After Poststructuralism

Transitions and Transformations

Rosi Braidotti

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317546801
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

The end of the Cold War revitalised continental philosophy and, more particularly, interest in it from outside philosophy. "After Poststructuralism: Transitions and Transformations" analyses the main developments in continental philosophy between 1980-1995, a time of great upheaval and profound social change. The volume ranges across the birth of postmodernism, the differing traditions of France, Germany and Italy, third generation critical theory, radical democracy, postcolonial philosophy, the turn to ethics, feminist philosophies, the increasing engagement with religion, and the rise of performativity and post-analytic philosophy. Analyses of the major figures are integrated within the discussion. After Poststructuralism reveals how continental philosophy - fuelled by an intense ethical and political desire to reflect changing social and political conditions - responded to the changing world and to the key issues of the time, notably globalisation, technology and ethnicity.

1

POSTMODERNISM

Simon Malpas

Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives.… To the obsolescence of the metanarrative apparatus of legitimation corresponds, most notably, the crisis of metaphysical philosophy and of the university institution which in the past relied on it. The narrative function is losing its functors, its great hero, its great dangers, its great voyages, its great goal.

(Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition)¹

Although by no means the first instance of the term “postmodern,” this is probably one of the most immediately recognizable. The publication in 1979 of Jean-François Lyotard’s La Condition postmoderne: Rapport sur le savoir – an investigation into “the condition of knowledge in the most highly developed societies”² commissioned by the Council of Universities of the Provincial Government of Quebec – provides a useful moment at which to locate the beginning of a very rapid spread of postmodernism as a subject of theoretical and philosophical discussion throughout a wide range of academic disciplines and, beyond them, across the media and culture of the developed world. The world-view presented in Lyotard’s book encapsulates the sense of change that was in the air at the beginning of the period covered in this volume of The History of Continental Philosophy, and anticipates what would become for people across the globe some of the defining experiences of the final decades of the twentieth century. At the beginning of the 1980s, with the elections that brought Ronald Reagan’s and Margaret Thatcher’s new breeds of monetarist economics, market deregulation, and ideologies of aggressively anti-welfare-state individualism to the US and UK, Lyotard’s invocation of the transformation of knowledge from an end in its own right into just one more product to be bought and sold in an international marketplace seemed to many to capture the spirit of the time. The “great goals” of Enlightenment philosophy – truth and emancipation – appeared to be replaced by new, less apparently noble objectives as knowledge became the quintessential commodity for a postmodern consumer society: “Knowledge is and will be produced in order to be sold,” Lyotard declared, “it is and will be consumed in order to be valorized in a new production: in both cases, the goal is exchange”³ In this sense, postmodernism located knowledge within the newly deregulated markets that came quickly to define the experience of economic life in the 1980s.

Alongside this commodification of knowledge, the period also saw radical innovations in communications media with the rapid development of the internet, the spread of digital telephony, and the ever-increasing numbers of radio and television channels catering to more specialized tastes, all of which created a sense of more and more complex and fragmented modes of production, interaction, and exchange. The collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union led some in the West to declare not just victory in the Cold War but, as the title of Francis Fukuyama’s 1992 book put it, the “end of history” itself with the triumph of a US form of “free-market democracy” and what President George Bush (senior) was to call a “New World Order.” It appeared for a time that economically, politically, socially, and culturally the global order was changing, and for many commentators the theories and arguments of those philosophies grouped beneath the banner of postmodernism best captured the opportunities and threats this new world might have to offer. Even if Lyotard’s particular responses to this change have frequently been questioned and challenged, the general sense that the world was in the process of undergoing a profound transformation rapidly developed into a key topic for debate, and the term “postmodern” became increasingly ubiquitous as the designation of this new “condition.”

There were moments in the 1980s and 1990s where it seemed that every new innovation, idea, and artifact had to be hailed or dismissed as “postmodern,” where discussions of culture were obliged to invoke the term to identify anything even remotely contemporary, and its deployment by journalists, commentators, critics, and students was practically mandatory. For better or worse, by 1995 it had become clear to many that, although the meaning of the term was anything but certain, Western culture and society had incontrovertibly become “postmodern.” One consequence of this, and a key difficulty for any attempt to delineate precisely what the term designates, is that precise analytical definitions of the postmodern in such works as Lyotard’s quickly became difficult to discern among the myriad mass-media and popular-cultural invocations. Some thinkers, faced with such confusion, explicitly renounced the term’s association with their work: for example, both Derrida and Foucault reject the application of postmodernism as a label for their work, with Foucault going so far as to claim that he has no idea what it might mean.⁴ Separating out a rigorously philosophical postmodernism from the significantly wider phenomenon that shaped many aspects of the cultural climate of Europe and North America during the 1980s and 1990s is no easy task.

This, though, is the aim here: to isolate and identify some of the key philosophical problems and arguments associated with postmodernism. Rather than attempting to encompass the countless different definitions provided by commentators from the whole range of humanities and social science disciplines, the objective is to explore postmodernism’s engagement with some of the problems and ideas it inherits from the continental philosophical tradition. For the purposes of this essay, then, the focus will fall predominantly on the work of the three most central and influential postmodern philosophers of the period: Fredric Jameson, Jean Baudrillard, and Lyotard.⁵ The aim is to outline the key tenets of their definitions of the postmodern, to produce a brief account of the philosophical contexts in which their work might be located, and to explore their influence on the broader thought and culture of the period.

Beginning with Jameson, the chapter will outline his arguments about the disruption of modern identity through the pastiche and schizophrenia generated in contemporary consumer society, and explore his critique of the idea of a loss of critical distance in postmodernist culture. The chapter will then introduce some of Baudrillard’s attempts to reorient philosophy, including the moves from a representational to a simulation-focused epistemology, from a Marxist production-orientated analysis of society to one driven by a thinking of consumption, from ethics to seduction and – in what is perhaps his most controversial work on such topics as the Gulf War and international terrorism – from oppositional critique to the ironic detachment of “skeptical intelligence.” Moving on to Lyotard’s more robustly pro-postmodern formulations, it will then discuss his analyses of the breakdown of modernity’s master narratives, his rethinking of Kantian reflective judgment, and his transformation of the category of the sublime, in order to facilitate explorations of the unpresentable, the differend, and the event.

I. THE DEATH OF THE SUBJECT IN LATE CAPITALISM

According to Jameson,⁶ a key aspect of postmodernism is “the ‘death’ of the subject itself – the end of the bourgeois monad or ego or individual.”⁷ The Cartesian subject, the keystone of modern philosophy, politics, and social science, loses its purchase in a postmodern world, and with it go modernist conceptions of aesthetic form, representation, critique, and collective politics. For Jameson, the disruption of such categories is the most profound and troubling aspect of the move to postmodernism. The causes and consequences of the death of the subject are central to his influential definition of postmodernism as “the cultural logic of late capitalism” in his important essay “Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” first published in the journal New Left Review in 1984, and expanded into a book with the same title in 1991. In these texts, Jameson develops an analysis of postmodernism that presents it as the cultural consequence of a transformation of capitalist economics in the second half of the twentieth century and seeks a means by which radical political critique might be able to continue in the contemporary world. He defines “late capitalism” as a “world capitalist system fundamentally distinct from the older imperialism”⁸ in which the globalization of stock-market speculation, the movement of industrial production to developing countries by multinational business, increasing automation and computerization, and the disruption and dispersal of the proletariat of classical Marxism give rise to new forms of identity, experience, and culture that can be called “postmodern.” The result of this, according to Jameson, is that “every position on postmodernism in culture … is also at one and the same time, and necessarily, an implicitly or explicitly political stance on the nature of multinational capitalism today.”⁹ This is crucial: for Jameson, the innovation and experimentation of contemporary artistic and cultural production can be grasped only as an expression of the transformed conditions of modern society, politics, and economics.

On the basis of this account of postmodernism as the superstructural expression of the development of global capitalism, Jameson presents a historically materialist-inflected analysis of contemporary culture in terms of the commodification of aesthetic experience:

Aesthetic production today has become integrated into commodity production generally: the frantic economic urgency of producing fresh waves of ever more novel-seeming goods (from clothing to aeroplanes), at ever greater rates of turnover, now assigns an increasingly essential structural function and position to aesthetic innovation and experimentation.¹⁰

This focus on the aesthetics of production and the consumption of aesthetic affect is crucial to his analysis of contemporary experience, identity, and politics. In a series of discussions of art, poetry, architecture, cinema, and television, Jameson traces the movement from what he identifies as the modernist idea of cultural practice as a vehicle that contests and parodically undermines bourgeois assumptions about the world to what he sees as the significantly less challenging postmodern notion of cultural production as having become just another aspect of commodity exchange and thereby lacking a critical edge. Modernist parody, he argues, has degenerated into little more than “blank pastiche” as art mixes and matches elements and fragments of everyday life without any sense of critical engagement or challenge, and in doing so has lost touch with the materiality of existence and community.

More generally, what is at stake in the commodification of aesthetic production is what Jameson sees as an increasing aestheticization of day-to-day identity: the key focus of production and consumption in late capitalism is the generation and marketing of images, lifestyles, and modes of being. The Western consumer purchases identities in the shape of everything from fashionable brands whose advertisements hold out the promise of spontaneous personal fulfillment as one joins the “smart set” to empty signifiers of identity such as trendy ringtones for mobile telephones that are designed less to inform us that we have a call than to tell those around us how cool we are and which cultural clique we have bought our way into. “Postmodernism,” Jameson asserts, “is the consumption of sheer commodification as a process.”¹¹ Commodities are no longer simply objects; they are brands, identities, ways of forging personalities and communities in a world that, he claims, has lost touch with traditional senses of being in common.

Jameson illustrates this process by contrasting two works of art: Vincent Van Gogh’s A Pair of Boots – which also formed the focus of Martin Heidegger’s seminal essay “The Origin of the Work of Art”¹² and from which Jameson draws ideas – with Andy Warhol’s Diamond Dust Shoes. Unlike the former, which presents “the whole object world of agricultural misery,” the latter, he argues, “no longer speaks to us with any of the immediacy of Van Gogh” nor even provides “a minimal place for the viewer” in a work that simply embraces the “commodity fetishism” rather than offering any form of critique.¹³ Shorn of context and history, Warhol’s shoes are presented immediately as a random collection of desirable commodities without the depth of community or history.

This postmodern consumption of images has, in its turn, a profound effect on identity. Commodified and aestheticized by the ubiquitous and all-encompassing fashion and marketing industries, the world “comes before the subject with heightened intensity, bearing a mysterious charge of affect, here described in the negative terms of anxiety and loss of reality, but which one could just as well imagine in the positive terms of euphoria, a high, and intoxicatory or hallucinogenic intensity,”¹⁴ which Jameson identifies with schizophrenia. Caught up in the infinite transformation and interchangeability of fashions and commodities, which are all the postmodern subject has to ground her or his sense of identity, the rapid alternations between anxiety and euphoria disable any potential for objective analysis or understand...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Series Preface
• Contributors
• Introduction
• 1. Postmodernism
• 2. German philosophy after 1980: themes out of school
• 3. The structuralist legacy
• 4. Italian philosophy between 1980 and 1995
• 5. Continental philosophy in the Czech Republic
• 6. Third generation critical theory: Benhabib, Fraser, and Honneth
• 7. French and Italian Spinozism
• 8. Radical democracy
• 9. Cultural and postcolonial studies
• 10. The “ethical turn” in continental philosophy in the 1980s
• 11. Feminist philosophy: coming of age
• 12. Continental philosophy of religion
• 13. The performative turn and the emergence of post-analytic philosophy
• 14. Out of bounds: philosophy in an age of transition
• Chronology
• Bibliography
• Index