Page 198 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

186 POSTMODERNISM AND THE ‘OTHER SIDE’

language and the symbolic which is the domain of the Law which, to
complete the circle, the movement of desire can only confirm and trace out
rather than contradict or overthrow, etc. Once sutured into the Jamesonian
critique of consumer culture (where the ‘death of the subject’ is seen as an
historic ‘event’ rather than [as from the post-structuralist perspective] as a
philosophically demonstrable case valid at all times in all places), the
Lacanian model of subjectivity and desire tends to consolidate the anti-
utopianism which forms the last of the major postmodernist negations (see
‘Against Utopia’ below), though Lacanian feminists and
critical postmodernists stress the extent to which a new political front is
opened up within discourse (signifying practice) itself. At this point,
through a series of post-structuralist slippages and puns a kind of total
‘closure of discourse’ (Marcuse) tends to occur so that we are denied the
prospect of any kind of ‘elsewhere’, any kind of ‘alternative’ let alone
transcendence through struggle or any prospect—imminent or otherwise—
of the removal of ‘scarcity’ through the rational deployment of global
resources. At one level, what are presented in the marxist discourse as
‘contradictions’ which are historical (hence ultimately soluble) get
transmuted in the discourse(s) of the Post into paradoxes which are eternal
(hence insoluble). Thus ‘desire’ supersedes ‘need’, ‘lack’ problematizes the
calculus of ‘scarcity’, and so on. The implication is that there is nowhere
left outside the ceaseless (mindless) spirals of desire, no significant conflict
beyond the tension (resorting here to the very different terms and emphases
of Foucault) between bodies and those constraints which shape and cut
against (de-fine) them as social bodies. Agon—the timeless (Hellenic)
contest between evenly matched combatants where there can be no final
victory, no irreversible outcome here replaces history—the grand (Hebraic)
narrative of the struggles of the righteous against the forces of evil—a
narrative composed of a succession of unique, unrepeatable moments
unfolding in a linear sequence towards the final day of judgement
(Armageddon, the Apocalypse, socialism: end of class struggle).
According to one strand within the postmodernist account, the
implication here is that without meaningful duration and the subjective
dispositions, expectancies, and orientations, which such a ‘sense of an
(imminent, just and proper) ending’ surreptitiously imposes on us all,
psychosis begins to replace neurosis as the dominant psychic norm under
late capitalism. For Baudrillard (1983c) there is the autistic ‘ecstasy of
communication’ where judgement, meaning, action are impossible, where
the psychic ‘scene’ (space of the subject/stage for psychic ‘dramas’ complete
with ‘characters’ equipped with conscious and unconscious intentions,
drives, motivations, ‘conflicts’, etc.) is replacd by an ‘obscene’ and arbitrary
coupling of disparate ‘screens’ and ‘termini’ where bits of information,
images, televisual close-ups of nothing in particular float about in the
‘hyperreal’ space of the image-bloated simulacrum: a Leviathan-like lattice