Page 196 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

184 POSTMODERNISM AND THE ‘OTHER SIDE’

In Jameson’s autopsia, the idea of depthlessness as a marker of
postmodernism accompanied as it is by a rejection of the vocabulary of
intellectual ‘penetration’ and the binary structures on which post-Socratic
thought is reckoned to be based (for example, reality v. appearance, real
relations v. phenomenal forms, science v. false consciousness,
consciousness v. the unconscious, inside v. outside, subject v. object, etc.)
can be understood in this context as another step away from the old
explanatory models and certainties. Derridian deconstruction and
grammatology further destabilize such dualistic structures by disrupting the
illusion of priority which tends to collect around one term in any binary
opposition through the prepositional links which bind antinomies together
(for example, behind consciousness, the primary unconscious; underneath
illusory phenomenal forms, the real relations; beyond subjective distortions,
a world of stable objects, and so on). If the ‘depth model’ disappears, then
so, too, does the intellectual as seer, the intellectual as informed but
dispassionate observer/custodian of a ‘field of enquiry’ armed with
‘penetrating insights’ and ‘authoritative overviews’, enemy of sophistry,
artifice and superficial detail. Once such oppositions dissolve a lot of other
things go too: there can be no more rectification of popular errors, no more
trawling for hidden truths, no more going behind appearances or ‘against
the grain’ of the visible and the obvious. (The anti-positivist, anti-empiricist
impetus that animated critical (rather than Greenbergian) modernism, is, in
other words, no longer available as a viable option.) In short, no more
(Book of) Revelations. Instead what is left, to use another postmodernist
key word, is a ‘fascination’ with mirrors, icons, surfaces. In those accounts
of postmodernism produced by writers who retain a problematic, residual
commitment to marxian frames of reference, this ending of critical distance
and the depth model is seen to be tied to (though not, presumably,
determined by) a larger historical shift into a ‘post-industrial’, ‘consumer’,
‘media’, ‘multi-national’ or ‘monopoly’ phase in the development of
capitalism. After the prohibitions, the instrumental rationality, and the
purposiveness of a production economy (and the complementary
‘oppositions’ and ‘interruptions’ of modernism), we get—or so the
argument goes—the licensed promiscuity, the unconstrained imaginaries,
the merger of subjects and objects, mainstreams and margins, the drift and
the dreamwork which characterize life in the consumption economy of the
Post. In an economy geared towards the spinning of endlessly accelerating
spirals of desire, consumption allegedly imposes its own ‘ecstatic’ or
pluralist (dis)order (Jameson’s ‘heterogeneity without norms’). Idolatry, the
worship of Baal (commodity fetishism) replaces positivism and its
doppelganger, marxism, the dominant epistemic faiths of the modern
period. Adorno and Hork-heimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment collapses as
the combative strategies of modernism—negation, estrangement, ‘non-
identity thinking’—which were supposed to work to reveal the