Ultimately, both traditional realism and avant-garde aesthetics are now equally “exhausted.” Rorty speaks of postmodernism as part of a “postKantian culture,” or “anti-Cartesian and anti-Kantian revolution,” and Susan Bordo notes “a certain similarity . . . with the Renaissance, in the cultural awakening” (6-7; 115) links of london. What has been challenged are the philosophical underpinnings of realism: the hierarchy in the signified/signifier opposition has been reversed as the signifier has been given priority over the signified, thus invalidating the interdependent Enlightenment notions of an autonomous subject and of a stable external reahty that can be imitated by language Links of London Necklaces. Antoine Compagnon indeed notes that the crisis of the concepts of mimesis and of the subject is linked to that of hterary humanism in general (126). As the transcendental signified is no longer perceived as derived from some Absolute Truth-God, History, or Reasonbut produced by language, there is no source of meaning outside the text. No longer origin and source of meaning, only an effect of discourse Links of London Bracelets, the subject loses its mastery-over itself and over the external world-and meaning is radically indeterminate. As ideology-taken in Althusser’s use of the term, to mean the unquestioned condition of our existence in the world, a way of thinking and acting that works in conjunction with social power-is inscribed in language, its so-called transparency is also invalidated. If the world is mediated through language, which speaks “always already” in our place, if we are “always already” subjects before being born” (Althusser 32), traditional realism is no longer possible. Not only has the modern basis for traditional realism been all but invalidated, but the joyous postmodern exaltation of simulacra and of the carnivalesque has run its course Links of London Bangles. As Barth explains, it is not language or hterature that is “exhausted,” but the “aesthetic of high modernism”.
October 11, 2009
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