thresholds

Jean-Francois Lyotard, "Answering The Question: What is Postmodernism?", trans. Regis Durand, in The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 1984, pp.71-82.

"Let us wage war on totality"

-so he yelled.

The grand narrative that is the capitalist economy, the one that seeks to modulate aesthetics confined to the area of 'beautiful', the one that seeks to marginalize, the one that seeks general consensus so to sustain the "reality" (76).

In supposing that all search towards universal truth would lead to totalitarian regimes, in rejecting that absolute knowledge is impossible.. isn't this anti-metanarrative stance a meta narrative in itself? Not only does this somewhat unfairly villifying dichotomy seem abruptly crude- this supposition of reality as controlled, resentful and unstable, seems to imply that postmodernism is in its extreme digression, nihilistic.

One of the forefathers of postmodernism, Nietzsche had this to say (quoted in Hicks, 193):

"Slave morality is the morality of the weak.. Weaklings are chronically passive, mostly because they are afraid of the strong. As a result, they cannot get what they want out of life. They become envious of the strong, and they also secretly start to hate themselves for being so cowardly and weak. But no one can live thinking he or she is hateful. And so the weak invent a rationalization- a rationalization that tells them they are good and the moral because they are weak, humble, and passive... And, of course, the opposites of those things are evil- aggresiveness is evil, and so is pride, and so is independence, and so is being physically and materially successful."

Interestingly, some main characteristics of conspiracy theory could be summed up as follows:

1. Stigmatization itself serves as justification of truth: credibility can be assigned on the merits of the stigmatization of the claim. (Barkun, 27)
2. Fact-fiction reversals: conspiracists claim that what is known amongst the general consensus is in fact a fiction.(29)
3. Skepticism towards a unified social order.(39)
4. Clear and distinct binary assumption of good (minority) and evil (mainstream). (40)

Perhaps somewhat crudely harsh an analogy, but I just could not help but notice..

What I also find quite irritating is the valorization of scientific knowledge built upon so far;
if knowledge is only particularist in the sense that it is produced in the confinements of a disciplinary matrix, henceforth rendering it 'incommensurable'...

Alan Sokal, in his Afterword(i) to the infamous Social Text affair(ii) -amidst his initiative to "combat a currently fashionable postmodernist/poststructuralist social-constructionist discourse", quotes Alan Ryan:

"It is, for instance, pretty suicidal for embattled minorities to embrace Michel Foucault, let alone Jacques Derrida. The minority view was always that power could be undermined by truth... Once you read Foucault saying that truth is simply an effect of power, you've had it.. But American departments of literature, history and sociology contain large numbers of self-described leftists who have confused radical doubts about objectivity with political radicalism, and are in a mess." (quoted in Sokal, 95)