Page 194 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

182 POSTMODERNISM AND THE ‘OTHER SIDE’

But Paris represents just one 1968. There were others, the ’68, for
instance, of Woodstock and the West Coast, of Haight-Ashbury, the
Pranksters, the hippies, the Yippies, the Weathermen, the Panthers and the
opposition to the war in Vietnam. The lunar desertscapes and dune buggies
of Manson and the Angels: the space of acid: the libertarian imaginary of
unlimited social and sexual licence, of unlimited existential risking. Here
too the rights of pleasure, the play of desire and the silent ‘discourse of the
body’ were being asserted against the puritanism and logocentricism of an
earlier ‘straighter’ set of ‘radical’ demands and aspirations. In different
ways in Paris and in San Francisco in the wake of two quite different ’68s,
the assertion of the claims of the particular against the general, the
fragment against the (irrecoverable) whole was to lead to the apotheosis of
the schizophrenic as it did more or less contem-poraneously in London in
the work of R.D.Laing (1967) and David Cooper (1971). While in Paris,
Kristeva, Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari excavated and redeemed the
buried, repressed and forbidden discourses of the mad and the marginal
(Bâtaille, Artaud, Pierre Rivière), young men and women stalked around
cities as far apart as Los Angeles and Liverpool wearing T-shirts decorated
with a screen-printed photograph of Charles Manson staring crazed and
blazing-eyed out into the world at chest level. The failed apocalyptic
aspirations of ’68 and the cult of the psychotic are both deeply registered in
the rhetoric and style of postmodernist critique and leave as their legacy a
set of priorities and interests which functions as a hidden agenda inside the
Post (see below).
To end this section on a footnote, it is perhaps surprising, given the
antigeneralist bias which informs and directs the manifold vectors of the
Post, that thinkers such as Jean Baudrillard, Jean-François Lyotard and
Fredric Jameson should retain such a panoptic focus in their work, writing
often at an extremely high level of abstraction and generality of a ‘post
modern condition’, or ‘predicament’, a ‘dominant cultural norm’, etc.

2
Against teleology
A scepticism regarding the idea of decidable origins/causes; this anti-
teleological tendency is sometimes invoked explicitly against the precepts
of historical materialism: ‘mode of production’, ‘determination’, and so on.
The doctrine of productive causality is here replaced by less mechanical,
less unidirectional and expository accounts of process and transformation
such as those available within the epistemological framework provided by,
for instance, ‘catastrophe theory’—to take one frequently cited example. In
the same kind of knight’s move which marked the growth of systems
theory in the 1950s, arguments and paradigms from the ‘hard’ sciences,
from post-Newtonian physics, relativity, bio-chemistry, genetics, etc. are