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  • Four Fundamental Myths of Postmodern Thought(Or, The Eclipse of the Gaze)
  • A. Kiarina Kordela (bio)

In the following I address four basic epistemological assumptions that underlie and define postmodern thought. While these assumptions are accepted, consciously or not, by postmodern thought as a priori and unchallengeable truths, I argue that they actually are historically established ideological myths that increasingly premise both mainstream and academic discourses, with specific analytical and political consequences. By postmodern thought I don’t mean any specific trend of thought within the epistemologically and culturally multicolored mosaic of postmodernity, the latter being understood as the era of global capitalism. Rather, I mean any thought that defines itself by precisely the four epistemological principles in question. The first premise of postmodern thought, examined in the first section of the present essay, is the obliteration of the universal as a legitimate epistemological category. This premise concerns not only the postmodern intolerance toward claims to universal representation or universal truth, but also the notorious death of “big theories.” The second premise, an intrinsic corollary to and predecessor of the first, is the notorious death of God, which becomes the object of the second section. The next section deals with the third premise of postmodern thought, that things in themselves are without meaning or value. The last section addresses the fourth premise, according to which—although nothing discursive is supposed to be without meaning or value—relativism is treated, knowingly or not, as precisely meaning-or value-free. Finally, as the subtitle implies, all four premises of postmodern thought are different manifestations of denying one and the same epistemological function: the gaze. [End Page 1]

Crucially, the point in critiquing these four cardinal cornerstones of postmodern thought is not to make a call for a return to a pre-postmodern epistemology and its values—for example, with regard to the first premise, a return to the primacy of the universal and a disregard of the particular, or, with regard to the second premise, a return to religion, and so on. Rather, the intention is to reveal the epistemological and political presuppositions and consequences of these often uncritically accepted truisms, and thus reformulate them as the proper premises of the postmodern thought at hand. This is only a precondition for subsequently rethinking and assessing—a task left to the reader—which of these premises, or what of their aspects, one may want to discard, revise, or accept as they are, depending on one’s epistemologico-political proclivities.

First Myth: The Particular Need not Be Concerned with the Universal

Among the various ways of approaching the relation between the particular and the universal, I think that in the context of specifically postmodern thought, Fredric Jameson’s reconceptualization of “allegory,” as presented in The Geopolitical Aesthetic, is a pertinent starting point.1 Jameson focuses on the fact that in late capitalism, the economic corollary of postmodern thought, the globalization of economic and power relations raises a hyper-awareness of the fact that the world order as a whole cannot be represented, and that, consequently, in our attempts to represent it we are always limited to representing only a partial and local phenomenon. Crucially, however, any such representation of the local (particular) always entails, Jameson argues, an “allegory” or “hypothesis” about the universal, the totality of the world order. This is why “all thinking today is also, whatever else it is, an attempt to think the world system as such” (Jameson, 4). Whether our thought analyzes this or that aspect of contemporary society and culture or, for that matter, any other historical period or culture, it always also attempts to represent the unrepresentable, that is, our “world system as such.”

By referencing specifically “allegory,” Jameson invokes the distinction between symbol and allegory. While a symbol is a fixed signifier [End Page 2] (or narrative) organically linked to the concept (world order) that it stands for, an allegory is an arbitrary signifier (or narrative) that is no more justified in representing the world order than any other signifier or narrative. This is why Jameson concludes, “nothing is gained by having been persuaded of the definite verisimilitude of this or that . . . hypothesis: but in the intent...

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