The Condition of Postmodernity 13 - autonomous learning

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358 The condition of postmodernitywhelming symbolic order, internalizes certain contradictions whichat a certain point become more and more self-evident. When Lyotard,for example, seeks to keep his radical hopes alive by appeal to somepristine and unsullied concept of justice, he proposes a truth statementthat lies above the melee of interest groups and their cacophonyof language games. When Hillis Miller is forced to appeal to liberaland positivist values to defend his mentor Paul de Man against whathe considers the calumny of false ' accusations, then he, too, invokesuniversals.And at the edges of these trends there are all sorts of fusions of thefragments in progress. Jesse Jackson employs charismatic politics in apolitical campaign which nevertheless begins to fuse some of thesocial movements in the United States that have long been apatheticto each other. The very possibility of a genuine rainbow coalitiondefines a unified politics which inevitably speaks the tacit languageof class, because this is precisely what defines the common experiencewithin the differences. US trade union leaders finally begin to worrythat their support for foreign dictatorships in the name of anticommunismsince 1950, has promoted the unfair labour practices andlow wages in many countries which now compete for jobs and investment.And when British Ford ,car workers struck and stopped carproduction in Belgium and West Germany, they suddenly realizedthat spatial dispersal in the division of labour is not entirely to thecapitalists' advantage and international strategies are feasible as wellas desirable. Signs of a new internationalism in the ecological sphere(forced by events for the bourgeoisie, sought out actively by manyecological groups) and in the fight against racism, apartheid, worldhunger, uneven geographical development, are everywhere, even ifmuch of it still lies in the realm of pure image making (like BandAid) rather than in political organization. The geopolitical stressbetween East and West also undergoes a notable amelioration (again,no thanks to the ruling classes in the West, but more because of anevolution in the East).The cracks in the mirror may not be too wide, and the fusions atthe edges may not be too striking, but the fact that all are theresuggests that the condition of postmodernity is undergoing a subtleevolution, perhaps reaching a point of self-dissolution into somethingdifferent. But what?Answers to that cannot be rendered in abstraction from the politicaleconomicforces currently transforming the world of labour, finance,uneven geographical development, and the like. The lines oftension are clear enough. Geopolitics and economic nationalism,localism and the politics of place, are all fighting it out with a newinternationalism in the most contradictory of ways. The fusion ofCracks in the mirrors, fusions at the edgesthe European Economic Community as a commodity trading blocktakes place in 1992; takeovers and merger manias will sweep thecontinent; yet Thatcherism still proclaims itself as a distinctivenational project resting upon the peculiarities of the British (a propositionwhich both left and right politics tend to accept). Internationalcontrol over finance capital looks inevitable, yet it seemsimpossible to arrive at that through the collectivity of national interests.In the intellectual and cultural spheres similar oppositionscan be identified.Wenders seems to propose a new romanticism, the exploration ofglobal meanings and the prospects for Becoming through the releaseof romantic desire out of the stasis of Being. There are dangers inreleasing an unknown and perhaps uncontrollable aesthetic powerinto an unstable situation. Brandon Taylor favours a return to realismas a means to bring cultural practices back into a realm where somekind of explicit ethical content can be expressed. Even some of thedeconstructionists seem to be reverting to ethics.Beyond that there is a renewal of historical materialism and of theEnlightenment project. Through the first we can begin to understandpostmodernity as an historical-geographical condition. On thatcritical basis it becomes possible to launch a counter-attack of narrativeagainst the image, of ethics against aesthetics, of a project ofBecoming rather than Being, and to search for unity within difference,albeit in a context where the power of the image and of aesthetics,the problems of time-space compression, and the significance ofgeopolitics and otherness are clearly understood. A renewal of historical-geographicalmaterialism can indeed promote adherence toa new version of the Enlightenment project. Poggioli (1968, 73)captures the difference thus:In the consciousness of the classical epoch, it is not the presentthat brings the past into culmination, but the past that culminatesin the present, and the present is in turn understood asa new triumph of ancient and eternal values, as a return to theprinciple of the true and the just, as a restoration or re-birth ofthose principles. But for the moderns, the present is valid onlyby virtue of the potentialities of the future, as the matrix of thefuture, insofar as it is the forge of history in continued metamorphosis,seen as a permanent spiritual revolution.There are some who would have us return to classicism and otherswho seek to tread the path of the moderns. From the standpoint ofthe latter, every age is judged to attain 'the fullness of its time, notby being but by becoming.' I could not agree more.359
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The Conditionof PostmodernityAn Enq
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