Michael’s Reviews > The Postmodern > Status Update

‘[…] to find means to give voice to those subjects or aspects of subjectivity whose uniqueness is excluded or silenced by the discursive totalities of the modern.’

‘Instead, postmodernism in art, theory or culture generally sets out to demonstrate the fractures and silences that have always been part of the grand narratives, to present the violence that emerges from foundational thinking as its categories are imposed on the refractory world of experience, […]

‘For both Laclau and Lyotard, then, the postmodern is not simply a move beyond the modern but is rather a mode of critique that is imminent to it. It does not provide final answers or set up alternative grand narratives. […]

‘Postmodern critique produces the field in which it intervenes’, and hence it produces the criteria by which it succeeds.

‘[…] A horizon, then, is an empty locus, a point in which society symbolises its very groundlessness, in which concrete argumentative practices operate over a backdrop of radical freedom, of radical contingency.’ The emphasis then is on a ‘logic’ rather than a ‘Cartesian subject’, a person who possesses rights. Why is it groundless, beyond being merely declared as such?

He goes on to write, ‘The discourses of equality and rights, for example, need not rely on a common human essence as their foundation; it suffices to posit an egalitarian logic whose limits of operation are given by the concrete argumentative practices existing in society. […]

My point illustrated by an excerpt from Laclau’s work ‘Politics and the Limits of Modernity’. Characterising post-modernist politics as being horizonal rather than foundational, he writes: ‘A formation that is unified in relation to horizon is a formation without foundation: it constitutes itself as a unity only as a delimits itself from that which it negates.’

‘For Eagleton, then, a radical politics must be both oppositional and foundational—the sort of alternative grand narrative that Marx's modern philosophy developed. In contrast to this, a post-modern critic develops a “politics without foundations” that seeks other resources to resist contemporary totalities.’ Yet it tries to find a politics without foundations by being a radical negative of prevailing politics.

‘“[…] All that was once lived has become mere representation” with the result that spectacle “epitomises the prevailing model of social life”, the “very hearty of society’s unreality”. Images and simulations become more immediate, more apparently real, more seductive and more desirable as they produce rather than reflect the reality in which we exist: […]

‘Baudrillard develops this idea of an infinite code of images within which the ideas of representation and reality have vanished from the French writer and revolutionary Guy Debord, who argued in his 1967 book, The Society of the Spectacle, that the “whole life of those societies in which modern conditions of production prevail presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. […]