The Condition of Postmodernity 13 - autonomous learning

48 The passage from modernity to postmodernityligious groups, women, the working class) with a unified voice. Thevery title of Carol Gilligan's In a dzfferent voice (1982) - a feministwork which challenges the male bias in setting out fixed stages in themoral development of personality - illustrates a process of counterattackupon such universalizing presumptions. The idea that all groupshave a right to speak for themselves, in. their own voice, and havethat voice accepted as authentic and legitimate is essential to thepluralistic stance of postmodernism. Foucault's work with marginaland interstitial groups has influenced a whole host of researchers, infields as diverse as criminology and anthropology, into new ways toreconstruct and represent the voices and experiences of their subjects.Huyssens, for his part, emphasizes the opening given in postmodernismto understanding difference and otherness, as well as theliberatory potential it offers for a whole host of new social movements(women, gays, blacks, ecologists, regional autonomists, etc.).Curiously, most movements of this sort, though they have definitelyhelped change 'the structure of feeling,' pay scant attention to postmodernistarguments, and some feminists (e.g. Hartsock, 1987) arehostile for reasons that we will later consider. .Interestingly, we can detect this same preoccupation with 'otherness'and 'other worlds' in postmodernist fiction. McHale, in emphasizingthe pluralism of worlds that coexist within postmodernistfiction, finds Foucault's concept of a heterotopia a perfectly appropriateimage to capture what that fiction is striving to depict. Byheterotopia, Foucault means the coexistence in 'an impossible space'of a 'large number of fragmentary possible worlds' or, more simply,incommensurable spaces that are juxtaposed or superimposed uponeach other. Characters no longer contemplate how they can unravelor unmask a central mystery, but are forced to ask, 'Which world isthis? What is to be done in it? Which of myselves is to do it?'instead. The same shift can be detected in the cinema. In a modernistclassic like Citizen Kane a reporter seeks to unravel the mystery ofKane's life and character by collecting multiple reminiscences andperspectives from those who had known him. In the more postmodernistformat of the contemporary cinema we find, in a film likeBlue Velvet, the central character revolving between two quite incongruousworlds - that of a conventional 1950s small-town Americawith its high school, drugstore culture, and a bizarre, violent, sexcrazedunderworld of drugs, dementia, and sexual perversion. Itseems impossible that these two worlds should exist in the samespace, and the central character moves between them, unsure whichis the true reality, until the two worlds collide in a terrible denouement.A postmodernist painter like David Salle likewise tends toPostmodernism 49'collage together incompatible source materials as an alternative tochoosing between them' (Taylor, 1987, 8; see plate 1.6). Pfeil(1988) even goes so far as to depict the total field of postmodernismas 'a distilled representation of the whole antagonistic, voraciousworld of otherness.'But to accept the fragmentation, the pluralism, and the authenticityof other voices and other worlds poses the acute problem of communicationand the means of exercising power through commandthereof. Most postmodernist thinkers are fascinated by the newpossibilities for information and knowledge production, analysis,and transfer. Lyotard (1984), for example, firmly locates his argumentsin the context of new technologies of communication and, drawingupon Bell's and Touraine's theses of the passage to a 'postindustrial'information-based society, situates the rise of postmodern thoughtin the heart of what he sees as a dramatic social and political transitionin the languages of communication in advanced capitalist societies.He looks closely at the new technologies for the production, disseminationand use of that knowledge as a 'principal force of production.'The problem, however, is that knowledge can now becoded in all kinds of ways, some of which are more accessible thanothers. There is more than a hint in Lyotard's work, therefore, thatmodernism has changed because the technical and social conditionsof communication have changed ..Post modernists tend to accept, also, a rather different theory as towhat language and communication are all about. Whereas modernistshad presupposed that there was a tight and identifiable relation betweenwhat was being said (the signified or 'message') and how it was beingsaid (the signifier or 'medium'), poststructuralist thinking sees theseas 'continually breaking apart and re-attaching in new combinations.''Deconstructionism' (a movement initiated by Derrida's reading ofMartin Heidegger in the late 1960s) here enters the picture as apowerful stimulus to postmodernist ways of thought. Deconstructionismis less a philosophical postion than a way of thinking aboutand 'reading' texts. Writers who create texts or use words do so on thebasis of all the other texts and words they have encountered, whilereaders deal with them in the same way. Cultural life is then viewedas a series of texts intersecting with other texts, producing more texts(including that of the literary critic, who aims to produce anotherpiece of literature in which texts under consideration are intersectingfreely with other texts that happen to have affected his or herthinking). This intertextual weaving has a life of its own. Whateverwe write conveys meanings we do not or could not possibly intend,and our words cannot say what we mean. It is vain to try and master