In Chapter 7, we noted that postmodernism accelerated existing processes that were already liberalising the left and moving it further away from its traditional values, policies and sources of support. In advocating a creative individualism free from the intrusions of the state and the judgements of the social order, it also paved the way for contemporary identity politics. However, the truth of the matter is that post-structuralism played a more active role in determining the shape and content of twenty-first-century identity politics. Postmodernism and post-structuralism are often conflated, but to shed light on the intellectual foundations of identity politics, we need to briefly disentangle these two terms.

Post-structuralism denied the existence of the underlying binary linguistic structures that had been the basis of structuralism. The structuralist Saussure had argued that the relationship between the external ‘referent’ – the thing being observed and represented – and the sign we construct to represent it is arbitrary, and therefore susceptible to the structures of social convention. Post-structuralists went one step further to claim that the relationship between the sign and the ‘signified’ – our personal mental representation of the sign itself – is also arbitrary. What we had thought of as structured meaning tied to the referent’s properties and qualities was actually fluid, open and ambiguous, and able to be constantly deconstructed with no apparent end in sight. Therefore, social convention and the rigid divisions between its binary categories – man/woman, true/false and so on – could be constantly questioned and disrupted.

If there was no end in sight, there was a means in sight. Derrida, the left’s most noted post-structuralist, suggested that a ‘democracy to come’ would end Western domination and carry on forever in a fluid, open-ended discussion as we abandon modernity along with our binary social structures and selves to explore the great diversity of ‘otherness’ that flickers in an endless process of becoming. Unsurprisingly, the modernist binary category bourgeois/proletarian was one of the first to be chucked into post-structuralism’s mincing machine.

Postmodernism was, in effect, a quasi-religious movement, a secular polytheism. As we saw in Chapter 7, it replaced traditional deities with graven images based on the self and its pleasures.