Page 192 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

180 POSTMODERNISM AND THE ‘OTHER SIDE’

In Europe, the retreat from the first person plural ‘we’—the
characteristic mode of address of the Voice of Liberation during the heroic
age of the great bourgeois revolutions—can be associated historically with
the fragmentation of the radical ‘centre’ after 1968 (though the process of
disenchantment begins in earnest after the Second World War with the
revelation of the Moscow trials, and after 1956 with the invasion
of Hungary and the formation of the New Left). At the same time, during
the 1950s attempts had been made, most notably by Sartre, to rescue a
viable marxism and to rectify the over general conception of epochal
change which marks the Hegelian philosohy of history. Sartre and Merleau-
Ponty sought to relate dialectical materialism, as Peters Dews (1986) has
recently put it, to ‘its smallest, most phenomenologically translucent
component, the praxis of the human individual’ (14). However these anti-
generalist tendencies are most clearly enunciated in the late 1960s with the
widespread disaffection of the students from the French Communist Party
and the odour of betrayal that hung over the party after the events of
1968; with the appearance of publications like Castoriadis’s History as
Creation, and with the fully fledged revival of interest—assuming the
proportions of a cult in the 1970s and early 1980s—in the work of
Nietzsche—a revival which can be traced back to the ‘rediscovery’ of
Nietzsche in the late 1950s by the generation of intellectuals which
included Foucault (1977) and Deleuze (1983) but which did not really take
off until the post-’68 period of disenchantment. From 1968 we can date the
widespread jettisoning of the belief amongst educated, ‘radical’ factions, not
only in marxist-leninism but in any kind of power structure administered
from a bureaucratically organized centre, and the suspicion of any kind of
political programme formulated by an elite and disseminated through a
hierarchical chain of command. This process of fragmentation and growing
sensitivity to the micro-relations of power both facilitated and was
facilitated by the articulation of new radical or revolutionary demands, and
the formation of new collectivities, new subjectivities which could not be
contained within the old paradigms, and which could neither be addressed
by nor ‘spoken’ in the old critical, descriptive and expressive languages.
Feminism, molecular and micro politics, the autonomy movement, the
counterculture, the politics of sexuality, the politics of utterance (who says
what, how, to whom, on whose behalf: the issue of the politics of power
and discourse, the issue of discursive ‘space’)—all these ‘movements’ and
‘tendencies’ grew out of the cracks, the gaps and silences in the old
‘radical’ articulations. Given their provenance on the ‘other side’, as it were
of the enoncé it is hardly surprising that the new politics was more or less
centrally concerned with the issue of subjectivity itself.
All these fractures and the new forms which grew inside them can be
understood in this context as responses to the ‘crisis of representation’
where the term ‘representation’—understood both in its everyday sense of