Post on 08-Feb-2023
Postmodernism, the teacher, and the politics of 'clarity'
John Xiros Cooper
Keynote speech,
33rd Annual Seminar for College Professors, Vancouver,
31 May 1991
After two decades of pomo talk, postmodern remains a very
slippery term. About as slippery as ‘proletarian
literature’ in the 1930s, or the word ‘aesthetic’ in the
1890s. However, with the turn of the millennium, it will
probably grow less slippery with time. Why? Because the
nerve centers of the dot-com universe are whispering that
pomo's fifteen minutes of fame are up and that
postmodernism is officially over. Now if the corpse will
only lie still, the coroner can get to work.
First flash of the scalpel: the postmodern was born,
developed, and died in precisely the same way as the
modern. It is the modern's inescapable 'other'.
Similarly, the end of Dada as a vital movement in art
occurred with the demise of its 'other'. I refer to the
deletion of etiquette from the collective brain of
advanced capitalist society sometime in the early 1960s.
Postmodernism's co-presence with modernism can be seen
when we realize that it was postmodernism to which
Baudelaire was referring when he couldn't tell whether
his reader was his brother (mon frère) or himself (mon
semblable). If the X Files documents a shadowy parallel
universe of unexplained events, postmodernism is
modernism's X file. So with the death of modernism, its X
dossier is now closed. In the new century ahead we will
need to get past this nomenclature of an ultimately self-
cancelling co-presence.
But about the death of the postmodern, my sources do say,
however, that it has only died in New York City, and I
suppose if you live in Manhattan and have watched and
heard the discourse of postmodernism trickle down from
the heights of the Trump Tower to the crack dealers on
Amsterdam Avenue, then you are no doubt weary of pomo
talk. But news travels slowly, even in hyperspace, so
here in the provinces we have a good three to five years
of pomo's fifteen minutes of fame remaining, except in
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the little strips of youth hipdom that can be found in
even the most clodhopper towns. Howevermuch that most
postmodern weapon, the Uzi submachinegun may have solved
the problem of the metaphysics of presence in the South
Bronx, the question of defining postmodernism, for us,
still remains, even at this late date, a slippery
business.
Does postmodernism, for example, represent a radical
break with the old notion of modern times, or is it
simply a revolt within the modernist aesthetic against
certain forms of ‘high modernism’ as represented, say, by
the poetry of T. S. Eliot, or the architecture of Mies
van der Rohe or the blank surfaces of minimalist abstract
expressionist painting (Mark Rothko)? Is postmodernism a
philosophical style, via Dada and Surrealism, with roots in
Nietzsche's debunking of classic humanism, or should we
view it strictly as a periodizing concept, say, as a
stylistic reaction to Bauhaus functionalism, beginning
possibly in the 1950s in Las Vegas? Is there beyond the
arts a postmodern politics and is Bill Clinton its magus?
Does postmodern politics have serious transformative (we
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used to say revolutionary) potential by virtue of its
opposition to all metanarratives of control (including
all forms of Enlightenment reason, Marxism, Freudianism,
etc.), and is it revolutionary by its close attention to
‘other worlds’ and to ‘other voices’ that have been long
silenced (women, gays, blacks, colonized peoples, all of
whom, as we've come to understand, have their own
histories and their own realities and now their own
shopping centres)? Or is it simply the commercialization
and domestication of modernity and the now familiar
aspirations of a laissez-faire, ‘anything goes’ market
eclecticism in which the human agent is repositioned in
history, not as ‘Man’, the measure of all things, or the
liberal variant of this, the individual as citoyen, the
rational, informed citizen, but as a utility maximiser on
a cell phone? Does postmodernism, therefore, undermine or
integrate with neo-conservative politics? And are we to
attach its rise to some radical restructuring of
capitalism, the emergence of some ‘post-industrial’
society, in which the capitalist mode of production
shifts from older, more rigid forms of capital
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accumulation (for which the term Fordist - after Henry
Ford - is normally used) to more flexible, less
centralized, more mobile ones, and is thus more
thoroughly exploitative and more impregnably invincible?
Do we view postmodern art, as the ‘art of an inflationary
era’ or as the ‘cultural logic of late capitalism’?
The most startling fact about postmodernism is not, it
seems to me, its acceptance of the ephemeral, the
fragmentary, and the discontinuous. We might recognize
this as one-half of Charles Baudelaire's conception of
modernity and of the ephemeral as the necessary condition
for an authentic heroism in modern times. (The other half
of Baudelaire is the traditional idea of transcendence
and the ideal as the final destination of fashion's
exhausted refugees.) But postmodernism responds to the
ephemeral, not by aiming to transcend it (which is a high
modernist theme), but by embracing it without
reservation. Postmodernism does not discover in the
ephemeral the eternal and immutable elements, reflections
of the ideal within appearance, that carry the potential
to unify and staunch the ceaseless flow of change. To the
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degree that it does try to legitimate itself by reference
to the past, postmodernism typically looks to those, like
Nietzsche for example, who emphasize the deep chaos of
modern life and its intractability before rational
thought. Embracing the fragmentary and ephemeral in an
affirmative fashion leads to a number of consequences.
To begin with, we find writers like Michel Foucault and
Jean-François Lyotard explicitly attacking any notion
that there might be a metalanguage, metanarrative, or
metatheory through which all things can be connected and
represented. Universal or eternal truths, if they exist
at all, cannot be specified. Condemning metanarratives -
those broad interpretative and explanatory schemes like
those constructed by Plato, Aquinas, Marx or Freud - as
‘totalizing’, Foucault for example insists upon the
absolute plurality of discourses as running dead against the
sway of explanatory totalities. This discursive diversity
resists what he calls, rather strikingly, ‘the fascism in
our heads’ by building upon the open and ungovernable
qualities of human discourse and, thereby, disrupting the
way knowledge is routinely produced and constituted at
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the particular sites where some ‘iron cage’ of
repression, some bureaucratic-technical power-discourse
prevails. Lyotard, more preoccupied with language as
such, speaks of ‘language games’, again in the plural, as
the ruptured landscape which the classic totalizations
cannot map, language as the medium not of one Logos, but
of a multitude of logoi. While ‘the social bond is
linguistic’, he argues, it ‘is not woven with a single
thread’ but by an ‘indeterminate number’ of ‘language
games.’ Each of us lives ‘at the intersection of many of
these’ and we do not necessarily establish ‘stable
language combinations and the properties of the ones we
do establish are not necessarily communicable.’ As a
result, ‘the social subject itself seems to dissolve in
this dissemination of language games.’ The traditional
metanarratives which synthesize and unify language-
knowledge-experience cannot be re-assembled when we've
reached this degree of dispersal and separation.
We don't realize perhaps well enough what a tremendous
investment Western society has made in these
metanarratives and how much they always enter into the
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events of the classroom or lecture theater. The
dissolution of these traditional metanarratives, I
believe, is where the greatest challenge to the teacher
in the humanities lies today.
Well, there is plenty here to keep the coroner's blades
flashing for longer than my little space of time allows.
So let me rotate this large subject so that we might look
at it more closely from our perspective, as teachers of
language and literature. What does postmodernism mean for
us?
The one account of the postmodern condition that seems
most relevant to a discussion of pedagogy and the
university as presently constituted is, I believe,
Lyotard's deployment of the term in his important summary
statement on the state of knowledge, ‘in the most highly
developed societies’, the book called La Condition
postmoderne: rapport sur le savoir (The Postmodern Condition: A Report on
Knowledge).
First let's note that the term ‘condition’ is an
interesting rhetorical move. Are we on the terrain of the
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pathological here? We should be wary of this because we
know that it has been one of Foucault's aims to question
the traditional distinction between the normal and the
pathological. Is it a ‘condition’ in the medical sense,
then, that is being dissected? Or is the term meant to
suggest logical enquiry, of the sort familiar in Anglo-
American philosophy, i.e., an attempt to establish the
necessary and/or sufficient conditions for something
called the postmodern to exist? The condition he
diagnoses as characterizing the state of knowledge in the
late 20th century is one of extreme scepticism towards
the great legitimizing discourses inherited from the
past. ‘I define postmodern,’ he writes, ‘as incredulity
toward metanarratives.’ Postmodern here denotes those
transformations which, since the end of the nineteenth
century (and more fully now than ever before), have
altered the rules of the game for science, literature,
and the arts. He means by metanarratives those grand
narratives which legitimize, which warrant, the theory
and practice of particular disciplines. Science for
example does not simply restrict itself to finding and
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stating useful regularities in nature and blithely
seeking the truth, it is obliged to legitimate the rules
of its own game. It then produces a discourse of
legitimation with respect to its own status. In the case
of science this metadiscourse is a form of positivist
philosophy.
Lyotard uses the term modern (as opposed to postmodern)
to designate any discipline that legitimates itself with
reference to a metadiscourse of this kind. In the
humanities we can list some of these Grand Disciplinary
Narratives easily enough:
the prevailing humanism which has provided the most
authoritative framing discourse of Western culture
since the sixteenth century;
the cult of personal identity, and of the
metaphysical construction of subjectivity;
the hermeneutics of meaning and the establishment of
a particular, well-policed standard of
intelligibility;
the primacy of Spirit in the spirit/matter couple;
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reason as the foundation of human freedom;
beauty as the goal of artistic activity;
equilibrium as the vanishing point of civil and
economic life, and so on.
These metanarratives of control can be heard whirring
routinely in the background of a hundred lectures any day
of the week around the campus.
The postmodern is defined then as incredulity towards
these metanarratives. The postmodern condition refers to
that state of dismay and crisis in which the legitimating
warrants, the underlying rules and framework of our game,
have dissolved. Leading us, some might feel, if we don't
just simply ignore the whole matter, to the precipice of
nihilism and dread. But we might want to see the
dissolution of these control mechanisms of thought and
feeling in other terms, as leading, for example, to joy
rather than dread, in recognizing here a possibly final
and complete liberation.
Which brings me to teaching.
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If what Lyotard proposes is true and there is a good deal
of evidence to suggest we are living through just such a
crisis, although I'm not sure that there aren't, at the
same time, some very powerful arguments to suggest that
he's wrong, but let's assume that his diagnosis reflects
accurately the actual conditions in which we do our work,
in which we try to establish, if not the final truth of
our statements, at least their plausibilities, how do we
then approach our work in the classroom? How do we teach
writing students, for example, about finding a personal
‘voice’ if the old certainty about the unity and
substance of personal identity is no longer possible and
can no longer legitimate the category of ‘voice’, or that
the romantic metanarrative of art as self-expression,
resulting in poetry, for example, which can be
confidently referred to the particulars of a personal
history and to an individual temperament and sensibility,
is no longer there even as a sustaining and necessary
fiction, what do we do then with the task of teaching?
And what about the pieties paid to the nobility of the
human spirit in a century which has seen the nihilistic
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destruction of so many millions of human bodies? And how
does the naive faith in the perfectibility of the human
person survive Bergen-Belsen and the ‘highway from hell’
north of Kuwait City? When the traditional metanarratives
ring hollow, where does the legitimating discourse dwell?
As a teacher you have a particularly difficult task
because you inevitably find yourself in the position of
making explicit these traditional metanarratives as
reference points in interpretation, in analysis and
discussion of a work's vision of the real and of the
human enterprise, and very often you find yourself
seeming to accept or even defend them by virtue of the
fact that you've made them explicit. Can you talk
confidently about Hamlet as ‘touching on the perennial
issues of human nature’ (as I heard recently in an
undergraduate lecture), when the term ‘human nature’
itself may be gibberish, may be simply an empty signifier
to be filled in eccentrically by the authority figure at
the lectern, useful perhaps for ideological purposes, for
re-inforcing some group's claim to power, or cultural
hegemony, and appealed to, not as the final solution to a
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real problem, but as a way of cutting short further, and
possibly more subversive, enquiry? In bringing our
attention to the underlying warrants, and the backing for
these warrants, upon which our discourses rest,
postmodernism has rendered us a great service, a service
of liberation. This is cause for joy. But as you might
suspect a condition of permanent reflexiveness presents
particular problems for the teacher and scholar, whose
position at the heart of the production and transmission
of knowledge carries with it a traditional, and often
jealously guarded, priestly authority. Let me give you a
personal example of the kind of problem the teacher of
literature can face under the conditions sketched to this
point.
I've spent the last fifteen years studying the work of
T.S. Eliot and I'm now well into a second book on his
work, and I've taught The Waste Land many times over that
period. It really is an impossible poem, a difficult
poem. I don't find it difficult because of its erudition
or its non-linear development by juxtaposition without
connectives, or because of its reliance on
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uncontextualized images to convey its primary effects,
nor do I find it difficult because I can't come up with a
convincing account of its ‘meaning’ - no, those aren't my
problems with the poem at all. My problem with The Waste
Land stems from the fact that convincing accounts of its
coherence, and therefore its meaning, can spring so
easily to my lips. My difficulty lies in the fact that I
can now effortlessly and convincingly transpose the
entire poem to a metadiscursive register which makes
sense of its text. Any small doubts arising from the
intractability or uncooperativeness of specific details
in the poem I can simply and glibly dismiss, if I'm so
minded. Not only do I command the lectern, I've also got
that intimidating fifteen years of professional study
under my belt.
Typically the poem's discontinuous, fragmentary surface
may be resolved by reference to vegetation myths of Indo-
European origin, that the seeming chaos of modern times,
when one stands far enough back from it, clearly reveals
underlying unifying patterns of ancient myth. These myths
are both social institutions, in the sense that they
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constitute society at some deeper level of communal or
collective consciousness, and they provide access to the
deeper recesses of individual consciousness. They make
order happen, in a poem that works through what seems an
irredeemably disordered and disordering discourse. These
appeals to Indo-European myths or the metaphysics of
subjectivity and consciousness as unifying
metanarratives, then, can make the poem cohere, even
against itself. You might call this metanarrative the
myth of myth-as-unifying principle.
But let me make a confession to you, the same one I
sometimes make to my students: my intuition tells me the
poem itself resists unified interpretation at every turn.
If truth be told, I've come to suspect that most accounts
of the poem's internal coherence are really anxiety-
ridden attempts to salvage the wreckage of a devastated
lucidity, not only in the poem itself, where the
traditional lucidities of romantic aesthetics are
ceaselessly challenged and subverted, but also to salvage
lucidity as such, in a more general sense, as a
sustaining structure of Western expressiveness. It seems
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to me that Eliot's challenges to romanticism carry us out
past aesthetic consciousness to a more radical
questioning of certain epistemological givens in Western
thought. I don't think Eliot intended such a penetrating
and radical critique, but the pressures of the historical
moment of composition and Eliot's own psychological and
emotional state at the time forced such a critique out of
him, carried him well past his own, more limited, goals,
such as they were.
What my struggles with the poem have made me conscious of
is not the difficulty of making sense of Eliot's text,
but of the pathological need to believe in and maintain
the myth of clarity as a central given of Western
concepts of communication. I don't think I need to sketch
a defense of lucidity for you; we all know, supposedly,
its value in our guts. You don't need to hear an argument
in defense of the lucid, because that defense is already
built into the operating metanarrative of expressiveness
in our culture. You might liken it to a default setting
of the mind, not as a metaphysical given, but as socially
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constructed for particular purposes. Postmodernism is
simply fiddling with the default settings.
We might interrogate the sanctity of normative syntax,
for example, in the same vein. Gertrude Stein's
stretching of the syntactic norms of language forces us
to recognize that the conventionally close, but
arbitrary, association of a normative syntax and meaning,
gives way to new forms of semantic circulation in a text,
semantic processes that go well beyond even Eliot's
subversion of the foundations of a certain kind of
inherited intelligibility.
But push further. Take ‘clarity’ as part of the mandate
to be intelligible in our culture. Think of it as a
political demand, our demand of writing students that
they be clear in thought and expression, that they make
their thought as clear to us as possible. Let me ask you
a difficult question: why should they trust us, why
should they trust our privileging of clarity? What if we
have some other motive, other than our usual appeal to
the wisdom of effective communication (for success in
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life), some other design not necessarily in the students'
own interest, in urging the students to be clear? What if
that motive is so thoroughly disguised in the rhetoric of
a generous and optimistic, yet fraudulent, liberalism, so
well hidden from view (and therefore so much more
effective) that we teachers aren't even aware that it
exists as the real destination of all our instruction in
clarity? Why should clarity be the principal aim of
effective expression? In a totalitarian society teaching
people to be clear could be seen as collaboration with
the regime, couldn't it? In some cultures, think of Nazi
Germany, being opaque and impenetrable is really the only
way to survive, being clear might mean revealing too
much. And really we don't have to remember Nazi Germany
to recognize that the demand to be clear might even be a
form of surveillance right here in our own classrooms.
The old rationale runs like this: the path to freedom
lies in the open and lucid operation of reason made
visible in clear expression. Only the clear thinker
satisfies the requirements of the Logos. Or so that
particular metanarrative goes and one can call on a long
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philosophical and rhetorical tradition to support it.
Here lies one of the most powerful myths of Western
thought. But what if we see things otherwise: coherence,
lucidity, clarity may have no universal warrant in the
history of what we mean by effective writing; they may
simply be tactics, essentially political in origin and
effect, to make the subalterns transparent to their
masters, in order to more effectively maintain
surveillance of them from the vantage of a power-
discourse, a discourse that constitutes us as pedagogues,
and puts us and ‘clarity’ in the service of the status
quo. The more clear the dominated are in expressing
themselves, the more easily we can look into their minds,
the more easily we can police their very souls; the more
we go on about souls and the eternal human spirit, the
more resigned they become to their inescapable fates, and
isn't it curious how often the inescapable fates of so
many of our students, or of colonized peoples, for that
matter, is servitude, not freedom.
The question of the political status of ‘clarity’ is, as
you might agree, an interesting case, although it is also
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a provocative one. I offer it as an example of a certain
kind of postmodern interrogation of what is, in the
practicalities of teaching language and literature, a
universally acknowledged truth.
Well I didn't mean to depress you. I did begin with joy a
moment ago and have ended, I fear, somewhere near
despair. The challenges of postmodernism as we find it in
the works of Lyotard and Foucault represent a challenge
particularly to the teacher. As I mentioned earlier
Lyotard's diagnosis of the postmodern condition in
knowledge is not itself beyond challenge. Both Lyotard
and Foucault, however, have made very powerful critiques
of certain unifying, totalizing predispositions in
Western thought. No more so than in their displacement of
the human from a position of privilege in the thought of
the West. Foucault's conclusion to The Order of Things
unabashedly announces the decentering of the human
subject: ‘One thing in any case is certain: man is
neither the oldest nor the most constant problem that has
been posed for human knowledge. Taking a relatively short
chronological sample within a restricted geographical
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area - European culture since the sixteenth century - one
can be certain that man is a recent invention within
it. . . . As the archaeology of our thought easily shows,
man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps
nearing its end’ (386-387). This departure from the main
path of Western philosophy, a turning which takes its
first modern formulation in Nietzsche on its way to
Foucault, jars us when heard against the reigning
humanism in all its numberless choruses. One is tempted
to respond with a ‘so what?’ After all, do Foucault,
Lyotard, and others really represent a serious challenge
to the workings of a humanism which is so thoroughly
ingrained in the intellectual and moral tradition of the
West that it cannot be shaken from the official rhetoric
of the American empire even as 100,000 charred bodies
pile up grotesquely in the desert north of Kuwait City?
Where do we locate Man (with a capital M), as the measure
of all things, among the nameless charred remains in
southern Iraq. Man? Is it just one more public relations
triumph for civilization?
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There is an argument that can be made which suggests that
the best thing to do as a teacher is ignore the crisis,
if that is what it is, proceed in the framework of the
old in order to give students something to hold on to -
after they have assimilated the old legitimizing
discourses with their value systems, standards of
intelligibility and coherence, the production of
authority, the policing of boundaries etc., after all
that, then open the debate on the question of the
legitimacy of the metanarratives of control, only then is
someone really in a position to understand, appreciate,
the implications of the postmodern condition.
I'm not sure our students can't already see through such
a tactic. I suspect that many of them find life in the
postmodern lane far more comfortable than we do, after
all they've always shopped in the malls with their
decentered design, their multiple, ungrounded discourses
of pleasure and instant gratification, their playful,
self-parodying invitations to decipher today's
consumption codes, their absent owners, exercising
control remotely through franchise and chainstore, and
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finally their transformation of the event of exchange
from a transaction constituted by two willing, rational
human beings, into a structure which constitutes,
sometimes ironically, a knowing, half-humorous parody of
the human through the act of consumption itself. Plato's
Republic cannot long survive these pastel parodies of
utopia.
But there are other arguments that can be deployed, that
are just as convincing, arguments that suggest that
assuming the undeniable truth of the old grand
narratives, about a unified human nature, history as the
record of human liberation, progress, et cetera, simply
transmits blindly to students, often below conscious
awareness, the whole hollow edifice of the past, with its
glaring contradictions, wishful thinking, semi-conscious
self-deceptions, its hidden exercises of power, its
police actions masquerading as the maintenance of
civilized or humane or progressive values, and so on: the
argument goes on to propose, that in the postmodern
condition, a new kind of pedagogy must be born, that not
only recognizes the postmodern condition as such, but
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inserts the very act of teaching itself, with all its
hidden assumptions about knowledge, power, and value into
the teaching process as well.
I only have a few minutes left and so must leave you, I'm
sorry to say, with these enormous questions unanswered.
But let me give this large subject one more turn, and let
me toy for a moment with what might sound like self-
contradiction. The very existence of the postmodern
condition as described by Lyotard is itself still an open
question. And the possibility exists that he is both
right and wrong, that, yes, there is a delegitimizing
process in progress and we are in the midst of it, very
much like the process of economic and statutory
deregulation that is transforming the civil societies of
the North Atlantic world by deliberately dissolving the
old regulatory mechanisms of social and economic life
(the political and economic metanarratives of our
grandparents) for the ‘freedom’ offered by the new
disciplines of the marketplace, which is now positioned,
supposedly, as a more natural form of regulation. The
mention of the word natural, of course, should alert us to
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the fact that we're sailing awfully close to a condition
where the natural is used to mask something that is
constructed socially through and through. And, if we
transpose Lyotard's scheme, we can see that the concept
of the market, which constitutes the most powerful socio-
economic metanarrative of our day, dissolves the old
discourses of value, regulation, and control, thus
casting customary societies, not just knowledge, into the
postmodern condition.
We only have to look around us in the public sphere to
see the effect of the delegitimizing of old value
systems. We do not even have to invent ‘a postmodern
condition’ in order to isolate the cause. Market
capitalism erodes systematically, without any help thank
you very much from the professors at the Ecole Normale
Superior, the old metanarratives of control. We are
witness to this in the everyday, not in the special
semiosphere of the theory seminar. We see it in the
organization of work under the pressure of the world
market, in the commercialization of the family, in the
disruption of the traditional life of communities by
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‘development’, and most strikingly, in the political
defeat of humanism by the remaking of the State as
material and ideological defender of the new commercial
religion, the primacy of ‘market forces’ to reorganize
not only material life, but consciousness itself,
according to what best maintains competitive production.
We work, we organize our family life, we remake
consciousness in order to maintain the efficient
circulation of goods and credit, all the rest, as the
saying goes, is frills. Where is the classical conception
of Man (with a capital M) in this situation? Precisely
nowhere. Individuals come and go, but the free play of
market forces goes on forever.
From this wider, and I hope more useful, perspective the
postmodern condition is not simply some philosophical
debate in Paris or a series of stylistic gyrations in
Manhattan or Milan. The postmodern condition, insofar as
postmodernism refers to the process of delegitimizing
privileged discourses of value which sustain established
societies, is everywhere around us. Is everywhere around
us, except in the classroom. The expiration of humanism,
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for example, envelops us at every turn, again except in
the classroom, where quixotically, the teaching of a
traditional humanism persists. In politics, in social
life, in economics the process of delegitimizing communal
values, of respect for the individual, of the value of
the arts, of the necessity of self-knowledge, is debunked
and ridiculed usually implicitly, but more openly now
than ever. Only in the classroom are these values part of
a sustaining metanarrative that functions there, among
the students, as resistance to and rebuke of the culture
of toys and its value system, a value system that begins
and ends with that most grimly despairing of postmodern
oneliners - who dies with the most toys, wins.
Well so what are we left with? A very ambiguous
situation, I fear. Our dilemma is really not one of
thought so much as one of action. If postmodernism is
liberation, then it represents one of the great and
hopeful turning points of human history. But if it is
simply the final extension of the power of the market
economy over all cultural and intellectual production,
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