POLITICAL IMAGE, THEORY AND PHILOSOPHY
BEYOND OF THE PREFIX “POST-”: PHILOSOPHICAL
AND POLITICAL EVALUATIONS
VIORELLA MANOLACHE*
Abstract. Within the views of several “postmodern skeptics” the term
(postmodernism) would circulate fallaciously, within a contort context,
marked by confusion and manipulations, entertaining the suspicion that
factual things may be about the countless “modern fashions” or about the
countless types of “overcoming”. They would exclusively legitimate on the
basis of the fact that they are to a greater extent “up to date”, or “newer”
— mechanisms characterizing, in fact, modernity, as noticed by Gianni
Vattimo, too [the Seminar from Stuttgart, 1991, stated through Ihab
Hassan, Malcolm Bradbury, John Barth, Raymond Federman, William
Gass the birth of the postmodernisms and the end of postmodernism (as a
continuation of modernism, but situated “outside the temporal order”)].
The present study will launch and verify the hypothesis according to
which, we would be in presence of certain alternative currents of
postmodernity, considering that the latter did nothing else but impose, at
its turn, a continuous trajectory for modernity (up to the purisms!). We will
apply, as following, alternative tensions to postmodernism, considering that
this remains a current whose direction is periodically changing, having a
usual shape of wave in its sinusoidal trajectory.
The alternative currents will presuppose an abandonment of the
evolutionist perspective and the acceptance of the paradigmatic revolution.
Sinusoidal, the currents will gain being only as protest movements against
dominant theories or theoretical tendencies, and even more as different
paradigms, as the (re)configuration of the axiological relief in a space of
“a-value”.
Keywords: alternative currents of postmodernity, “postmodern weakness”,
modernity, rationality, random thought
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* PhD, scientific researcher III, at the Romanian Academy, Institute of the Political Science and
International Relations, at the Department of Political Philosophy, [email protected]
Pol. Sc. Int. Rel., VIII, 2, p. 3–23, Bucharest, 2011.
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Random Thought and the “Postmodern Turn”
2
(Re)dialectics, (re)injected with/by another meaning, as a derived, lateral
product, postmodernism becomes a concept under (re)territorializing, hunted as
well by the menace of settlement, sedimentation, convenience or inconvenient
soaking, as by the penultimate hypostasis. Opting for the reactivation of the
paenultimus, in the hypostasis of ambreior, the words and ideas are
philosophically and politically (re)invested, within a (re)active-, unforeseeable,
unpremeditated, they become parole, access words, passwords, non-technical
operators, verifying the hypothesis we launch, according to which postmodernism
does not get stunned in the realm of fixed things, in continuum, but it becomes
mobile, by the implementation of the tensions, of the alternative currents that
justifies the (em)placement under a “Postmodern Turn”.
The term post-, even when (a)glued to any of the derivations of notion of
modo, remains (multi)faced, mosaic-like, overturn in/by (self)reflexive reflections
and irrigations. The confusion brought along by such suffixes (over)bid the
multiple micro-narrations that do not propose any sort of universalizing
stabilization or legitimacy. The multiple perspectives modify the optics on the
phenomenon: postmodern culture renounces to be the result of a rupture with the
project of modernity, but it becomes the consequence of this radicalization, as
the theme of the intercultural capacity of translation announces the axis of an
imperative1.
The (pre)fix post- is (self) emplaced as a product of the modern, and outside
this product, it is not merely overcome, but assumed. Its double emplacement,
outside and (in)side modernity, by innocence and irony, does not exclude the
meta level, the play of experiment that establishes that its novelties, far from
canceling it, detach it definitively from any fixed and fixing borders. The
overcome of the post- becomes dynamic (re)cognition, acceptance, and the deep
penetration of insight! The logic of post- is placing all into the critical ply of inbetween, multiplying the distances, within an unequal and random dispute.
Placing the Subject and Object within such an (un)equal dispute Baudrillard2
placed also a stake on the philosophical mythology of the infinite independence
and freedom of the Of the Object. (Trans)verse, it de-signs both the real world
and its absence, the absence of the Subject, instituting the rest as an obstacle for
the Subject-Object relationship. The use value and the exchange value, the
double morals (the commercial exchange of the moral sphere and the game of
the immoral sphere) get to be considered the identification hallmarks of the
Object. In agreement with Baudrillard, we are not situated on the trajectory of a
random world, where there is not anymore a Subject, nor Object — notions
harmoniously assigned within the register of knowledge.
Random thought becomes thus the hallmark of the infinite (re)production of
the same (micro)form, over and over again, proliferating, in conformity with an
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1 Irina Stãnciugelu, Prefixul “post” al modernitãþii noastre (The Prefix-Post of our Modernity), Bucharest,
Trei Publishing House, 2002.
2 Jean Baudrillard, Cuvinte de acces (Passwords), Bucharest, Art Publishing House, 2008.
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BEYOND OF THE PREFIX “POST-”
5
identical formula, a totally random universe, where the causes and the effects do
(over)lap according to the “single face rule”, (re)cognized in the energy
(in)stored by the process of “torsion” of Möbius band.
It is known that the places where the subject-thought gets further tensioned
(in) store an increased quantity of energy. Conversely one notices that the places
in the “band” that are more leveled (and, as a consequence, less tensioned) (in)
store less energy. Transferring the hypotheses of the Möbius band to the
(philo)sophical level, when the width of the band modifies, it will lead to a
process of breaking, meaning that the distribution of energy in the band will be
modified and, this determines a permanent change of shape.
The declared duel Subject-Object produces, according to Baudrillard, an
overturn, a revenge, a vendetta of the Object supposedly passive that left itself
to be discovered and under torsion, but suddenly transgresses into a strange
attractor, capable of metaphysical confrontation. Thought becomes a unique
face, with different-torsion qualities and energetically (un)equal planes,
canceling he canonical order of the thought-subject, the one that used to impose
an order situated outside of the Object or maintained at the same distance. The
disappearance of the fixity of the thinking Subject and the acceptance of the
consciousness as a phenomenon of existential (con)torsion presupposes a symbolic
exchange of energy between the world and thought, fact that is to destabilize the
equally-ordering and stasis-rationalizing discourses.
Thus, one may accept, as well, the tentative occasioned by Slavoj Zizek3 who
proposed as a retrieving model the existence of the void of subjectivity left
without substance, by the fusion between / in-between Capital and Science, in
the hypostasis of the “absolute proletarian”. It forms a sort of Möbius band,
where the points on the inner surface and the points of the exterior surface are
part of the same bi-dimensional pattern that allows the motion from one end to
the other, traveling on the surface of the band, but not over-crossing its margins.
The (Kantian) “transcendental turn” will bring to the fore, a dislocated Subject,
signified by Lacan through the mathematical sign of a barred S. The Lacanian
Subject of the enunciation becomes an unsubstantial, voided logical version
(note function!), while the Subject of the enunciation (persona) is composed by
the phantasm material that fills the void of the $. Such a cut-out, a real fret-saw,
places, within the same equation the noumenal Subject and this appearance. The
transcendental Object represents the form of the Object in general, since the
general form of each possible object is (pre)face in /through the (re)presentation
of the Object in general.
According to Zizek, the is an “objet a” that represents that specific surplus of
the substance that lingers in subjectivity, as a correlative for the Subject in its
radical impossibility to measure up to it. The opposite notion, establishes a
Subject under the empty form of a recipient voided of its subjective content.
These left-over parts, these remains (mentioned as well by Baudrillard) take
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3 Slavoj Zizek, Zãbovind în negativ.Kant, Hegel ºi critica ideologiei (Tarrying with the negative: Kant, Hegel
and the critique of ideology), Bucharest, All Educational Publishing House, 2001.
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4
form (as Subject) or material content(as Object), establishing that object a represents
the material of the Subject as an empty form.
The tensioned relationship between subject and substance dispels “the prediction
of the stress points”, that is, the status of the Subject will be accepted only as a
niche, or as a breaking point within the universal substance, as a disappearing
mediator, with the non-substantial coloring of the subject that knows is being
duplicated and replicated.
Placing the virtual space as another level of torsion for simulation and the
simulacra, Jean Baudrillard (in the interview published with the title A Magnificent
Game4) distancing himself from postmodernism (“I have nothing to do with it”!,
he said), considered that such an analytical term is to definitively consecrate the
reversibility and the total visibility and the principles of the nihilism to the
disadvantage of postmodernist features!
Indeed, only modernity can be characterized as dominated by a history of
thought, seen as progressive illumination, as an (epi)phenomenon that grows and
breeds solely within the context of nearness and (re)appropriation, ever more
fully, of the fundaments that are thought, the same way Aristotle did, as origins.
This is the explanation for the fact that here we have an attempt to (re)present
this technical and practical revolution of the Western history as a justification for
an eternal retrieval, (re)birth, (re)turn. The overcoming, as a hallmark of modernity,
could not be conceived otherwise than a “progressive development”. As a
consequence, Nietzsche and Heidegger consider that one should reserve her
critical distance towards the foundations, on the one hand, and on the other hand
that there are no other names for more relevant and true foundations than the
critical landmarks becoming operational. This “weak” perspective, entitles them
to be vindicated as “platforms” of postmodernity5.
The birth of a new spiritual eon by the turn to another cultural paradigm brings
about radical changes into the system of all values, imposing postmodernism.
To this end, the study elaborated by Angela Botez6 aim to enlighten the double
understanding of the term postmodernism. Whether some authors still insist on
the excess of definitions (with its deficit of defining scope) and if for others the
term is useless, for Angela Botez this can cover the specific of the spirituality at
the end of the century and millennium. The integrative concepts characteristic
for postmodernism presuppose referential conceptual landmarks such as decentralism,
deconstruction, discontinuity, difference, dissemblance, dislocation.
The postmodern paradigm will replace with new concepts and tendencies, the
modernist concepts and tendencies represented by realism, formalism, semantics,
fundamentalism, representation, narrative, typicality, origins and causes,
objectivity, determination, sectary character. The new concepts that impose
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4 Un joc magnific (A Magnifiaient Game), in Le Monde Diplomatique – Oslo – 14. 04. 2007, www.
aisberg.8k.ro.
5 Gianni Vattimo, Sfârºitul modernitãþii. Nihilism ºi hermeneuticã în cultura postmodernã (The End of
Modernity: Nihilism and Hermeneutics in Post-modern Culture), Constanþa, Pontica Publishing House, 1993.
6 Angela Botez, Concepte integrative: antice, moderne, postmoderne (Integrative Concepts: Antique, Modern,
Postmodern), Bucharest, Semne Publishing House, 1997.
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BEYOND OF THE PREFIX “POST-”
7
themselves in privileged positions are: eclectism, antiformalism, egalitarism,
anarchy-Eros, process, deconstruction, dispersion, rhetoric, liberalism, textuality,
anti-narrative, mutation, difference, irony, indetermination, immanence, holism,
solidarity.
To the question how could we define postposition?, Angela Botez answers by
the anchorage of such a term (dependent on modernism, but also its negation),
in the new configurations of feelings and ideas that result from the detachment
and the critique of the structures of modernism. The dichotomies discarded by
the postposition are these between past and present, real and imaginary, totality
and fragment, concept and work.
Although pluralistic, postmodernist orientations are not skeptical: they
emphasize the (inter)relation between / among persons and things and the fact
that reality is in continuous movement and “undecided”. Postmodernism privileges
the heterogeneity and difference as freeing forces in the (re)definition of the
cultural discourse. The fragmentation, the indetermination and an immense
distrust in all the universal and totalizing discourses is the characteristic of the
new paradigm.
The rediscovery of the pragmatism in philosophy (Rorty), the change of the
orientation concerning the philosophy of science (Kuhn, Feyerabend), the
accents (trans)posed on the discontinuity and difference in history and on the
polynomial convention instead of the accents placed on the simple causality or
even on the complex one (Foucault), the new developments of the mathematics
reveling the indeterminism (the theory of the catastrophes, chaos theory, fractal
geometry), the resurrection in ethics and anthropology of the validity and of the
dignity of the “other” — are all indices for the profound changes in spiritual,
sensitive, perceptive and sentimental structure.
Opting for a functional scheme of postmodernism (as “noncredibility over the
metanarrative” and — epistemologically — as a rejection of the uniqueness of
the metatheory, method and truth), and by placing it in contrast with modernism,
Angela Botez highlights the following paramount traits of postmodernism: (a)
the orientation towards pluralism, heterogeneity, difference, fragmentation,
indetermination as freeing forces in defining the cultural discourse; (b) the selfirony, pastiche and undermining of the solemnities of the metaphysics, as
opposed to the autonomy and austerity from the spiritual discourses of modernity;
(c) the tendency to de-centralization, deconstruction, proliferation and disjunction;
(d) the accent placed on the “other” (sexual, religious, or national minorities),
compared to the centrality of the “self” in modernism; (e) the argument for the
existence of a great number of “possible worlds”, resulted in contextualization;
(f) the change of the modernist chronoscope with a mosaic, fragmentary, simultaneous
one, as the result of the postindustrial and electronic communication technologies;
(g) the distrust in the meta-language and metatheory, within a broader text beyond
the texts, a culture beyond cultures, a language beyond languages; (h) the
resistance to the imposition of the domination and autonomy of the unique
science. Given that science is similar to the other forms of the human spirituality
cannot legitimate them, cum as modernist epistemologies sustain; (i) the rejection
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6
of the “divinization” of science from the realist visions that consider that science
can reach transcendence, as well as religion reaches the sacred; (j) the accent on
the relative and dialogue in the detriment of the abstract, functional and
monologue within modernism; (k) the apparition of the third term in the objectsubject knowledge relation: the context.
The so-called “death of philosophy and a epistemology” is proven to be an
“apparent death”, much less dangerous than that heralded in philosophy by the
vogue of the positivist and analytic schools, presupposing the deconstruction of
these absolutist conceptions that can “kill” by themselves the culture, by sterilization
or suffocation in the “scientific embrace”7.
Proposing to (re)view the holistic perspective that conceives science, moral,
religion and politics in a philosophical cohabitation with liberalism and pragmatism
— as typical hallmarks of the human progress — be it global and / or individual,
(re)opens the quarrel between late modernism and postmodernism [closed in a
«(Pan)doric box»!]. For the closure of the metaphysics manifests through the
(un)revealing of the limits which the metaphysics, identified with the general
model of the European thought, and through this imposition, unconsciously
repressing violently the different possibilities of the alternative thought.
The future (as an abstract notion, yet politically engaged!) becomes, in the
vision of Vattimo8, either a process, or a paradox apparition of a guaranteed
novelty, related to the automatisms of the system. What risks disappearing is the
past that is, especially that special continuity of the experience that chains meanings
together. Precisely this is the limit that should vindicate more engagement. As in
many other aspects, and here (fore-tellingly!) the (late) modern world seem to
get perverted: the thought of difference recognizes that over the being it can
never have a full grip, but just (re)memorance, a trace, a remembrance.
Modernity placed its stakes on the “card” of human freedom, with all that is
implied by the faith in progress and in the rational capacity to produce freedom.
The effects are (inter)seen in agrarian type societies, via capitalism, rationalization,
anomy and the clear absence of historical direction (Durkheim), work alienation
and exploitation (Marx), excessive bureaucratization and the disappearance of
the individual in the structures (Weber), by the atomization of society (Simmel)
or by the increase of the surveillance groups (Foucault). Postmodernism ends
organized as a “system of objects”, a society marked by consumerism, by the
occultation of the resources that ensure the social prestige. Renouncing
“fundamentism”, postmodernism brings with its conceptualizations the collapse
of the hierarchies of knowledge, tastes, opinions, a replacement of the lively
(real) image with the one fabricated (constructed) on the TV screen, in a process
migration of the words towards images, of the discourse towards person, of the
logo-centrism towards icon-centrism. New types of scattering and fragmentation
————————
7 Angela Botez, Concepte integrative: antice, moderne, postmoderne (Integrative Concepts: Antique, Modern,
Postmodern) Bucharest, Semne Publishing House, 1997.
8 Gianni Vattimo, Dincolo de subiect (Beyond Subject), Constanþa, Pontica Publishing House, 1994.
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9
(a world of pure simulacra9, models, codes, digital systems) are searching for the
legitimating of freedom in (dis)orientation10.
According to Paul H. Ray11, postmodernism (as wrong answer, oriented against
the authoritarian and reductive character of modernity) becomes a condition in
itself for the late modernity, representing its end. Although, the idea of “new
liberalism” became the conceptual exercise of (over)lapping of the idea of
“postmodern imperialism”, for Ray (suspicious at the intellectual trend that refuses
the post-change!), postmodernism represents only the late logic of modernity
itself — an effort valued as paradigm.
Central and East European postmodernism (understood as transformation, reassumption) vises a (pre)change at religious level, too, (the mapping of a heavylegged and recalcitrant Orthodoxism), pushing Central and East European world
forward to another order of being where the Heideggerian opposite of the
historical malady is marked by the stylistic unity between interior and exterior.
For Vaclav Havel12 East European revolutions legitimate through the Husserlian
concept of Lebenswelt. For Havel, Lebenswelt presupposes (re)weakening, living
for the truth. To the Husserlian lack of understanding of the natural world, of the
appropriated experience, Havel opposes (reflecting otherwise to the revolutionary
fundaments presented by Masaryk and Kohak) a subjective reaction, one of the
overcoming of the burden of the alienation of a modern and Husserlian nature!
The Havelian version vises a (pre)changing of an ideological apparatus into an
identified operational theory (Masarzk+Patoka) and then, and only then,
conceptualized (Husserl). The conceptual appeal traces the contradictions of a
Central and East European world, imposed by ideological points of view, freed
from the impersonal, messianic element, and from the manipulative force and
orientated toward pre-disposition, toward the lived experience.
The changes of the East European world anticipate the patterns detailed by
Masaryk. After Heidegger, the crises of a bourgeois and Christian Subject are
hallowed by the twilight of the hegemonic role of the conscience towards the
historical conscience and toward the façades of the interiority. Starting from
these aspects of Heideggerian theory, Havel pleads for a common archetypal basis.
Derriderian, the unstable authoritarianism (in conformity with the definition
from the Dictionary of Political Thought, the authority implies the capacity one
has to make herself listened or respected, while at the institutional level it
supposes the ownership of the competence to issue orders) presupposes
strategies without objectives. Against the loss of identity, as difference, and as a
change through transcendence, Havel suggests a plea for (re)connection, for a
humane and utilitarian understanding: What is the common good? Havel’s
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9 Baudrillard, the theoretician of the thesis of the “vanishing meaning”, has won his notoriety, according
to Lyon, declaring that the Golf War did not take place (!). With Baudrillard, the war, the defeat and the Arabian
and Israeli negotiations were hallowed by unreality: they were but a “si-mulation on computer”. Maybe Golf
War was the first postmodern war, concludes David Lyon.
10 David Lyon, Postmodernitatea (Postmodernity), Du Style Publishing House, Bucharest, 1998.
11 Paul H. Ray, Transmodernismul nu este postmodernism (Transmodernism is not Postmodernism),
www.aisberg.8k.ro.
12 Vaclav Havel, Politics and Conscience, New York, Random House, 1985.
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8
answer is: global civilization and planetary democracy. This is the Havelian
justification for the initiation of the Central and East European revolutions. The
critique of the Marxism (in its further deformation) encompasses the fact that
reality is not governed by universal finite (inter)related or simplified laws,
directed toward understanding and the anticipation of the systematic formulae of
request/answer.
Movement and Countermovement:
Postmodern Wisdom vs. Postmodern weakness
In agreement with Mike Cole13, the celebration of the particularities becomes
the interpretation of a collapse of the worries for all that is beyond what can be
expressed through the individual experience, be it in the name of the autobiography,
Lyotardian narrative, nation, tribe, personal therapy or phenomenology. From
this perspective, the agenda of the modernists and postmodernists becomes a
trap of (self)destructive antagonisms as a mark of the parochial truth. All these
might require the mention that, for Cole, as well capitalism, as well as Marxism
is registered, given their European origins, under the aegis of the common myth
— tensions retrieved as well within the universal logic of the modernists as in
the particularities so praised by the postmodernists.
Z. Bauman14 sustains a lucid inventory of the “postmodern wisdom” and of
the “postmodern weakness”. Although accepted merely as a crisis period, postmodern
spirit proves its “wisdom” by the renunciation to the search of an all comprising,
total and finale formula, for a life without ambiguous character, risk, danger or
error, aware that each treatment (either local, specialized, individualized or rendered
efficient) becomes its major “target”.
“Postmodern weakness” is a political weakness, for the politics of the postmodern
habitat (be it of the politicians, dissipated, multi-center, be it evasive and lacking
control) remains flooded with lacunae especially in what it concerns the extensiveness
and the institutionalization of moral responsibility.
Thus, we can discuss as well an extrusive assumption, which is marked by
ostentation and which is delimited from the concept of postmodernism, regained
in the theoretical and extravert attitudes or in the actions themselves, but also by
a requisition of the real possibilities to effectively operate within the communities
organized after such percepts. These doubts could be nourished also by the
presence of an anemic postmodern fond of the contemporary communities.
Within the views of several “postmodern skeptics” the term (postmodernism)
would circulate fallaciously, within a contort context, marked by confusion and
manipulations, entertaining the suspicion that in factual things may be about the
countless “modern fashions” or about the countless types of “overcoming”. They
would exclusively legitimate on the basis of the fact that they are to a greater
————————
13 Mike Cole, Transmodernism, Marxism ºi Postmodernism (Transmodernism, Marxism and Postmodernism),
Policy Features in Education, vol. 2, nr. 3 & 4, Routledge Falmer 2004, www.aisberg.8k.ro.
14 Zygmunt Bauman, Etica postmodernã (Postmodern Ethics), Timiºoara, Amarcord Publishing House, 2000.
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BEYOND OF THE PREFIX “POST-”
11
extent “up to date”, or “newer” — mechanisms characterizing, in fact, modernity,
as noticed by Gianni Vattimo, too [the Seminar from Stuttgart, 1991, stated
through Ihab Hassan, Malcolm Bradbury, John Barth, Raymond Federman,
William Gass the birth of the postmodernisms and the end of postmodernism (as
a continuation of modernism, but situated “outside the temporal order”)].
For James Parker15, postmodernism is (over)rated, ready to reach a sure and
rapid death, “banished from the kingdom”, and it has nothing left but to commit
an epistemological suicide. Proclaiming the death of postmodernism, and
finding it guilty to be self-referential, Parker renames it, “morbid modernism”,
dissolver of the modern certainties from the registrar of the modern logic!
Without inscribing it within the coordinates of such a vernacular trajectory,
through which to confer to the “communitarian postmodernism” a protochronous
dimension (centering it within a climate of routine or, on the contrary, decentering it, by a marginal overbid), we confess that we shall rather give way to
the invitation extended by Andrei Pleºu to take “refuge” in a “territory freed
from the fascination of modernity”. Thus we would give up the idea of a strong
renewal that seems compulsory when we find the moment to glance “without a
fake innocence” and “after almost one hundred years of utopian, stubborn and
blind look forward”(!), not as much “back”, as we are lured in an “Alexandrian”
manner by Andrei Pleºu, but rather “sideways”. For there is not as much the idea
of the re-installment of another center that comes as a priority with such an
option, as it is rather the recourse to the “soft-cunnings”, translated into a
recessive behavior, in a “strategy of delay” that would contribute to a “digressive
change of the forward movement”. Hence this is an alternative that relates to the
“surrounding movement”, by which there is no way that modernism can find its
endo-avangarde dimension “jammed”, but which might eventually decisively
influence its physiognomy. Any “sketch of a theory of the secondary” would
presuppose, in essence, a relation of concurrence between two essential parts:
the associational communities and the state. It explores the “changing relations
and patterns within a host of nuances and transformations” and, with a
“melancholic satisfaction” unveils “the fall and the disappearance of any type of
principal structures and of pretentious hegemonies. It uncovers “with a sort of
approving fascination” the capacities of “absorption and of redemption” of
imperfection and of digression.
A secondary nuance envisions the retrieval: the movement, the advancement
and progress in this world seem to be inexorably entropic, fact true as well for
the “natural evolution” and for “cosmological development”, as for the “social
and historical progress”. Each advancement seems accompanied by a
“diminishing of substance”, by a “removal of a potentialities” and by a “jam of
options”. The installment of an “entropic quietude”, is delayed (counterpoised)
by the intervention of the reactionary nature of the secondary and by the
obstinate recessives of reality, confirmed by the reaction of certain
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15 James Parker, Un recviem pentru postmodernism (A Requiem for Postmodernism), The Southern, no. 2,
summer 2001, www.aisberg.8k.ro.
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communitarian gestures. These communitarian gestures (a new philosophical
current, a new philosophical construction) become themselves the target of
“subversion” especially because they push toward “new horizons of progress”
and, therefore, closure. The entropy is, therefore, avoided by a creative reaction
and by the actions oriented to retrieve the past. A fact that can be immediately
noticed might be the reputable increase and in depth of the theoretical
conscience of the political fact, regained in the preoccupation (explicit or not) to
trigger the mechanisms for mutual generation, functioning and involvement.
The relationships of the human Subject with the political language that
constitutes it in the very social and political act, the psychological, social and
political effects of the manipulation of the action and rhetoric instruments creators
of communitarian illusion. The lightness, the incisiveness, the immediate power
of impact with present-day reality emanate from the behavior of the individual
and free the new political actors from certain clichés and ideological schemes,
and install the primate of the “environment politics”, the assuming of the real
through a conscious language: especially for this reason, the depolitization of
perception and of the political discourse, the placement in discussion of certain
production relationships until now overseen, the revision of the concept of
nature and of nature itself and of the importance of the categories such as
political “consumption” and “response”, the practical (re)consideration of the
concepts of “invention” and “representation”, are acute problems where the reflection
on the means shows that they do not constitute anymore external elements that
could be detached from the political practice. On the contrary they become
constitutive factors for the new “action adventure”.
From this perspective, the “question” of the state is not that to “obstacle”, or
to strangulate a certain “political order”, but to (re)establish the sort of complexity
where they could vanish engulfed by the routine, by the “speed and linearity of
progress”. Recessive things are maintained by a “conscience of recessive-ness”
which has as a rule the coexistence in tensional.
A possible orientation in “this landscape of confuse relationships”, where the
elements are refused the chance to fusion in a “recurrent synthesis”, one can find
only in such “flux projects”, as some sort of assuming in extenso of the recessive
dimension of the communitarian action.
Mircea Florian defined the quality of recessive-ness as delimitation toward
similar concepts, such as: complementarities, parallelism, correlation, contradiction.
This regressive duality would (thus) presuppose a type of relationship where the
terms involved, opposite but not contradictory, (co)existing in a state of
(in)equality, marked by a certain tension that is permanently maintained there.
What was that the new political action intended was actually reduced to the
(re)settlement of politics in a “tensional relationship”, recessive (in)equality, by
which it pictured the extension of the “space of culture and existence”.
Appealing to a neologism invented by Ihab Hassan we signal here the presence
of the undetermined tendency [(in an “explanation” of this neologism:
undetermanence — approximate equivalent to the recessive duality proposed by
11
BEYOND OF THE PREFIX “POST-”
13
Mircea Florian (1983), Ihab Hassan (1986) affirms that he used the term to indicate
two central (and essential) tendencies of postmodernism —indetermination and
immanence. The two tendencies are not dialectic because they are not perfectly
antithetical and they do not lead to synthesis. Each contains each own
contradictions and they allure to the other’s elements. Their interaction does not
suggest the process-ness of a bi-lectical and all encompassing postmodernism)]
whose process-ness, suggesting a tolerant, bi-lectical intersection, of the
(de)formation, ambiguity, discontinuity, pluralism and so on and so forth with the
diffusion, dissemination, pulsing, and interaction, triggering the mechanisms of a
political action that is “more or less conscious of the intention to extend the
domain of what is meaningful and of the humane”.
A thinker such as Habermas16 follows the recuperation of the conscience and
of the intimate relation between modernity and rationality and to weaken the
project of postmodern thought that aims severance, a “parting with the political
modernity”. Postmodernism is stated from the very beginning to be “absolute”,
in (counter)time with the phenomenon of the increase in the complexity of life
in advanced industrial societies. In the understanding of Jürgen Habermas it may
be that as well social endemism, freed and stimulated from a political standpoint
and that unveils itself after the principles of a “strategic and utilitarian ethics”,
as the “pleonexia”, politically attenuated and freed by the subculture, to be entertained
by the spaces of playful contingency enlarged by the program of unmediated
satisfaction to meet a consensus in the renouncing at the justification of the
praxis of the norms that are capable of truth. Francis Fukuyama (1994) argues
that the idea of the “end of history and the last man”, central in postmodernism,
is present also for instance at Hegel and as a consequence later on, at Marx.
According to David Harvey17 there are two rather different regimes of
accumulation (along with their associated models of regulation) that could stay
in contrast, each of those corresponding to a relatively coherent type of social
formation. Thus, I propose for the analysis the “Fordist modernism” regime, on
the one hand, and the “flexible postmodernism”, on the other.
Fordist modernism is not by far homogeneous. It has to do with the relative
stability and permanence — the fix capital in the mass production, the stabile,
standardized and homogeneous markets, a fixed configuration of influence and
political-economic power. Postmodern flexibility, though, is dominated by
fiction, phantasm, fictive capital, images, and ephemeral. Postmodern flexibility
merely reverses the dominant order that is characteristic for the Fordist
modernism. The political-economic apparatus of the latter arrived at a relative
stability, causing a strong material and social change. Even so, this politicaleconomic apparatus of postmodernism is nevertheless accompanied by an
endemic instability that looks for compensations into the more stable spaces of
the being and in geopolitics of charisma.
————————
16 Jürgen Habermas, Cunoaºtere ºi comunicare (Knowledge and Human Interests), Bucharest, Editura
Politicã Publishing House, 1983, and Discursul filosofic al modernitãþii. 12 prelegeri (The Philosophical Discourse
of Modernity), Bucharest, All Educational Publishing House, 2000.
17 David Harvey, Condiþia postmodernitãþii (The Condition of Postmodernity), Timiºoara, Editura
Amarcord, 2002.
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The Romanian political space where many generations manifest themselves
is guided by the accents posed on the action of recuperation, doubled by the
rejection of a particular behavior and political discourse that float within the drift
of the “dogmatic slogans” and by the integration into the proper cultural projects
of the “stolen models” of modernity. In this context will be invented also the
“politic protochronism” as a counter weight to the “liberal perspectivism of values”.
The confrontation from the beginning of the 90s between the representatives
of the “modern” and “protochronous”, stands out nowadays (with all its dramatic
scope) “politically obsolete and without object”, both positions being in reality
revolute, even if in different proportions18. Behind this Romanian political scene
occupied by a type of modernism characterized by the “depletion of its novelty
resources”, capable to regenerate only through “experimental political epiphenomena”,
a series of underground phenomena, considered “bizarre”, “accidents”, “political
curiosities”, replace now in discussion the recessive structure that prevails in our
political postmodernity.
In terms of Mircea Florian’s philosophy we witness a “recessive duality” that
does not presuppose “terms of an equal power (isostenic), and of an equal value
(isostimic), but a prevalent/ “under-valiant” rapport. We describe here the system
of political (re)orientation practiced by the Romanian political parties that were
resurrected after 1989. The principle “the same support, the same substance, but
different modalities” (extended also in what it concerns the politic) seems to
privilege the modalities of the political support. The accomplishment of the
political support is realized by a “continuous chain” of images on a given surface.
The model is undertaken from postmodern architecture and it is placed to the
border between the necessity to keep in mind “the past of the political environment”
and the wish to speak to a culture within it, through its forms, explicitly and
consciously reactivated as the unique modality to make it reflect upon its selfconstructive values and representations.
Our conviction is that in postmodernism there is an inextricable alliance
between the “ideological dimension” and the “theoretical” one that is attached to
the border between (de)naturalized political doctrines and programs, between
iconic and verbal, between the values of the mass culture and the values of the
————————
18According to Horia Muntenus — Noua paradigmã a secolului XXI [The New Paradigm of the 21st
Century] (following the footsteps of Adrian Dinu Rachieru in Elitism ºi postmodernism [Elitism and
Postmodernism ]) there were two stages in the evolution of the Romanian postmodernists, after 1989. During
the first years, they were preoccupied with/by the assault of the cultural institutions, although the discussions
around the concept of postmodernism almost succumbed, and then, about 1995, they have forcefully returned,
classicizing the current. Engaged in debunking at all costs and scenario of the “demented stray paths” and
paralyzed in the malefic of postmodernism, H. Muntenus considers that they represent the triumph of Zombie,
“the tiny African beast of the live-dead, aggressive, lost in the opaqueness of nature, frustrated by the noneducation, marching Zombies, through the gulags of communism and Nazism”: “It seems that especially the
concept of mass culture from socialism was what eased the apparition of postmodernism in the countries of
the East without the support of postmodernity. Paradoxically, postmodernism, in spite of all expectancies,
represents a closing to the righteous end of the Marxist-Leninist materialism, but with the illusion that it is its
adversary. This way I consider suggestive that many of the postmodern philosophers come from the branch of
the Marxism, reformed in postmodernism. No wonder that postmodern mentality has found an ideal terrain of
manifestation in the countries newly exited from the Soviet Block, while in the West it ended relatively
quickly, as Jean-François Lyotard did when he was the first who attempted to withdraw his goods (concept)
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BEYOND OF THE PREFIX “POST-”
15
noocratic culture. Through the theoretical dimension the conviction that the
political remain literally in-formal is articulated. In agreement with Marshall
McLuhan19, the in-formal space is organized after the principle of the antimedia, where the audio-tactile characteristic defines the space of the
involvement, while the visual space becomes the mark of detachment.
All these may require also the observation that any process that is pushed
sufficiently far has the tendency to suddenly reverse its course or to become its
own opposite20.
According to Giorgio Agamben21, we would be placed in a state of exception,
with an emptied centre, but still efficient, where two opposed forces action: one
that institutes and another that deactivates and deposes, accordingly to the imperative
of movement and countermovement.
The new philosophical, cultural, political, social, economic, etc. forms /
formulae model the strictness of the modernist order, without denying, though,
the order itself. They allure toward the secondary, one of a postmodernist origin,
————————
from the market, after he launched it in 1979”. The constitution and activation of a new generation marked by
the existence within a sphere less rigid politically engaged, with priority to the associational orientation, aside
the “feeling of friendship” and a series of structures that are typically postmodern, designed explicitly as well
at the level of political perspective, of the communicational project, as implicitly, within the fabric of the social
relations, in the design of the very relational woven threads. For instance, the project of the 80s, vises a
provisory construct, an explicit and implicit program, a summation with equally historical, typological and
axiological dimensions. Beyond the left wing polarizations (treated in a superficial key even by someone like
Horia Muntenus) within the accolade of the years 1974-1980, postmodernism is accepted as an esthetical
reality and proposed as a cultural model, within a contextual relation, depoliticized, tolerated, as a vital knot
of a possible Romanian intellectual rebirth. Placing itself with approximation into an “idiotrophic context”,
Romanian postmodernism of the 80s was received as an “ideological instrument” of a oppositional ethical
modernity, be it even passive and evasion oriented, toward a certain social-political and cultural reality. All
these might require the mention that the denigrators of postmodernism (following the imperative of Magda
Cârneci — to make the necessary distinction between contestation and denigration!) were the ones recruited
from the ranks of protochronists, Romanian postmodernism of the 80s representing the project of the young
critical theoreticians!
19 Marshall McLuhan, Texte esenþiale (Essential Texts), Bucharest, Nemira Publishing House, 1997, 2006.
20 For Tönnies (Comunità e Società, Milano, Ed. di Comunità, 1963) community-hard core is a live
organism, when one analyzes the primary group, while society becomes a mechanical aggregate that is founded
on mediations of exchange and contract. If the great unitary visions became dismantled, centre found in a
process of becoming are now the places for affirmation, where once there was nothing but periphery. For, along
with the attempt to absolutization attached to each ideology the alternative forms were deprecated. For Max
Sheler a term such as democratism excludes in the first place the existence of a solidarity of origin among the
parts of humanity, so that the “destines of these parts to affect the whole, and the different individuals, peoples,
races, etc. to manifest a solidarity with the whole in a different degree”. Translating such a theory over to a
biologic domain, the principle of solidarity has as a correspondent the theory according to which any part of a
fecundated cell can become any of the organs and it can intervene for each of those, if it was not entrusted,
beforehand, with a certain task following the structured formation of the organs. According to Max Sheler, any
society represents in fact the rest, the residue, mark of the internal havoc of communities, or, in Gusdorf’s
terms (see Mit ºi metafizicã — Myth and Metaphysics, Amarcord Publishing House, Timiºoara, 1996) a
“secondary mythology”, more secret, “as a background of the personal thought”, related to the center — the
domain of normality, the source. All these might require the following moral-political mention: whether strong
thought presupposed the victory over one of the elements in opposition, the weak thought envisions the
dissolving in irenic, in tolerance. The emplacement into the matrix of the weak thought, presupposes assuming
a fragile equilibrium between the abyssal contemplation of the negative and the erasing of any origin
whatsoever that is, the translation of anything presupposed in practices and games, in techniques, that are only
locally valid.
21 Giorgio Agamben, Starea de excepþie (Homo sacer II, 1), Cluj, Idea Design & Print Publishing House, 2008.
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VIORELLA MANOLACHE
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and in interior they tame this aseptic-modernist theory, fragment it and diversify
it, broadcasting it, de-canonizing it and, eventually, re-signifying it.
For Constantin Virgil Negoiþã22, postmodernism is at once modern and
premodern. In such duplicity in the landscape, textualism was “unpurified” by
the ideologies of the New Left, self-imposed as “political correctness”, an
ideologism oriented toward the dismantlement of the mythical thought, of the
sacred, of traditional values, of religions, of the Western canon.
Postmodernism becomes, thus, also from a political point of view ambivalent,
with a double encoding, both as an accomplice and as a contestant toward the
closure of the key terms within a parodist politics. Concerning the parodist use
of “de-doxification”, for instance, feminism as a postmodern political movement,
attempts to explain the crisis of legitimacy described by Lyotard23 in terms of the
action of patriarchal ideology, of the oppression of women and other minority
groups. The minority movements, ecological or feminist, become thus postmodern
representations of the self, unveiling a new consciousness on representation, a
new understanding as well of the contexts, as of the particularities of the gender
experience. These movements vest the aspect of a conscious affirmation, contradictory
and self-undermining. In a paradigmatic manner, the symbolic meaning of
postmodernism, presupposes the ceasing of imitation and a (re)conquering of the
political, with its productive and constructive aspects of the act of representation24.
Imperatively, postmodernism is refused a future continuity without the retrieval
of the “premodern”, founded on entirely different logic than that of the excluded
third party. To the weak thinking commented upon by Vattimo, Negoiþã proposes
the fuzzy logic — element that points to the transgression from modern
postmodernism to premodern postmodernism. Such a vague logic of groups or
the fuzzy systems offer a flexible method for the expert systems: the term
necessity is analogue with credibility, and the term possibility is analogue with
plausibility. As well the possibility, as the necessity represent values of truth
expressed through 0 or 1.
Following the mathematical instrument of the categories, a thinking type pullback
becomes for Negoiþã the “retreat”, as an informational aggregate, explaining the
generation of complexity as a decomposition into the composing elements.
Between these landmarks, Ziauddin Sardar25 describes postmodernism as a
————————
22 For Constantin Virgil Negoiþã (Logica postmodernului – Postmodern Logic), Paralela 45 Publishing
House, Piteºti, 2004), the postmodernists buried communism. In a logic of the vague and of the soft calculus,
the alternative becomes Bill Clinton, the postmodern President, characterized by the belief in everything,
Clinton Administration being similar, according to Negoiþã, to Weimar Republic. Starting from Thomas
Friedman, Negoiþã considers that in the 20th century important were not the floods, but rather the periods after
the flood. The peace after the Second World War becomes thus the hallmark of the first postmodern peace, only
that, the reinvent of the new tribalism gets reduced (merely) to the fear of terrorism. In the terms of Basarab
Nicolescu, the Soft War replaces the Cold War!
23 J. Francois Lyotard, Condiþia postmodernã. Raport asupra cunoaºterii (The Postmodern Condition: A
Report on Knowledge) Bucharest, Babel Publishing House, 1993, p. 24-27, 68-74, 92-101, 101-110.
24 J. F. Lyotard, Postmodernismul pe înþelesul copiilor (Postmodernism for Children), Cluj, Apostrof
Publishing House, 1997, p. 9-20.
25 Ziauddin Sardar, Postmodernism and the Other: New Imperialism of Western Culture, London, Pluto
Press, 1997.
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BEYOND OF THE PREFIX “POST-”
17
new imperialism of the Western culture, as a continuity of colonialism and
modernism, as a marginalizing power of the non-Western cultures. For Sardar,
postmodernism represents a linear projection, a natural conclusion of modernity,
thus privileging secularism and thus it becomes the ideology of the archisms.
The alternative proposed by Sardar represents a transfer of modernity and
postmodernity into a new order of society, finding a synthesis between life that
intensifies tradition (amendable to change and transition) and o new form of
modernity that respects the values and the life style of the traditional cultures.
Thus, we will launch and verify the hypothesis according to which, we
would be in presence of certain alternative currents of postmodernity, considering
that the latter did nothing else but impose, at its turn, a continuous trajectory for
modernity (up to the purisms!). We will apply, as following, alternative tensions
to postmodernism, considering that this remains a current whose direction is
periodically changing, having a usual shape of wave in its sinusoidal trajectory.
Alternative Currents (Tensions) of Postmodernity
The alternative currents will presuppose an abandonment of the evolutionist
perspective and the acceptance of the paradigmatic revolution. Sinusoidal, the
currents will gain being only as protest movements against dominant theories or
theoretical tendencies, and even more as different paradigms, as the (re)configuration
of the axiological relief in a space of a-value.
The false impression of the unidirectional overcome presupposes ideologization,
indoctrination that is, one of the many possible modalities to answer through
force. The apparent illusion of the overcome through an anterior paradigm does
not presuppose more than a self-exile to the periphery of the movement of
re(e)volution.
The movement of re(e)volution26 will relate to a spatial and temporal reference,
designing an overcome through “the beyond” (trans-): trans-modernity and not a
temporal reference, designing an overcome through “the after” (post-): postmodernity.
The alternative currents will relate through a by-pass movement to
postmodernity as a principal artery, as a directive pipe, all of these representing
but deviations, doubles of postmodernism.
By the relation to the Nietzschean problematic that Habermas considered
“the turning plate of the entrance in postmodernism27, of the eternal return and
to the Heideggerian effects of the metaphysical overcoming, the theoretizations
on postmodernism, most often (de)centered and (in)coherent gain philosophical
rigor and dignity only to the extent we consider the new condition of existence
in the late industrial world.
We have to state from the very beginning: the Heideggerian critique of
humanism and the Nietzschean announcement of nihilism through the death of
————————
26 See Aisberg, October 2005, http://aisberg.8k.ro/page2.html.
27 Jürgen Habermas, Discursul filosofic al modernitãþii. 12 Prelegeri (The Philosophical Discourse of
Modernity), Bucharest, All Publishing House, 2000, p. 24-34.
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16
God are the symptoms and notifications of decadence and not of postmodernism.
The imprudence to “attach” such aspects to postmodernity as specific (in)sights
conduces to a perspective on this episteme in late-modernist parameters of critical
overcoming, or of enclosure in a logic that Habermas called “the undermining of
rationalism, overbid of the temporal philosophy of origin, leveling of the gender
difference and eventually unmasking of the aporias aiming the exit of this
philosophy of the Subject”.
Indeed only modernity can be characterized as dominated by a history of
thought as progressive illumination, as the epiphenomenon that grows and fruits
solely within the context of nearness and (re)appropriation, ever more fully, of
the foundations of thought as origins. This way is explained the fact that it is
attempted a (re)presentation of this technical and practical revolution of the
Western history as a justification of an eternal retrieval, rebirth, return. The
overcoming, as a mark of modernity, could not have been conceived otherwise
than a “progressive development”.
Thus, Nietzsche and Heidegger consider that one should critically distance
herself from the fundaments on the one hand, and, on the other, they cannot
indicate the name of another, more true founding, where the critical references
might become operational.
The prefix -post in postmodernism indicates on the one hand the parting of
the ways with modernity, and also a nostalgia of modernity considering that
“modernity intends to subtract itself from its very own logics of development,
from the idea of critical development directed to a new foundation”28 refusing
itself the right to remain enclosed into the unfolding logic characteristic precisely
to modern thought.
The dissolving of the stability of being is partial in the “great systems of the
metaphysical historicism of the 20th century”. There, as affirmed by Vattimo, the
being does not relay, but it becomes, according to necessary and recognoscible
rhythms that still retain a certain ideal stability, thought by Nietzsche and Heidegger
as happening. The ontology is nothing else but the interpretation given to this
emplacement (condition), considering that outside this happening our being
becomes historicized.
Things change when we recognize that postmodernism is characterized not as
much as novelty in relation to modernism, but, especially as a dissolution of the
“category of new, as experience” of “end of history” and not as a stage of modernity.
Even if the theoreticians speculate this experience of end of history, of
“twilight of the West”, of catastrophic menace of the atomic bomb (apocalypse),
the postmodern experience indicates, in the terminology of the present day
culture (A. Gehlen), a post historic experience, the condition in which progress
becomes routine. Human capacities of technically speculating nature are now
intensified to paroxysm and the capacity of use and planning affect structurally
their novelty. Consumption society seems the physiologic answer that political
system demands for its very survival. A sort of inner immobility reduces any
————————
28 Gianni Vattimo, Dincolo de subiect (Beyond Subject), Constanþa, Pontica Publishing House, 1994, p. 6.
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BEYOND OF THE PREFIX “POST-”
19
political experience of the reality to an experience with the images, perceived
within the “cotton like and acclimatized peace where computers operate”.
D. Lyon29 analyzing the relation between technology and society insisted on
the electronically mediated communication, underlining especially the manner
in which it influences our reactions toward the others, or, in crises situations,
toward ourselves. Undoubtedly the statute of “reality” and of meaning is placed
under serious scrutiny from the postmodern perspective. This super “panopticon”
does not increase only the knowledge power, but also it reconstitutes by
“multiplication the “selves” that might become the Subject.
For Baudrillard30, the new means of communication foretell (politically as
well — our emphasis) a world of pure simulacra, of models, codes and digital
systems, of images of mass-media that became “real” or that rather erode any
distinction between the “real” world and mass-media. The possible victims of
this dissolution: society or the “social” in any of their manifestations. The pluralist
societies are by far the most “noisy” ones, in what concerns the spectacle they
offer to the social world in the intention of different social agents to impose their
symbolic capitalism as the legitimate social capital.
Otherwise, political dynamics survives solely through the management, within
the forms of instable equilibrium and within the continuous processes of
transformation in front of the breaking in fragments and in front of its dissolution
in ideologies: in fact, if true, as it was said that society as a system of determinations
needs a certain type of absolutization, it is as true that political is the place of the
communicated practical experience. The alternative for the political center,
schematized through political belonging is represented by the recourse to
structures deprived of a center and finality, from the perspective of the nonsubstantial and more fluid subjectivities in their process of becoming.
From this perspective, political spectrum is (over)load with political derivations,
structures with many more dimensions, with a multitude of centers, with a
multitude of relatively autonomous ideological strata, endowed with nonlinear
causal relations.
This way, we underline, postmodernism becomes ambivalent from a political
point of view, with a double encoding, both as an accomplice and as a contestant,
toward the closure of the key terms within a parody politics.
The idea of end of modernity signifies beyond the nuances the abandon of the
idea of linear evolution and teleology presupposes a necessary direction of all
societies, toward the ideal of the Western capitalist world that is, toward the
world we call postmodern31.
As established from the very beginning, postmodernity becomes intimately
linked with its alternative currents through a local causality. Any physical
phenomenon can be understood by a continuous chaining of causes and effects: to
————————
29 David Lyon, Postmodernitatea (Postmodernity), Bucharest, Du Style Publishing House, 1998, p. 90-134.
30 Jean Baudrillard, Strategii fatale (Fatal Strategies), Iassy, Polirom Publishing House, 1998, p. 24-53.
31 Viorella Manolache, Postmodernitatea româneascã — între experienþã ontologicã ºi necesitate politicã
(Romanian Postmodernity — between Ontological Experience and Political Necessity), Sibiu, Editura
Universitãþii “Lucian Blaga” Publishing House, 2004.
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18
each cause in a given point, corresponds an effect in an infinitely close point. In
this manner, two points separated by a distance (be it infinite!) are related through
a continuous chaining of causes and effects, establishing a sinusoidal movement.
If we opt for a three phased calculus (modernity – postmodernity – alternative
post-) then we shall establish that such a three phased system of alternative
sinusoidal tensions, does not presuppose else than the union of the three mono
phased sources, as alternative sinusoidal.
Such an affirmation is justified by the fact that all the alternative currents of
postmodernity (transmodernity, cosmodernity, hipermodernity, paramodernity,
metamodernity, remodernity) is related to postmodernity, by the reception and/
or refusal of modernity.
Transmodernity is nothing else but postmodernity lacking its innocent break,
the return to the fugitive lines and to the ideas of modernity: Hegelianism,
utopian socialism, Marxism, the philosophy of suspicion, by trans-justification
and overcoming of paradigms, in other words, a dialectic type of synthesis of the
modern and postmodern theses; cosmodernity becomes placed between modernity
and postmodernity, as a trans-discipline and quantic perspective of modernity,
permitting the integration of the old notion of cosmos and the birth of a new
spirituality, where transcendence becomes philosophy and not religion;
hypermodernity becomes a radicalization of modernism, a form of division
within postmodernism, opting for a new anthropocentrism, experimentalism,
chimerism, connexionism, fracturism, utilitarianism, virtualism online, fantasy
and cyberpunk.
An out of phase case is represented by paramodernitatea, remodernity and
metamodernitatea. The first does not herald itself as an overcoming of modernism,
but it imagins its seen and unseen effects, organizing as an articulated replica
given to technocratic hegemony and to excessive bureaucratization.
If metamodernity does nothing else but crosses postmodernism in / by
philosophical hermeneutics, the theory of communication or deconstruction,
remodernity proposes to replace postmodernism, sealing off the époque of
scientific materialism, nihilism and spiritual bankruptcy and becomes rather
inclusive than exclusive, preoccupied with connective and inclusive projects,
rather than with concepts such as alienation and exclusion engaged in a new art,
unsubordinated to any political or religious dogma.
The (pre)fix post-, is (self)placed as a product of the modern, and outside it,
not overcome, but just assumed. This double emplacement, outside and inside
modernity, by innocence and irony, does not exclude meta level, the game of
experiment, establishing that its novelties, far from canceling it, are definitively
detaching it from any fixed landmarks. The overcoming of post- becomes
dynamic, acceptance, and in-depth re-knowledge! The logic of post- places us
within the critical ply of between/among, multiplying the distances, in an
unequal and random dispute.
Inventorying the less known theories in Romania (as are the untranslated
cutting-edge studies or the ones published — solely! — in the Aisberg journal),
we shall subsume theories of Paul H. Ray, Mike Cole or James Parker,
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BEYOND OF THE PREFIX “POST-”
21
concerning what Z. Bauman announced in his work entitled Postmodern Ethics,
as the postmodern powerlessness. Although accepted as a crisis period,
postmodern spirit makes proof of the “wisdom” it engages by the renouncing to
the search of the all encompassing, total and finale formula of life that would
prove unambiguous, without any risk, danger or error, with the conscience of the
fact that each treatment (either local, specialized, individualized or rendered
efficient) becomes its main “target”. “Postmodern powerlessness” is of a political
order, for the politics of the postmodern habitat (be it one of the politicians,
dissipated, polycentric, be it evasive and lacking control) remains with lacunae
especially in what it concerns the extensiveness and the institutionalization of
moral responsibility.
Thus, we may talk as well of the extrusive assumer, with the ostentation in
the delimitation of the concept of postmodernism, regained equally in attitudes
theoretically extraverted or in actions per se, as of the refutation of the real
postmodern capacities to effectively operate in communities organized after
such percepts. These doubts could be nourished also by the presence of an “anemic
postmodern fond” of contemporary communities.
If for Paul H. Ray, postmodernism represents only the late logic of modernity
itself — an effort turned into paradigm, and for Mike Cole the agenda of
modernists and postmodernists becomes a trap of self-destructive antagonisms
as mark of the parochial truth, for James Parker postmodernism has nothing left
but to commit epistemological suicide. Proclaiming the death of postmodernism,
finding it guilty of being self-referential, Parker calls it also “morbid modernism”,
dissolver of modern certitudes in the register of modern logic!
At this point we have to mention that the present study — starting from the
new forms/formulae in philosophy, culture, politics, society, economy, etc.
considers that postmodernism models the strictness of the modernist order,
without denying, though, the order itself. They lure toward the secondary, one
of postmodernist type, and in interior they tame the aseptic-modernist theory,
fragmentize it and diversify it, broadcasting it, de-canonizing it, and eventually,
re-signifying it.
According to Theodor Codreanu, Christianity is a transmodern religion, par
excellence. Thus, transmodernism open the way to special knowledge, through
revelation, and not by the «complexes of culture» assumed by modernism and
postmodernism, in the light of the relativism that accompanies any change of
cultural paradigm. Th. Codreanu proposes the construction of a new hermeneutics,
meant to make the world transparent toward lumen, hermeneutics that separates
definitively the «complexes of culture» (that traversed the culture since Renaissance
to postmodernism) and the «complexes of depth» (the areas of transparence).
For James Parker32, the new transmodern vision (neither uniform, nor monolithic,
or theistic) seems to get formed as a construction from diverse disciplines, having
in common the rejection of the absolute wishes of modernism (the autonomous
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32 James Parker, Un recviem pentru postmodernism (A Requiem for Postmodernism), The Southern, no. 2,
summer 2001, www.aisberg.8k.ro.
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20
cause, the ameliorator optimism) and the rejection of the fundamentals of
postmodernism (the truth as a communitarian fiction, the moral and social
constructions, the traditional illegitimate influences).
Posing into a common equation religion and governance, John J. Reilly33
considered that public a non-religious life of the secular modernity will be
ornamented again by the religious institutions and meanings. Historically, there
would be, according to Reilly, three eras: the premodern, where the world was
not just religious, but also blessed, governed by hierarchies that intermediated
humane and transcendental; modernity — rational, anti-transcendental and
hierarchic and period of transition, marked by postmodernism as late modernity
and by modernism as familiar trick.
The tolerance toward diversity, the antipathy toward traditional hierarchies,
the fixation on informational technologies become the flagrant hallmark of the
period of transition, where even theology becomes trans-consolidated through a
critical method, abandoned by the classics a long time ago.
As announced by René Girard34, we would be placed in the post-Christian
phase of human history, of wild comparatives, pluralism, and multiculturalism
and of the other variations on the theme of modern relativism.
By excelling in ambiguity, and since they are placed pejoratively as a confusing
concept, the ideologies — discussed in the chapter entitled “Ideologies post-?
Post-Ideologies?”) — now become emplaced on a lax terrain, hallowed by the
history of the attempts of gaining distance from the consecrated concept
(ideology), in the tentative to find an alternative from /outside the sphere of the
strong ideological discourse.
Conceptual, ideology, as a science of ideas, is inextricable linked to modernity,
to history and historical thought.
The end of the ideological epoch can be dated even since the 50s, the years
that followed, stated the end of ideology as such. Where the philosophical and
social thought anchors on “endisms”, in an era of integrate ends, overlapped in
the years 70s-80s of the postmodern thought (the end of ideology, the end of
history, the end of knowledge, the end of the social), this turn targeted the
canceling of meaning that modernity awarded to these concepts, offering as
alternative another dimensioning, a repositioning within postmodern condition.
Here we have to mention that the term of ideology converted in ideologies
will be, paradoxically, retrieved by this very postmodern thought! In this way,
we attempted a historical-philosophical-political study, applied to the Romanian
space, in an analysis of the ideological hard versions and of the soft alternatives,
subsumed by us to the following invariants: political invariants of liberal type,
political invariants of conservative type political invariants of socialist type,
alternative political invariants: the reactivation of differences, profound Romania,
soft power, postmodern geography of the European Union, another territorial
configuration: the Declaration from Bucharest.
————————
33 John J. Reilly, Religie ºi guvernanþã. Un rãspuns (Religion and Governance. An Answer), Religious
Futurists Bulletin, October 1998, www.aisberg.8k.ro.
34 René Girard, Prãbuºirea Satanei (The Fall of Satan), Bucharest, Nemira & Co. Publishing House,
2006.
21
BEYOND OF THE PREFIX “POST-”
23
Such a study, confirms that the physiognomy of this new ( East)ethic/esthetic
reality from the vernacular post-December (1989) area, “virusated” by
postmodernity, even if the appearance absorbs also traditional well-consolidated
elements, remains a relatively new construct that corresponds to another reality,
being the consequence of ideological, technological, social, psychological,
esthetic, philosophical, etc. mutations, after our — de facto! — Integration in the
intellectual and economic West-European community. At stake here is the option
for a different form, for which the coagulation principle will not be organic, but
rather mechanic, leveling but the surface, by assimilation accustomed to
generalized stereotyped and mechanized habits and reflexes, the product of a
relaxing and relaxed culture, one indifferent to hierarchies and canonize(d) values.
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