Tantrum of the Intellectuals

Featherstone suggests that postmodernism is in part a “loss of confidence on the part of the intellectuals in the universal potential of their project.” Thus, postmodern theory is marked by “tendencies toward indeterminacies , the recognition of openness, pluralism, randomness, eclecticism, incoherence, paralogism, intertextuality, the primacy of the many over the one,” as well as ” immanences , the acknowledgement of our innerworldliness, our own opaque symbolic self-constitution, our entrapment in a dissemination and diffusion of signs that derealize history and all the other meta-narratives.”

Postmodernism is thus the intellectuals’ own loss of confidence in the superiority of Western civilization, and in their authority to establish the standards that will lead to universal progress. Structurally, this loss of confidence is linked to the loss of status of intellectuals in contemporary culture. In part, this is a matter of “the lack of use that today’s state has for legitimation to reproduce the structure of domination,” and on the other hand with “the massive expansion in the production of cultural goods which they can no longer control nor indeed are consulted about as ‘gallery owners, publishers, TV managers,’ and other ‘capitalists’ or ‘bureacrats,’ the ‘agents of the market’ undermine things” (the quotations are from Bauman).

Once theologians provided the intellectual support for Western civilization, but they were toppled in the early modern period. Now another circulation of elites is underway, as secular intellectuals are toppled by new intellectuals. Just think of the conflicts between “legitimate press” and “blogosphere”; or of the differences between academic journals and web discussion sites; or of the comparative cultural influence of Matt Groening and your ten most important liteary critics. It’s just not fair.