Nothing Mat(t)ers: A Feminist Critique of Postmodernism

10 NOTHING MAT(T)ERS
“Postmodernist” is what Americans have labelled these diverse writers, “a sign that
Paris no longer controls the designation of its own thought” (1991, p. 120).
Given the elusiveness of a chronology for postmodernism and its masked cohort,
it seems a definition of the Mystery itself is beyond human capabilities. Charles
Bernstein (1987, p. 45) admits there “is no agreement on whether postmodernism is
a period, a tendency within a period, an aestheticophilosophical category
transcending, indeed deploring, periodization, much less exactly who or what would
constitute the definition of the term…” Gaile McGregor calls it “a portmanteau
concept yielding something for everyone” (1989, p. 148) and notes that “the
literature yields an almost breathtaking range of contradictory assertions about its
constitution, its derivation, and its value” (1989, p. 147). John Rajchman (1991,
p. 125) remarks that:
Postmodernism is theoretical cannibalism; it is the supermarket approach to
ideas. One jumbles together the different theoretical idioms available without
commensurating them into a single coherent language.
Some definitions have come forward, nevertheless. From the right, J.G.Merquoir
(1989, p. 41) finds that postmodernism is at least three things:
(a) a style or a mood born of the exhaustion of, and dissatisfaction with,
modernism in art and literature;
(b) a trend in French philosophy, or, more specifically, in poststructuralist
theory;
(c) the latest cultural age in the West.
Craig Owens (1983, p. 57) describes postmodernism: “Decentered, allegorical,
schizophrenic…however we choose to diagnose its symptoms, postmodernism is
usually treated, by its protagonists and antagonists alike, as a crisis of cultural
authority, specifically of the authority vested in Western European culture and its
institutions.” Raulet (1983, p. 205) says it is “a breaking apart of reason, Deleuzian
schizophrenia.” Hassan’s postmodernism at once invokes an abstract
“Apollonian view” and a sensuous “Dionysian feeling”: “sameness and difference,
unity and rupture, filiation and revolt” (1987, p. 88). Hassan first used the term in
order to “explore the impulse of self-unmaking” (1987, p. 86). From a Marxist
perspective, Alex Callinicos (1990b, p. 115) characterizes it as the discourse of a
satiated but dissatisfied Western generation:
The discourse of postmodernism is therefore best seen as the product of a
socially mobile intelligentsia in a climate dominated by the retreat of the
Western labour movement and the ‘overconsumptionist’ dynamic of
10. cont. from previous page Baudrillard’s work as “a variant of poststructuralism” (1989a, p. 90)
best read in terms of the poststructuralist debates. Baudrillard becomes a sort of ultrapoststructuralist
who takes the fundamental premises to the extreme “to dissolve the concepts and
problematic of social theory and radical politics altogether” (1989a, p. 91).