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The crises in postmodernism is not relativism or the lack of
commitment; it is the incessant argument that there is inherent
nihilism operating in a theory that survives on incredulity and
dismantling of all establish truths. As Stuart Sim writes,
"For some thinkers, postmodernism is the liberation from an
institutionally repressive culture; for others, an abdication of
social and intellectual responsibility that is symptomatic of
cultural decline. One side wants to accelerate, the other to
arrest this process."
Sturat Sim’s
coverage of the subject is ample and takes up an array of areas
connected with postmodernism such as philosophy, sociology and
politics, science, technology and aesthetics. His book takes up
the enormous task of consolidating the competing and
proliferating voices in recent discussions on contemporary
critical practice. It provides more than just an overview of the
present juncture in the literary theoretical landscape. An
invaluable contribution to the area of cultural and literary
theory, it takes up not only the history of its development but
also considers a maze of positions, past and present, to make
available to the reader a comprehensive idea of a movement that
has evoked much controversy.
The Enlightenment
project flounders under the impact of theoreticians like
Lyotard, who challenge the metanarrtives of liberal humanism and
Marxism that had promised to end poverty and liberate men from
all political oppression. These grand narratives of modernity do
not have the unchallenged and unquestionable support of
contemporary intellectuals who are intolerant of all ideologies
that designate to themselves an honoured position in matters
both social and political. The blowing up of the infamous
building Pruitt-Igoe on July 15, 1972 at 3.32 p.m. in St. Louis
was for the architect Charles Jencks, symbolic of end of the
modernist "brutalism" with its severe geometrical
shapes and lack of ornamentation seen "in the tower-block
estates" that began to dot the western cityscape, and that
were acutely out of favour with the inhabitants who were witness
to these revolting "vandalised slums." From now on
popular taste would be kept in mind; abstraction would be
displaced by the 19th century realism; and atonality by tonality
in music. In the creative process, it was the dominance of the
pastiche.
Commitment to
technological progress and to democratic political structures is
no longer a faith that postmodernists accept.
For the
postmodernists, pure communion with the world is not possible;
philosophers like Derrida take the certainty of reason as a
nightmare of repression and authoritarianism. The
anti-Enlightenment thinker is outraged by the totalitarian
overconfidence of such dogmatism and the reprehensible history
of atrocities carried out by the West in its systematic
rationality of the Nazi holocaust, in the scientific rationalism
of the Atomic Bomb, the proliferation of multinational dominance
of third-world economies and the ever-escalating environmental
abuses perpetrated by governments.
Sim cites the case
of a traditional institution like the monarchy in Britain, which
is no longer cherished and there are campaigns to end it;
leaders like Clinton or Bush or Blair are not much respected.
Structures of time-honoured authority are under a serious
threat. And these mutations are at least "as much a
manifestation of postmodernism as the high-flown philosophical
theories of a Lyotard, or any of his contemporaries in the
poststructuralist movement.
Postmodernism is
to be understood as a theorisation of what is happening in more
diffuse fashion in the general culture around us, of the
incredulity that is becoming an increasingly regular feature of
our daily lives. Some commentators even speak of the phenomenon
of ‘credicide,’ the death of belief, in our culture."
Nevertheless, postmodernism exists by its very supplementary
relationship to modernism which is rather problematic to ignore.
Frederic Jameson and Jurgen Habermas are the two staunch
adherents of the idea that both the movements are interlocked,
the latter getting the thrust from the former. Lyotard too
maintains that, "postmodernity is not a new age. It is the
rewriting of some features modernity has tried or pretended to
gain, particularly in founding its legitimation upon the purpose
of the general emancipation of mankind."
Thus it becomes
clear that postmodernism is not merely an intellectual movement;
it can be visibly seen in operation in most of the cultural
areas in recent times. As Charles Jencks sums it, postmodernism
ranges from arts to politics to food: it varies from
"conviction politics of Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair to
the search for a new liberalism that can combine
multiculturalism and universal rights." Postmodern food
fluctuates from an Indianised Mac Burger to the California
Cuisine that coalesces the French and the Pacific Rim or the
Maggie masala version of Chinese food. The omnipresence of it is
also perceptible in the area of fashion where a discoloured blue
denim kurta is worn with a pair of trousers and Reeboks or in
the fusion music of the Colonial Cousins. Indeed, there is no
getting away from this overwhelming cultural movement.
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