On American translation of post- to anti-
I'm thinking about different facets of why, in American idiom, post- is often interpreted as meaning anti- rather than "after" or beyond."
Basic Idea
Linguistics
In English language, post- has historically, and in dictionaries, just means "after:" it's a temporal condition, not an opposing relation: postwar, postnatal.
But in political and theoretical discourse, it often has connotations of "against:" postmodernism is seen as not just after modernism, temporally, but is seen as rejecting the claims of modernism, usually specifically modernist universalism.
In the American idiom, the post- prefix is often still temporal, but signifying a rupture in a zero-sum state.
Philosophy
In European thought, philosophers in "post-" schools of thought maintained continuity of thought with what they were "after:" Jacques Derrida's post-structuralism is not anti-structure but an exploration of structuralist assumptions. But in the U.S., post-structuralism is often equated with anti-truth, as a result of the former's reduction into anti-structuralism
Culture
American public discourse is basically nothing but opposing binaries: liberal and conservative, and frames progress in terms of rupture rather than continuity, so "post-" becomes a story of breaking free from whatever it is post.
This was especially true during the Cold War, when Continental theory arrived in American academia, when almost all thought was filtered into these lens: liberal and Marxist, realist and relativist.
Loops
Because American readers assume "post-" means "anti-," Continental theory texts are taught, cited, and mobilized in ways that utilize that reading: when looking for a term to signal their opposition to a thing, American thinkers use "post-," for example postliberalism.1
This induces a connotative drift in the idiom of American discourse, compared to the idiom of global discourse (which I might also say includes a idiom of international discourse with a different drift.)
For example, while in the global idiom, post-socialism generally signifies that which comes after state socialism, while in the American idiom, it generally signifies that which is opposing socialism or proving its failure.
Postmodernism in America
In France, postmodernism, and post-structuralism, were parts of a wider, dense debate about Marxism, phenomenology, and structural linguistics. They weren't about negating, but about folding and complicating structures: Derrida's différance, Michel Foucault's geneaology.
In America, the first institutional interpretation of these texts was in literary studies: folk like Derrida were read through Paul de Man and the Yale school, where the "undeccidability" of meaning was emphasized. This made postmodernism less about examining philosophical structures and more as an attitude, or orientation: anti-truth, anti-foundation, anti-grand narrative.
Locked into their Cold War binaries, postmodernism itself became a thing to decide: a pole of debate: is it destroying truth? relativizing science? undermining morality.
Once "postmodernism = anti-truth" got traction, it became an interpretative shorthand in both conservative critique, with things like cultural Marxism, and in progressive identity, as a "against Enlightenment rationalism."
Curricula, anthologies, and polemics reinforced this, and by the end of the Cold War era, "post-" had become heavily encoded as a symbol of ideological stance, not symbol of chronological position.
I keep hand-waving to the Cold War as a mechanism for inciting this translation and drift to dualism, but in order for that mechanism to exist, it had to have been selected, and this is likely reflecting a longer historical drift. But the erason I'm looking this way is mostly because of two texts: François Cusset's French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States (2003ce) and Alan Sokal's parody Social Text (1996ce).
American Drift to Dualism
American political theology has structured itself with binaries for a long time: liberty and tyranny, civil and savage.
While these concepts are very abstract, they were the explicit grounds for the structure of things like American sovereignty, citizenship, and national legitimacy. And these structures were seen as incommensurate with the things from which they came: American governance was a rupture from the English monarchism that organized it and the Indigenous governance of land that provided its material base.
European thinkers like Georg Hegel and Karl Marx developed and elaborated dialectical reason, where contradiction was seen as generative, producing synthesis. American liberal thought, though its conceptual lineage was in European thought, usually truncated that move: contradiction wasn't used as generative tension, but a sorting operation.
When looking toward what has made America different than Europe, there's a few different dynamics that have been clearly identified by different schools of thought, but the idea most relevant here is the Transatlantic cybernetic circuit.
What I mean by that is how the earliest American settlers arrived with a way of life that was compatible with European ways of living; specifically the early settlers of New England arrived with a way of life that was compatible with England: they both had the same political referents: the Bible, English legal code, Anglican and Calvinist doctrine.
In America and Europe, these references were produced into texts: charters, catechisms, sermons. These texts referenced the same foundations, but in different environments and situations.
I'm not doing a good job explaining what I'm thinking of here, but it's close maybe to the concepts in The American Jeremiad by Sacvan Bercovitch (1978ce), but that's not quite it. But you're either in fidelity to the covenants, or you're in betrayal.
But the idea that American intellectualism and political formations have a drift to dualism is something that's been diagnosed a few ways in a few frames. Here are some others that come to mind:
- Louis Hartz in The Liberal Tradition in America (1955ce)
- America never had feudalism or aristocratic estates: it was born as a liberal nation.
- Without deep counter-traditions (monarchism, socialism, aristocraticism) to structure conflict, especially intellectual conflict, everything was an intra-liberal conflict.
- Patrick Wolfe in Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native (1999ce)
- settler-colonialism is a structure, not an event:
- its fundamental logic is elimination: excluding the Indigenous, including the settler
- the system preserves European heterogeneity but eliminates non-European heterogeneity.
- settler-colonialism is a structure, not an event:
- Maurice Duverger in Political Parties: Their Organization and Activity in the Modern State (1954ce)
- Duverger's Law: first-past-the-post voting tends to produce two-party systems
- Alexis de Tocqueville in Democracy in America (1835ce)
- American democracy arises from lack of aristocracy and leads to individualism.
- cultural style of stance-taking: issues are processed as personal commitments.
- Tocqueville warned of a tyranny of the majority that comes from this.
So, lack of material structuration derived from epistemic structuration that was translated into a more compressed form, and myths that made these absences feel good, led to the American drift to dualism, might by how I'd say it.
Backlinks
Footnotes:
Postliberalism is a perhaps interesting case study here, because it was taken up by Europeans who did a similar translation, resulting in using an antagonist thought as structuring thought, which is a demonstration of a certain dynamic of this phenomenon, in which American codes are taken into the European or global code but in doing so limit the code's potential results to what the American code facilitates.