Page 160 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

In the realm of uncertainty: the global village and capitalist postmodernity 151
number of re writings’ (1990:287). Theorizing in the postmodern context has to give up
on the search for totalizing and universalizing forms of knowledge and truth. Put more
positively, if there is no position from which a fixed and absolute truth (i.e. a Grand
Theory) can be put forward, then we can only strive for the construction of ‘partial
truths’, to use James Clifford’s (1986) term. Critical theorizing, then, always has to imply
an acknowledgement of its own open-endedness, its own partiality in its inevitable drive
towards narrative closure, in its attempts to impose order in the stories it tells. At the very
least, a critical understanding of what it means to live in the true realm of uncertainty that
is capitalist postmodernity must take on board a positive uncertainty about its own
‘communicative’ effect, its own attempts to construct meaningful discourse in which the
chaos of the world ‘today’ is rendered in ‘sceptical, if not paranoid assessment’ (Morris
1988b:197). Or in the words of Laclau: ‘Utopia is the essence of any communication and
social practice’ (1991:93).