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 thatParis 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. CharlesBernstein (1987, p. 45) admits there “is no agreement on whether postmodernism isa period, a tendency within a period, an aestheticophilosophical categorytranscending, indeed deploring, periodization, much less exactly who or what wouldconstitute the definition of the term…” Gaile McGregor calls it “a portmanteauconcept yielding something for everyone” (1989, p. 148) and notes that “theliterature yields an almost breathtaking range of contradictory assertions about itsconstitution, its derivation, and its value” (1989, p. 147). John Rajchman (1991,p. 125) remarks that:Postmodernism is theoretical cannibalism; it is the supermarket approach toideas. One jumbles together the different theoretical idioms available withoutcommensurating 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 poststructuralisttheory;(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 isusually treated, by its protagonists and antagonists alike, as a crisis of culturalauthority, specifically of the authority vested in Western European culture and itsinstitutions.” Raulet (1983, p. 205) says it is “a breaking apart of reason, Deleuzianschizophrenia.” 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 inorder to “explore the impulse of self-unmaking” (1987, p. 86). From a Marxistperspective, Alex Callinicos (1990b, p. 115) characterizes it as the discourse of asatiated but dissatisfied Western generation:The discourse of postmodernism is therefore best seen as the product of asocially mobile intelligentsia in a climate dominated by the retreat of theWestern labour movement and the ‘overconsumptionist’ dynamic of10. 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 ultrapoststructuralistwho takes the fundamental premises to the extreme “to dissolve the concepts andproblematic of social theory and radical politics altogether” (1989a, p. 91).