The Death of Post Modernism

[KXX4493553 at aol.com]

In einer eMail vom 02.02.2004 18:50:27 Westeuropäische Normalzeit schreibt 
monrobotics at yahoo.com:


> The true war is a celebration of
> markets." (GR, Pt. I, p. 105)
> 

This sounds not very post-modern, doesn't it? All has its time, and 
post-modernism was - let's say - the intellectual fashion of the post 68 era until to 
the late eighties. It was the master narration which claimed that there was no 
master narration any longer. In these times I was also a "postmodern" if you 
will. The postmodernism of the architecture was a different one than the 
postmodernism of philosophy and epistemology, but the common point of all these 
-isms was fragmentation and de-construction. Everything became language, text, 
structure, simulacra. Postmodernism was an unconscious prophecy: now we have the 
fragments of the world market and the world society, the de-constructed social 
structures and the simulacra of the brandings and the war that never ends. 
All is commodity. Well, that's it. There's no truth like in the GR quotation.
But where's the truth? Lacan's "Big A" and Adorno's Non-Identical? In the 
last edition of LETTRE INTERNATIONAL  there was published an interesting 
discussion between Baudrillard and Derrida at the evening before the Iraq war broke 
out. Baudrillard (which spoke after 9/11 about the "suicide" of the crashing 
twin towers) still speaks of his "singularities", and Bin Laden is for him a 
singularity which resists the control powers. He's part of the multitude à la 
Negri (which, BTW, I saw in a discussion in the German Second Public Television  
ZDF yesterday). A very dangerous and horrible version of a singularity in the 
multitude, but part of it. He remembers me sometimes at the Dostojewskian 
anarchist aristocrats which have no program but just their hate and their will of 
destruction. But he's no 19th century figure, not a feudalist, not an 
aristocrat, he's very postmodern, very ridiculous and very dangerous. And a result of 
the privatized world, part of the markets of violence, the most dangerous of 
the war lords we have all over the world, from Kongo to Bosnia to Columbia. And 
think of the Opium masters in Afghanistan which are the alliies of the 
International troops there, and which are now protected by the new German troops in 
Kundus.     
And Mr. Bush is the master of deficit spending, a true student of Mr. Keynes. 
Not quite like the Japs, but nearly. With this deficit the US would never 
become a member of the EU. I think anti-americanism is the childish version of 
anti-capitalism, for me the imperialist states (imperialism simply means 
"struggle for hegemony") are trying to get new "cheques and balances" to devide the 
world new in their interest. No PaxWar Americana, and there never will be a Pax 
Europa.
>From a very ironical and cynical point of view, the whole Al Queida stuff can 
be seen as a kind of asymmetric world war between two former business 
partners, and the Bush family and the Bin Laden Group really were business partners 
in former times. Perhaps nowadays, who knows.
But where's the truth in all that? Is this the whole truth? 
 
kwp
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