Sabine Heuser - Virtual Geographies

Introduction

The postmodern understood correctly would be a project. Postmodernism, on the other hand, insofar as it is really more than simply a fashion, a sign of regression or a new ideology, can most likely be comprehended as a process of searching, an attempt to register traces of change and to highlight the contours of this project more sharply. (Wellmer 109, my tr.)

It is not the world that is postmodern, here, it is the perspective from which that world is seen that is postmodern. (Bertens, The Idea of the Postmodern 9)

New Final Frontiers: Problems and Aims

THE POSTMODERN is a vague and vexing concept employed by a wide variety of disciplines including architecture, the visual arts, literature, geography, sociology, and philosophy.1 Attempts to generalize about its characteristic features and discourses are consistently thwarted by a splintering specificity: all things postmodern are informed by distinct disciplinary histories and complex esthetic and temporal relations to a whole array of modernisms and various stages of modernity.2 JeanFrancois Lyotard's writings on The Postmodern Condition (1979) and The Postmodern Explained (1993) provide a philosophical framework for the idea of the postmodern, by claiming that the postmodern is not to be understood as an epochal delimitation which simply follows from or breaks with modernism. More specifically, Lyotard's concept of the postmodern overrides the linear notion of history, according to which one movement follows and replaces another (as in the extreme case of avant-gardism). However, Lyotard only seemingly rejects the notion of the avant-garde, because he ultimately retains and re-inscribes the esthetic aspects and utopian aspirations associated with it, especially when he considers the sublime and the unpresentable in presentation (The Inhuman 89107; The Postmodern Explained 6774). If Lyotard retains a notion of the avant-garde, it is a postmodern version of the concept, since he divorces the avant-garde from all drives toward innovation or novelty for their own sake. When he speaks of the postmodern, he refers to the "modern in its nascent state," which has a more complex temporal relation to the modern than that of succession, transcendence, or replacement. In fact, the model of historical change that many critics following Lyotard have employed is neither one of a radical rupture with modernism and the modern, nor a merely reactionary moment in response to it, but a critical revisiting in the sense of working through what came before.3 Consequently, the postmodern is a mode or a way of thinking, and not a unified phenomenon or age. It theorizes its inherent contradictions and inconsistencies, embodied in a multitude of postmodernisms.

1 The best summary of the emergence of the term postmodernism can be found in Michael Khler, "'Postmodernismus': Ein begriffsgeschicht-licher Uberblick," and Gerhard Hoffmann, Alfred Hornung and Rdiger Kunow, "'Modern', 'Postmodern' and 'Contemporary' as Criteria for the Analysis of 20th Century Literature."

Postmodernity is thus not the heralding of a new age so much as the rewriting of some of the features claimed by modernity particularly modernity's claim to ground its legitimacy on the project of liberating humanity as a whole through science and technology. But that rewriting has already been in progress since the inception of modernity itself (Lyotard, "Rewriting Modernity" Inhuman 34). Unlike Lyotard, Marxist critics tend to embrace a view of postmodernity as proof or precursor of a new age or era (Bertens Idea; Jameson Postmodernism; Harvey Condition). For Fredric Jameson and David Harvey, postmodernity is linked to a social analysis of "latecapitalism" or of post-Taylorism.4 Andreas Huyssen follows Raymond Williams's vein of Marxist analysis when he observes in postmodernism a "change in sensibility" and warns that "the problem with such historical macro-schemes, in relation to postmodernism, is that they prevent the phenomenon from even coming into focus" {Divide 181; 183).

4 Fredric Jameson in Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capital ism (1992) and David Harvey in The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (1989) ultimately use postmodernity as the signification of a new epoch that breaks with modernity because of changed social conditions. A prime example they cite is postmodern architecture, because of its complicity "in the patronage of multinational business," as Jameson argues (4). The characteristic features that he derives from this analysis for postmodern artifacts are: a "new depthlessness" leading to "simulacra" and "superficiality" in an uncritical move from description to evaluation; and the "weakening of historicity" and the "waning of affect" as the "new emotional ground tone," which are projected onto the era of postmodernity (9). Similarly, Harvey calls for a "meta-theory" (117) to counteract the disempowerment resulting from the "fetishisms of locality, place, or social grouping" where the focus on fragmentization mimics the dominant mode of flexible capital accumulation perpetuated by Western governments since Taylorism. Lyotard's analysis of The Postmodern Condition, on the other hand, focus ses on the status of knowledge in postindustrial societies and its forms of commodification as data. He thus undermines any reliance on the metanarratives of humanism, justice, and truth, which can no longer presuppose a consensus, and which, when forcibly imposed, become associated with terror. This has served as his main point of divergence from the view of another Marxist scholar, Jurgen Habermas.

When attempting to show which esthetic strategies, no matter how unstable, render a particular grouping of science fiction works postmodern, it is necessary to confine oneself to a particular postmodernism emerging from a resonance with ideas of modernization and literary modernism within the field of science fiction. The problem of how postmodernism in science fiction might present itself and what esthetic, rhetorical, and narrative strategies it might employ is only one facet of the postmodern "force field."