Page 186 - Contemporary Cultural Theory 3rd edition

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Postmodernism and cultural theory

War: ‘In contemporary society and culture—postindustrial
society, postmodern culture—the... grand narrative has lost its
credibility, regardless of what mode of unification it uses, regard-
less of whether it is a speculative narrative or a narrative of
emancipation’. The postmodern incredulity towards metanarra-
tives, whether in aesthetics or science or politics, was, for Lyotard,
in part a consequence of the internal logic of the metanarratives
themselves, which tended to proceed from scepticism to plural-
ism. But it was also a correlate of postindustrialism, since
knowledge itself had now become a principal form of produc-
tion, thereby, according to Lyotard, shifting emphasis ‘from the
ends of action to its means’ (Lyotard, 1984, p. 37).
His slightly later essay, ‘What is Postmodernism?’, recapit-
ulated much of this earlier analysis, but abandoned the initial
attempt at cultural periodisation (p. 79). Here, the postmodern
continued to be understood as that which ‘denies itself the solace
of good forms, the consensus of a taste which would make it
possible to share collectively the nostalgia for the unattainable;
that which searches for new representations...in order to impart
a strong sense of the unpresentable’ (p. 81). The postmodern,
he declared, will ‘wage a war on totality’, that ‘transcendental
illusion’ of the nineteenth century, the full price of which has
proven to be ‘terror’ (pp. 81–2). For Lyotard, then, the nineteenth-
century dream of ‘totality’ had given birth to the
twentieth-century nightmare of totalitarianism.

Baudrillard on simulacra and simulation
Baudrillard uses the term ‘simulacrum’ to mean a sign without
a referent, ‘never exchanged for the real, but exchanged for itself’;
and ‘simulation’ to mean the processual aspects of simulacra, or
the non-referential equivalent of representation (Baudrillard, 1994,
p. 6). He argued that there had been a succession of three orders
of simulacra since the Renaissance—the natural, the productive,
and ‘the simulacra of simulation’, respectively. The first of these
need not concern us here. But the shift from the second order,
which was founded on industrial manufacture, to the third,
founded on information and characterised by hyperreality

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