The Death of Post Modernism
KXX4493553 at aol.com
KXX4493553 at aol.com
Mon Feb 2 15:05:51 CST 2004
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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