Democracy & Nature, Vol. 7, No.

1, 2001

Dawns, Twilights, and Transitions:

Postmodern Theories, Politics, and
Challenges
STEVEN BEST & DOUGLAS KELLNER

ABSTRACT The postmodern turn which has so marked social and cultural theory also involves
conflicts between modern and postmodern politics. In this essay, we articulate the differences
between modern and postmodern politics and argue against one-sided positions that dogmatically
reject one tradition or the other in favor of partisanship for either the modern or the postmodern.
Arguing for a politics of alliance and solidarity, we claim that this project is best served by drawing
on the most progressive elements of both the modern and postmodern traditions. Developing a new
politics involves overcoming the limitations of certain versions of modern politics and postmodern
identity politics in order to develop a politics of alliance and solidarity equal to the challenges of the
new millennium.

What’s going on just now? What’s happening to us? What is this world,
this period, this precise moment in which we are living?
Michel Foucault
In the past two decades, the foundational claims of modern politics have been
attacked by postmodern perspectives. The grand visions of emancipation in liber-
alism, Marxism, and other political perspectives of the modern era have been
deemed excessively grandiose and totalizing, occluding differences and
neglecting more specific oppressions of individuals and disparate groups. The
liberal project of providing universal rights and freedoms for all has been chal-
lenged by groups struggling for their own rights, advancing their own particular
interests, and championing the construction of their unique cultures and identi-
ties. The Marxian project of revolution, worldwide and global in scope, has been
replaced in some quarters by more localized struggles and more modest and
reformist goals. The result is a variety of new forms of postmodern politics whose
discourses, practices, and effects are beginning to register and come under critical
scrutiny.
The contemporary world is undergoing major transformations in science, tech-
nology, economics, culture, and everyday life. This ‘great transformation’
(Polyani), comparable in scope to the changes produced by the industrial revolu-
tion, is moving toward a postindustrial, infotainment, and biotech mode of global
capitalism, organized around new information, computer, communications, and
genetic technologies. Scientific and technological revolution are key elements of
the global restructuring of capitalism, which includes the growth of far-reaching
transnational corporations; intensified competition on a planetary scale; moving
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DOI: 10.1080/10855660020028791
 Steven Best & Douglas Kellner

industry and manufacturing to the developing world, while investment flows into
the overdeveloped world; heightened exploitation; corporate downsizing; and
greater levels of unemployment, inequality, and insecurity. Yet the scientific–
technological–economic revolutions of our time also involve the advent of novel
forms of labor, politics, culture, and everyday life which contain new economic
opportunities, openings for political transformation, and a wealth of innovative
products and technologies which might improve the human condition.
Within politics today, one observes a broad expanse of phenomena, many novel,
ranging from local struggles over power and identity to new forms of global poli-
tics. The latter respond to powerful new forces such as transnational corporations,
the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization,
and formations such as the European Union and the North American Free Trade
Alliance. The global economy and polity thus exhibits novel structures and alli-
ances that in many cases surpass the power of the nation-state that emerged as the
key institution of the modern political order—although the state continues to be a
stronger political force than some theories of globalization indicate. In addition,
violence and political fragmentation in the former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia,
Asia, Africa, and numerous other regions such as the Middle East have created a
new world disorder based on intense ethnic and territorial rivalries.
In the United States, the ‘New Deal’ of the 1930s and the ‘Great Society’ of the
1960s have devolved into a dysfunctional welfare state which in the 1990s degener-
ated further into a disciplinary workfare camp, as millions continue to fall through
tears in the ‘social safety net’ and incarcerated in the prison industrial complex.
Throughout the globe, neo-liberalism has replaced Social Democracy and with the
collapse of the Soviet Union, global capitalism and its hypercommodified McCulture
are now hegemonic, confronted with no alternative historical bloc. Yet novel forms
of spectacle and technopolitics in the spheres of culture and new media are creating
nascent public spheres and altering the locus and substance of communication and
contestation. For decades, politics has been played out significantly in broadcast
media, and now with the Internet and cyberculture, new public spheres and domains
of political information, debate, and struggle are arising.
Hence, the present conjuncture is highly ambiguous, positioning those in the
overdeveloped Western and Northern areas between the era of modernity and a
new epoch for which the term postmodernity has been coined. At the same time,
people in other parts of the world are still living in premodern social and cultural
forms, and on the whole the developing world exists in a contradictory matrix of
premodern, modern, and postmodern forms. The rapid transformation of the world
generates new dangers such as the potential loss of the modern traditions of
humanism, the Enlightenment, and radical social movements, as well as innovative
possibilities, such as emerge from new technologies, new identities, and new polit-
ical struggles. The old theories, concepts, and modes of thought and analysis will
only go so far in theorizing, analyzing, and mapping the emerging constellations,
thus requiring novel modes of thought, strategies, discourses, and practices. 1

1. For analysis of transformations in theory, politics, culture, science, and technology, see Steven
Best and Douglas Kellner, Postmodern Theory: Critical Interrogations (London: MacMillan and
New York: Guilford Press, 1991) and The Postmodern Turn (New York: Guilford Press, 1997).

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Indeed, the contemporary terrain shows a mutation in political thought and

practice that parallels and is informed by changes in theory. For us, the concept of
the ‘postmodern’ serves as a marker to highlight the new, to call attention to
discontinuities and ruptures, and to signal that an extensive range of novelties are
appearing which require fresh analyses, theories, and practices. But for the post-
modern to have theoretical and political gravity, it must be linked with the
tumultuous metamorphoses of the day and given concrete substance and force.2

From Modern to Postmodern Theory and Politics

Today the revolutionary project stands accused before the tribunal of
history—accused of having failed, of having engendered a new aliena-
tion. This amounts to recognizing that the ruling society has proved
capable of defending itself, on all levels of reality, much better than
revolutionaries expected. Not that it has become more tolerable. Revo-
lution has to be reinvented, that’s all.
Internationale situationniste No. 6 (August 1991)
As capitalism was undergoing dramatic socio-economic, scientific, and techno-
logical changes, a paradigm shift was underway in the realms of theory, the arts,
science, and culture at large. By the 1980s, there were intense polemics over the
importance of the postmodern turn, with some celebrating postmodern discourse
and culture as an advance over moribund modern forms, while others attacked
postmodern theory and artifacts as degenerate and regressive. Many, especially
the older generation, went on with business as usual, ignoring the massive
changes taking place and the controversies over their significance.
In the realm of theory, the postmodern turn consists of a movement away from
the mechanistic and positivistic worldview of modern science, along with a repu-
diation of Enlightenment optimism, faith in reason, and emphasis on transcultural
values and human nature. Postmodernists typically reject foundationalism and
transcendental subjectivities within theory, mechanism and positivism in science,
and the modernist emphases on innovation and originality in art. With the belief
that modern theories and politics have become reductive, illusory, and arrogant,
various postmodern theorists, artists, and activists emphasize counter-values of
multiplicity and difference, anti-realism, aesthetic irony and appropriation,
ecological perspectives, and a proliferation of competing forms of politics.
2. Few discussions link the transformations to both wide-ranging scientific and technological
revolutions and the global restructuring of capitalism. Many discourses of the postmodern
largely make shifts in technology responsible for the rupture with modernity, as in Baudril-
lard (1983a and 1993) who neglects the significance of the reorganization of the economy.
While Jameson (1984 and 1991), Harvey (1989), and others relate postmodern culture to
transformations of capitalism, they tend to downplay the roles of scientific and technological
revolution. Others, like Lyotard (1984), interpret the ‘postmodern condition’ largely through
mutations of discourse and culture. We argue that if notions of postmodernity, or a postmodern
condition, are to have any force, they must receive a socio-historical grounding in analysis of
the conjuncture of scientific and technological revolution and the global restructuring of capi-
talism.

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As with postmodern theory, there is no one ‘postmodern politics’, but rather a

conflicting set of positions that emerges from the ambiguities of social change
and multiple postmodern theoretical perspectives. Yet the different categories of
postmodern politics are not merely conceptual distinctions, but are actual polit-
ical tendencies played out in the public sphere, in the universities, in the
workplace, and in everyday life. Thus, as new technologies transform every
aspect of life, as culture plays a more crucial role in domains from the economy
to personal identity, and as capital creates a new global economy and new
syntheses of the global and the local abound, politics too takes on new forms and
content.
Generally characterized, the project of modern politics was to define and
implement universal goals like freedom, equality, and justice in an attempt to
transform institutional structures of domination. Modern politics emerged from
the Enlightenment project of subjecting to critique by the new norms of reason all
forms of authority and all existing institutions. Modern politics presupposed a
democratic public sphere where individuals and social groups could discuss polit-
ical problems and choices and intervene practically in public affairs. The modern
political project involved attempts to discern basic human rights, the common
good and universal values, and to provide institutional guarantees that allow
democratic rights, discussion, and consensus.
Thus, the American Revolution declared the universal rights of ‘all people’ to
be ‘self-evident truths’ as revealed by the light of Reason. The French Revolution
championed the universal ‘Rights of Man’ on the basis of liberté, egalité, frater-
nité and shortly thereafter Mary Wollstonecraft published a treatise Vindication
of the Rights of Women.3 Attempting to realize these universal appeals beyond the
limiting context of bourgeois class relations, Marx urged that the ‘Workers of the
World Unite!’ to create an international politics of solidarity designed to over-
throw bourgeois property forms. In the Americas and then in Africa, Asia, and
throughout the non-Western world, national liberation movements emerged
which challenged colonialism and sought to bring the promises of modern
democracy and liberty to areas of the world sunk in oppression. Simon Bolivar’s
struggles for Latin American freedom, the slave revolts of the Caribbean, and
Jose Marti’s vision of Nuestra America, free of colonial domination, articulated
the yearnings unleashed by the modern project and attempts to realize its prom-
ises, where later liberation movements claimed that only socialism can redeem
the sufferings of the ‘wretched of the Earth’ and realize the promises of
modernity.
Yet the promises and yearnings of modernity and modern politics were seldom
realized. Workers were exploited throughout the modern epoch by rapacious
capital; women were only able to gain democratic rights by the early decades of
the 20th century and continued to suffer patriarchal domination; people of color
have been systematically discriminated against by the forces of racism; and the
developing countries continued to be oppressed by the imperialist powers.
Despite war, poverty, hunger, economic depression, and fierce forms of

3. Mary Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Woman (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1975
[1792]).

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subjugation and suffering, modern politics was optimistic in its outlook; indeed,
it was often religious in its teleological faith that the progressive logic of history
would soon be realized. Enlightenment faith in a better future inspired liberalism
and Marxism alike. Thus, modern politics was informed by strong normative
values and utopian visions of a world of universal freedom, equality, and
harmony.
A postmodern politics began to take shape during the 1960s with the appear-
ance of numerous new political groups and struggles. The development of a
postmodern politics is strongly informed by the vicissitudes of social move-
ments in Europe, the United States, and the developing world, as well as by
emerging postmodern theories. The utopian visions of modern politics proved,
in this context, difficult to sustain. They were either rejected in favor of cyni-
cism, nihilism, and, in some cases, a turn to the right, or were dramatically
recast and scaled down to more ‘modest’ (non-systemic, non-revolutionary)
proportions. The modern emphasis on collective struggle, solidarity, and alli-
ance politics gave way to extreme fragmentation, as the ‘movement’ of the
1960s splintered into various competing struggles for rights and liberties. The
previous focus on transforming the public sphere and institutions of domination
gave way to new emphases on culture, personal identity, and everyday life, as
macropolitics were replaced by the micropolitics of local transformation and
changes in subjectivity.
In the aftermath of the 1960s, novel and conflicting conceptions of post-
modern politics emerged. Postmodern politics thus take a variety of forms and
would include the anti-politics of Baudrillard and his followers, who exhibit a
cynical, despairing rejection of the belief in emancipatory social transforma-
tion, as well as a variety of efforts to create a new or reconstructed politics. On
the extreme and apolitical position of a Baudrillard, we are stranded at the end
of history, paralyzed and frozen, as the masses collapse into inertia and indif-
ference, and media simulations and technology triumph over agency. Thus,
from Baudrillard’s perspective, all we can do is ‘accommodate ourselves to the
time left to us’.4
The flip-side of a negative and nihilistic postmodern politics is an affirmative
postmodern politics. Such positive postmodern positions range from an apolitical
New Age life-style postmodernism to a self-conscious oppositional postmod-
ernism, a postmodernism of resistance. 5 New Age postmodernism is largely a
form of apolitical individualism that emphasizes transformation of life-style and
values, while eschewing traditional politics. It is a kind of pop postmodernism
that envisions a ‘new age’ of spirituality that overcomes the excesses of capitalist
materialism and consumerism in favor of God, the soul, and the body, while
blending together numerous philosophies and traditions in a potpourri marketable
to all tastes.
4. Jean Baudrillard, ‘The Year 2000 Has Already Happened’, in Arthur and Marilouise Kroker,
eds, Body Invaders: Panic Sex in America (Montreal: The New World Perspectives, 1988),
p. 44.
5. See Teresa Ebert, Ludic Feminism and After (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press,
1996) and Hal Foster, ‘Introduction’, The Anti-Aesthetic (Washington: Bay Press, 1983).

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Another form of affirmative postmodern politics also rejects traditional

modern politics and attempts at large-scale social transformation in favor of
piecemeal reforms and local strategies. This is the position of Foucault, Lyotard,
and Rorty, all of whom renounce a global politics of systemic change in favor of
modifications at the local level designed to enhance individual freedom and
progressive change. Foucault and Lyotard reject utopian thought and the category
of ‘totality’ as terroristic, while searching for new ‘styles’ of life ‘as different as
possible from each other’ (Foucault) and a proliferation of ‘language games’ in
‘agonistic’ opposition to one another (Lyotard). Rorty merely—and meekly—
seeks ‘new descriptions’ of reality that pluralize the voices in the social ‘conver-
sation’, as he replaces normative critique with ‘irony’ and retires philosophy to a
limited role in private life. This form of postmodern politics, consequently, is but
a refurbished liberal reformism that fails to break with the logic of bourgeois
individualism and undermines attempts to construct bold visions of a new reality
to be shaped by a more radical and ambitious politics of alliance and solidarity.
Reconstructive postmodernism attempts to combine modern and postmodern
politics. More extreme negative and affirmative postmodern approaches involve
a decisive break and rejection of modern politics, calling for a radical disconti-
nuity and dramatically different politics. Such a form of reconstructive
postmodern politics, however, advanced by Laclau and Mouffe, among others,
stakes out a position between the modern and postmodern, in order to use post-
modern critiques of essentialism, reductionism, and foundationalism to
reconstruct Enlightenment values and socialist politics through a logic of contin-
gency and plurality.6 Rejecting the Marxist reduction of emancipatory politics to
class struggle that privileges the working class, Laclau and Mouffe embrace the
new social movements of the 1970s and 1980s as multiple sources of progressive
change which can bring about ‘radical democracy’.
Finally, there is another mode of affirmative postmodern politics, perhaps the
dominant form of politics today, known as ‘identity politics’ that often has eman-
cipatory aspirations but which usually falls short of advancing systemic change
and new forms of radical struggle. ‘Identity politics’ refers to a politics in which
individuals construct their cultural and political consciousness through engaging
in struggles or associations that advance the interests of the groups with which
they associate. Sometimes identification is concrete, based on participatory
involvement in specific groups, while sometimes it is more imaginary and
abstract in nature, as one identifies, for example, with the black, gay and lesbian,
or with whatever community from which one gains their identity and sense of self
and belonging.
Identity politics has its origins in the new social movements of the 1970s and
1980s and, ultimately, the struggles of the 1960s. Yet the ‘movement’ of the
1960s both pursued a coalition and alliance politics and challenged the dominant
powers on multiple levels—gender, race, the hierarchical structure of the univer-
sities, colonial domination, US imperialism in Vietnam, the alienated nature of
work, sexual repression, and the oppressive organization of everyday life. In the

6. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Toward a Radical
Democratic Politics (London: Verso Books, 1985).

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1970s, however, the ‘movement’ fragmented into the ‘new social movements’
which included feminist, black liberation, gay and lesbian, and peace and envi-
ronmental groups, each fighting for their own interests (e.g. blacks saw the
emerging environmental movement in the late 1960s as a bourgeois diversion
from civil rights struggles, and environmentalists emphasized wilderness issues
while ignoring problems of urban pollution). By the 1980s and 1990s, as the
Balkanization process continued, the new social movements had become trans-
formed into ‘identity politics’, the very name suggesting a turn away from
general social, political, and economic issues toward concerns with culture and
subjectivity.
Identity politics bears the influence of postmodern theory, which is evident in
the critique of modern reductionism, abstract universalism, and essentialism, as
well as a use of multiperspectival strategies that legitimate multiple political
voices. Foucault’s genealogical politics, for example, is explicitly designed to
liberate suppressed voices and struggles in history from the dominant narratives
that reduce them to silence. In identity politics, individuals define themselves
primarily as belonging to a given group, marked as ‘oppressed’ and therefore as
outside the dominant white male, heterosexual, capitalist culture. These identities
revolve around a ‘subject position’, a key identity marker defined by one’s
gender, race, class, sexual preference, and so on, through which an individual is
made subordinate to the dominant culture. Although class is certainly a major
form of identity, identity politics typically is defined in opposition to class
politics.
But while postmodern theory usually attacks essentialism, there is a form of
essentialism in many modes of identity politics which privilege gender, race,
sexual preference, or some other marker as the constituent of identity. Moreover,
through fetishizing a single all-defining personal identity (woman, black,
chicano, gay, etc.), identity politics also departs from the insight of postmodern
theory that identities are multiple and socially constructed, and that they need to
be reconstructed in an emancipatory, autonomous, and self-affirming fashion. In
other words, some versions of identity politics fetishize given constituents of
identity, as if one of our multiple identity markers were our deep and true self,
around which all of our life and politics revolve.
In some forms, identity politics dovetails with liberal interest group politics
that seeks to advance the concerns of a specific group, typically in opposition not
only to the dominant groups, but also to other marginalized and oppressed
groups. Thus, in contrast to the universal and collective emphases of modern
politics, a postmodern identity politics tends to be insular and something of a
special interest group, perhaps itself a postmodern phenomenon. Hence, whereas
modern politics focused on universal goals like gaining civil liberties, reducing
inequalities, or transforming structures and institutions of domination, post-
modern identity politics singles out the specific interests of a group and
constructs identities through identification with its struggles.
Of course, critics of modern politics have indicated from the beginning that the
universal claims of modern theorists and politicians were cloaks for advancing
the particular interests of ruling groups, mainly white male property owners. The
cardinal rights advanced by the bourgeois revolutions in the US, France, and else-
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 Steven Best & Douglas Kellner

where were those of property rights which granted supreme economic and
political power to white male capitalists in flagrant contradiction to their demo-
cratic rhetoric. Yet the new universal ideology of modern politics unleashed a
power that the ruling classes could not restrain; it inspired and legitimated the
struggles of the very groups it was used to suppress, including those advocating
identity politics today, who denounce universal appeals as inherently ideological
and oppressive.
Yet classical Marxism also advanced a reductionist and essentialist view of
politics that is repudiated by postmodern politics. Marx theorized labor as a
‘universal class’ that by emancipating itself will free all other oppressed groups.
On Marx’s scheme, subjectivity is constituted as a class identity and all social
antagonisms devolve around production as the essence of the social. Later Marx-
ists continued with this policy, subsuming other key social issues to the ‘woman
question’, ‘race question’, ‘national question’, and so on, failing to see how race,
gender, nationality, and other forms of identity were crucial and often more
directly relevant for many different groups of people. In addition, nationalism
proved a far more powerful identity than did international workers’ solidarity for
various European workers during the First World War.
Yet Marxist politics was not effectively displaced as the dominant radical
political discourse and movement until the 1960s, with the explosion of new
struggles and identities that fundamentally contested advanced capitalist society.
Identity politics as it is defined today departs—explicitly or implicitly—from a
critique of Marxist politics. The break from the essentialist and reductionist logic
informing certain Marxist conceptions of class struggle has had some liberating
effects in the political field. It allowed for new conceptions of micropolitics,
pluralist democracy, and a politicization of the multiple ways in which the subject
is constituted across numerous institutional sites and in everyday life. Yet there
are also problematic elements in extreme postmodern rejections of some classical
positions within modern politics.

Contributions and Limitations of Postmodern Politics

Dialectical thought has meant the most advanced state of knowledge,
and it is only from this, in the last analysis, that decisive action can
come.
Max Horkheimer
One of the key insights of the postmodern turn, theorized by Foucault, was that
power is everywhere, not only in the factories, but in the schools, prisons, hospi-
tals, and all other institutions. This insight is both depressing, since it
acknowledges that power saturates all social spaces and relations, and exhila-
rating, because it allows for and demands new forms of struggle. Hence, multiple
forms of resistance open up along every line of identity that is controlled or
normalized. The movements of the period challenged capitalism, state power and
bureaucracy, and the repressive organization of everyday life in the midst of
consumer society, along with various modes of ideologically constituted
identities.
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Postmodern politics, following capital and state intervention processes them-

selves, represents a politicization of all spheres of social and personal existence,
which were previously ignored or rejected by modern and Marxist approaches as
proper political spaces. With postmodern politics, every sphere of social life
becomes subject to questioning and contestation, and the sites of struggle
multiply. With the pluralistic approach, power is more vulnerable to attack and
hence Foucault emphasized the contingency and frailty of power relations. Where
a Leninist would argue that pluralized struggle only dissipates the centralized
forces needed to combat capital and the state, a politically radical postmodernist
could respond that the new struggles attack the weak links of the system and
spread resistance everywhere, thereby allowing for the general attack that Lenin-
ists rightly think is necessary for overthrowing capitalism.
Hence, the 1960s brought a shift from a macropolitics that focused on
changing the structure of the economy and state to a micropolitics that aims to
overturn power and hierarchy in specific institutions, and to liberate emotional,
libidinal, and creative energies repressed by the reality principle of bourgeois
society. An important aspect of micropolitics, as evident in the work of Lyotard,
Foucault, and Deleuze and Guattari, is a politics of subjectivity which theorizes
the conditions under which the modern subject has emerged as an effect of
power, what Foucault calls the ‘subjectification’ of individuals. This entails
primarily a struggle against the ‘microfascism’ latent in everyone, to be combated
by breaking out of, in the terms of Deleuze and Guattari, the ‘molar’ pole of
desire (such as informs all normalized subjectivities) and finding the ‘molecular’
lines of escape. For Foucault, the politics of subjectivity involves a ‘politics as
ethics’ which creates new subjects on the Greek model of an ‘aesthetics of
existence’.7
Postmodern models of politics attempt to redefine the ‘political’ based on
changes in society, technology, economics, and everyday life. A postmodern
cultural politics, building on the insights of Gramsci, the surrealists, Lefebvre,
and the situationists, thematizes culture as a crucial terrain of power and struggle.
To the extent that social reproduction is now largely achieved at the levels of
culture and everyday life, where the individual is a target of total administration,
questions of subjectivity, ideology, culture, aesthetics, and utopian thought take
on a new importance. The instrumentalist, pragmatic, or rationalist conception of
political struggle, which attempts to shape ‘political consciousness’, class or
otherwise, and mobilize political insight into a political movement that tran-
scends questions of culture, is insufficient because it begs the question of how a
political movement will be possible in the first place, given the degree of subjec-
tive identification with dominant modes of thought and behavior throughout
society. As thinkers like Reich and Adorno saw, fascism has roots not only in the
crisis of monopoly capital, but also in the repression of the instinctual structure
and the emergence of an ‘authoritarian personality’.
Thus, if people live immersed in a culture colonized by capitalism, a culture of
spectacles that binds affect and mobilizes pleasures to its sights, sound, and expe-

7. See Best and Kellner, Postmodern Theory, and Steven Best, The Politics of Historical Vision
(New York: Guilford, 1995).

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riences, then the struggle for culture, subjectivity, and identity is no longer
secondary to the struggle for society, and both cultural and identity politics are
crucial for breaking from the dominant ideologies and creating new forms of life
and consciousness. Given the need to produce new subjectivities, political educa-
tion, rational persuasion, and moral appeals remain of the greatest importance,
but they can be very weak opponents of the seductive pleasures of MTV, block-
buster films, the Internet, fashion and advertising, and commodity consumption
of all kinds. In Marcuse’s words, ‘no persuasion, no theory, no reasoning can
break this prison [of subjectivity], unless the fixed, petrified sensibility of the
individuals is ‘dissolved’, opened to a new dimension in history, until the oppres-
sive familiarity with the given object world is broken—broken in a second
alienation: that from the alienated society’.8
A radical cultural politics attempts to undo the socialization of the dominant
culture by providing new ways of seeing, feeling, thinking, talking, and being.
Progressives today must not simply fall back on the old valorization of critical
realism and its narrow cognitive models, as valuable as didactic and pedagogical
art might be. What is ultimately needed are new affective structures and modes of
experience which can act as catalysts and the condition of the possibility of
broader social and political transformations. Here, the political function of crit-
ical art becomes, negatively, a defamiliarization from the dominant mode of
experiencing reality, what Marcuse has termed an alienation from alienation.
Such has been the practice of Brecht’s epic theater, Artaud’s theater of cruelty, or
Godard’s anti-narrative films, all of which sought to question and displace the
dominant mode of experiencing reality, rather than reproduce it through staid
aesthetic conventions. Positively, a cultural politics has the task of ‘aesthetic
education’, the reshaping of human needs, desires, senses, and imagination
through the construction of images, spectacles, and narratives that prefigure
different ways of seeing and living.
Situationist art, for example, practiced both functions, the negative through its
deconstruction of advertisements and other images (detournement), and the posi-
tive through experiences with the ‘constructed situation’, a practice earlier
advanced by the surrealists in their various exercises and games (such as ‘the
exquisite corpse’) designed to liberate unconscious creative forces. Paradoxi-
cally, today we find the atrophy of the senses in their hypertrophic extension
throughout the sensorium of the spectacle and its images and commodity
empires.9 Against Lukàcs, we emphasize the importance of formal innovation
and avant-gardism in the arts, where such new techniques and modes of vision
can help people break with repressive identifications with both the utilitarian
(instrumental reason) and affective (sign and exchange value) modes of experi-
ence constituted by advanced capitalism. A new society will not be attainable
until it is experienced as a need, as a desire for new modes of community, work,
experience, social interaction, and relations to the natural world that could never
be satisfied within capitalism and therefore cannot be co-opted by economic
reforms.

8. Herbert Marcuse, Counterrevolution and Revolt (Boston: Beacon Press, 1972), pp. 71–72.
9. See Best and Kellner, The Postmodern Turn, ch. 3.

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As Bahro saw, capitalism generates needs and desires it ultimately cannot

satisfy for freedom, justice, self-realization, and a good life, and a radical
cultural politics will depict both how the current mode of social organization
restricts, limits, and deforms desire, freedom, and justice, while projecting
visions of how these aspirations could be realized. 10 Both the radical nega-
tions of society by certain forms of critical modernism (i.e. Kafka, Beckett,
German Expressionism, etc.) and the utopian dimension of art stressed by
theorists such as Bloch and Marcuse is thus more relevant than ever today
when radical critique is needed to free individuals from forms of oppression
of which they are often unaware and when a better way of life is technically
possible for all.
The emphasis on local struggles and micropower, cultural politics that redefine
the political, and attempts to develop political forms relevant to the problems and
developments of the contemporary age is extremely valuable, but there are also
key limitations to the dominant forms of postmodern politics. While an emphasis
on micropolitics and local struggles can be a healthy substitute for excessively
utopian and ambitious political projects, one should not lose sight that core sources
of political power and oppression are precisely the big targets aimed at by modern
theory, including capital, the state, imperialism, racism, and patriarchy. Taking on
such major forces of domination involves coalitions and multifront struggle, often
requiring a politics of alliance and solidarity that cuts across group identifications
to mobilize sufficient power to struggle against evils such as capitalism or the
state.
Thus, while today we need the expansion of localized cultural practices, they
attain their real significance only within the struggle for the transformation of
society as a whole. Without this systemic emphasis, cultural and identity politics
remain confined to the margins of society and are in danger of degenerating into
narcissism, hedonism, aestheticism, or personal therapy, where they pose no
danger and are immediately co-opted by the culture industries. In such cases, the
political is merely the personal, and the original intentions of the 1960s goal to
broaden the political field are inverted and perverted. Just as economic and polit-
ical demands have their referent in subjectivity in everyday life, so these cultural
and existential issues find their ultimate meaning in the demand for a new society
and mode of production.
Yet we would insist that it is not a question of micro vs. macropolitics, as if it
were an either/or proposition, but rather both dimensions are important for the
struggles of the present and future.11 Likewise, we would argue that we would
need to combine the most affirmative and negative perspectives, embodying
Marcuse’s declaration that critical social theory should be both more negative

10. Rudolph Bahro, The Alternative in Eastern Europe (London: New Left Books, 1978).
11. See Best and Kellner, Postmodern Theory, for our discussion of the need to overcome the
antitheses between modern macro politics and postmodern micropolitics and how both
perspectives can be deployed in a more inclusive politics of the future. In chapter 8 of Post-
modern Theory, we suggest how a combination of micro and macropolitics were combined in
the struggles against state communism in 1989, thus putting in question theories that would
privilege one dimension to the neglect of the other.

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and utopian in reference to the status quo.12 There are certainly many things to be
depressed about is in the negative and cynical postmodernism of a Baudrillard,
yet without a positive political vision merely citing the negative might lead to
apathy and depression that only benefits the existing order. For a dialectical poli-
tics, however, positive vision of what could be is articulated in conjunction with
critical analysis of what is in a multiperspectivist approach that focuses on the
forces of domination as well as the possibilities of emancipation.
But it is also a mistake, we believe, to ground one’s politics in either modern or
postmodern theory alone. Against one-sided positions, we advocate a version of
reconstructive postmodernism involving a politics of alliance and solidarity that
builds on both modern and postmodern traditions. Unlike Laclau and Mouffe
who believe that postmodern theory basically provides a basis for a new politics,
and who tend to reject the Enlightenment per se, we believe that the Enlighten-
ment continues to provide resources for political struggle today and are skeptical
whether postmodern theory alone can provide sufficient assets for an emancipa-
tory new politics. Yet the Enlightenment has its blindspots and dark sides (such
as its relentless pursuit of the domination of nature, and naive belief in
‘progress’), so we believe that aspects of the postmodern critique of Enlighten-
ment are valid and force us to rethink and reconstruct Enlightenment philosophy
for the present age. And while we agree with Habermas that a reconstruction of
the Enlightenment and modernity are in order, unlike Habermas we believe that
postmodern theory has important contributions to make to this project.
Various forms of postmodern politics have been liberatory in breaking away
from the abstract and ideological universalism of the Enlightenment and the
reductionist class politics of Marxism, but they tend to be insular and frag-
menting, focusing solely on the experiences and political issues of a given group,
even splintering further into distinct subgroups such as divide the feminist
community. Identity politics are often structured around simplistic binary opposi-
tions such as Us vs. Them and Good vs. Bad that pit people against one another,
making alliances, consensus, and compromise difficult or impossible. This has
been the case, for example, with tendencies within radical feminism and ecofem-
inism that reproduce essentialism by stigmatizing men and ‘male rationality’
while exalting women as the bearers of peaceful and loving value and as being
‘closer to nature’.13 Elements in the black nationalist liberation movement in the
1960s and the early politics of Malcolm X were exclusionist and racist, literally
demonizing white people as an evil and inferior race. Similarly, the sexual poli-
tics of some gay and lesbian groups tend to exclusively focus on their own
interests, while the mainstream environmental movement is notorious for
resisting alliances with people of color and grass roots movements.14
Even though each group needs to assert their identity as aggressively as possible,
postmodern identity politics should avoid falling into seriality and sheer fragmenta-
tion. These struggles, though independent of one another, should be articulated

12. Herbert Marcuse, Negations (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968).

13. Janet Biehl, Rethinking Ecofeminist Politics (Boston: South End Press, 1991).
14. Mark Dowie, Losing Ground: American Environmentalism at the Close of the Twentieth
Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995).

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within counterhegemonic alliances, and attack power formations on both the micro-
and macro-levels. Not all universal appeals are ideological in the sense criticized by
Marx; there are common grounds of experience, general concerns, and similar
forms of oppression that different groups share which should be articulated—
concerns such as the degradation of the environment and common forms of oppres-
sion that stem from capitalist exploitation and alienated labor.

The New Political Terrain

Thought in contradiction must become more negative and more utopian
in opposition to the status quo.
Herbert Marcuse
To overcome alienation and oppression, the implementation of radical democracy
is proposed by a variety of tendencies within postmodern theory. In modern
democratic theory, the notion of representative democracy superseded in liberal
capitalist societies the stronger forms of participatory democracy advocated by
the Greeks and modern theorists like Rousseau, Bakunin, and Marx. The post-
modern political turn, then, involves a radicalization of the theme of participatory
democracy that is advocated in a variety of fields and domains of social life.
Within the mode of theory, the democratic turn involves a shift toward more
multiperspectival theorizing that respects a variety of sometimes conflicting
perspectives rather than, as in modern theory, seeking the one standpoint of
objective truth or absolute knowledge. In opposition to discourses of the unity of
absolute truth, postmodern micropolitics stresses difference, plurality, conflict,
and respect for the other.
Yet it would be a mistake to draw too sharp a distinction between the modern
and postmodern paradigms and to vilify the modern as the site of all that is
repressive and retrograde, and the postmodern as the mode of progressiveness
and emancipation. There are emancipatory and problematic aspects in both the
modern and postmodern traditions and we are claiming that we are currently
suspended between two historical epochs—the modern and the postmodern—
each of which has its own theoretical articulations and discourses, narratives,
forms of art and cultural expression, scientific paradigms, politics, and modes of
everyday life. The problem for those of us trying to theorize this great transfor-
mation, this rapid move into a new space, is to think together the modern and the
postmodern, to see the interaction of both in the contemporary moment and to
deploy the resources of both modern and postmodern theory to illuminate,
analyze, and criticize this space.
Consequently, we eschew a totalizing and essentializing assault on postmodern
theory and politics as inherently ‘regressive’, ‘reactionary’, or an ‘ideology of
late-capitalism’, and support an approach that overcomes a radical disjunction
between modern and postmodern approaches to theory and politics. 15 This project
requires a reconstruction of politics drawing on the traditions of modern politics

15. Best and Kellner, Postmodern Theory, ch. 8.

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and the new discourses and trends of a postmodern politics. Such an approach
would overcome the one-sided and non-dialectical squabbles between advocates
of modern and postmodern politics and would provide a more viable and inclu-
sive politics for the future. Whereas there are obvious problems with a modern
politics that attempts to develop a universal model for all times and all places
irrespective of differences and specificities, there is still the need for a normative
vision and political principles and norms that respect the rights and discourses of
others, that support a politics of alliance and solidarity which seeks the common
and public interests of individuals in a given society, and that aspires to a higher
ground above the special interests of particular groups.
Hence, modern theories such as Marxism remain a crucial form of criticism
today, providing indispensable categories to analyze and criticize exploita-
tion, alienation, class struggle, and capitalist economic and cultural
hegemony, none of which have disappeared in the postmodern world. Indeed,
what we are witnessing today on a global level is the intensification and
strengthening of capitalist domination in the form of the mushrooming of tran-
snational corporations which resist regulation and control, growing levels of
economic inequality, increased monopoly control of key resources and tech-
nologies, the revival of child labor and sweatshops, the privatization of state
functions, and major upheavals due to capitalist reorganization and restruc-
turing. Yet Marxism can no longer rely on the hopes that the struggles of the
industrial proletariat and construction of socialism will automatically provide
liberation or that this scenario is guaranteed by history. The events of the past
decade have shown that certain versions of orthodox Marxism are flawed and
that the Marxian tradition must be rethought and invented anew to make it
relevant to the challenges of the future. 16
Thus, we should avoid both the characteristic deficiencies of a modern politics
that is grounded in an excessively universalizing political discourse that occludes
differences and imposes a general dogmatic political schema which is held to be a
foundational and not-to-be questioned arbitrator of political values and decisions.
In addition, we should reject a postmodern identity politics that renounces the
normative project of modern politics, that refuses common and general interests
as intrinsically repressive, and that thus abandons a politics of alliance and soli-
darity in favor of the advocacy of one’s own special interest group. Instead, a new
politics would mediate the differences between the traditions, creating new
syntheses that would strive for a higher ground based on common interests,
general philosophical principles, and a renunciation of dogmatism and authoritar-
ianism of whatever sort.
A new postmodern politics would also overcome the Eurocentrism of modern
politics and valorize a diversity of local political projects and struggles. Although
globalization is creating a more homogenized and shared world, it is doing so
unevenly, thus proliferating difference and heterogeneity at the same time it
produces resemblance and homogeneity. New syntheses of the global and the

16. Steven Best, The Politis of Historical Vision, and Douglas Kellner, ‘The Obsolescence of
Marxism?’, in Bernd Magnus and Stephen Cullenberg, eds, Whither Marxism? (London: Rout-
ledge, 1995), pp. 3–30.

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local, new hybridities, and an increased diaspora of many peoples and cultures is
creating a novel situation in which modernization and postmodernization
processes are reaching the far corners of the world.17 Thus, to the extent that
modernization processes now include postmodernization processes, such that
NAFTA, GATT, and the World Bank are bringing the cultures and technologies
of developed postindustrial societies to developing societies, these societies must
confront not only rapacious capital, repressive state control, and the exploitation
of labor, but also mass media, cultural spectacles, computer technologies, new
cultural identities, and so on.
In this situation, a postmodern politics must learn to be at once local, national,
and global, depending on specific territorial conditions and problems. While
sometimes only local struggles are viable, a new politics must also learn how to
go beyond the local to the national and even global levels, requiring new forms of
struggle and alliance against the growing power of transnational capitalism, the
superstates that remain the dominant political forces, and the rapidly expanding
culture industries of contemporary technocapitalism. Such new struggles and alli-
ances are emerging already, as evident in the dramatic Seattle upheavals in
December 1999, and the anti-globilization demonstrations in Washington D.C.
and Prague in 2000.
Rethinking politics in the present conflicted and complex configurations of
both novel and established relations of power and domination thus requires
thinking through the complex ways in which the global and the local are intercon-
nected. Theorizing the configurations of the global and the local also requires
developing new multidimensional strategies ranging from the macro to the micro,
the national to the local, in order to intervene in a wide range of contemporary
and emerging problems and struggles. To the slogan, ‘Think globally, act
locally’, we may thus add the slogan, ‘Think locally, act globally’. From this
perspective, problems concerning planetary environmental problems, the devel-
opment of a worldwide information superhighway, and the need for new global
forums for discussing and resolving the seemingly intransigent problems of war
and peace, poverty and inequality, and overcoming divisions between the haves
and the have-nots may produce new conceptions of global citizenship and new
challenges for intellectuals and activists.
Yet it is impossible to predict what forms a future postmodern politics will
take. Such a politics is open and evolving, and will itself develop in response to
changing and perhaps surprising conditions. Thus, it is impossible to sketch out
the full parameters of a postmodern politics as the project is relatively new and
open to further and unpredictable developments. In this novel and challenging
conjuncture, the old modern and new postmodern politics both seem one-sided.
Power resides in macro and micro institutions; it is more complex than ever with
new configurations of global, national, regional, and more properly local forces
and relations of power, generating new conflicts and sites of struggle, ranging
from debates over ‘the new world order’—or disorder as it may appear to
many—to struggles over local control of schools or the environment. This

17. Ann Cvetovitch and Douglas Kellner, eds, Articulating the Global and the Local. Globaliza-
tion and Cultural Studies (Boulder: Westview, 1997).

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situation thus requires fresh thinking and politics as we move into the new
millennium.

Which Road Ahead?

Our tragedy lies in the richness of the available alternatives, and in the
fact that so few of them are ever seriously explored.
Tom Athanasiou
Our contemporary situation thus finds us between the modern and the post-
modern, the old and the new, tradition and the contemporary, the global and the
local, the universal and the particular, and any number of other competing
matrices. Such a complex situation produces feelings of vertigo, anxiety, and
panic, and contemporary theory, art, politics and everyday life exhibit signs of all
of these symptoms. To deal with these tensions, we need to develop new
syntheses of modern and postmodern theory and politics to negotiate the novel-
ties and intricacies of our current era.
Indeed, both modern and postmodern positions have strengths and limitations,
and we should seek a creative combination of the best elements of each. Thus, we
should merge modern notions of solidarity, alliances, consensus, universal rights,
macropolitics and institutional struggle with postmodern notions of difference,
plurality, multiperspectivalism, identity, and micropolitics. The task today is to
construct what Hegel called a ‘differentiated unity’, where the various threads of
historical development come together in a rich and mediated way. The abstract
unity of the Enlightenment, as expressed in the discourse of rights or human
nature, produced a false unity that masked and suppressed differences and privi-
leged certain groups at the expense of others. The postmodern turn, conversely,
has produced in its extreme forms, warring fragments of difference exploding any
possible context for human community. This was perhaps a necessary develop-
ment in order to construct needed differences, but it is now equally necessary to
reconstruct a new social whole, a progressive community in consensus over basic
values and goals, a solidarity that is richly mediated with differences that are
articulated without being annulled.
Thus, one of the main dramas of our time will be which road we choose to
travel into the future, the road that leads, in Martin Luther King’s phrasing, to
community, or the one that verges toward chaos. Similarly, will we take the
course that leads to war or the one that brings peace? The one that establishes
social justice, or ever grosser forms of inequality and poverty? Will we stay on
the same modern path of irrational growth and development, of the further expan-
sion of a global capitalist economy (the world of NAFTA and GATT) that has
generated seemingly permanent economic, social, and environmental crisis, or
will we create a sustainable society that lives in balance with the natural world?
Will we chart a whole new postmodern path, blind to the progressive heritage of
the past, with all its attendant snares and dangers? Or will we stake out an alterna-
tive route, radicalizing the traditions of modern Enlightenment and democracy,
guided by the vision of a future that is just, egalitarian, participatory, ecological,
healthy, happy, and sane? The future will depend on what choices we make,
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hence we must intelligently and decisively develop a new politics for the future.
In this way, we can begin to develop a politics of alliance and solidarity equal to
the challenges of the new millennium.

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