Postmodern critique, postmodern re-enchantment

“Postmodernity,” writes Zygmunt Bauman in his 1992 Intimations of Postmodernity , “means many different things to many different people. It may mean a building that arrogantly flaunts the ‘orders’ prescribing what fits what and what should be kept strictly out to preserve the functional logic of steel, glass and concrete. It means a work of imagination that defies the difference between painting and sculpture, styles and genres, gallery and the street, art and everything else. It means a life that looks suspiciously like a TV serial, and a docudrama that ignores your worry about setting apart fantasy from what ‘really happened.’ It means license to do whatever one may fancy and advice not to take anything you or the others do too

seriously. It means the speed with which things change and the pace with which moods succeed each other so that they have no time to ossify into things. It means attention drawn in all directions at once so that it cannot stop on anything for long and nothing gets a really close look. It means a shopping mall overflowing with goods whose major use is the joy of purchasing them; and existence that feels like a life-long confinement to the shopping mall. It means the exhilarating freedom to pursue anything and the mind-boggling uncertainty as to what is worth pursuing and in the name of what one should pursue it.”

Among these many descriptions, Bauman offers two of his own that are particularly intriguing. The first is that postmodernism takes Enlightenment critique to a final cul de sac where there is nothing left to critique. Postmodern critique “finds it ever more difficult to go on being critical just because it has destroyed everything it used to be critical about; with it, off went the very urgency of being critical.” Modernist art, “bent on censoring modern reality,” ended up refusing to represent the subject of its critique – ended up, in short, with blank canvases, empty manuscript pages, long silences presented as concerts. Similarly, “critical theory confronts an object that seems to offer no more resistance; an object that has softened, melted and liquidized to the point that the shapr edge of critique goes through with nothing to stop it.”

Hence postmodern cynicism, irony, and world-weariness: “How ridiculous it seems to try to change the direction of history when no powers give an inkling that they wish to give history direction. How empty seems the effort to show that what passes for truth is false when nothing has the courage and the stamina to declare itself as truth for everybody and for all time. How farcical it seems to fight for genuine art when one can no more drop anything incidentally without the dropped object being proclaimed art . . . . How idle it seems to exhort people to go there rather than somewhere else in a world in which everything goes.”

Second, Bauman suggests that one of the discontinuities between modernity and postmodernity has to do with the animation/enchantment of the world. For modernity, spirit and will were all lined up on the subjective side of a divide, while the world outside was merely “a raw material in the work guided and given form by human designs . . . . Left to itself the world had no meaning. It was solely the human design that injected it with sense and purpose.” This is in seeping with Bauman’s characterization of modernity as a rage for order and structure in a world of chaos (Bauman follows Stephen Toulman here). Postmodernity deconstructs the subject-object relation, trespasses the fence between self and world, protesting modernity’s disenchantment of forests and lakes, which “stemmed from the encounter between the designing posture and the strategy of instrumental rationality.”