason resulting in the clownish absurdity of opposed universal authorities - and as if to drive the point of the impossibility of compromise between opposed universals home, we have the divine comedy of the third pope arising in Pisa.  But after having demonstrated the historical impossibility of resolution, this resolution was somewhat miraculously achieved, at least outwardly.  But how could this resolution be achieved inwardly?  The French people had nothing but time to answer this question, and what's more, they had the extraordinary resource of the University and its prodigious capacity for highly sophisticated, if not convoluted, apologetics - and, perhaps even more importantly, the capacity and commitment to archiving and preserving these apologetics and reinterpreting them as necessary to adapt to the changing centuries.  The French would become adepts of relentless reinterpretation.  The goal is to render the narrative into a series of techniques, and then even to take away the narrative of this technicity, and its goal. France became at once a culture of erasure and a culture of seemingly infinite textuality.

We may skip over the next few centuries, mentioning only in passing the French Renaissance in music, art, and literature, especially as it emerged from Burgundy, as well as the Protestant Reformation and especially the Reform Churches that grew out of the writings of the theologian Jean Cauvin (John Calvin) at the University of Paris.  To denarrativise is not to remove any facts.  It is perfectly possible to maintain an abundance of facts in the absence of any narrative to give them any coherent human meaning.  John Calvin's great innovation was to denarrativise by over-narrativising.  Then of course we have the horrifying tales of the Huguenots and the French wars of religion, and later the French Revolution, which was in no small part a "rationalist" revolt against the Catholic Church, to the rather absurd extent of worshiping a goddess of Reason in the Notre-Dame Cathedral.  And let's not forget France's centuries-long history as an imperial power, conquering colonies far-flung across the world, and thus spreading French Catholicism to the far corners of the Earth.  

I maintain that French Catholicism has been, and remains, a different religion from Roman Catholicism.  It has maintained a distinction, even as it has interacted closely with the Vatican - and indeed, there may have been times that people have managed to install a Pope or two who subscribed to a kind of faith that was more French Catholic than Roman Catholic - and not just in the 14th and 15th centuries.

To use Lacan's narrative, we could call the tactic of denarrativising a kind of fetish.  It is a way of reconciling oneself to opposing universals.  To use Octave Mannoni's famous phrase, the logic of the fetishist takes the form of the expression, "Je sais bien, mais quand-meme..." ("I know very well, but all the same....")  It allows the believer to be in the world, but not of the world.  Do not forget the origin of the academy in monasticism.  The tactic of denarrativising is a kind of cloistering, which allows a certain separation from the political institution of the Church, even as it is a part of the Church.  I have already written about Althusser's relationship to the Church.  You could also see Badiou, when he insists that he is a Maoist but not a Marxist, as denarrativising: the same point-like facts remain, but in a different over-arching narrative.

So, if postmodern culture arises from the lived cultural experience of the French people, does that make it cultural appropriation for those of us who are non-French to adopt the signifiers of postmodern culture?