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

12 NOTHING MAT(T)ERSIn The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Jean-François Lyotarddefines postmodernism 12 as an “incredulity toward metanarratives” (1984, p. xxiv)and a resistance to interpretation: “It is necessary to posit the existence of a powerthat destabilizes the capacity for explanation” (1984, p. 61). For Lyotard, critique,like alienation, is impossible, out of fashion. He takes a position of self-regulationwithin his own philosophical meditation, such that he both represents and diagnosespostmodernism: this is the simultaneity of the postmodern condition. Lyotard findsthat the major characteristic of the postmodern condition, a “historicallyexceptional” event, is its presentation of the most complex self-regulation of basichuman conditions: “life, death, birth, work, the parity of the rich and poor” (1985,p. 12). After curating Les Immatériaux at the Centre Georges Pompidou in 1985,Lyotard defined the postmodern condition again:I shall keep this idea of a slow and heavy change equal in length to that ofmodernity; and this particularity of technologies to create, in an autonomousfashion, new material materials, new matrices, from their acquired knowledgeand not as a function of people’s needs. And I would insist precisely on thefact that this development is searching for its legitimation (1985, p. 14).According to Élie Théofilakis, editor of a collection discussing Lyotard’s LesImmatériaux, modernity is dead, as is the Western promise to humanity of thecontrol of its destiny through “Knowledge, Emancipation, the Economy, History,”(1985, p. ix). Such hard materials on which to base a modern sensibility no longerexist. Simultaneously, technoscience has relegated the last five thousand years to thehistory of the stone age, and humanity as the measure of all things is only anostalgia. In fact, “there will never again be any proof of our ends, nor proof of theend” (1985, p. x). As man/nature is replaced by man/technique, “our” previousknowledge and sensibility is displaced, dematerialized; les immatériaux create usand we are not longer in control. Even the frontiers of life and death become fluid,mobile. We are already other, indeed, we are the immaculately conceived! Can wesay then that postmodernism is the philosophy of the immaculately deceived? Theundead?Fredric Jameson tends to refer to postmodernist and poststructuralist theoriesinterchangeably, but he distinguishes between these conceptualizations and thepostmodern condition: postmodernism versus postmodernity. 13 Jameson states thatthere “is a difference between the production of ideologies about this reality and thereality itself. They necessarily demand two different responses” (in Stephanson:1989, p. 72). It is Jameson’s view that postmodernity is the cultural logic of latecapitalism (1984) (1990). He sees poststructuralist theory as a symptom ofpostmodernist culture (1984, p. 61) but expects that a reconstructed postmodernism12. For a trenchant and thoughtful critique of Canadian postmodernism, see Gaile McGregor (1989).Especially useful is her discussion of Linda Hutcheon’s work on postmodernism (1988a; 1988b).13. Contrary to Lyotard and Jameson, Scott Lash (1990, p. 4) sees postmodernism as a strictlycultural paradigm, exclusive of, although compatible with, the post-industrialist capitalist economy.It is a “regime of signification” rather than a “regime of accumulation”.