Whatever Happened to Postmodernism?

Foster begins: 'Not so long ago it seemed a grand notion' is an ironic description of Lyotard's idea of the end of grand narratives and modernity's fundamental link to ideas of progress (1995: 205). He characterises this as a halt to 'the march of reason, the accumulation of wealth, the advance of technology, the emancipation of oppressed workers, and so on' (1995: 205). The notion of postmodernism, he argues, has always been under dispute. But more particularly, he is making reference to his own earlier work around critical postmodernism: Postmodern Culture, (1993) first published as The Anti-Aesthetic. He advocated a critical practice that sought new forms for culture and politics. Since then the notion has become thoroughly incorporated, banal, empty and worse still - fashionable. 

Foster is largely in sympathy with Jameson's 'long-wave' theory and defends its over-determined mechanical appearance as a more subtle 'palimpsest of emergent and residual forms' (1995: 207). Nevertheless he adds that it's too spatial and not sensitive enough to different speeds and to the idea of deferred action (he takes from Freud). By this, he points to Freud's view of subjectivity as structured through a 'relay of anticipations and reconstructions of events that may become traumatic through this relay'. He simply adopts this dialectical pattern by way of analogy in the relationship of modernism to postmodernism as a 'continual process of anticipated futures and reconstructed pasts' (207) and perhaps accounts for a present crisis of culture. Each period builds dialectically on the previous one and then releases new energies as a result of the contradictions that arise.  This is evoked in Benjamin's poetic notion that 'every epoch dreams the next', emphasising that any conception of the present (now-time) is dynamic and nonsynchronous (207). To illustrate this line of thinking 'whatever happened to postmodernism?', he adopts a similar model of periodisations but of thirty years apart (not fifty like Mandel) - the 1930s of high modernism, 1960s that marks the advent of postmodernism, and 1990s, the time of now (or to be more accurate when it was written, then). He discusses the relationship of technology and culture but by employing psychoanalysis too, is keen to trace corresponding shifts in Western conceptions of subjectivity and its relationship to the cultural other. Through this model and by treating theory not merely as a critical instrument but as an object too, general shifts emerge according to Foster and certain anticipations and reconstructions are evident. For instance. Fanon's reworking of Hegel and Marx master-slave dialectic in The Wretched of the Earth (1961) that underpinned anti-colonial struggles appears now to be overshadowed by postcolonial fashion with little connection to the fundamental dialectical tensions of power (an argument more consistent with Jameson than Foster perhaps). For Foster, in the 1930s, Levi-Strauss and structural anthropology, Lacan and the structures of the unconscious, addressed the formations of subjectivity. This shifts to the 1960s, where Althusser, Foucault, Barthes, Deleuze and Guattari all addressed the death of the humanist subject, only to return in excessive identity formations, now split, fractured and in multiple forms (and offering multiple markets for capital). It is important not to mis-read the 'death of the author' thesis, however much a contradiction that might seem if meaning is produced in the act of reading. The author and therefore death is metaphorical. The argument does not simply take issue with individual cultural producers but with meaning production under certain conditions, and in particular within authoritarian communication models. The generality was strategic, and death-wish only wishful thinking. 

In the 1930s too, Benjamin's 'The Artwork in the Age of its Technical Reproducibility' engaged with the relationship of authenticity to authority. Much of this discussion of culture and technology was recast in the 1960s in contrasting ways by McLuhan in Understanding Media (1964) on the body and by Debord as The Society of the Spectacle (1967) on the image - respectively endorsing technophilic and technophobic tendencies (1995: 209). More specifically, in support of this backwards and forwards dynamic, he continues: 'even as one moment leads to the next, this next comprehends the one before' (1995: 218). Thus he draws a line between Benjamin and the mechanical age of the 1930s transformed to Debord and the spectacle of the 1960s to cyberpunk that imagines the cybernetic extensions predicted by McLuhan in the 1960s, that cross reference back to Benjamin (1995: 218) and so on. This is confusing, but emphasises the complex referencing back and forwards through history.

Analogies and images appear and reappear in new guises. The body penetrated by technology in Benjamin (the magician and surgeon comparison where the surgeon-technologist penetrates deep into reality), is 'electronically' extended in McLuhan (to a global nervous system prefiguring the Internet) and in turn to Haraway's cyborg figure where technology is inseparable from the body (in 'The Cyborg Manifesto'). The image designed for reproducibility in Benjamin is spectacularised by Debord and loses its referent as the simulacra of Baudrillard. The point for Foster is not to judge the various merits of the various and competing positions, but to use these examples to indicate change in any present situation. This is what he points to as the deferred action or double movement of modernism and postmodernism. But why not judge the merits too, for we both lose and gain simultaneously. 

A winner's game requires losers. Foster's interest in the cultural other serves to stress the limits of the New World Order. He says: 'Thus, if we celebrate hybridity and heterogeneity, we must remember that they are also privileged terms of advance capitalism, that social multiculturalism coexists with economic multiculturalism' (1995: 212). Under this logic of expanding markets and consumer capitalism, like any other dominant system, even resistance is necessary for the system to reproduce itself afresh. Foster puts it like this: 'Such a vision does not totalise, for no order, capitalist or otherwise, can control all the forces that it releases. Rather, as Marx and Foucault variously suggest, a regime of power also prepares its resistance, calls it into being, in ways that cannot always be recouped.' (1995: 212)

All these issues and the earlier critical theories and methodologies revolve around the idea of 'correct distance' for Foster (1995: 214). The question of how you adopt correct distance from something is easily connected to anthropology and psychoanalysis - through participant-observer relations and the like. He evokes Fanon again too, when the 'other' of European colonial history begins to reject colonial authority and re-establish autonomy in a colonial context - the paradox is exemplified by the Fanon's title Black Skin, White Faces (he makes reference to the work of Homi Bhabha too, eg. The Location of Culture). The examples stress the importance placed on spatial matters, not least in postmodernism itself, and all separations of the West and Rest, centre and periphery, culture and nature and so on. Certainly these distinctions appear less firm, even if power is distributed just as unevenly. Like Jameson, he is concerned that poststructuralism and its deconstruction of such binaries (Derrida is a case in point) has ultimately served to obscure their workings and ability to make strategic transformations. This is not to dismiss its critical ability at all but to question its own sense of authority - to turn it back on itself perhaps.

The key issue for Foster is one of distance. In Benjamin, the eclipse of distance (welcomed in the loss of aura), allowed the potential for culture to become more democratic. This exists as potential and is just as likely to be mis-used by Fascism because of its reach (more on this in Benjamin notes - though Foster cites Adorno and Horkheimer in The Dialectics of Enlightenment, who drew the comparison between Nazi Germany and the culture industry of the United States; they had fled one to think it evident in the other in another guise). Distance under the influence and impact of new technology, already dialectical in Benjamin (add good quote), is further emphasised in Heidegger's quote: 'a uniformity in which everything is neither far nor near' (1947, quoted in Foster, 1995: 219). In the age of the internet, distance is key to understanding this paradox, and the feeling that Debord described as 'the lonely crowd'. Distance is dialectical in that it remains bound to this idea of being both critical and distracted. He explains the currency of this position: 'Is our media world one of a cyberspace that renders bodies immaterial, or one in which bodies, not transcended at all, are marked, often violently, according to racial, sexual, and social differences? Clearly it is both at once, and this new intensity of dis/connection is postmodern' (1995: 221 - his example is the anecdote of his fascinated/disgusted reaction to the CNN coverage of the Gulf War).

The paradox is all the more pronounced in 'spatiotemporal splittings' described in various ways: 'disgust undercut by fascination; sympathy undercut by sadism; fantasy of disembodiment dispelled by adjection'(1995:222). The evocative idea of obscene proximity is a reference to Baudrillard's essay 'the ecstasy of communication' that renders things too close in a pornography of information. He sees the current tendency towards disavowal as part of this (I know but nevertheless... I will find excuses to not do anything about it). If things appear too far and too close, how then are we to operate with any sense of critical judgement, if critical distance is eroded? Foster offers the model of deferred action, of the relay of anticipation and reconstruction. Without saying it he is evoking the 'angel of history' capable to reconstructing past events to make them better (in 'Thesis on the Philosophy of History'. This, for Foster is one way out of a difficult situation (of being a cultural theorist), and is the proper function of critical history and theory.