Mamta Kalia

perpetuation of dissensus – on a
permanent crisis in representation, on
an ever-greater awareness of the
contingent and localised- the unstablenature
of all norms for representing the
world. If we take a critical view of
consensus and dissensus, we find that
these are two poles (black and white)
but the social reality often lies in between
(grey): there may be ‘consensual
dissensus’ (of low, medium or high degree)
or ‘dissensual consensus’ (of low, medium
or high degree). That is, there is nothing
like absolute consensus or absolute
dissensus. In Indian context often the
consensus is achieved through
suppression of the marginalized people’s
voice either by domination (force) or
by cultural hegemony( consent), hence
it is less democratic and less
emancipatory. On the other hand,
dissensus implies to be more democratic
and more emancipatory because the
voice of the marginalized people has
an autonomous space for expression of
world views.
Further, for anti-thetical radicalism
of Robert Rorty, there is a need for
a ‘detheoreticised sense of community’.
He finds Lyotard right in his rejection
of meta-narratives and of Habermas’
‘universalistic philosophy’ (search for
communicative rationality) but, on the
other hand, he finds Habermas right in
his insistence on ‘liberal politics’ that
post –modernists want to abandon in
order to avoid universalistic philosophy.
But this is an ambivalence of Rorty
because for a detheoreticised sense of
community, one has to go beyond liberal
politics of civil liberties to emancipatory
politics of inclusion and diversity.
Baudrillard thinks that all repressive
and reductive strategies of power systems
are already present in the internal logic
of the sign, as well as those of exchange
value and political economy. Therefore,
to restore meaning (symbol) is a ‘total
revolution’ (not to be confused with
Jaiprakash Narayan’s terms)- but it is
not the proletariat’s revolution. This
radical anti-representation and his
subordination of political economy of
the sign (based on consumption) led him
to dissociate from his earlier Marxism.
Since Marxism is still associated with
‘western rationalism’, to Baudrillard, it
is only “a limited petite bourgeois critique,
one more step in the banalisation of
life toward the ‘good use’ of the social”.
He clearly observes that the concept
of mode of production now gives way
to a ‘mode of signification’ that, in turn,
is controlled by the ‘code’. He is of
the view that the mass media prevent
communication because of their very
form. In the first order of ‘simulacra’–
period from renaissance to the industrial
revolution- the value was still ‘natural’
(grounded) but in the second order (of
industrial era) value was commercial–
based on exchange. In the third order,
at present (post- industrial era), an order
of differential value of sign- of ‘simulation’is
controlled by the ‘code’. Now,
especially through electronic media the
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