Beyond

I've been thinking about the "beyond" claim. I guess the context that comes first to mind is political argumentation. Consider these two book titles. I haven't looked them up, so for all I know they may be actual titles. First, Beyond Liberalism. Second, Beyond Conservatism. The first title is supposed to attract conservatives, particularly, I suspect, conservatives who were once liberal or conservatives who attended a liberal university and are still pissed about it. The second title is supposed to attract liberals, by the same mechanism.

The presupposition is that there is a linear development of some kind. Liberalism is here, but there is something wrong with it. It is internally contradictory. It is morally unsatisfying. It is impractical; it is expensive. It is NOT, however, a step on the road to communism. "Beyond" at least takes the "step on the road" argument away. Maybe we could picture it as the town you reach at the end of a long day and discover that there are no rooms available. That's what's wrong with it. So "what's beyond Citrus Springs?" becomes a pertinent and wearisome question. In Pleasantville, the movie I love and hate alternately, the outsider's question, "What's beyond Pleasantville?" is treated as a joke because there literally is not anything beyond Pleasantville.

But if anyone wrote Beyond Feminism, the author doesn't think much of feminism. Just to keep the pronoun's straight, let's make it a woman author. She thinks that feminism is...oh, I'll just look up the page a little...feminism is internally contradictory or morally unsatisfying, or impractical, or expensive (this would be in societal terms, I suppose). So we need to move "beyond" it. And the development is linear. So all we need to know is what is beyond feminism, in what sense it is "beyond," and what other valuable things do we have to give up to get there? Probably we are not going to find out those things.

It is just as reasonable to declare that feminism is the end, the very highest point, of the scale of development. Any criticism you might encounter about feminism is, therefore, an imperfect version of it. The practice that is being criticized is inadequate because it "falls short of" feminism. As a practical matter, the difficulty may be not either "falls short" or "goes beyond," but it may be on another value axis entirely. That, I regret to say, is a topic for another day.

The great thing about Marx's historical determinism is that he puts the whole mechanism and all the stages and the certain endpoint all on the page at the same time. When he says that socialism is "beyond" capitalism, you know exactly what he means. It's linear...well, dialectical...development and capitalism is here and as you leave it behind, you get to socialism. Woohoo!

I think that "beyond," without all that careful setting up, really doesn't mean anything at all. Well...I suppose it means that the writer doesn't like it. But we should all be beyond that by now, don't you think?