Page 189 - Cultural Studies and Political Economy

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relations. (For instance, one might note, on the Internet communicators can
retain anonymity and can even assume and change their ostensible or as-
sumed identities at a whim.)
Second, linguistic change in the electronics era, he claims, affects the con-
struction of self-identities: “The self is [now] decentered, dispersed, and mul-
20
tiplied in continuous instability.” He continues: “In this world the subject
has no anchor, no fixed place, no point of perspective, no discreet center, no
21
clear boundary.” In part, this is an outcome (as noted above) of the exag-
gerated separation in time and/or space of message receivers and message
senders. But television advertisements, too, are a factor in this regard, ac-
cording to Poster, because they mold viewers into consumer-subjects, im-
printing their minds “with floating signifiers attached to commodities not by
any intrinsic relation to them but by the logic of unfulfilled desire.” 22
Third, and most importantly, language disconnects from material reality.
Poster claims that as language loses its capacity for representation, “‘reality’
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comes to be constituted in the ‘unreal’ dimension of the media.” Indeed, he
declares, “it becomes increasingly difficult, or even pointless, for the subject
24
to distinguish a ‘real’ existing ‘behind’ the flow of signifiers.” He writes:
“The tendency in poststructuralism is therefore to regard truth as a multiplic-
ity, to exult in the play of diverse meanings, in the continual process of rein-
terpretation, in the contention of opposing claims.” And again: “Social life
25
in part becomes a practice of positioning subjects to receive and interpret
messages.” 26
For Poster, the loss of referentiality in language is not something to be be-
moaned, but celebrated. For him, every discourse or knowledge system
claiming to contain or represent universal truth buttresses structures of power
27
and hence oppresses the disadvantaged. Regarding power, Poster is in ac-
cord not only with Derrida but also with Adorno and Horkheimer’s critique
of the Enlightenment, and is not far removed from Innis’ objections to mo-
nopolies of knowledge, or from Williams/Hoggart’s understanding of elite
culture. Poster’s solution, though, following Derrida, de Man, and other de-
constructionists, is not to reapply systems of knowledge so that they might
benefit more of humankind, or to seek to balance instrumental knowledge
with other types of knowledge (aesthetic, moral, intuitive, or personal, for ex-
ample), or to authenticate hitherto marginalized or disregarded knowledge
systems (indigenous knowledge systems, for example, or working class cul-
ture), but rather to de-authenticate knowledge through the claim that language
is now self-referential and can no longer represent external reality.
For Poster, poststructuralism is the latest advance in critical theory, which
he characterizes as an approach seeking “to assist the movement of revolution
by providing a counter-ideology that delegitimizes the ruling class.” 28 Of