Identity Politics: The Explosion of the Subjects
The problem in defining Postmodernity is twofold: the problem with the slippery concept of Modernity, and the ambiguity of the prefix “post.” What does that “post” means? “The prefix “post” makes reference to a temporal succession in which one reality, event, experience, reading, or interpretation comes after another. In this sense, one can not rescind from the other, that is, that to continue it, deny it, radicalize it, or to get rid from it, postmodernity find itself in a relation of inclusion; it depends on modernity”(Translation is mine; Gazir Sued, p. 4).
In that sense the consensus seems to be that the “post” of postmodern does not means an end and a new beginning which would make “postmodern” a chronological concept. But like modernity, postmodernity refers to a complexity which should not be simply conceived as a mere chronology or periodicity of events. In order to use the term without erasing the complexities that are encased on it, Urdanibia suggests using the term “more as an operative concept than an analytic one” (Urdanibia, p. 42). It should be understand that the term deploys an advise and an admonition. Postmodernity designates the advent of instabilities and mutations in the terrain of modernity. It advise that the regulatory codes and coordinates in which modern existence was deployed have been altered. The concept invites to re-read all the assumptions of modernity -looking to their limits, paradoxes, wearing out; as well as, the continuities that have prevailed- taking into account the complexities produced by the changes in all the social spheres occurred in the finals decades of this century. This operation yields neither a historical delineation, a political postulate, a philosophical imaginary, or to a cultural motif, but to a contingent condition that encase all of them: a postmodern condition.
In the Book with precisely that name, “The Postmodern Condition,” Jean-Françoise Lyotard stated: “I define postmodernism as incredulity toward metanarratives.” He is referring to the metanarratives of modernity. For him the postmodern condition is one in which those grand narratives of modernity have come to their limit. Not necessarily a historical limit that calls for an end, but more as a limit of their promises and effects. One of the cornerstones of the thought inscribed within the postmodern condition is a critique of those metanarratives. Some of the critiques to those metanarratives are:
Identity Politics: The Explosion of the Subjects
Psychoanalysis: The Implosion of the Subject
It should be stated that there is a broad set of postmodern trends: ones that speak of an end, other of the emergence of something new, other of simulacrum, other of mass hedonism. There are as well different political approaches to the spectrum of postmodernity. While it is true that the majority of contemporary intellectuals that have assumed the postmodern condition as a new space for theorizing the political come mainly form Marxist and New Left traditions, it is also true that there are others that have conservative or right wing positions within the perspective of postmodern theorizing. (Although postmodernity by itself suppose a critique to those dichotomies of left and right as the defining references of the political spectrum.)
A good example of right wing theorizing withing a postmodern perspective is Francis Fukuyama's thesis about the end of history, in which he stated that history ended by collapse of communism and the "victory" of global capitalism. For him there is no longer ideological struggle and, therefore, there is no more history (he is assuming a Hegelian theory of history). Fukuyama's thesis makes clear that within postmodernism there are a whole bunch of trends and perspectives, that sometimes are in contradiction with each other. Postmodernism is not a homogeneous body of thought but the acceptance of an epochal and cultural condition.
About the Question of Narrative