We are fast arriving at a sad and empty place, which the spirit of postmodernism embodies all too well. “Never in any previous civilization have the great metaphysical preoccupations, the fundamental questions of being and the meaning of life, seemed so utterly remote and pointless,” in Frederic Jameson’s judgment.
Peter Sloterdijk finds that “the discontent in culture has assumed a new quality: it appears as universal, diffuse cynicism.” The erosion of meaning, pushed forward by intensified reification and fragmentation, causes the cynic to appear everywhere. Psychologically “a borderline melancholic,” he is now “a mass figure.”
The postmodern capitulation to perspectivism and decadence does not tend to view the present as alienated — surely an old-fashioned concept — but rather as normal and even pleasant. Robert Rauschenberg: “I really feel sorry for people who think things like soap dishes or mirrors or Coke bottles are ugly, because they’re surrounded by things like that all day long, and it must make them miserable.”
We are all aware of the possibility that we may have to endure, until its self-destruction and ours, a world fatally out of focus. “Obviously, culture does not dissolve merely because persons are alienated,” wrote John Murphy, adding, “A strange type of society has to be invented, nonetheless, in order for alienation to be considered normative.”
Meanwhile, where are vitality, refusal, the possibility of creating a non-mutilated world?
Barthes proclaimed a Nietzschean “hedonism of discourse;” Lyotard counselled, “Let us be pagans.” Such wild barbarians!
Of course, their real stuff is blank and dispirited, a thoroughly relativized academic sterility. Postmodernism leaves us hopeless in an unending mall; without a living critique; nowhere.
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