Postmodern Political Theory
Jean
Baudrillard “Disneyworld
Company”
Leslie Paul Thiele. “Modernity and
Postmodernity”
Modernity (Thiele)

Challenge to Tradition and Authority, by
 The Renaissance
 The Protestant Reformation
 The Scientific Revolution (against Dogma) (16th &
17th centuries)
 The Industrial Revolution/s
 The Bourgeois Revolution/s
Assumption: “The order of the universe is… accessible to
reason and observation” (Thiele)
 Method
 Faith in:
 Science (to master the Universe)
 Humanity
 Progress
 Voluntarism
Jean François Lyotard
The Postmodern Condition (1979)
Lyotard defined Postmodernity as
“incredulity toward metanarratives,” or those
all-encompassing stories that account for
the ultimate meaning of the world...
“What, then, is the postmodern? (…) It is
undoubtedly a part of the modern. All that has
been received, if only yesterday… must be
suspected” (79)
Rejection of Science,
Humanism, and Progress...



Because of the secret Will to Power and
MASTERY over the Universe (and Human
Beings) that Modernity embodies
Discussion of the COSTS that Science,
Humanism, and Progress carry with them...
(pollution, biological manipulation,
destruction of species and danger of selfannihilation of the species…)
Individuality, reason, and autonomy are put
in question
(Some) Roots of Postmodernism




Nietzsche - Heidegger
Einstein’s theory of Relativity
The Holocaust/Hiroshima/Stalinism
(French) Structuralism



Anthropology (Levi-Strauss)
Sociology
Linguistics


The Linguistic “turn”
Linguistic, Cultural, Economic, Historical,
Political, Class, Spatial… structures determine
our perception, identities, and choices
(French) Postructuralism



Late ’60s
Reject “Grand Theories” & Science
Postructuralists engage with
“specific analyses of how particular
forms of power achieve particular
effects within particular historical
periods” (Thiele 81)
Jacques Derrida -Deconstruction



Assumption: Language CREATES reality
Utilization of the rhetorical features of a
text to undermine its manifest content
or argument
Exposition of the self-contradictory
forces present in any attempt to
conceptualize categories or structures
Power







Is EVERYWHERE (Michel Foucault)
Is creative/productive
Multiplicity of territories of power.
We are all simultaneously subject to power while
exercising power on others.
Power= Spider’s Web without a spider (Thiele)
Nietzschean themes: Power frames us a SOUL and
chains us through the soul (Domination works by
telling us WHAT and WHO we are…)
Domination becomes much more effective when it
is internalized (for you think you are freely
choosing, while in fact you are “choosing”
whatever hegemonic structures determine you to
do…)
Postmodern political theory addresses
other dimensions of politics


Thiele: “Politics is not only about how
individual needs become satisfied… Politics
also plays a role in determining how these
needs are created in the first place, how
they become articulated, and what sort of
relationships form around them.” (74)
Needs/Interests/rights/liberties/identities
not only influence politics but result from
the political
Modern & Postmodern (political?) theory
Individuals are seen as
independent, stable,
free, and rational
agents (agency)
Individuals have and
manage power
voluntarily
Individuals pursue the
satisfaction of their
needs and interests
Individuals transform the
world
Power is an effect of
structures
Individuals are effects
of power that emerge
from a changing,
unstable, and
complex environment
(agency?)
Concern with identities
as defined by power
relations
(trans/post/hybrid)
Modern & Postmodern (political?) theory
The meaning of the entire
Universe centered on man
Laws & regularities
Progress
Conscious & rational political
processes
Focus on relationships
Universal Truth (& universal
method/s)
Theory mirrors reality
Hobbes, Locke
Humankind is an accident
Humankind goes nowhere/lack
of meaning
Contingency/Chance
Unconscious processes
Focus on the Self
Perspectivist (Nietzschean) denial
of (epistemological or ethical)
common foundations
Theory ≈ Literature (all theories
are just narratives)
Irony
Lyotard, Baudrillard, Derrida
(Foucault?)
Greek
Christian Modern
Postmodern
-Cyclical time
-Centered on the
Polis/Agora
-Emphasis on virtue
and beauty
-Life is meaningful if
it is recognized by
others/transcendenc
e
-Truth≈Puzzle
needs to be
reconstructed
(fragments) (i.e.
Socratic method,
tragedy)
-Linear History
(with an end)
-Centered on
God
-Afterlife
-Sin
-Salvation
through Faith
-Truth is
absolute and
revealed
(Bible)
-History is just a
narrative/illusion/ef
fect of
power/language
(Post-History)
-Progress?
-Reason?
-Science?
-Truth is
constructed/effe
ct of power
-Irony
-Agonism
-Linear (or
dialectical) History
(Progress)
-Centered on
Man/individual
-Material
realization of
humankind (Man
becomes the Sun
for Man)
-Reason
-Truth is
discovered
(science/method)
Jean Baudrillard (essays)




19291966 Ph.D. “The system of objects”
1972 University of Paris, Nanterre.
Influence of Guy Debord’sThe Society of
the Spectacle

(Capitalism turns into a spectacle)




Simulacra and simulation
Viruses
Reality? Virtual reality, hyperreality
Physics (black holes)
Jean Baudrillard: Disneyworld Company
(1996)
Downtown New York
“…Transforming the pornographers and the
prostitutes, like the factory workers in
Smurfland, into extras [figurants]in their own
world,metamorphosed into identical figures,
museumified, disneyfied. By the way, do you
know how General Schwarzkopf, the great
Gulf War strategist, celebrated his victory? He
had a huge party at Disney World. These
festivities in the palace of the imaginary were
a worthy conclusion to such a virtual war.”
“…the Disney enterprise goes beyond the
imaginary.”
Capturing reality  Spectacle

“Disney, the precursor, the grand initiator of the
imaginary as virtual reality, is now in the process
of capturing all the real world to integrate it into
its synthetic universe, in the form of a vast
"reality show" where reality itself becomes a
spectacle [vient se donner en spectacle], where
the real becomes a theme park. The transfusion
of the real is like a blood transfusion, except that
here it is a transfusion of real blood into the
exsanguine universe of virtuality. After the
prostitution of the imaginary, here is now the
hallucination of the real in its ideal and simplified
version.”
Replicas & Simulacra

“At Disney World in Orlando, they are
even building an identical replica of the
Los Angeles Disneyland, as a sort of
historical attraction to the second degree,
a simulacrum to the second power. It is
the same thing that CNN did with the Gulf
War: a prototypical event which did not
take place, because it took place in real
time, in CNN's instantaneous mode…”
No real world anymore…

“Everything is possible, and everything is recyclable
in the polymorphous universe of virtuality. Everything
can be bought over. There is no reason why Disney
would not take over the human genome, which, by the
way, is already being resequenced, to turn it into a
genetic show. In the end [au fond], they would
cryogenize the entire planet, just like Walt Disney
himself who decided to be cryogenized in a nitrogen
solution, waiting for some kind of resurrection in the real
world. But there is no real world anymore, not even for
Walt Disney.”
“The New World Order is in a Disney mode.”
An Epcot version of History?

“Disney wins at yet another level. It is not only
interested in erasing the real by turning it into a
three-dimensional virtual image with no depth,
but it also seeks to erase time by synchronizing
all the periods, all the cultures, in a single
traveling motion, by juxtaposing them in a single
scenario. Thus, it marks the beginning of real,
punctual and unidimensional time, which is also
without depth. No present, no past, no future,
but an immediate synchronism of all the places
and all the periods in a single atemporal
virtuality.”
Vanishing or disappearance of
history
Meaning results from relations within a whole. Outside that whole,
there is no meaning
 We have been so “liberated” (=atoms) that we no longer have
either place, meaning, or History (thrown in the emptiness of the
Virtual)
 The “referential orbit of things” is broken.
 Both individuals and events move in the void
(People get killed in mass scale, we die, but nobody cares… There is no
tragedies anymore. We all become “mere life”)
 “A certain type of slowness or deliberation (i.e. a certain speed, but
not too much), a certain distance, yet not too much, a certain
liberation (the energy of rupture and change), but not too much - all
these are necessary for this condensation, for the signifying
crystallization of events to take place, one that we call history - this
type of coherent unfolding of causes and effects we call the real.”
 History requires duration, but our obsession with “real time”
eliminates it…

The Spectacle

“…reality itself, the world itself, with its
frenzy of cloning has already been
transformed into an interactive
performance, some kind of Lunapark for
ideologies, technologies, works,
knowledge, death, and even destruction.”
Post-historical Utopias

“Disney realizes de facto such an atemporal
utopia by producing all the events, past or
future, on simultaneous screens, and by
inexorably mixing all the sequences as they
would or will appear to a different civilization
than ours. But it is already ours. It is more and
more difficult for us to imagine the real, History,
the depth of time, or three-dimensional space,
just as before it was difficult, from our real world
perspective, to imagine a virtual universe or the
fourth dimension.”
From the mid 70s on…

Neo-Conservative policies (structural
adjustment, militarization)
&

Postmodern thinking