WHERE HAS THE REPRESENTATION GONE TO?

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."

(http://www.institutodelafelicidad.com)

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?