Page 199 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

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work of programmes, circuits, pulses which functions merely to process
and recycle the ‘events’ produced (excreted) within itself. For Jameson
(1983) there is the ‘schizophrenic’ consumer disintegrating into a
succession of unassimilable instants, condemned through the ubiquity and
instantaneousness of commodified images and information to live forever
in chronos (this then this then this) without having access to the (centring)
sanctuary of kairos (cyclical, mythical, meaningful time). For Deleuze and
Guattari there is the nomad drifting across ‘milles plateaux’ drawn, to use
their phrase, ‘like a schizophrenic taking a walk’ (1977) from one arbitrary
point of intensity to the next by the febrile and erratic rhythm of desire
(conceived in this case against Lacan as the subversive Other to the Law not
as its accomplice). In each case, a particular (end of) ‘subjectivity’, a
particular ‘subjective modality’, a distinct, universal ‘structure of feeling’ is
posited alongside the diagnostic critique of the contemporary ‘condition’.
Just as Marshall Berman proposes that modernization (urbanization,
industrialization, mechanization) and modernism, the later answering wave
of innovations in the arts together articulated a third term, the experience
of modernity itself; so the prophets of the Post are suggesting that post-
modernization (automation, micro-technologies, decline of manual labour
and traditional work forms, consumerism, the rise of multinational media
conglomerates, deregulation of the airwaves, etc.) together with
postmodernism (bricolage, pastiche, allegory, the ‘hyperspace’ of the new
architecture) are serving to articulate the experience of the Post. Whereas
the experience of modernity represented an undecidable mix of anticipated
freedoms and lost certainties incorporating both the terror of disintegrating
social and moral bonds, of spatial and temporal horizons and the prospect
of an unprecedented mastery of nature, an emancipation from the very
chains of natural scarcity—whereas, in other words, modernity was always
a Janus-faced affair—the experience of post modernity is positively
schizogenic: a grotesque attenuation—possibly monstrous, occasionally
joyous—of our capacity to feel and to respond. Post-modernity is
modernity without the hopes and dreams which made modernity bearable.
It is a hydra-headed, decentred condition in which we get dragged along
from pillow to Post across a succession of reflecting surfaces drawn by the
call of the wild signifier. The implication is that when time and progress
stop, at the moment when the clocks wind down, we get wound up. In
Nietzsche’s dread eternal Now, as the world stops turning (stroke of noon,
stroke of midnight), we start spinning round instead. This at least, is the
implication of the end of history argument: thus—Zarathustra-like—speak
the prophets of the Post. In the dystopian extrapolation of schizophrenia as
the emergent psychic norm of postmodernism we can hear perhaps, the
bitter echo (back-to-front and upside-down) of the two ’68s: San Francisco
(Jameson) and Paris (Baudrillard). The schizophrenic is no longer presented
as the wounded hero/heroic victim of the modernizing process (‘Who poses