Page 190 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

178 POSTMODERNISM AND THE ‘OTHER SIDE’

concentrate instead on what gets left out, marginalized, repressed or buried
underneath that term. The selective tradition is here seen in terms of
exclusion and violence. As an initial counter-move, modernism is discarded
by some critical postmodernists as a Eurocentric and phallocentric category
which involves a systematic preference for certain forms and voices over
others. What is recommended in its place is an inversion of the modernist
hierarchy—a hierarchy which, since its inception in the eighteenth,
nineteenth or early twentieth centuries (depending on your periodization)
consistently places the metropolitan centre over the ‘underdeveloped’
periphery, western art forms over Third World ones, men’s art over
women’s art or, alternatively, in less anatomical terms ‘masculine’ or
‘masculinist’ forms, institutions and practices over ‘feminine’ or ‘feminist’
ones. Here the word ‘postmodernism’ is used to cover all those strategies
which set out to dismantle the power of the white, male author as a
privileged source of meaning and value.

THE THREE NEGATIONS
I shall return later to some of the substantive issues addressed by ‘critical
postmodernism’ but for the moment I should like to dwell on the
constitutive role played here, indeed throughout the Post, by negation. In
fact, it is a crucial one, for postmodernism as a discourse or compound of
discourses is rather like Saussure’s paradigm of language, in that it’s a
system with no positive terms. In fact, we could say it’s a system predicated,
as Saussure’s was, on the categorical denial of the possibility of positive
entities per se. (See for instance, Lyotard’s bracketing-off, de-construction,
de-molition of the concept of ‘matter’ in the catalogue notes for the ‘Les
Immatériaux’ exhibition at the Pompidou Centre in 1984. More recently,
Lyotard (1986b) has argued against the ‘vulgar materialist’ line that matter
can be grasped as substance. Instead he suggests that matter should be
understood as a ‘series of ungraspable elements organized by abstract
structures’ (10).) However, a kind of rudimentary coherence begins to
emerge around the question of what postmodernism negates. There are, I
think, three closely linked negations which bind the compound of
postmodernism together and thereby serve to distinguish it in an
approximate sort of way from other adjacent ‘isms’ (though the links
between post-structuralism and post-modernism are in places so tight that
absolute distinctions become difficult if not impossible). These founding
negations, all of which involve—incidentally or otherwise—an attack on
marxism as a total explanatory system, can be traced back to two sources:
on the one hand historically to the blocked hopes and frustrated rhetoric of
the late 1960s and the student revolts (what a friend once described to me
as the ‘repressed trauma of 1968’), and on the other, through the
philosophical tradition to Nietzsche.