Postmodernist theory: Lyotard, Baudrillard and others

Abstract

Such a notion of history is indebted to conflicts which had their root in Enlightenment. As Hayden White points out, the Enlightenment broadly agreed with Leibniz's monadology in the sense that the philosophers of the Enlightenment subscribed to the view that there was an underlying unity or direction to human history. But the big difference between Leibniz and Enlightenment is that Leibniz thinks that this essential unity of humanity is simply immanent, whereas the philosophers of the Enlightenment view it as an ideal whose realization lies in the future, an ideal which is therefore, at best, imminent, or one which isToynbee's invocation of a postmodern moment can thus be seen to accord with the idealist drive of Leibniz; yet it also acknowledges the necessarily future orientation of history. Toynbee can plainly see that the 'modern' moment is not yet a moment of a universal accord or harmony. In this, he is rather like the literary critic Erich Auerbach, who wrote his great study, Mimesis, while living in Turkey in flight from the Nazis. In that study, Auerbach poignantly and desperately attempts to discern, and to validate in the literary history of the western world, the idea of a shared humanity in which, 'below the surface conflicts' which ostensibly wedge us apart, 'the elementary things which our lives have in common come to light'.4 Both these writers were writing under the sign of the Second World War, in which the ideology of a specific racial difference and disharmony momentarily, butby Jameson, who models his own version of 'late Marxism' to correspond with Mandel's descriptions of 'late capitalism'.6