To Have Done with Postmodernism: A Plea (Or Provocation) For Globalization Studies

To begin, a caveat: this is not really an objective argument for the abandonment of postmodernism as the privileged interpretive framework for analysis of the present, so much as it is a plea for another perspective to begin systematically contesting the stranglehold that postmodernism has too long exerted over study of contemporary culture: the perspective of globalization studies, which I take to be a historical step beyond the radical linguistic indeterminacy of postmodernism rather than a retreat from that indeterminacy. Or perhaps it is merely a provocation, a blunt instrument intended to get a long-overdue argument started. In any case, let me explain.¹

The proliferation of conferences, broadcasts, books and articles dedicated to the issue of globalization suggests by its range—which runs from business administration to the humanities and in some cases even to the physical sciences—that something more is at stake in this notion than mere op-ed punditry or intellectual fashion. As many critics have noted, globalization does not signify a fundamentally new phenomenon, at least not when its elements of commerce, mobility and social hybridization are considered separately, but clearly there is something new in the orders of magnitude that these elements have now attained and in the speed at which they now interact. I would like to propose that we treat globalization not as a totally new thing, but as a threshold across which the growth and acceleration of long-existing trends has only recently pushed us. At this threshold, the quantitative changes produce a qualitative shift, which is what I think we mean to emphasize when we talk about globalization as a pressing issue. The goal of all the aforementioned conferences etc., then, is to determine what this qualitative shift entails within distinct fields of knowledge and inquiry and in the relations among these fields.

I would further like to suggest that the problematic of globalization, whatever new complications and contradictions it carries along with it, has one tremendous merit from a literary and cultural point of view: it heralds the radical reorientation, and perhaps even the end, of the tortuous debates over postmodernism that have dominated literary and cultural studies for the past twenty-five years. Now, there are many contending, indeed mutually exclusive definitions of postmodernism currently in circulation—this is to my mind one of the biggest problems with it, the exasperating indistinctness which allows it to be all things to all people—but for my purposes here it will refer to the decomposition of the overall cultural project of modernism, which was the reconstitution of a more-or-less rational, creative and tolerant society from out of the shattered fragments of the ancient traditions of national, ethnic, gender and power conflict that no longer seemed viable in the accelerated world of the twentieth century.² Henry Adams’ continually re-commenced and ultimately useless education can stand as a literary emblem for this project.³ Sympathetic cultural historians have justifiably called modernism “Promethean” in the range of its critique and the energy of its invention, but from the postmodern point of view modernism simply sought to replace the supposedly “natural” conflicts between inherited traditions with a self-consciously artificial consensus that was equally destructive and false.

Jean-François Lyotard, the most prominent left-wing proponent (as opposed to critic) of postmodernism as the self-criticism of modernism, argued that modernism’s reliance on what he called “grand narratives of progress”—both idealist, like the Hegelian eschatology of redeemed spirit, and materialist, like the Marxist redemption of social existence through political revolution—to overcome the contradictions of inherited tradition was itself a continuation of that same tradition, and hence it was guilty of the same ultimately totalitarian sin of imposing a destructive consensus and uniformity on an irreducibly multiple and diverse world (or rather on the language-games that constitute the social world).⁴ For Lyotard, the postmodern is marked by a widespread “incredulity” toward these grand narratives—they seem unbelievable and irrelevant to most of us. We know that time continues to pass, but despite...