Page 214 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

202 IAIN CHAMBERS

proposals and possibilities that the debate over modernity and
postmodernity has uncovered. I would like to think that the ‘noise’ that has
been generated, the spaces that have been opened up between the signs, and
the subsequent disturbance in discursive regimes, betray an unsuspected
‘truth’ about the contemporary critical condition. This truth may perhaps
help us better to experience and engage in what Stuart calls a more
adequate account.
Naturally, any idea of ‘adequacy’ invokes the testing of previous limits.
Working over previous ground does, almost inevitably, involve moving
beyond previous referent points; which, it must be emphasized, is not the
same as eradicating them. Postmodernism, whatever the variant chosen,
clearly invokes an attempt (and a temptation) to move beyond earlier
points of reference, although not necessarily in an obviously linear nor
scorched-earth fashion.
It is certainly imprecise and perhaps a little ungenerous to suggest that
postmodernity merely entertains the idea of the ‘end of the world’. More
suggestively, and more accurately, it can be read to suggest the potential
ending of a world: a world of European, enlightened rationalism and its
metaphysical and positivist variants. In a sophisticated account a la Derrida
this would be to give shape through modernism to the end of modernism.
In a more immediate language it would be to contest a world that is white,
male and Eurocentric, and which believes its rationalizations to be the
highest form of reason.
This particular world is indeed increasingly cracking apart as both
internal and external forms of history, knowledge and power multiply. Old
meanings do indeed find themselves meaning-less. There is a new
complexity that can be received either as an extension of sense or as the
manifesto of its eventual dissipation. In certain areas of a heterogeneous
postmodern constituency there is the welcomed registration of this
expanded condition. Elsewhere, it has led to an altogether darker vision,
particularly when concentrated in the acerbic prose of Jean Baudrillard’s
negative reports from the semantic edges of the contemporary universe.
However, notwithstanding its exasperating cybernese style it is possible
to discern in the sheen of Baudrillard’s breathless prose the unmistakable
echoes of a critical configuration that resonates with Lukács, the Frankfurt
School, the Situationists and the vocabulary of alienated consciousness.
Pushed to its logical limit, the commodification of the world—the
‘hyperreality’ of a totally alienated social existence—comes to its final
steady-state in the simulacrum: use values are obliterated in an incessant
exchange of signs that bear ‘no relation to any reality whatever’. We thus
now find ourselves in the next logical step after alienation—the obscene
transparency of the post-spectacle: