The Last Post?

Abstract

Postmodernism is as various as the books about it, indeed sometimes created by them. But whatever the tones and stances of the different postmodernisms whether 'carnavalesque', anarchistic, sceptical, cynical, demonic or tragic-comic they are changed, we are all changed, by the recent events in Eastern Europe, by the apparent collapse of Socialism and Marxism, and thereby the vindication of the postmodern spirit, which can applaud and proclaim: 'I told you so!' as it watches the last claybottomed bastion of the Enlightenment 'project' topple to the ground, for 'Now you can be like us'. Postmodemism acquires a status and legitimation it had never dreamt of. The 'wall' is removed and put up for sale and the deprived crowds hurtle across the gap to savour the hi-tech of Western capitalism. The market economy surges to the East upon a tide of pluralism. An ironic playwright becomes President of Czechoslovakia. Communist darkness glows with the designer commodity. History has lost its meaning, indeed reached its end according to a Japanese-American academic, echoing Daniel Bell's 'end of ideology' of the fifties, when the capitalist consensus was complete this side of the Elbe and 'post-industrialism' had just been born. The present situation is both a return to the consensus of those days and dramatically different. Gone is the cold-war nightmare of the Bomb. Gone are the old fixities and frontiers. Multinational capital is melting the globe into a new consensus as Socialism declines and the Third World languishes. In the de-industrialised West the 'information society' is born, propelled by monetarism and dominated by the media and the image. Poverty, homelessness, unemployment grow, but in the illusory world of Thatcherism, where society does not exist, the individual is free to do what she or he likes not in the old Rabelaisian sense of selffulfillment or delight, but in the 'postmodern' Nietzschean one of the 'will to power'. Even this 'will to power' shrinks, according to Kroker and Cook, to a mere 'will to will' as all purpose and meaning, indeed all reality drains out of this society and its members rush hysterically after short-term profits and excitements which can never satisfy. The Western world, according to this vision, resembles Baudrillard's 'simulacrum', a second order world of media and information which banishes the real and produces an economy of signs without referents, a world without depth, a world of spectacle, display and surfaces, of designer commodities and aestheticised needs into which the hapless inhabitants try vainly to 'implode' in search of something new. It is Nietzsche's nihilist desert. The actual reality of the homeless, the poor and the unemployed has no place in this metaphysical scheme. (A predilection for surface over depth is common coinage among postmodernists from Deleuze onwards, for depth connotes cause and meaning.) There is another, apparently more optimistic, face to postmodernism, which says: it's all over the grand narratives, the Enlightenment project, ideologies, causes, goals, profundities, totalities, homogeneities, for look what they did: did they not result