WESTERN WORLD & THE INDIVIDUAL
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How do postmodern texts respond to the problem of the individual? On the whole, pessimistically. Douglas Coupland’s Generation X relates three twenty-something’s revolt against their lives as economic units in the office world. Their response is to move to the desert, take on ‘McJobs’ (low pay, low prestige, low responsibility), and distinguish themselves by a blend of pre-existing styles. In the stories they tell each other, to restore a sense of personal narrative and meaning to their lives, they obsessively quote their culture or envisage its apocalyptic destruction: the closest we can get to individuality, they seem to say, is to be a different collage of the same ingredients. Tarentino’s Pulp Fiction, another favourite pomo text, literally derives its unique style: John Travolta’s character echoes his persona in earlier films, such as Saturday Night Fever (1987); Samuel Jackson’s hairstyle is reminiscent of early 1970s blaxportation; the gangsters’ black suits and ties are imported from Tarentino’s Reservoir Dogs, which imported them from 1960s movies, such as Oceans 11; the restaurant Jack Rabbit Slims and the diner in the first scene draw from 50s decor and personalities; and in the middle of all this, we find contemporary Los Angeles and contemporary drugs.
Postmodern theory openly abhors individualism. In his eleven catenas of postmodernism, Ibah Hassan lists "Self-less-ness, Depth-less-ness":
Postmodernism vacates the traditional self... Critics have noted the "loss of self" in modern literature, but it was originally Nietzche who declared the "subject" "only a fiction"... Thus postmodernism suppresses or disperses and sometimes tries to recover the "deep" romantic ego, which remains under dire suspicion in post-structuralist circles as a "totalizing principle." (Hassan, 505)
Post-structuralism draws on constructionism (another of Hassan’s catenas) to argue its point. In "Constructing the Subject, Deconstructing the Text", Catherine Belsey argues for the inconsistency and contradictoriness of identity, rooted in seeing the subject as a construct:
If it is to participate in the society into which it is bornà the child must enter into the symbolic order, the set of signifying systems of culture... Subsequently it learns to recognize itself in a series of subject-positions... which are the positions from which discourse is intelligible to itself and others. ‘Identity’, subjectivity, is thus a matrix of subject positions, which may be inconsistent or even in contradiction with one another. (596)
Even these categories of subject-positions are held as suspect in post-structural theory: they inscribe us into society, into the symbolic order, but are by no means fixed, as Margaret Ferguson notes in "Juggling the Categories of Race, Class and Gender: Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko" (162).
At the same time as post-structuralism upsets traditional notions of the individual, subjectivity is a favourite discussion point, especially in fields such as feminism and post-colonialism. The reclamation of denied subjectivity is also part of the postmodern agenda. In the catena "Decanonization", Hassan writes:
In the largest sense, this applies to all canons, all conventions of authority... "subversion" may take other.. benevolent forms such as minority mvements, or the feminization of culture, which also require decanonization. (505)
This restoration of subjectivity is not identical with traditional individualism. As Eagleton notes, the ‘Transcendental Subject’ has invariably been the white, privileged subject. In "Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism", Gayatri Spivak is hostile to the "Western cult of the individual" as she sets about reinscribing the subjectivity of the Bertha as the native Jamaican woman in Jane Eyre:
As the female individualist, not-quite/not-male, articulates herself in shifting relationship to what is at stake, the "native female" as such (within discourse, as a signifier) is excluded from any share in this emerging norm. (244, my emphasis)
Thus postmodernism, and especially post-structuralism (which is perhaps pomo’s Linguistics Department), does not take up an opposite stance to the capitalist love of the individual but modifies and compensates for it as alchemy compensated for Christianity. Rather than the Great White Individual, who exists at the price of other’s individuality, postmodernism offers the individual as a collage, a variation on a limited set of themes, and post-structuralism specifies this as a matrix of subject-positions in which the subjectivity (rather than individuality, or uniqueness) of all subjects can be restored (rather than only that of those privileged by the economic system).
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