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Title: The Catastrophe of Postmodernism Author: John Zerzan Date: 1991 Language: en Topics: anti-civ, postmodernity, post-structuralist Source: Retrieved on February 12th, 2009 from http://www.primitivism.com/postmodernism.htm
Madonna, “Are We Having Fun Yet?”, supermarket tabloids, Milli Vanilli,
virtual reality, “shop ‘till you drop,” PeeWee’s Big Adventure, New
Age/computer ‘empowerment’, mega-malls, Talking Heads, comic-strip
movies, ‘green’ consumption. A build-up of the resolutely superficial
and cynical. Toyota commercial: “New values: saving, caring — all that
stuff;” Details magazine: “Style Matters;” “Why Ask Why? Try Bud Dry;”
watching television endlessly while mocking it. Incoherence,
fragmentation, relativism — up to and including the dismantling of the
very notion of meaning (because the record of rationality has been so
poor?); embrace of the marginal, while ignoring how easily margins are
made fashionable. “The death of the subject” and “the crisis of
representation.”
Postmodernism. Originally a theme within aesthetics, it has colonized
“ever wider areas,” according to Ernesto Laclau, “until it has become
the new horizon of our cultural, philosophical, and political
experience.” “The growing conviction,” as Richard Kearney has it, “that
human culture as we have known it...is now reaching its end.” It is,
especially in the U.S., the intersection of poststructuralist philosophy
and a vastly wider condition of society: both specialized ethos and, far
more importantly, the arrival of what modern industrial society has
portended. Postmodernism is contemporaneity, a morass of deferred
solutions on every level, featuring ambiguity, the refusal to ponder
either origins or ends, as well as the denial of oppositional
approaches, “the new realism.” Signifying nothing and going nowhere, pm
[postmodernism] is an inverted millenarianism, a gathering fruition of
the technological ‘life’-system of universal capital. It is not
accidental that Carnegie-Mellon University, which in the ’80s was the
first to require that all students be equipped with computers, is
establishing “the nation’s first poststructuralist undergraduate
curriculum.”
Consumer narcissism and a cosmic “what’s the difference?” mark the end
of philosophy as such and the etching of a landscape, according to
Kroker and Cook, of “disintegration and decay against the background
radiation of parody, kitsch and burnout.” Henry Kariel concludes that
“for postmodernists, it is simply too late to oppose the momentum of
industrial society.” Surface, novelty, contingency — there are no
grounds available for criticizing our crisis. If the representative
postmodernist resists summarizable conclusions, in favor of an alleged
pluralism and openness of perspective, it is also reasonable (if one is
allowed to use such a word) to predict that if and when we live in a
completely pm culture, we would no longer know how to say so.
In terms of systematic thought, the growing preoccupation with language
is a key factor accounting for the pm climate of narrowed focus and
retreat. The so-called “descent into language,” or the “linguistic turn”
has levied the postmodernist— poststructuralist assumption that language
constitutes the human world and the human world constitutes the whole
world. For most of this century language has been moving to center stage
in philosophy, among figures as diverse as Wittgenstein, Quine,
Heidegger, and Gadamer, while growing attention to communication theory,
linguistics, cybernetics, and computer languages demonstrates a similar
emphasis over several decades in science and technology. This very
pronounced turn toward language itself was embraced by Foucault as a
“decisive leap towards a wholly new form of thought.” Less positively,
it can be at least partially explained in terms of pessimism following
the ebbing of the oppositional moment of the ’60s. The ’70s witnessed an
alarming withdrawal into what Edward Said called the “labyrinth of
textuality,” as contrasted with the sometimes more insurrectionary
intellectual activity of the preceding period.
Perhaps it isn’t paradoxical that “the fetish of the textual,” as Ben
Agger judged, “beckons in an age when intellectuals are dispossessed of
their words.” Language is more and more debased; drained of meaning,
especially in its public usage. No longer can even words be counted on,
and this is part of a larger anti-theory current, behind which stands a
much larger defeat than the ’60s: that of the whole train of
Enlightenment rationality. We have depended on language as the
supposedly sound and transparent handmaiden of reason and where has it
gotten us? Auschwitz, Hiroshima, mass psychic misery, impending
destruction of the planet, to name a few. Enter postmodernism, with its
seemingly bizarre and fragmented turns and twists. Edith Wyschograd’s
Saints and Postmodernism (1990) not only testifies to the ubiquity of
the pm ‘approach’ — there are apparently no fields outside its ken — but
also comments cogently on the new direction: “postmodernism as a
‘philosophical’ and ‘literary’ discursive style cannot straightforwardly
appeal to the techniques of reason, themselves the instruments of
theory, but must forge new and necessarily arcane means for undermining
the pieties of reason.”
The immediate antecedent of postmodernism/poststructuralism, reigning in
the ’50s and much of the ’60s, was organized around the centrality it
accorded the linguistic model. Structuralism provided the premise that
language constitutes our only means of access to the world of objects
and experience and its extension, that meaning arises wholly from the
play of differences within cultural sign systems. Levi-Strauss, for
example, argued that the key to anthropology lies in the uncovering of
unconscious social laws (e.g. those that regulate marriage ties and
kinship), which are structured like language. It was the Swiss linguist
Saussure who stressed, in a move very influential to postmodernism, that
meaning resides not in a relationship between an utterance and that to
which it refers, but in the relationship of signs to one another. This
Saussurian belief in the enclosed, self-referential nature of language
implies that everything is determined within language, leading to the
scrapping of such quaint notions as alienation, ideology, repression,
etc. and concluding that language and consciousness are virtually the
same.
On this trajectory, which rejects the view of language as an external
means deployed by consciousness, appears the also very influential
neo-Freudian, Jacques Lacan. For Lacan, not only is consciousness
thoroughly permeated by language and without existence for itself apart
from language, even the “unconscious is structured like a language.”
Earlier thinkers, most notably Nietzsche and Heidegger, had already
suggested that a different language or a changed relationship to
language might somehow bring new and important insights. With the
linguistic turn of more recent times, even the concept of an individual
who thinks as the basis of knowledge becomes shaky. Saussure discovered
that “language is not a function of the speaking subject,” the primacy
of language displacing who it is that gives voice to it. Roland Barthes,
whose career joins the structuralist and poststructuralist periods,
decided “It is language that speaks, not the author,” paralleled by
Althusser’s observation that history is “a process without a subject.”
If the subject is felt to be essentially a function of language, its
stifling mediation and that of the symbolic order in general ascends
toward the top of the agenda. Thus does postmodernism flail about trying
to communicate what lies beyond language, “to present the
unpresentable.” Meanwhile, given the radical doubt introduced as to the
availability to us of a referent in the world outside of language, the
real fades from consideration. Jacques Derrida, the pivotal figure of
the postmodernism ethos, proceeds as if the connection between words and
the world were arbitrary. The object world plays no role for him. The
exhaustion of modernism & the rise of postmodernism ut before turning to
Derrida, a few more comments on precursors and the wider change in
culture. Postmodernism raises questions about communication and meaning,
so that the category of the aesthetic, for one, becomes problematic. For
modernism, with its sunnier belief in representation, art and literature
held at least some promise for providing a vision of fulfilment or
understanding. Until the end of modernism, “high culture” was seen as a
repository of moral and spiritual wisdom. Now there seems to be no such
belief, the ubiquity of the question of language perhaps telling as to
the vacancy left by the failure of other candidates of promising
starting points of human imagination. In the ’60s modernism seems to
have reached the end of its development, the austere canon of its
painting (e.g. Rothko, Reinhardt) giving way to pop art’s uncritical
espousal of the consumer culture’s commercial vernacular. Postmodernism,
and not just in the arts, is modernism without the hopes and dreams that
made modernity bearable.
A widespread “fast food” tendency is seen in the visual arts, in the
direction of easily consumable entertainment. Howard Fox finds that
“theatricality may be the single most pervasive property of postmodern
art.” A decadence or exhaustion of development is also detected in the
dark paintings of an Eric Fischl, where often a kind of horror seems to
lurk just below the surface. This quality links Fischl, America’s
quintessential pm painter, to the equally sinister Twin Peaks and pm’s
quintessential television figure, David Lynch. The image, since Warhol,
is self-consciously a mechanically reproducible commodity and this is
the bottom-line reason for both the depthlessness and the common note of
eeriness and foreboding.
Postmodern art’s oft-noted eclecticism is an arbitrary recycling of
fragments from everywhere, especially the past, often taking the form of
parody and kitsch. Demoralized, derealized, dehistoricized: art that can
no longer take itself seriously. The image no longer refers primarily to
some ‘original’, situated elsewhere in the ‘real’ world; it increasingly
refers only to other images. In this way it reflects how lost we are,
how removed from nature, in the ever more mediated world of
technological capitalism.
The term postmodernism was first applied, in the ’70s, to architecture.
Christopher Jencks wrote of an anti-planning, pro-pluralism approach,
the abandoning of modernism’s dream of pure form in favor of listening
to “the multiple languages of the people.” More honest are Robert
Venturi’s celebration of Las Vegas and Piers Gough’s admission that pm
architecture is no more caring for people than was modernist
architecture. The arches and columns laid over modernist boxes are a
thin facade of playfulness and individuality, which scarcely transforms
the anonymous concentrations of wealth and power underneath.
Postmodernist writers question the very grounds for literature instead
of continuing to create the illusion of an external world. The novel
redirects its attention to itself; Donald Barthelme, for example, writes
stories that seem to always remind the reader that they are artifices.
By protesting against statement, point of view and other patterns of
representation, pm literature exhibits its discomfort with the forms
that tame and domesticate cultural products. As the wider world becomes
more artificial and meaning less subject to our control, the new
approach would rather reveal the illusion even at the cost of no longer
saying anything. Here as elsewhere art is struggling against itself, its
prior claims to help us understand the world evaporating while even the
concept of imagination loses its potency.
For some the loss of narrative voice or point of view is equivalent to
the loss of our ability to locate ourselves historically. For
postmodernists this loss is a kind of liberation. Raymond Federman, for
instance, glories in the coming fiction that “will be seemingly devoid
of any meaning...deliberately illogical, irrational, unrealistic, non
sequitur, and incoherent.”
Fantasy, on the rise for decades, is a common form of the post-modern,
carrying with it the reminder that the fantastic confronts civilization
with the very forces it must repress for its survival. But it is a
fantasy that, paralleling both deconstruction and high levels of
cynicism and resignation in society, does not believe in itself to the
extent of very much understanding or communicating. Pm writers seem to
smother in the folds of language, conveying little else than their
ironic stance regarding more traditional literature’s pretensions to
truth and meaning. Perhaps typical is Laurie Moore’s 1990 novel, Like
Life, whose title and content reveal a retreat from living and an
inversion of the American Dream, in which things can only get worse.
Postmodernism subverts two of the over-arching tenets of Enlightenment
humanism: the power of language to shape the world and the power of
consciousness to shape a self. Thus we have the postmodernist void, the
general notion that the yearning for emancipation and freedom promised
by humanist principles of subjectivity cannot be satisfied. Pm views the
self as a linguistic convention; as William Burroughs put it, “Your ‘I’
is a completely illusory concept.”
It is obvious that the celebrated ideal of individuality has been under
pressure for a long time. Capitalism in fact has made a career of
celebrating the individual while destroying him/her. And the works of
Marx and Freud have done much to expose the largely misdirected and
naive belief in the sovereign, rational Kantian self in charge of
reality, with their more recent structuralist interpreters, Althusser
and Lacan, contributing to and updating the effort. But this time the
pressure is so extreme that the term ‘individual’ has been rendered
obsolete, replaced by ‘subject’, which always includes the aspect of
being subjected (as in the older “a subject of the king,” for example).
Even some libertarian radicals, such as the Interrogations group in
France, join in the postmodernist chorus to reject the individual as a
criterion for value due to the debasing of the category by ideology and
history.
So pm reveals that autonomy has largely been a myth and cherished ideals
of mastery and will are similarly misguided. But if we are promised
herewith a new and serious attempt at demystifying authority, concealed
behind the guises of a bourgeois humanist ‘freedom’, we actually get a
dispersal of the subject so radical as to render it impotent, even
nonexistent, as any kind of agent at all. Who or what is left to achieve
a liberation, or is that just one more pipe dream? The postmodern stance
wants it both ways: to put the thinking person “under erasure,” while
the very existence of its own critique depends on discredited ideas like
subjectivity. Fred Dallmayr, acknowledging the widespread appeal of
contemporary anti-humanism, warns that primary casualties are reflection
and a sense of values. To assert that we are instances of language
foremost is obviously to strip away our capacity to grasp the whole, at
a time when we are urgently required to do just that. Small wonder that
to some, pm amounts, in practice, to merely a liberalism without the
subject, while feminists who try to define or reclaim an authentic and
autonomous female identity would also likely be unpersuaded.
The postmodern subject, what is presumably left of subject-hood, seems
to be mainly the personality constructed by and for technological
capital, described by the marxist literary theorist Terry Eagleton as a
“dispersed, decentered network of libidinal attachments, emptied of
ethical substance and psychical interiority, the ephemeral function of
this or that act of consumption, media experience, sexual relationship,
trend or fashion.” If Eagleton’s definition of today’s non-subject as
announced by pm is unfaithful to their point of view, it is difficult to
see where, to find grounds for a distancing from his scathing summary.
With postmodernism even alienation dissolves, for there is no longer a
subject to be alienated! Contemporary fragmentation and powerlessness
could hardly be heralded more completely, or existing anger and
disaffection more thoroughly ignored.
Enough, for now, on background and general traits. The most influential
specific postmodern approach has been Jacques Derrida’s, known since the
’60s as deconstruction. Postmodernism in philosophy means above all the
writings of Derrida, and this earliest and most extreme outlook has
found a resonance well beyond philosophy, in the popular culture and its
mores.
Certainly the “linguistic turn” bears on the emergence of Derrida,
causing David Wood to call deconstruction “an absolutely unavoidable
move in philosophy today,” as thought negotiates its inescapable
predicament as written language. That language is not innocent or
neutral but bears a considerable number of presuppositions it has been
his career to develop, exposing what he sees as the fundamentally
self-contradictory nature of human discourse. The mathematician Kurt
Gödel’s “Incompleteness Theorem” states that any formal system can be
either consistent or complete, but not both. In rather parallel fashion,
Derrida claims that language is constantly turning against itself so
that, analyzed closely, we can neither say what we mean or mean what we
say. But like semiologists before him, Derrida also suggests, at the
same time, that a deconstructive method could demystify the ideological
contents of all texts, interpreting all human activities as essentially
texts. The basic contradiction and cover-up strategy inherent in the
metaphysics of language in its widest sense might be laid bare and a
more intimate kind of knowing result.
What works against this latter claim, with its political promise
constantly hinted at by Derrida, is precisely the content of
deconstruction; it sees language as a constantly moving independent
force that disallows a stabilizing of meaning or definite communication,
as referred to above. This internally-generated flux he called
‘différance’ and this is what calls the very idea of meaning to
collapse, along with the self-referential nature of language, which, as
noted previously, says that there is no space outside of language, no
“out there” for meaning to exist in anyway. Intention and the subject
are overwhelmed, and what is revealed are not any “inner truths” but an
endless proliferation of possible meanings generated by différance, the
principle that characterizes language. Meaning within language is also
made elusive by Derrida’s insistence that language is metaphorical and
cannot therefore directly convey truth, a notion taken from Nietzsche,
one which erases the distinction between philosophy and literature. All
these insights supposedly contribute to the daring and subversive nature
of deconstruction, but they surely provoke some basic questions as well.
If meaning is indeterminate, how are Derrida’s argument and terms not
also indeterminate, un-pin-downable? He has replied to critics, for
example, that they are unclear as to his meaning, while his ‘meaning’ is
that there can be no clear, definable meaning. And though his entire
project is in an important sense aimed at subverting all systems’ claims
to any kind of transcendent truth, he raises différance to the
transcendent status of any philosophical first principle.
For Derrida, it has been the valorizing of speech over writing that has
caused all of Western thought to overlook the downfall that language
itself causes philosophy. By privileging the spoken word a false sense
of immediacy is produced, the invalid notion that in speaking the thing
itself is present and representation overcome. But speech is no more
‘authentic’ than the written word, not at all immune from the built-in
failure of language to accurately or definitely deliver the
(representational) goods. It is the misplaced desire for presence that
characterizes Western metaphysics, an unreflected desire for the success
of representation. It is important to note that because Derrida rejects
the possibility of an unmediated existence, he assails the efficacy of
representation but not the category itself. He mocks the game but plays
it just the same. Différance (later simply ‘difference’) shades into
indifference, due to the unavailability of truth or meaning, and joins
the cynicism at large.
Early on, Derrida discussed philosophy’s false steps in the area of
presence by reference to Husserl’s tortured pursuit of it. Next he
developed his theory of ‘grammatology’, in which he restored writing to
its proper primacy as against the West’s phonocentric, or speech-valued,
bias. This was mainly accomplished by critiques of major figures who
committed the sin of phonocentrism, including Rousseau, Heidegger,
Saussure, and Levi-Strauss, which is not to overlook his great
indebtedness to the latter three of these four.
As if remembering the obvious implications of his deconstructive
approach, Derrida’s writings shift in the ’70s from the earlier, fairly
straightforward philosophical discussions. Glas (1974) is a mishmash of
Hegel and Gent, in which argument is replaced by free association and
bad puns. Though baffling to even his warmest admirers, Glas certainly
is in keeping with the tenet of the unavoidable ambiguity of language
and a will to subvert the pretensions of orderly discourse. Spurs (1978)
is a book-length study of Nietzsche that ultimately finds its focus in
nothing Nietzsche published, but in a handwritten note in the margin of
one of his notebooks: “I have forgotten my umbrella.” Endless,
undecidable possibilities exist as to the meaning or importance-if
any-of this scrawled comment. This, of course, is Derrida’s point, to
suggest that the same can be said for everything Nietzsche wrote. The
place for thought, according to deconstruction, is clearly (er, let us
say unclearly) with the relative, the fragmented, the marginal.
Meaning is certainly not something to be pinned down, if it exists at
all. Commenting on Plato’s Phaedrus, the master of de-composition goes
so far as to assert that “like any text [it] couldn’t not be involved,
at least in a virtual, dynamic, lateral manner, with all the words that
composed the system of the Greek language.”
Related is Derrida’s opposition to binary opposites, like
literal/metaphorical, serious/playful, deep/superficial, nature/culture,
ad infinitum. He sees these as basic conceptual hierarchies, mainly
smuggled in by language itself, which provide the illusion of definition
or orientation. He further claims that the deconstructive work of
overturning these pairings, which valorize one of the two over the
other, leads to a political and social overturning of actual,
non-conceptual hierarchies. But to automatically refuse all binary
oppositions is itself a metaphysical proposition; it in fact bypasses
politics and history out of a failure to see in opposites, however
imprecise they may be, anything but a linguistic reality. In the
dismantling of every binarism, deconstruction aims at “conceiving
difference without opposition.” What in a smaller dosage would seem a
salutary approach, a skepticism about neat, either/or characterizations,
proceeds to the very questionable prescription of refusing all
unambiguity. To say that there can be no yes or no position is
tantamount to a paralysis of relativism, in which ‘impotence’ becomes
the valorized partner to ‘opposition’.
Perhaps the case of Paul De Man, who extended and deepened Derrida’s
seminal deconstructive positions (surpassing him, in the opinion of
many), is instructive. Shortly after the death of De Man in 1985, it was
discovered that as a young man he had written several anti-semitic,
pro-Nazi newspaper articles in occupied Belgium. The status of this
brilliant Yale deconstructor, and indeed to some, the moral and
philosophical value of deconstruction itself, were called into question
by the sensational revelation. De Man, like Derrida, had stressed “the
duplicity, the confusion, the untruth that we take for granted in the
use of language.” Consistent with this, albeit to his discredit, in my
opinion, was Derrida’s tortuous commentary on De Man’s collaborationist
period: in sum, “how can we judge, who has the right to say?” A shabby
testimony for deconstruction, considered in any way as a moment of the
anti-authoritarian.
Derrida announced that deconstruction “instigates the subversion of
every kingdom.” In fact, it has remained within the safely academic
realm of inventing ever more ingenious textual complications to keep
itself in business and avoid reflecting on its own political situation.
One of Derrida’s most central terms, dissemination, describes language,
under the principle of difference, as not so much a rich harvest of
meanings but a kind of endless loss and spillage, with meaning appearing
everywhere and evaporating virtually at once. This flow of language,
ceaseless and unsatisfying, is a most accurate parallel to that of the
heart of consumer capital and its endless circulation of
non-significance. Derrida thus unwittingly eternalizes and universalizes
dominated life by rendering human communication in its image. The “every
kingdom” he would see deconstruction subverting is instead extended and
deemed absolute.
Derrida represents both the well-travelled French tradition of
explication de texte and a reaction against the Gallic veneration of
Cartesian classicist language with its ideals of clarity and balance.
Deconstruction emerged also, to a degree, as part of the original
element of the near-revolution of 1968, namely the student revolt
against rigidified French higher education. Some of its key terms (e.g.
dissemination) are borrowed from Blanchot’s reading of Heidegger, which
is not to deny a significant originality in Derridean thought. Presence
and representation constantly call each other into question, revealing
the underlying system as infinitely fissured, and this in itself is an
important contribution.
Unfortunately, to transform metaphysics into the question of writing, in
which meanings virtually choose themselves and thus one discourse (and
therefore mode of action) cannot be demonstrated to be better than
another, seems less than radical. Deconstruction is now embraced by the
heads of English departments, professional societies, and other
bodies-in-good-standing because it raises the issue of representation
itself so weakly. Derrida’s deconstruction of philosophy admits that it
must leave intact the very concept whose lack of basis it exposes. While
finding the notion of a language-independent reality untenable, neither
does deconstruction promise liberation from the famous “prison house of
language.” The essence of language, the primacy of the symbolic, are not
really tackled, but are shown to be as inescapable as they are
inadequate to fulfilment. No exit; as Derrida declared: “It is not a
question of releasing oneself into an unrepressive new order (there are
none).”
If deconstruction’s contribution is mainly just an erosion of our
assurance of reality, it forgets that reality — advertising and mass
culture to mention just two superficial examples — has already
accomplished this. Thus this quintessentially postmodern point of view
bespeaks the movement of thinking from decadence to its elegiac, or
post-thought phase, or as John Fekete summarized it, “a most profound
crisis of the Western mind, a most profound loss of nerve.”
Today’s overload of representation serves to underline the radical
impoverishment of life in technological class society — technology is
deprivation. The classical theory of representation held that meaning or
truth preceded and prescribed the representations that communicated it.
But we may now inhabit a postmodern culture where the image has become
less the expression of an individual subject than the commodity of an
anonymous consumerist technology. Ever more mediated, life in the
Information Age is increasingly controlled by the manipulation of signs,
symbols, marketing and testing data, etc. Our time, says Derrida, is “a
time without nature.”
All formulations of the postmodern agree in detecting a crisis of
representation. Derrida, as noted, began a challenge of the nature of
the philosophical project itself as grounded in representation, raising
some unanswerable questions about the relationship between
representation and thought. Deconstruction undercuts the epistemological
claims of representation, showing that language, for example, is
inadequate to the task of representation. But this undercutting avoids
tackling the repressive nature of its subject, insisting, again, that
pure presence, a space beyond representation, can only be a utopian
dream. There can be no unmediated contact or communication, only signs
and representations; deconstruction is a search for presence and
fulfilment interminably, necessarily, deferred.
Jacques Lacan, sharing the same resignation as Derrida, at least reveals
more concerning the malign essence of representation. Extending Freud,
he determined that the subject is both constituted and alienated by the
entry into the symbolic order, namely, into language. While denying the
possibility of a return to a pre-language state in which the broken
promise of presence might be honored, he could at least see the central,
crippling stroke that is the submission of free-ranging desires to the
symbolic world, the surrender of uniqueness to language. Lacan termed
jouissance unspeakable because it could properly occur only outside of
language: that happiness which is the desire for a world without the
fracture of money or writing, a society without representation.
The inability to generate symbolic meaning is, somewhat ironically, a
basic problem for postmodernism. It plays out its stance at the frontier
between what can be represented and what cannot, a half-way resolution
(at best) that refuses to refuse representation. (Instead of providing
the arguments for the view of the symbolic as repressive and alienating,
the reader is referred to the first five essays of my Elements of
Refusal [Left Bank Books, 1988], which deal with time, language, number,
art, and agriculture as cultural estrangements owing to symbolization.)
Meanwhile an estranged and exhausted public loses interest in the
alleged solace of culture, and with the deepening and thickening of
mediation emerges the discovery that perhaps this was always the meaning
of culture. It is certainly not out of character, however, to find that
postmodernism does not recognize reflection on the origins of
representation, insisting as it does on the impossibility of unmediated
existence.
In response to the longing for the lost wholeness of pre-civilization,
postmodernism says that culture has become so fundamental to human
existence that there is no possibility of delving down under it. This,
of course, recalls Freud, who recognized the essence of civilization as
a suppression of freedom and wholeness, but who decided that work and
culture were more important. Freud at least was honest enough to admit
the contradiction or non-reconciliation involved in opting for the
crippling nature of civilization, whereas the postmodernists do not.
Floyd Merrell found that “a key, perhaps the principal key to Derridean
thought” was Derrida’s decision to place the question of origins off
limits. And so while hinting throughout his work at a complicity between
the fundamental assumptions of Western thought and the violences and
repressions that have characterized Western civilization, Derrida has
centrally, and very influentially, repudiated all notions of origins.
Causative thinking, after all, is one of the objects of scorn for
postmodernists. ‘Nature’ is an illusion, so what could ‘unnatural’ mean?
In place of the situationists’ wonderful “Under the pavement it’s the
beach,” we have Foucault’s famous repudiation, in The Order of Things,
of the whole notion of the “repressive hypothesis.” Freud gave us an
understanding of culture as stunting and neurosis-generating; pm tells
us that culture is all we can ever have, and that its foundations, if
they exist, are not available to our understanding. Postmodernism is
apparently what we are left with when the modernization process is
complete and nature is gone for good.
Not only does pm echo Beckett’s comment in Endgame, “there’s no more
nature,” but it also denies that there ever was any recognizable space
outside of language and culture. ‘Nature’, declared Derrida in
discussing Rousseau, “has never existed.” Again, alienation is ruled
out; that concept necessarily implies an idea of authenticity which
postmodernism finds unintelligible. In this vein, Derrida cited “the
loss of what has never taken place, of a self-presence which has never
been given but only dreamed of...” Despite the limitations of
structuralism, Levi-Strauss’ sense of affiliation with Rousseau, on the
other hand, bore witness to his search for origins. Refusing to rule out
liberation, either in terms of beginnings or goals, Levi-Strauss never
ceased to long for an ‘intact’ society, a non-fractured world where
immediacy had not yet been broken. For this Derrida, pejoratively to be
sure, presents Rousseau as a utopian and Levi-Strauss as an anarchist,
cautioning against a “step further toward a sort of original an-archy,”
which would be only a dangerous delusion.
The real danger consists in not challenging, at the most basic level,
the alienation and domination threatening to completely overcome nature,
what is left of the natural in the world and within ourselves. Marcuse
discerned that “the memory of gratification is at the origin of all
thinking, and the impulse to recapture past gratification is the hidden
driving power behind the process of thought.” The question of origins
also involves the whole question of the birth of abstraction and indeed
of philosophical conceptuality as such, and Marcuse came close, in his
search for what would constitute a state of being without repression, to
confronting culture itself. He certainly never quite escaped the
impression “that something essential had been forgotten” by humanity.
Similar is the brief pronouncement by Novalis, “Philosophy is
homesickness.” By comparison, Kroker and Cook are undeniably correct in
concluding that “the postmodern culture is a forgetting, a forgetting of
origins and destinations.”
Turning to other poststructuralist/ postmodern figures, Roland Barthes,
earlier in his career a major structuralist thinker, deserves mention.
His Writing Degree Zero expressed the hope that language can be used in
a utopian way and that there are controlling codes in culture that can
be broken. By the early ’70s, however, he fell into line with Derrida in
seeing language as a metaphorical quagmire, whose metaphoricity is not
recognized. Philosophy is befuddled by its own language and language in
general cannot claim mastery of what it discusses. With The Empire of
Signs (1970), Barthes had already renounced any critical, analytical
intention. Ostensibly about Japan, this book is presented “without
claiming to depict or analyze any reality whatsoever.” Various fragments
deal with cultural forms as diverse as haiku and slot machines, as parts
of a sort of anti-utopian landscape wherein forms possess no meaning and
all is surface. Empire may qualify as the first fully postmodern
offering, and by the mid-’70s its author’s notion of the pleasure of the
text carried forward the same Derridean disdain for belief in the
validity of public discourse. Writing had become an end in itself, a
merely personal aesthetic the overriding consideration. Before his death
in 1980, Barthes had explicitly denounced “any intellectual mode of
writing,” especially anything smacking of the political. By the time of
his final work, Barthes by Barthes, the hedonism of words, paralleling a
real-life dandyism, considered concepts not in terms of their validity
or invalidity but only for their efficacy as tactics of writing.
In 1985 AIDS claimed the most widely known influence on postmodernism,
Michel Foucault. Sometimes called “the philosopher of the death of man”
and considered by many the greatest of Nietzsche’s modern disciples, his
wideranging historical studies (e.g. on madness, penal practices,
sexuality) made him very well known and in themselves suggest
differences between Foucault and the relatively more abstract and
ahistorical Derrida. Structuralism, as noted, had already forcefully
devalued the individual on largely linguistic grounds, whereas Foucault
characterized “man (as) only a recent invention, a figure not yet two
centuries old, a simple fold in our knowledge that will soon disappear.”
His emphasis lies in exposing ‘man’ as that which is represented and
brought forth as an object, specifically as a virtual invention of the
modern human sciences. Despite an idiosyncratic style, Foucault’s works
were much more popular than those of Horkheimer and Adorno (e.g. The
Dialectic of Enlightenment) and Erving Goffman, in the same vein of
revealing the hidden agenda of bourgeois rationality. He pointed to the
‘individualizing’ tactic at work in the key institutions in the early
1800s (the family, work, medicine, psychiatry, education), bringing out
their normalizing, disciplinary roles within emerging capitalist
modernity, as the ‘individual’ is created by and for the dominant order.
Foucault, typically pm, rejects originary thinking and the notion that
there is a ‘reality’ behind or underneath the prevailing discourse of an
era. Likewise, the subject is a delusion essentially created by
discourse, an ‘I’ created out of the ruling linguistic usages. And so
his detailed historical narratives, termed ‘archaeologies’ of knowledge,
are offered instead of theoretical overviews, as if they carried no
ideological or philosophical assumptions. For Foucault there are no
foundations of the social to be apprehended outside the contexts of
various periods, or epistemes, as he called them; the foundations change
from one episteme to another. The prevailing discourse, which
constitutes its subjects, is seemingly self-forming; this is a rather
unhelpful approach to history resulting primarily from the fact that
Foucault makes no reference to social groups, but focuses entirely on
systems of thought. A further problem arises from his view that the
episteme of an age cannot be known by those who labor within it. If
consciousness is precisely what, by Foucault’s own account, fails to be
aware of its relativism or to know what it would have looked like in
previous epistemes, then Foucault’s own elevated, encompassing awareness
is impossible. This difficulty is acknowledged at the end of The
Archaeology of Knowledge (1972), but remains unanswered, a rather
glaring and obvious problem.
The dilemma of postmodernism is this: how can the status and validity of
its theoretical approaches be ascertained if neither truth nor
foundations for knowledge are admitted? If we remove the possibility of
rational foundations or standards, on what basis can we operate? How can
we understand what the society is that we oppose, let alone come to
share such an understanding? Foucault’s insistence on a Nietzschean
perspectivism translates into the irreducible pluralism of
interpretation. He relativized knowledge and truth only insofar as these
notions attach to thought-systems other than his own, however. When
pressed on this point, Foucault admitted to being incapable of
rationally justifying his own opinions. Thus the liberal Habermas claims
that postmodern thinkers like Foucault, Deleuze, and Lyotard are
‘neoconservative’ for offering no consistent argumentation to move in
one social direction rather than another. The pm embrace of relativism
(or ‘pluralism’) also means there is nothing to prevent the perspective
of one social tendency from including a claim for the right to dominate
another, in the absence of the possibility of determining standards.
The topic of power, in fact, was a central one to Foucault and the ways
he treated it are revealing. He wrote of the significant institutions of
modern society as united by a control intentionality, a “carceral
continuum” that expresses the logical finale of capitalism, from which
there is no escape. But power itself, he determined, is a grid or field
of relations in which subjects are constituted as both the products and
the agents of power. Everything thus partakes of power and so it is no
good trying to find a ‘fundamental’, oppressive power to fight against.
Modern power is insidious and “comes from everywhere.” Like God, it is
everywhere and nowhere at once.
Foucault finds no beach underneath the paving stones, no ‘natural’ order
at all. There is only the certainty of successive regimes of power, each
one of which must somehow be resisted. But Foucault’s characteristically
pm aversion to the whole notion of the human subject makes it quite
difficult to see where such resistance might spring from,
notwithstanding his view that there is no resistance to power that is
not a variant of power itself. Regarding the latter point, Foucault
reached a further dead-end in considering the relationship of power to
knowledge. He came to see them as inextricably and ubiquitously linked,
directly implying one another. The difficulties in continuing to say
anything of substance in light of this interrelationship caused Foucault
to eventually give up on a theory of power. The determinism involved
meant, for one thing, that his political involvement became increasingly
slight. It is not hard to see why Foucaultism was greatly boosted by the
media, while the situationists, for example, were blacked out.
Castoriadis once referred to Foucault’s ideas on power and opposition to
it as, “Resist if it amuses you — but without a strategy, because then
you would no longer be proletarian, but power.” Foucault’s own activism
had attempted to embody the empiricist dream of a theory — and ideology
— free approach, that of the “specific intellectual” who participates in
particular, local struggles. This tactic sees theory used only
concretely, as ad hoc “tool kit” methods for specific campaigns. Despite
the good intentions, however, limiting theory to discrete, perishable
instrumental ‘tools’ not only refuses an explicit overview of society
but accepts the general division of labor which is at the heart of
alienation and domination. The desire to respect differences, local
knowledge and the like refuses a reductive, totalitarian-tending
overvaluing of theory, but only to accept the atomization of late
capitalism with its splintering of life into the narrow specialties that
are the province of so many experts. If “we are caught between the
arrogance of surveying the whole and the timidity of inspecting the
parts,” as Rebecca Comay aptly put it, how does the second alternative
(Foucault’s) represent an advance over liberal reformism in general?
This seems an especially pertinent question when one remembers how much
Foucault’s whole enterprise was aimed at disabusing us of the illusions
of humanist reformers throughout history. The “specific intellectual” in
fact turns out to be just one more expert, one more liberal attacking
specifics rather than the roots of problems. And looking at the content
of his activism, which was mainly in the area of penal reform, the
orientation is almost too tepid to even qualify as liberal. In the ’80s
“he tried to gather, under the aegis of his chair at the College de
France, historians, lawyers, judges, psychiatrists and doctors concerned
with law and punishment,” according to Keith Gandal. All the cops. “The
work I did on the historical relativity of the prison form,” said
Foucault, “was an incitation to try to think of other forms of
punishment.” Obviously, he accepted the legitimacy of this society and
of punishment; no less unsurprising was his corollary dismissal of
anarchists as infantile in their hopes for the future and faith in human
potential.
The works of Jean-Francois Lyotard are significantly contradictory to
each other — in itself a pm trait — but also express a central
postmodern theme: that society cannot and should not be understood as a
whole. Lyotard is a prime example of anti-totalizing thought to the
point that he has summed up postmodernism as “incredulity toward
metanarratives” or overviews. The idea that it is unhealthy as well as
impossible to grasp the whole is part of an enormous reaction in France
since the ’60s against marxist and Communist influences. While Lyotard’s
chief target is the marxist tradition, once so very strong in French
political and intellectual life, he goes further and rejects social
theory in toto. For example, he has come to believe that any concept of
alienation — the idea that an original unity, wholeness, or innocence is
fractured by the fragmentation and indifference of capitalism — ends up
as a totalitarian attempt to unify society coercively.
Characteristically, his mid-’70s Libidinal Economy denounces theory as
terror.
One might say that this extreme reaction would be unlikely outside of a
culture so dominated by the marxist left, but another look tells us that
it fits perfectly with the wider, disillusioned postmodern condition.
Lyotard’s wholesale rejection of post-Kantian Enlightenment values does,
after all, embody the realization that rational critique, at least in
the form of the confident values and beliefs of Kantian, Hegelian and
Marxist metanarrative theory, has been debunked by dismal historical
reality. According to Lyotard, the pm era signifies that all consoling
myths of intellectual mastery and truth are at an end, replaced by a
plurality of ‘language-games’, the Wittgensteinian notion of ‘truth’ as
provisionally shared and circulating without any kind of epistemological
warrant or philosophical foundation. Language-games are a pragmatic,
localized, tentative basis for knowledge; unlike the comprehensive views
of theory or historical interpretation, they depend on the agreement of
participants for their use-value. Lyotard’s ideal is thus a multitude of
“little narratives” instead of the “inherent dogmatism” of
metanarratives or grand ideas. Unfortunately, such a pragmatic approach
must accommodate to things as they are, and depends upon prevailing
consensus virtually by definition. Thus Lyotard’s approach is of limited
value for creating a break from the everyday norms. Though his healthy,
anti-authoritarian skepticism sees totalization as oppressive or
coercive, what he overlooks is that the Foucaultian relativism of
language-games, with their freely contracted agreement as to meaning,
tends to hold that everything is of equal validity. As Gerard Raulet
concluded, the resultant refusal of overview actually obeys the existing
logic of homogeneity rather than somehow providing a haven for
heterogeneity.
To find progress suspect is, of course, prerequisite to any critical
approach, but the quest for heterogeneity must include awareness of its
disappearance and a search for the reasons why it disappeared.
Postmodern thought generally behaves as if in complete ignorance of the
news that division of labor and commodification are eliminating the
basis for cultural or social heterogeneity. Pm seeks to preserve what is
virtually non-existent and rejects the wider thinking necessary to deal
with impoverished reality. In this area it is of interest to look at the
relationship between pm and technology, which happens to be of decisive
importance to Lyotard.
Adorno found the way of contemporary totalitarianism prepared by the
Enlightenment ideal of triumph over nature, also known as instrumental
reason. Lyotard sees the fragmentation of knowledge as essential to
combatting domination, which disallows the overview necessary to see
that, to the contrary, the isolation that is fragmented knowledge
forgets the social determination and purpose of that isolation. The
celebrated ‘heterogeneity’ is nothing much more than the splintering
effect of an overbearing totality he would rather ignore. Critique is
never more discarded than in Lyotard’s postmodern positivism, resting as
it does on the acceptance of a technical rationality that forgoes
critique. Unsurprisingly, in the era of the decomposition of meaning and
the renunciation of seeing what the ensemble of mere ‘facts’ really add
up to, Lyotard embraces the computerization of society. Rather like the
Nietzschean Foucault, Lyotard believes that power is more and more the
criterion of truth. He finds his companion in the post-modern pragmatist
Richard Rorty who likewise welcomes modern technology and is deeply
wedded to the hegemonic values of present-day industrial society.
In 1985 Lyotard put together a spectacular high-tech exhibition at the
Pompidou Center in Paris, featuring the artificial realities and
microcomputer work of such artists as Myron Krueger. At the opening, its
planner declared, “We wanted...to indicate that the world is not
evolving toward greater clarity and simplicity, but rather toward a new
degree of complexity in which the individual may feel very lost but in
which he can in fact become more free.” Apparently overviews are
permitted if they coincide with the plans of our masters for us and for
nature. But the more specific point lies with ‘immateriality’, the title
of the exhibit and a Lyotardian term which he associates with the
erosion of identity, the breaking down of stable barriers between the
self and a world produced by our involvement in labyrinthine
technological and social systems. Needless to say, he approves of this
condition, celebrating, for instance, the ‘pluralizing’ potential of new
communications technology — of the sort that de-sensualizes life,
flattens experience and eradicates the natural world. Lyotard writes:
“All peoples have a right to science,” as if he has the very slightest
understanding of what science means. He prescribes “public free access
to the memory and data banks.” A horrific view of liberation, somewhat
captured by: “Data banks are the encyclopedia of tomorrow; they are
‘nature’ for postmodern men and women.”
Frank Lentricchia termed Derrida’s deconstructionist project “an
elegant, commanding overview matched in philosophic history only by
Hegel.” It is an obvious irony that the postmodernists require a general
theory to support their assertion as to why there cannot and should not
be general theories or metanarratives. Sartre, gestalt theorists and
common sense tell us that what pm dismisses as “totalizing reason” is in
fact inherent in perception itself: one sees a whole, as a rule, not
discrete fragments. Another irony is provided by Charles Altieri’s
observation of Lyotard,” that this thinker so acutely aware of the
dangers inherent in master narratives nonetheless remains completely
committed to the authority of generalized abstraction.” Pm announces an
anti-generalist bias, but its practitioners, Lyotard perhaps especially,
retain a very high level of abstraction in discussing culture, modernity
and other such topics which are of course already vast generalizations.
“A liberated humanity,” wrote Adorno, “would by no means be a totality.”
Nonetheless, we are currently stuck with a social world that is one and
which totalizes with a vengeance. Postmodernism, with its celebrated
fragmentation and heterogeneity, may choose to forget about the
totality, but the totality will not forget about us.
Gilles Deleuze’s ‘schizo-politics’ flow, at least in part, from the
prevailing pm refusal of overview, of a point of departure. Also called
‘nomadology’, employing “rhizomatic writing,” Deleuze’s method champions
the deterritorialization and decoding of structures of domination, by
which capitalism will supersede itself through its own dynamic. With his
sometime partner, Felix Guattari, with whom he shares a specialization
in psychoanalysis, he hopes to see the system’s schizophrenic tendency
intensified to the point of shattering. Deleuze seems to share, or at
least comes very close to, the absurdist conviction of Yoshimoto Takai
that consumption constitutes a new form of resistance.
This brand of denying the totality by the radical strategy of urging it
to dispose of itself also recalls the impotent pm style of opposing
representation: meanings do not penetrate to a center, they do not
represent something beyond their reach. “Thinking without representing,”
is Charles Scott’s description of Deleuze’s approach. Schizo-politics
celebrates surfaces and discontinuities; nomadology is the opposite of
history.
Deleuze also embodies the postmodern “death of the subject” theme, in
his and Guattari’s best-known work, Anti-Oedipus, and subsequently.
‘Desiringmachines’, formed by the coupling of parts, human and nonhuman,
with no distinction between them, seek to replace humans as the focus of
his social theory. In opposition to the illusion of an individual
subject in society, Deleuze portrays a subject no longer even
recognizably anthropocentric. One cannot escape the feeling, despite his
supposedly radical intention, of an embrace of alienation, even a
wallowing in estrangement and decadence.
In the early ’70s Jean Baudrillard exposed the bourgeois foundations of
marxism, mainly its veneration of production and work, in his Mirror of
Production (1972). This contribution hastened the decline of marxism and
the Communist Party in France, already in disarray after the reactionary
role played by the Left against the upheavals of May ’68. Since that
time, however, Baudrillard has come to represent the darkest tendencies
of postmodernism and has emerged, especially in America, as a pop star
to the ultra-jaded, famous for his fully disenchanted views of the
contemporary world. In addition to the unfortunate resonance between the
almost hallucinatory morbidity of Baudrillard and a culture in
decomposition, it is also true that he (along with Lyotard) has been
magnified by the space he was expected to fill following the passing, in
the ’80s, of relatively deeper thinkers like Barthes and Foucault.
Derrida’s deconstructive description of the impossibility of a referent
outside of representation becomes, for Baudrillard, a negative
metaphysics in which reality is transformed by capitalism into
simulations that have no backing. The culture of capital is seen as
having gone beyond its fissures and contradictions to a place of
self-sufficiency that reads like a rather science-fiction rendering of
Adorno’s totally administered society. And there can be no resistance,
no “going back,” in part because the alternative would be that nostalgia
for the natural, for origins, so adamantly ruled out by postmodernism.
“The real is that of which it is possible to give an equivalent
reproduction.” Nature has been so far left behind that culture
determines materiality; more specifically, media simulation shapes
reality. “The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth — it is
the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true.”
Debord’s “society of the spectacle” — but at a stage of implosion of
self, agency, and history into the void of simulations such that the
spectacle is in service to itself alone.
It is obvious that in our “Information Age,” the electronic media
technologies have become increasingly dominant, but the overreach of
Baudrillard’s dark vision is equally obvious. To stress the power of
images should not obscure underlying material determinants and
objectives, namely profit and expansion. The assertion that the power of
the media now means that the real no longer exists is related to his
claim that power “can no longer be found anywhere”; and both claims are
false. Intoxicating rhetoric cannot erase the fact that the essential
information of the Information Age deals with the hard realities of
efficiency, accounting, productivity and the like. Production has not
been supplanted by simulation, unless one can say that the planet is
being ravaged by mere images, which is not to say that a progressive
acceptance of the artificial does not greatly assist the erosion of what
is left of the natural.
Baudrillard contends that the difference between reality and
representation has collapsed, leaving us in a ‘hyperreality’ that is
always and only a simulacrum. Curiously, he seems not only to
acknowledge the inevitability of this development, but to celebrate it.
The cultural, in its widest sense, has reached a qualitatively new stage
in which the very realm of meaning and signification has disappeared. We
live in “the age of events without consequences” in which the ‘real’
only survives as formal category, and this, he imagines, is welcomed.
“Why should we think that people want to disavow their daily lives in
order to search for an alternative? On the contrary, they want to make a
destiny of it...to ratify monotony by a grander monotony.” If there
should be any ‘resistance’, his prescription for that is similar to that
of Deleuze, who would prompt society to become more schizophrenic. That
is, it consists wholly in what is granted by the system: “You want us to
consume — O.K., let’s consume always more, and anything whatsoever; for
any useless and absurd purpose.” This is the radical strategy he names
‘hyperconformity’.
At many points, one can only guess as to which phenomena, if any,
Baudrillard’s hyperbole refers. The movement of consumer society toward
both uniformity and dispersal is perhaps glimpsed in one passage...but
why bother when the assertions seem all too often cosmically inflated
and ludicrous. This most extreme of the postmodern theorists, now
himself a top-selling cultural object, has referred to the “ominous
emptiness of all discourse,” apparently unaware of the phrase as an apt
reference to his own vacuities.
Japan may not qualify as ‘hyperreality’, but it is worth mentioning that
its culture seems to be even more estranged and postmodern than that of
the U.S. In the judgment of Masao Miyoshi, “the dispersal and demise of
modern subjectivity, as talked about by Barthes, Foucault, and many
others, have long been evident in Japan, where intellectuals have
chronically complained about the absence of selfhood.” A flood of
largely specialized information, provided by experts of all kinds,
highlights the Japanese high-tech consumer ethos, in which the
indeterminacy of meaning and a high valuation of perpetual novelty work
hand in hand. Yoshimoto Takai is perhaps the most prolific national
cultural critic; somehow it does not seem bizarre to many that he is
also a male fashion model, who extols the virtues and values of
shopping.
Yasuo Tanaka’s hugely popular Somehow, Crystal (1980) was arguably the
Japanese cultural phenomenon of the ’80s, in that this vacuous,
unabashedly consumerist novel, awash with brand names (a bit like Bret
Easton Ellis’s 1991 American Psycho), dominated the decade. But it is
cynicism, even more than superficiality, that seems to mark that full
dawning of postmodernism which Japan seems to be: how else does one
explain that the most incisive analyses of pm there — Now is the
Meta-Mass Age, for example — are published by the Parco Corporation, the
country’s trendiest marketing and retailing outlet. Shigesatu Itoi is a
top media star, with his own television program, numerous publications,
and constant appearances in magazines. The basis of this idol’s fame?
Simply that he wrote a series of state-of-the-art (flashy, fragmented,
etc.) ads for Seibu, Japan’s largest and most innovative department
store chain. Where capitalism exists in its most advanced, postmodern
form, knowledge is consumed in exactly the way that one buys clothes.
‘Meaning’ is pass‚, irrelevant; style and appearance are all.
We are fast arriving at a sad and empty place, which the spirit of
postmodernism embodies all too well. “Never in any previous civilization
have the great metaphysical preoccupations, the fundamental questions of
being and the meaning of life, seemed so utterly remote and pointless,”
in Frederic Jameson’s judgment. Peter Sloterdijk finds that “the
discontent in culture has assumed a new quality: it appears as
universal, diffuse cynicism.” The erosion of meaning, pushed forward by
intensified reification and fragmentation, causes the cynic to appear
everywhere. Psychologically “a borderline melancholic,” he is now “a
mass figure.”
The postmodern capitulation to perspectivism and decadence does not tend
to view the present as alienated — surely an old-fashioned concept — but
rather as normal and even pleasant. Robert Rauschenberg: “I really feel
sorry for people who think things like soap dishes or mirrors or Coke
bottles are ugly, because they’re surrounded by things like that all day
long, and it must make them miserable.” It isn’t just that “everything
is culture,” the culture of the commodity, that is offensive; it is also
the pm affirmation of what is by its refusal to make qualitative
distinctions and judgments. If the postmodern at least does us the
favor, unwittingly, of registering the decomposition and even depravity
of a cultural world that accompanies and abets the current frightening
impoverishment of life, that may be its only ‘contribution’.
We are all aware of the possibility that we may have to endure, until
its self-destruction and ours, a world fatally out of focus. “Obviously,
culture does not dissolve merely because persons are alienated,” wrote
John Murphy, adding, “A strange type of society has to be invented,
nonetheless, in order for alienation to be considered normative.”
Meanwhile, where are vitality, refusal, the possibility of creating a
non-mutilated world? Barthes proclaimed a Nietzschean “hedonism of
discourse;” Lyotard counselled, “Let us be pagans.” Such wild
barbarians! Of course, their real stuff is blank and dispirited, a
thoroughly relativized academic sterility. Postmodernism leaves us
hopeless in an unending mall; without a living critique; nowhere.