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there have been problems from the 1970s in mapping postmodernism from a (primarily) literary style onto a broader social formation.
the driving assumptions are good old zeitgeist history.
what has been at stake in the debates is the social power that would accrue to academics who found themselves in a position to generate a descriptive category that would bind other analysts to a particular frame of reference.
many folk want to be marx.
generating names is a way to audition for the gig.
it is not at all a foregone conclusion that the term "postmodern" refers to anything particular in the social world----even if you focus on the famous category of "fragmentation"--which turns out to be extraordinarily loose, and that functions (among other things) to posit the previous (modern) period as one of unity--which is empirically not true--and to reduce the astonishing complexity of modes of fragmentation to a single term/feature.
i suspect that the term is revealing in this particular conversation, however, in that authoritarian forms of government involve intimately a dream of a return to some prior, lost unity.
here it seems that it is assumed this would have to be forced onto people.
the most atomized societies have in general been authoritarian.
the kinds of regime that have least fostered individual responsibility have been authoritarian.
look at the history of stalinism, for example: it is a central feature of almost any description of life under that regime.
same applied under fascism.
same obtained under monarchies (which in general were more coherent ideologically than they were politically).
the same unfolded under oligarchy.
if you find these problems in contemporary american society, i would argue it is a direct function of the degree to which the states are already authoritarian in significant aspects--and i still maintain that the way out--if there is one--- is less not more of this.
why bother to cultivate responsibility, say--or more generally an adult relation to the world--if you live under a regime that infantilizes you at every turn? infantilization follows from the reliance on a external authority, which is assumed to be omniscient, a kind of spectral parent who chastizes the wayward child, who enforces "discipline" in the name of abstract higher norms? how on earth can you expect an increase in reponsibility from a population that you would reduce to the status of a child?
i am understanding less and less of this thread as i participate in it.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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