Page 200 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

188 POSTMODERNISM AND THE ‘OTHER SIDE’

the greater threat to society: the fighter pilot who dropped the bomb on
Hiroshima or the schizophrenic who believes the bomb is inside his body?’
[R.D.Laing]). The schizophrenic is no longer implicitly regarded as the
suffering guarantor of threatened freedoms and of an imperilled ontic
authenticity but rather as the desperate witness/impotent victim of the
failure not only of marxism but also of the inflated libertarian claims,
dreams and millenarian aspirations of the two ’68s.

3
Against Utopia
Running parallel to the anti-teleological impulse, and in many ways, as is
indicated above, serving as the inevitable complement to it, there is a
strongly marked vein of scepticism concerning any collective destination,
global framework of prediction, any claims to envisage, for instance, the
‘ultimate mastery of nature’, the ‘rational control of social forms’, a
‘perfect state of being’, ‘end of all (oppressive) powers’, and so on. This
anti-utopian theme is directed against all those programmes and solutions
(most especially against marxism and fascism) which have recourse to a
bogus scientificity, which place a high premium on centralized planning/
social engineering, and which tend to rely heavily for their implementation
on the maintenance of strict party discipline, a conviction of ideological
certitude, and so on. The barbaric excesses (for example, Auschwitz, the
Gulag) which are said to occur automatically when people attempt to put
such solutions and programmes into action are seen to be licensed by
reference to what Lyotard (1984) calls the ‘grands récits’ of the West: by the
blind faith in progress, evolution, race struggle, class struggle, etc., which is
itself a product of the deep metaphysical residue which lies at the root of
western thought and culture. In other words (and here there is an explicit
link with the nouvelles philosophes of the 1970s) all holy wars require
casualties and infidels, all utopias come wrapped in barbed wire. Many
commentators have remarked upon both the banality and the irrefutability
of these conclusions.
The image which is often invoked as a metaphor for the decline of
utopian aspirations, the refusal of ‘progress’ and the ‘progressive’
ideologies whch underpin it—an image which in a sense encompasses all
three of the founding negations of postmodern thought—is Walter
Benjamin’s allegorical interpretation of Paul Klee’s painting the Angelus
Novus. Benjamin (1969) suggests that in this painting, the angel of history
is depicted staring in horror at the ‘single catastrophe’ which hurls
‘wreckage upon wreckage’ at his feet as the storm which is blowing from
Paradise propels him irresistibly ‘into the future to which his back is turned’
(257). ‘This storm,’ writes Benjamin, ‘is what we call progress’. In a
number of subtly and elaborately developed arguments evolved partly in