One of the key assumptions of postmodernity was
the one enunciated by Lyotard, The
postmodern condition; the great narratives have stopped being valid and are
replaced by the small stories. Along with this process, the powerful subject
teleological, agent of revolutions, were no more. Minimalist subjects telling
personal stories, in the middle of a present that refused to go anywhere. The
beauty as it is essential to art, yielded to performative strategies and
products. The technological reason guided by the effectiveness prevailed now
without opposition - and I believe it still does- modernity had inaugurated an
era of representation, which it’s center on discourse. Representation was the
nuclear element of social and theoretical narratives. The reality is represented in the subject in an
objective and truthful way.
In postmodernity there is a predominance of
presentation over representation, of performance over speech, of the action
over discourse. Even more, doing things is what matters the most. Austin’s text
“How to do Things with Words” has been quoted endlessly.
Where has representation gone in postmodernity?
Has all the solids been dissolve in the air, or has simply disappeared without
trace? If the field of representation no longer exists any more, does this mean
it’s the definitive triumph of performance, of presence, which abolished the
question for the sense?
The beauty has moved from art to design, to
merchandise, to the new technological objects. Likewise representation was
exiled somewhere and I speak not only of small speeches, of the brief
annotations on the world, but from the big narratives that sought to understand
the world in its entirety.
Certainly we have the return of the
fundamentalism, as religion, new age or any other class, that are increasingly
ferocious, also found its refuge in some theories such as the Latin American Cultural
Studies in its auto-exoticism.
However, there is another field extended along
the globe, that is presented to us as daily, real, effective and which
penetrates deep into the social fabric trying to fill that anxiety of sense, the
need for talk, the expectation of future that despite everything, it’s still
with us, especially in Latin America where capitalist modernization is the
order of the day.
And the world which is now inhabited by the
great narratives is not other than the big brands, which absorbed the modern
unfulfilled promises and the desires of equality that real socialism failed to
achieve, turning them into effective marketing strategies both to sell and to
fill the void, to populate of illusions the desert of the real.
As an example we quote Coca-Cola’s Institute of
Happiness, as starting point, we all know that Coca-Cola is synonymous of happiness;
we have been told till fatigue, by all possible means, when we open a bottle, this
ignites the spark of life that makes us exist.
The issue is further complicated when Coca-Cola
aims to become the ethical construction of happiness, which directs us and
guides us in his insatiable quest. In their web page we can know happiness, read
the opinion of the experts, access to studies on the theme, measure our
happiness or take our daily dose of happiness that comes in pill form.
One of the quotes: "as shown by the
results of the Institute of Happiness studies, the happiness is a great
antidote to the crisis, because people with more positive points of view are
significantly happier. A good 67% of the respondents believe that their
personal situation will be the same or better in the next 12 months. Also, at a
general level, an overwhelming 74% of the happy people believe that the future
will bring you more good things than bad."
Or another example from Nike, where we learned that
the lightness is no longer in the Six
proposals for the next millennium of Italo Calvino, but in Nike SB Lunar
One Shot.
Isn't it time to leave behind the postmodernity
and place on our shoulders the great stories that we need, that allow us to
move beyond capitalism, beyond the destruction of the planet, the inequality,
the racism?
