Sandoval's Postmodernism
Introduction
Postmodernism is the movement that developed in the 1970s and 1980s across several fronts such as: philosophy, the arts, architecture, politics, and economics that moved away from modernism. (Connor,2004) Jameson gives Postmodernism a special perspective. Jameson also gives us his take on: Postmodern entrapment, Cognitive Mapping, and a few other supportive subjects. Another aim is to bridge the citizen-subjects postmodern movement to the women of color’s movement during the 1960s, 70s, and 80s.
Postmodernism is a Globalizing Neocolonial Force
Fredric Jameson’s 1984 Manifesto on Postmodernism warned about the social changes endemic to the transition of capital from its market to its monopoly stage. These warnings are ever present in our society today. Jameson also warns of the transmutation of economic, political, cultural, and psychic formations under the influence of unprecedented forms of global exchange, are coalescing into dangerous neocolonial conditions. This could be seen throughout the western world’s political races. There is a redundancy with very little advancement on the citizens rather the corporations benefit. We also see this with Europe’s treatment of its former colonies. Jameson argues that the first world culture has undergone a shift, transformation of immense proportions to be imagined “ in terms of an explosion, a prodigious expansion of culture throughout the social realm. This is potentially the “ third great original expansions of capitalism around the global.” We live in a society where the wealthiest individuals keep on getting wealthy and the poorest of people stay poor. Jameson’s manifesto predicts that the first world, especially the U.S. cultural orders are attaining an original epoch wherein consciousness is becoming threatened with an irrevocable and tragic fall into despair; this despair can be tempered, but only with a hysterical and addictive form of exhilaration. There is a further issue that we as a society are evolving into a society that is incapable of evaluating and interpreting our current history. Due to Globalization there is a growing notion that we must achieve by all means possible or our lives are rendered useless. Therefore this postmodern socio/ political/ economic culture must be courageously confronted and opposed in all its neocolonial dimensions and originality.
Postmodern Entrapment
The advent of postmodernism means that the first world citizen-subject has become caught in a strange, new, anti-narrative, escape from which requires fresh forms of perceiving and acting. The ending of the modernist period, of its conquests, slavery, colonizations, and resistances is not perceived as the foundation on which higher, morally evolved, and “postcolonial” order can evolve. With this ending, it has become more difficult for citizen-subjects to organize and fight such a monopolistic society. Through the means of culture, the citizen-subjects were able to resist these changes, with artists like Picasso and van Gogh whose works were derived from the artists’ alienation and distance from dominant cultural mores and forms. An example of this would be Parody, the art form that under modernism mimicked the dominant in order to challenge it, has become extinct. It has been replaced by a new aesthetic whose manifestation is replication. It is not currently possible for citizen-subjects to break through the net of ideological lines that make us subjects in culture. Under modernism although the oppression was more obvious, the movements were more easily formed. However, in today’s society we are not able to form such movements. This postmodern entrapment comprises our situation in the current crisis.
Textual Mutations
Jameson emphasizes, is “ not a matter of content any longer but of some more fundamental mutation” in the world. The effect of this fundamental mutation in culture has upon consciousness – or on what Jameson calls the “disposition” of the nationalist first world subject. He warns, we can observe “ a shift in the dynamics of cultural pathology” such that “the alienation” of the citizen-subject generated under previous social eras, has been “displaced” by what he calls the “fragmentation of the subject.” This fragmentation brings about “ the end of the Bourgeois ego or monad” of previous times, and will undoubtedly bring about “the end of the psychopathologies of that ego as well.” With the death of the bourgeois ego, the individual monad, the centered citizen-subject only makes way for the mutated birth that is postmodern subjectivity, a neocolonial psychic condition. Western subjectivity is wedged between a past that has abandoned it and a nonexistent future. This current state we are living in has people not looking in the past. There seems to be a pattern of our past repeating itself, while humanities’ inability to correct itself for the change of the future. We must take a stand and learn from what has transpired in order to have a bright future. Due to this new dominant culture we have in the West, there is an abundance of lost tradition that is fading everyday. The speed of the growth of Globalization has attributed to the demise of previous traditions.
The Amputation of Oppositional Consciousness
Under Postmodern globalization, art no longer functions as an instrument of social criticism and change. For example, Parody is an art form that requires the coexistence of inherited and dominant cultural norms and traditions, which it mimics, ridicules, and transforms. An onslaught of difference between normality and parody, the west’s aesthetic of resistance. Jameson also talks about the city structures of the 1950s in the US being grand and unique. However, the transformation of the 1980s with the focus then being on malls and shopping centers. This landscape development was in aid to change with the new order of globalization. With this shift from alienation to now a focus on the consumer, we have replaced the privacy to obtaining as much information as possible. It is a complete change to the way we as people perceived the world. This new influence and gear towards the consumer led to an expansion across the big cities to create even larger cities and even metropolises. Corporations are trying to obtain as much data on their customers as possible. In their place, panoply of heterogeneous aesthetic forms, ethoi, and possibility burdened and collapsed their internal structures, creating the new, postmodern aesthetic form “pastiche.” According to Jameson, both parody and pastiche are similar as both are the “imitation” of a mask, but in its metamorphosis from parody, pastiche has become the “neutral practice of such mimicry, without any of parody’s ulterior motives.” Postmodern aesthetic forms may appear to parody social norms. But functionally, this work can be understood as pastiche in function. Advanced capitalist territories today are being linked into varying fields of “stylistic and discursive heterogeneity without a norm.” This new territorialization disables all formerly dominant languages or understandings that might have been used to define the present diffusion of social reality; there are no controlling codes capable of mapping this mobile terrain. This means that US citizen-subjects live in an era of post literacy. That operates beyond older notions of language, writing, and language itself. Postmodern citizen-subjects become mesmerized, engaged, and charmed by the schizophrenic, metonymic psychic and material conditions around them. Because of today’s ability to gather information within a seconds notice, it is not also possible to receive the correct information or from a true source. Too often we are wanting to get the news the quickest even if it is from an unreliable source. Therefore people are gullible to speed over credibility.
Cognitive Mapping
First world subjects have lost their “positions as individual and collective subjects” in the social order, lost their capacities to “act and struggle,” to speak a single language, to represent through parody if such citizen-subjects have become immobilized by “spatial as well as social confusion, then it becomes imperative to identify yet another “moment of truth” under globalization. The formerly centered and legitimated bourgeois citizen-subject of the first world is set adrift under the imperatives of late-capitalist cultural conditions, if such citizen-subjects have become anchorless, disoriented, incapable of mapping their relative positions inside multinational capitalism, lost in the reverberating endings of colonial expansionism, the first world subjectivity under the domination of neocolonial drives in which the subject must face the very “limits of figuration,” then the first world subject enters the kind of psychic terrain formerly inhabited by the historically decentered citizen-subject: the colonized, the outsider, the queer, the subaltern, the marginalized. Jameson also claims that it is important for citizen-subjects to learn how to map these events so our psychic and materialistic views coordinate with the local, national, and international realities. By learning how to map such events we will be better abled to formulate groups and movements to counteract such postmodern dominant cultures. It is important to gather as much information as possible so that citizen-subjects around the world can band together.
Cognitive Mapping or Social Mapping is important because it charts social events as it happens. An example of social mapping is the movement of women of color. Feminists are in need of change from the male dominated society, but for women of color it is even against the female white population. This is because of white women wanting the same equality however, only in a white dominated society. Therefore this ongoing struggle not only within male vs. female society, but also within the feminist side as well. Feminist of color identify their struggle with the movements of culture, racial, sex, gender, class, and power.
There are three main techniques that are used for Cognitive Mapping: Casual mapping, Semantic mapping, and Concept mapping. Casual mapping is an individual’s set of perspectives is a system of personal constructs and individuals use their own personal constructs to understand and interpret events. Semantic mapping also known as idea mapping is used to explore an idea without the constraints of a superimposed structure. A concept map is a graphical representation where the nodes represent concepts, and links represent the relationship between concepts. In essence a Cognitive map whether casual, semantic, or concept are a structure of a thought process. (Dagan, 2015)
Freedom from the Prison House: A Dissident form of Globalization
All citizen-subjects are becoming strangely permeated, transformed, and marginalized. The industrial working class, also known as the Proletariat, can never be viewed again as the “subject of history” rather now people of the third world, people of color, of lesbians, gays, queers, women, or the subordinate. Jameson fears in part are true; that the first world is going through a democratization of oppression that on one can escape. It encompasses people of race, gender, sex, class, and culture. It is growing evermore difficult for such citizen-subject to organize due to the oppressors growing in wealth. This is why the wealthy class controls the politicians in order to keep the taxes for the wealthiest individuals low.
Feminist of Color and Postmodern Resistance
The social movement of the US third world feminism took place during the 1960s, 70s, and 80s. It didn’t just bring to life the fight for feminism, but oppositional activity. This movement didn’t only effect the movements within the US, but globally as well. Feminist began to unite through two different understandings of domination, subordination, and effective resistance. Gayatri Spivak coined “ hegemonic feminist theory against the “US third world feminist theory.” U.S. third world feminism arose from the very discourses denying, permitting, and producing difference. It is the ability to identify to generate the activities of new citizen-subject, and another model for self-conscious production of resistance. The Civil Rights movement included: the women’s movement, ethnic, racial, sex, gender, class, and human liberation. Althusser suggested that all citizens endure ideological subjection. Althusser’s theory of ideology: to identify forms of ideology in opposition and by the suppressed seeking to break free of the dominant social order. There are five principle categories: equal rights, revolutionary, supremacist, separatist, and differential. Differential consciousness aids in reversing the effects of domination by giving structure.
Situating History
There were huge differences between the white women’s movement and the women of color movement. Women of color have had a far greater struggle. Francis Beale named the second wave of Feminism “a white women’s movement.” This is due because the white women want equality to the men, however within a white dominated society. According to Audre Lorde, she summarized the white women’s movement when they called for unity they were misnaming it for a deeper and real need for homogeneity. The big question we are left with is: how did this systematic repression occur within an academic system that is aimed at recognizing new forms of knowledge?
Feminism's Great Hegemonic Model
Showalter had a three-stage structure that was reiterated throughout the 1980s text of hegemonic feminist theory and criticism. First phase of matching the male’s contribution to society. Also known as “Liberal Feminism” displaying women as fully equal to men. The second is phase: The importance of women and their work within the family, class, and other women. This is also known as “Marxism feminism.” The third phase is: movement away from the male dependency, unlike the first two phases. Known as “cultural or radical feminism.” Despite the three phases, this also led to difficulties because it didn’t address racism, which made it difficult for feminist of color to advance equally. Which then led to Sargent adding the fourth phase of “socialist feminism.” Summing up of the four phases we go from “women are the equal of men, women are different from men, women are superior to men, and finally women are racially divided.” Women of color were considered a border culture due to the advancement of white feminism. Feminist of color identified with the movements of cultural, racial, sex, gender, class, and power.
The Theory and Method of Oppositional Consciousness in the Postmodern World
The feminist movement not only had struggles of gender domination, but also struggles against race, sex, national, economic, cultural, and social. Cultural topography is a critical set of points when individuals and groups aim to transform dominant and oppressive powers. Mapping of the ideological places where oppositional activity has taken place. This new topography is not necessarily feminist in nature, but it comprises a history of oppositional consciousness. As Jameson points out, under postmodern transnationalization new forms of resistance and oppression must be recognized. The following five-location topography consciousness demonstrate hegemonic feminist political strategies to be expressions of the forms of oppositional consciousness that were utilized also by profoundly varying subordinated constituencies under earlier modes of capitalist production. The Equal-Rights form claimed the major difference as only exterior physical differences. However, It also had recognized that all humans are created equal. It was considered to be Liberal feminism. The Revolutionary form identifies, legitimizes, and intensifies their differences. Its goal is to lead society to function without the domination/subordination power axis. A revolutionary organization example would be the Black Panthers Party. It is also known as Marxist and Socialist feminisms. The Supremacist form not only claimed their differences but assert their differences due to evolution and they are the dominant person. The mission of supremacist practitioners of oppositional consciousness is to provide the social order a higher ethical and moral vision, and consequently more effective leadership. The Separatist form recognized the different brands and their inferiority, thus wanting to be separate from society. It is similar to the ideals of a Utopian society. The Differential form of consciousness and social movement had no adoption of the other four forms. Represents the variant, they shift from one women’s group to the next. It was difficult not to reestablish an oppressive regime while freeing itself. The differential form also had the ability to pick and choose one or more forms, between the four forms depending on the situation.
The Differential Form of Consciousness and Social Movement
When the differential form of U.S. third world feminism is deployed, these “differences do not become opposed to each other.” Differential consciousness and social movement thus are linked to the necessity to stake out and hold solid identity and political positions in the social world. The differential mode of social movement and consciousness depends on the practitioner’s ability to read the current situation of power and self- consciously choosing and adopting the ideological stand best suited to push back its configurations. Merle Woo asserted that U.S. third world feminism is “created in a community, bonded not by color, sex, or class, but love and the common goal for the liberation of mind, heart, and spirit.”
Differential Coalitional Consciousness: The End of Domination
Differential consciousness and social movement comprise the radical form of cognitive mapping. There are five different categories of Consciousness: Equal-Rights, Revolutionary, Supremacist, Separatist, and Differential. These are important tools used by social movements to combat injustice. There is a new space in cyber space, giving transcultural, transgender, transsexual, and transnational new leaps to begin their enactment against oppositional praxis. Today, the differential is studied along with feminism, race, ethnicity, sex and marginality studies. these shared theories come together through the method of oppositional consciousness. We can only achieve global transcultural social justice through means of recognition and practice of these forms resistance.
Bibliography:
Connor, S. (2004). The Cambridge Companion to Postmodernism. Cambridge University.
Sandoval, C. (2000). Theory out of Bounds: Methodology of the Oppressed. University of Minnesota.
Dagan, R. (2015). Cognitive Mapping : Definition, Examples, and Resources. From: http://richarddagan.com/cogmap.php
