Hollywood Utopia

188 Hollywood Utopia
affirm a controlling meta-discourse. Nevertheless, I will argue that this
‘breakdown’ affords more effective, if merely symptomatic, exposition of often
conflicting representations of ecological debates than a more apparently coherent
meta-narrative exposition which tends to close down meaning and internal debate.
Postmodernism, the optimists affirm, has become the new, libertarian, allencompassing,
periodising strategy for addressing life and art. Instead of
remaining bogged down within the vortex of modernist opposition between low and
high art, with the inevitable divisive ideological consequences for its audiences,
postmodernist theory attempts to break free from the chains of such fixed cultural,
textual and ideological strategies. Anxieties concerning meta-narratives began with
Jean-Francois Lyotard, and while they often served to ‘ground and legitimate
knowledge’, many are no longer regarded as ‘credible’ (McHale 1992: 5). Such
breakdowns, especially between binary oppositions and the apparent loss,
according to Lyotard, of ‘transcendental foundations’ (cited in Tallack 1995: 360)
coincidentally afford more space for new and often less ideologically regressive
discourses to break through in popular film.
Postmodernism in this guise has in some ways become the controlling discourse
and aesthetic because of its exposure of the weakness of modernism. What it
discovers (or rather rediscovers) ‘is that rationality cannot ground itself, and that
therefore modernity cannot be grounded’ (Bertens 1995: 241). Modernity is, of
course, also ‘enigmatic at its core’, as Giddens (Giddens 1990: 49) has remarked,
in that it sends out contradictory impulses which have come to constitute its two
primary modes of thought - ‘the one expansionist, transcendent, and omnirepresentational,
the other self-reflexive, inward spiralling, and antirepresentational
- that in our day and age have come to clash so violently’ (cited in
Bertens 1995: 242). Hans Bertens correctly characterises Habermas’s modernist
position as ‘defending philosophy against irrationalism’ and his central argument
as addressing ‘the plausibility of a rationality that distinguishes itself from the
rationality denounced by poststructuralists’ (Bertens 1995: 111).
Without such a unifying rationality, Habermas feared that a dissensus politics
would leave the Left fragmented and unable to organise and mobilise. Poststructuralism
had successfully attacked empirical rationalism as only one form of
knowing but Habermas affirmed that the project of modernity was more than this
‘means-end rationalism’ and consequently advanced what Bertens describes as a
‘post-rationalist modernity’ (ibid.: 111). Bertens goes so far as to contend that we
might choose between the ‘postmodern’ or a more progressive form of modernism
which draws from both paradigms. He calls this the ‘radicalised modern’ which
coincidentally also helps to legitimise an ecological agenda. It is our fate, therefore,
he continues, ‘to reconcile the demands of rationality and those of “the sublime”,
to negotiate a permanent crisis in the name of precarious stabilities’ (ibid.: 248).