Professor: Jorge Martínez Lucena

Post-modernity and the Self (2)

The post-modern condition (1979) by J. F. Lyotard warned about the fall of the metanarratives in Western Culture.

There are certain historical facts that promote our skepticism of metanarratives:

- The Second World War (disasters and crimes against humanity)

- May ‘68 (youth revolts against the bourgeois life)

- The Fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 (communism shows how it is not viable at all and capitalism seems to become the only valid alternative)

- 9/11 (the American dream is symbolically torn apart)

The Fall of the Metanarratives

Metanarratives had two main functions traditionally:

1. Psychological: They let us make sense of our experiences, actions and life in general.

2. Sociological: They provided us with social unity, because sharing the criteria to judge life is a very strong agent of cohesion. The same ideal lets us be together in the face of different situations.

Functions of Metanarratives

As soon as the metanarratives began to show their weaknesses, individuals and societies within Western Culture felt their absence in form of anomie.

This anomie has two components:

• Psychological: Citizens don’t yet have a clear response to their need for sense.

• Sociological: Our societies become more individualistic, narcissistic and atomized.

Transformations within Western Culture

According to this explanation, after the fall of the metanarratives, our societies should have become centers of violence with an absence of governability, but they are not, generally speaking.

Question: How is psychological and sociological stability now constructed in order to obtain social peace?

Governability in Western Cultures

Perhaps there is still a worldwide accepted metanarrative which tends to hide its condition as a metanarrative, disguising itself as a neutral characteristic of the general reality.

This hidden metanarrative could be seen as capitalism with all of its attributes (entertainment, consumerism, technologies…).

The Dumb Metanarrative

Capitalism would be a metanarrative that doesn’t give a rational explanation or take our human experiences into account. We would be able to detect this fact in two different points:

1.To maximize our personal benefit or our well-being doesn’t necessarily coincide with happiness in our experience.

2.To rely on the Adam Smith’s equation according which our private selfishness should be necessarily our best contribution to the common good.

The Dumb Metanarrative

Capitalism is a metanarrative that doesn’t appeal to our rational experience in order to avoid contradictions. It aims instead to provide us with certain emotions or emotional experiences which respond both to our psychological need for sense and our sociological need for cohesion.

Capitalism and Emotions

• Our psychological need for sense is met in various ways, such as through the intensity and authenticity of our fictional capitalist experiences as consumers.

• Our sociological need to maintain social agreement on basic questions is met by neo-tribal phenomena which provide us with a sense of belonging and feelings of authenticity. What gives us unity as a society today is the fact that our unconscious ideal is to be alternative, different and authentic.

Capitalism and Emotions

The narratives selves of post-modern citizens are nowadays mainly constructed through their consumerism of emotional and intense experiences that allow them some sense of belonging to very liquid groups (neo-tribal).

This neo-tribal belonging makes them feel different, special, and authentic, while it is also the place to where all the differences are rerouted and homologated through the post-modern market.

Self and Identity

Everyone is consuming difference, is feeling himself to be different while he is really doing what everybody else does.

Everyone is saying, with his agency, something that he would not defend rationally. We are saying that this emotional consumerism can make us happy while, as we can see in our experience, the essence of consumerism consist of never providing the consumer total satisfaction.

Self and Identity

Capitalism tries to assume the role of being the very rationality of reality, instead of an economic ideology which fundamentally fails to take into account several (unmeasurable) factors of reality.

BUT

Capitalism, in its present-day formulation, is not capable of providing us with this meaningfulness and satisfaction on a rational level.

The Capitalist Paradox