The term postmodernism could be described within a varied range of critical and descriptive discourses. It gets stretched in all directions between different debates, different disciplinary and discursive boundaries. As it is been used to designate so much it could be argued it might become a meaningless term. Although words as complex and contradictory as this, have formed the focus for historically significant debates and have occupied a semantic ground in which something important felt to be embedded.
There are three closely linked negations which bind the compound of modernism together and thereby serve to distinguish it in an approximate sort of way from other similar beliefs. They are: against totalisation, against teleology and against utopia. All of these negotiations incidentally serve as an attack on Marxism as a total explanatory system. They could be tracked back to two sources. On the one hand historically to the blocked hopes and frustrated rhetoric of the late 1960s and the student revolts. On the other hand through the philosophical tradition to Nietzsche.
Gramsci's approach requires us to negotiate and engage with both power and popular through a range of populist discourses. To engage with the popular we need to force into purely theoretical analysis of a 'negative dialectic '(Adorno) in favour of a more 'sensous (and strategic)logic'. "The Gramscian model demands that we grasp these processes not because we want to use them but because we want to expose them or to understand them in the abstract...".
No comments:
Post a Comment