mihai stanescu translated by irina ionescu & nadia marcovici |
news flash: “In Romania the police force has been left behind by a group of protesters having claims of solving certain social problems. The Romanian government is still standing up for the idea of not resorting to violence and of its availability to dialogue. The prime minister is reasserting....”
I turn off the tv, “the eyes chewing gum” as Frank Lloyd Wright named it.
I am impressed: how could the protesters (someone breaking the law) pass by the law defenders? It seems to me that the most adequate explanation of all is the most general one : the violation of law in the name of promised and promiscuous liberty of opinion. In other words, an aggressive expression of what we like to call “POST-MODERNISMThe post-modern epoch develops an aura of multiple, almost infinite definitions around things, ideas, words. All of them legitimate, all of them simultaneously accepted, all of them “good”. The impossibility of the unique perspective. In such a polysemantic network which tends to include (unless it has done it already) all things, any attempt to establish a hierarchy, a more or less formal order “smells like” dictatorship, like totalitarianism. That is how the defiance of law appears. Or, rather its becoming out-of-date. It is slightly out-of fashion to speak about bipolar (good/ wrong) hierarchies and it is even dangerous to do it in the presence of the individual who exists in post-modernism only by his daily life. You cannot speak to him about Jacques Derrida, deconstruction, etc, as he has no “cultural proof”.
the law, being distorted, the message of the conditional type becomes violent and urges to aggressiveness. You prove to be aggressive each time you try to select from a series out of the unpredictably many meanings of the world. Because any selection follows the pattern of determination and there is an implicitly hidden marginalization hereHence, I think, the modern society neurosis. And then, the difference with the solutions found by the modernist/ avant-garde movement, anterior to post-modernism, Frederic Jameson, comparing the modern architecture with the post-modern one, remarked the violent way in which the first one carries into effect the differentiation: International style monuments.- it radically separates the New Utopian space of modern city from city’s chaotic and crammed structure which is explicitly repudiated while a post-modern building is tacitly integrated in the environment to which it belongs due to its resemblance to it. Thus, the need to experiment alternative solutions. The ideal of King Arthur was to level all the strident differences. This idea becomes peremptorily necessary from the perspective of the dialogue, being the only chance to offer a new dimension to the space of interdisciplinary vagueness that is creative only in its essence and ambiguous in its form and meaning.
this world can be “inhabited” only if we find an intrinsic order, otherwise there is too risky for human beings of our epoch who are already sick. Hence, the over-saturated need to specialize and to basically clarify the terms of the speech in every form of dialogue. The terms of meta-theories appeared and obligatorily need to develop under this very pressure. Because we are no longer aggressed by imposed orders and thematic, rigid limitations. Cultural studies use the concept of “culture” in the broadest sense possible, which covers the entire society’s lifestyle. This image looks like that of a circle with neither center nor boarder. It seems only an appearance and to lead us to the boarders of human imagination mainly because any attempt to attach a practical use to it proved to be an absurd thing. Nothing is left out, nothing is given a privileged treatment. We can “re-place” any term claiming the semantic equivalence.Anyway, pay attention! all this doesn’t derive only from man’s absolute possession in his relation with his intellectual products. Boarders of the speech, which have been re-placed in its center, can generate other violent elements: terms such as: “phalocracy”, “minorities rights”, “liberalism” generate different orders and new divisions. In other words, post-modernism creates “in the shadow”, its own hierarchies, its own aggressive potential and implicitly its own manipulative potential either through judgements such as: “POST HOC, ERGO PROPTER HOC”, or through metaphoric discourse.
given the conditions above, the theme of “Virtualia”’s present issue appears more than necessary: meta-discourse, seen by the author of this text on the one hand, as an attempt of objectivity in order to obtain the sublimation of impulses that appear once the individual liberty has been expressed, and, on the other hand, as a way of re-adjusting the cultural universe to the intrinsic spatial dimension of today’s man.
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