CULLENBERG, AMARIGLIO, RUCCIO:
"Be that as it may, we note again that for many literary and cultural
theorists like Jameson, the realm of the postmodern denotes rampant
commodification, unchecked by oppositional forces--avant-gardes, say--that
find themselves subverted or even co-opted by the very power and allure of
the market. And, again, this world structured according to the object-life
of the commodity has been thought to have received an enormous recent boost
by the emergence of new information technologies, especially the internet.
According to this view, computers have made commodity time and space
ultimately traversable in ways unthinkable for past generations of
producers and consumers. In addition to the use of computer technology in
such "post-Fordist" production methods as "flexible specialization," it is
claimed that one need not leave oneís chair (in front of oneís screen, of
course) to be bombarded by commodity images and the cornucopia of goods
that exist and are transacted in cyberspace. This obliteration of previous
constraints of time and geographical location in buying and selling
(lowering considerably transactions costs and reducing to rubble other past
barriers to the international flow of financial capital and goods)
reconstructs all notions and experiences pertaining to community and
nation, hence the idea of the "global economy" that is said to be the
hallmark of the postmodern.
CULLENBERG, AMARIGLIO, RUCCIO:
Lyotardís "report on knowledge," as he calls it, is concerned largely with
two interrelated issues. One is rejection and (hoped-for) disappearance of
what he terms the "grand metanarratives" that have structured much thought
and practice since the Enlightenment. Hence, to the degree that "modernity"
may be said to be contemporaneous with the rise and spread of Enlightenment
thinking, Lyotard is offering a diagnosis of life after modernism. These
metanarratives have ranged in their overarching scope from the promise of
political independence and human liberation through representative
democracy and/or the victory of the masses to the claims for the efficacy
of scientific knowledge as the harbinger of social progress through victory
over a now mostly tamed nature and through social engineering. Lyotard
calls particular attention to those metanarratives, like liberalism and
Marxism, that have held out the hope for total change in society and
culture (and economy) through advocacy of particular principles and
perspectives. In both liberalism and Marxism, for example, there has been
the tendency to measure human progress partly in terms of the ability of
humankind to harness technology and science to human designs, most
especially the end of political oppression and/or economic exploitation.