(Post) Modern Polemics

Abstract

In American cultural politics today there are at least two positions on postmodernism now in place: one aligned with a neoconservative politics, other derived from poststructuralist theory. Neoconservative postmodernism is more familiar of two: defined mostly in terms of style, it depends on modernism, which, reduced to its own worst formalist image, is countered with a return to narrative, ornament and figure. This position is often one of reaction, but in more ways than stylistic for also proclaimed is return of history (the humanist tradition) and return of subject (the artist/architect as master auteur). Poststructuralist postmodernism, on other hand, assumes the death of man not only as original creator of unique artifacts but also as centered subject of representation and of history. This postmodernism, opposed to neoconservative, is profoundly antihumanist: rather than a return to representation, it launches a critique in which representation is shown to be more constitutive of reality than transparent to it (thus poststructuralist connection). And yet, however opposed in sytle and politics, it is my contention that these two cepts of postmodernism disclose an historical identity.

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