A Paradise Lost - KOPS - Universität Konstanz

‘postmodern condition’ we all are caught living in. John Frow provides a global model of
the contemporary situation, based on late capitalism:
The result of this new speed and flexibility of capital is neither a colonial order of
direct domination nor a neo-colonial order of indirect domination of one nation-
state by another, but a world system – which we might call precisely ‘post-
colonial’ – in which dominance is exercised by international capital through the
agency of dominant nation-states and regions but in large part independently of
their control. It is in something like these dimensions that I think it is possible to
frame – without reducing them to a singular temporality – the concepts of post-
modern and post-colonial cultural production. 97
Postmodernism starts with the realization of the end of European hegemony and thus
entails a questioning of authority. When it is seen not as a chronological period but as a
way of thinking and doing, a theoretical concept, or “modernity conscious of its true
nature,” as Zygmunt Baumann has it, 98 the convergence with postcolonial ideas becomes
obvious:
The concept of postmodernism was originally used to describe a cultural or
intellectual trend that opposed the rigid modernist style in art, architecture, and
design. However, it has come to be applied to a much wider range of
philosophical and social science discourses concerned with the ‘crisis of
modernity’ – the end of assumptions, overarching theories, and metanarratives
that have gained prominence since the Enlightenment. 99
Postmodernism supplants modernism’s ‘orderly’ root-and-branch structure with the
concept of the rhizome, invoked by Deleuze and Guattari: This botanical term for a root
system that spreads across the ground and grows from several points has been taken up as
a metaphor for the workings of colonial discourse or cultural hegemony, which do not
operate in a simple vertical way, but dynamically, laterally and intermittently. 100
97 John Frow, “What Was Post-Modernism?” in Adam/Tiffin 1991: 139-52, here 149.
98 Quoted in Woods 1999: 12. Modernism had been, among other things, a reaction to the pressure that
imperialism exerted on culture, expressing the realization that the exotic was no longer ‘out there’ but ‘in
here,’ right at the center of the Empire, and subsequently beginning to supplant the no longer achievable
syntheses by eclectic fragments, irony, and self-referentiality. If modernism broke up all unity in despair,
postmodernism is enjoying the pieces.
99 Douglas Foley/Kirby Moss, “Studying U.S. Cultural Diversity,” in Ida Susser/Thomas C. Patterson (eds.),
Cultural Diversity in the U.S., Oxford 2001: 339-362, here 350-51.
100 See Ashcroft et al. 1998: 207. Wilson and Dirlik quote Deleuze and Guattari in their introduction to the
Asia/Pacific special issue of boundary 2: “Isn’t there in the East, notably in Oceania, a kind of rhizomatic
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