Postmodern Political Theory

Baudrillard
 From the mid 70s on…

 Neo-Conservative policies (structural

adjustment, militarization)

&

 Postmodern thinking
 Modernity
 Challenge to Tradition and Authority, by
 The Renaissance
 The Protestant Reformation
 The Scientific Revolution (against Dogma) (16th
& 17th centuries)
 The Industrial Revolution/s
 The Bourgeois Revolution

The order of the universe is accessible to

reason and observation  Method

 Faith in:
 Science (to master the Universe)
 Humanity
 Progress
 Jean François Lyotard

.The Postmodern Condition

Lyotard defined Postmodernity as

“incredulity toward metanarratives,”
or those all-encompassing stories
that account for the ultimate
meaning of the world...
 Modern & Postmodern (political?) theory
Individuals are seen as Power is an effect of
independent, stable, structures
free, and rational Individuals are effects
agents (agency) of power that emerge
Individuals have and from a changing,
manage power unstable, and
voluntarily complex environment
Individuals pursue the (no agency)
satisfaction of their Concern with identities
needs and interests as defined by power
Individuals transform the relations
world (trans/post/hybrid)
Modern & Postmodern (political?) theory
The meaning of the entire
Universe centered on man
Laws & regularities
Progress
Conscious & rational political
processes
Focus on relationships
Universal Truth (& universal
method/s)
Theory mirrors reality
Hobbes, Locke
Humankind is an accident
Humankind goes nowhere/lack
of meaning
Contingency/Chance
Unconscious processes
Focus on the Self
Perspectivist (Nietzschean) denial
of (epistemological or ethical)
common foundations
Theory ≈ Literature (all theories
are just narratives)
Irony
Lyotard, Baudrillard, Derrida
(Foucault?)
(Some) Roots of Postmodernism
 Nietzsche - Heidegger
 Einstein’s theory of Relativity
 The Holocaust/Hiroshima
 (French) Structuralism
 Sociology
 Linguistics
 The Linguistic “turn”
(French) Postructuralism

 Late ’60s
 Reject “Grand Theories” & Science
 Postructuralists engage with
“specific analyses of how particular
forms of power achieve particular
effects within particular historical
periods” (Thiele 81)
Jacques Derrida -Deconstruction

 Assumption: Language CREATES reality

 Utilization of the rhetorical features of a
text to undermine its manifest content
or argument
 Exposition of the self-contradictory
forces present in any attempt to
conceptualize categories or structures
 Power
 Is EVERYWHERE (Michel Foucault)
 Multiplicity of territories of power.
 We are all simultaneously subject to
power while exercising power on
others.
 Power= Spider’s Web without a spider
 Power frames us a SOUL and enchains
us through the soul (Domination works
by telling us WHAT and WHO we are)
 Rejection of Science,
Humanism, and Progress...
 Because of the secret Will to Power
and MASTERY over the Universe (and
Human Beings) that Modernity
embodies
 Discussion of the COSTS that
Science, Humanism, and Progress
carry with them...
 Jean Baudrillard

 Viruses
 Virtual reality
 Physics (black holes)
 Jean Baudrillard: Disneyworld
Company
Real people (workers, prostitutes) transformed…

“The idea would be simply to transform, in situ, one of the

high centers of pornography into a branch of Disney
World. Transforming the pornographers and the
prostitutes, like the factory workers in Smurfland, into
extras in their own world,metamorphosed into identical
figures, museumified, disneyfied. By the way, do you
know how General Schwarzkopf, the great Gulf War
strategist, celebrated his victory? He had a huge party at
Disney World. These festivities in the palace of the
imaginary were a worthy conclusion to such a virtual
war.”
 Not working class, but… The masses

 “Successive events attain their annihilation

in indifference. Neutralized and bullet-
sprayed by information, the masses
neutralise history retrospect and act as a
screen of absorption. They themselves
have no history, no meaning, no
conscience, no desire. They are potential
residues of all history, of all meaning, of
all desire.”
 Loss of Meaning
 “What has been lost is the glory of the event, its aura, as
Benjamin would say. Over the centuries, history lived under
the sign of glory, under the sign of a quite strong illusion
that had played on the durability of time which one inherited
from the ancestors and then passed onto descendants. This
passion today would seem rather pathetic. What we are
after is no longer glory but identity… whereas the task once
was to lose oneself in a prodigious dimension, in an
"immortality" Hannah Arendt speaks about, and the
transcendence of which would equal God (glory and
salvation have long been the topic of discussion among
people, like passion and compassion, rivals in the face of the
Eternal). The prodigious or phenomenal event which cannot
be measured either in terms of its causes or its
consequences and which creates its own scene, its own
dramaturgy - no longer exists.”
 History, Meaning, Progress?
 “… history, meaning, progress are no longer able to find
their speed or tempo of liberation. They can no longer
pull themselves out of this much too dense body which
slows down their trajectory, slows down their time to the
point from whereon perception and imagination of the
future escapes us. All social, historical and temporal
transcendence is absorbed via this mass's silent
immanence. Already, political events no longer conduct
sufficient autonomous energy to rouse us and can only
run their course as a silent movie in front of which we all
sit collectively irresponsible.”
 “History… implodes… in current events.”
 Big-Bang
 “Somewhere in the course of the eighties of the twentieth century, history
took a turn in another direction. Once it passed its apogee in time, once it
reached the peak of the curve in its evolution, its solstice of history, a sliding
back of events set in, an unfolding of inverted meaning. As in the case of
cosmic space, historical space-time would also have a curvature. By way of
the same chaotic effect in time as in space, things go faster and faster as they
approach their culmination, just like the flow of water speeds up mysteriously
as it approaches the waterfall. In the Euclidean space of history, the fastest
route from one point to another is a straight line, the one of Progress and
Democracy. This however only pertains to the linear space of the
Enlightenment. In our non-Euclidean space of the end of the century, a
malevolent curvature invincibly reroutes all trajectories. The phenomenon is
doubtlessly linked to the sphericity of time (visible on the horizon of the end
of the century just like the earth is visible on the horizon at the end of the
day) or to the subtle distortion of the field of gravity. (…)This is the end of
linearity. Viewed from this perspective, the future no longer exists. And if
there is no future, neither is there an end anymore. And yet this is not what is
meant by the end of history. What we have to deal with is a paradoxical
process of reversion, a reversal of effect with respect to modernity which,
having reached its speculative limit and extrapolated all its virtual
developments, disintegrates into its rudimentary components through a
catastrophic process of recurrence and turbulence.”
 Dissolution
 This self-dissolving, typical of the West as it is of
the East, can be seen in the degradation of the
structures of power and representation (in other
words, the more the political sphere is
intellectualized, the more it secretly negates its
will to govern or rule and this premonition about
itself is the source of all corruption), and also in
the numerous strategies aimed at the re-
enchantment of values, cultures, difference[s].
 Apocalypse?
 “Messianic hope was founded on the reality of
the Apocalypse. Today, this has no more
substantive reality than the original Big Bang.
We will no longer have a right to this dramatic
illumination. Even the idea of putting an end to
our planet via an atomic clash has become
barren and superfluous - if this no longer holds
any meaning for anybody, not even for God,
what good is it for? Our Apocalypse is not real, it
is virtual.”
 “There is no final solution.”
 “We cannot escape the worst, to comprehend that History will not
have an end because all of its components - the Church,
communism, democracy, ethnic groups, conflicts, ideologies -
continue on an indefinite course of recycling. What is truly incredible
is that as much as we had thought to have gone beyond history,
none of it has really been surpassed, none of it has disappeared -
they are all there ready to resurface, all the archaic, anachronic
forms quite intact and atemporal like the virus in the furthest
recesses of the body. In an attempt to rescue itself from cyclic time,
all that history has managed to accomplish was to relapse into the
order of recyclables.”
 “…when one speaks of "the end of history", of "the end of the
political", of "the end of the social", of "the end of ideologies", none
of this is true. The worst indeed is that there is no end to anything
and that everything will continue to take place in a slow, fastidious,
recurring and all-encompassing hysterical manner - like nails and
hair continue to grow after death.”
 Waste
 “…defunct ideologies, completed utopias, dead
concepts, fossilized ideas that continue to pollute
our mental space. These historical and
intellectual waste products give rise to more
serious concern than industrial waste. Who will
do us the favour of cleaning out all the
sedimentation of secular idiocy?”
 The problem is resolved via the postmodern
invention of recycling and the incinerator. From
the ashes of the Great Incinerators of history,
one resurrects the Phoenix of postmodernity!”
 Nostalgia?
 “Nostalgia for the lost object? Not even
that. Nostalgia was nice in the way it
sustained the feeling vis-a-vis things that
have taken place and could also branch
out to encompass those that could come
around again. It was beautiful as a utopia,
as an inverted mirror of utopia. Beautiful
in the way of never being fully complete,
like a utopia never fulfilled.“
 The Procession of Simulacra
 “At Disney World in Orlando, they are even
building an identical replica of the Los Angeles
Disneyland, as a sort of historical attraction to
the second degree, a simulacrum to the second
power. It is the same thing that CNN did with
the Gulf War: a prototypical event which did not
take place, because it took place in real time, in
CNN's instantaneous mode. Today, Disney could
easily revisit the Gulf War as a worldwide show.”
 The Virtual
 “Disney, the precursor, the grand initiator of the
imaginary as virtual reality, is now in the process of
capturing all the real world to integrate it into its
synthetic universe, in the form of a vast "reality show"
where reality itself becomes a spectacle, where the real
becomes a theme park. The transfusion of the real is like
a blood transfusion, except that here it is a transfusion
of real blood into the exsanguine universe of virtuality.
After the prostitution of the imaginary, here is now the
hallucination of the real in its ideal and simplified
version.”
 “The virtual takes over
the real…”
 “There is no reason why Disney would not take over the human genome,
which, by the way, is already being resequenced, to turn it into a genetic
show. In the end, they would cryogenize the entire planet, just like Walt
Disney himself who decided to be cryogenized in a nitrogen solution,
waiting for some kind of resurrection in the real world. But there is no real
world anymore, not even for Walt Disney. If one day he wakes up, he'll no
doubt have the biggest surprise of his life. Meanwhile, from the bottom of
his nitrogen solution he continues to colonize the world - both the imaginary
and the real - in the spectral universe of virtual reality, inside which we all
have become extras. The difference is that when we put on our digital suits,
plug in our sensorial captors, or press the keys of our virtual reality arcade,
we enter live spectrality whereas Disney, the genial anticipator, has entered
the virtual reality of death.”

 The New World Order is in a Disney mode.

 The Matrix
 The Spectacle
 “…reality itself, the world itself, with its frenzy of
cloning has already been transformed into an
interactive performance, some kind of Lunapark
for ideologies, technologies, works, knowledge,
death, and even destruction. All this is likely to
be cloned and resurrected in a juvenile museum
of Imagination or a virtual museum of
Information.”
 Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle
 Vanishing or disappearance of history
 Meaning results from relations within a whole. Outside that
whole, there is no meaning
 We have been so “liberated” (=atoms) that we no longer have
either place, meaning, or History (thrown in the emptiness of
the Virtual)
 The “referential orbit of things” is broken.
 Both individuals and events move in the void
(People get killed in mass scale, we die, but nobody cares… There
is no tragedies anymore. We all become “mere life”)
 “A certain type of slowness or deliberation (i.e. a certain speed,
but not too much), a certain distance, yet not too much, a
certain liberation (the energy of rupture and change), but not
too much - all these are necessary for this condensation, for the
signifying crystallization of events to take place, one that we call
history - this type of coherent unfolding of causes and effects
we call the real.”
 History requires duration, but our obsession with “real time”
eliminates it…
 Post-historical Utopias
 “Disney realizes de facto such an atemporal
utopia by producing all the events, past or
future, on simultaneous screens, and by
inexorably mixing all the sequences as they
would or will appear to a different civilization
than ours. But it is already ours. It is more and
more difficult for us to imagine the real, History,
the depth of time, or three-dimensional space,
just as before it was difficult, from our real world
perspective, to imagine a virtual universe or the
fourth dimension.”
 Terrorism

 “…demand for a violent resolution to

reality when this reality, in fact, eludes us
endlessly in a hyperreality?”
 Hyperreality leads to the “obliteration of a
reckoning, of a Judgement Day, of an
Apocalypse or of a Revolution” (their time
is gone, the Messiah arrives one day
later…)
Greek Christian Modern Postmodern
-Cyclical time -Linear -Linear History -History is just
-Centered on the History (with (Progress) a
Polis/Agora an end) -Centered on narrative/illusio
-Emphasis on -Centered on Man/individual n/effect of
virtue and beauty God -Material power/language
-Life is -Afterlife realization of (Post-History)
meaningful if it is -Sin humankind -Progress?
recognized by -Salvation (Man becomes -Reason?
others/transcend through Faith the Sun for -Science?
ence Man)
-Truth is -Self-
-Truth≈Puzzle absolute and -Reason Annihilation of
needs to be revealed -Truth is Humankind
reconstructed (Bible) discovered (there is death
(fragments) (science/metho around, but
d) nobody cares)
-Irony