The Jihad vs McWorld dilemma is our present day place/space debate, the same local/global conflict which Heidegger dealt with. Yet the debate is weakened by its polarities, for its either fundametalism or nihilism, place or space, local or global, "deep pessimism" or "revolutionary fury," all or nothing. At the risk of being repetitive, I feel it is important to once again stress the simple point that postmodernism, though much of its critique of modernism is good, fails to strike a balance. For though rationality might not make good art, it tends to be useful in dealing with economic trends undermining people's livelihoods. By rejecting this rationality, by rejecting the yang which gives meaning to the yin, postmodernism loses the lack of constraint and with it the lack of values, which are needed to confront the standard lowering drive of the global economy. This will certainly make every millionaire CEO out there a little more comfortable, a little more relaxed, with the dominant postmodern ideology downplaying any attempt to find commonalities of experience which bind us all. This will continue as long as postmodernists tell people that there is no objective truth, that class relations are a thing of the past, and as the deconstructible/reconstructible decentered postmodern self lives off of the instant identities and disposable gratifications which they consume at ever faster rates, with ever faster returns for corporations having a field day leaking across the globe like a broken embryo, blurring boundaries of place with space, of right with wrong, of fact with fantasy.
I end here with a passage from Celeste Olalquiaga's book Megalopolis: Contemporary Cultural Sensibilities, amd his description of Alice in Wonderland. In the story Alice:
"is suspended in time so that she freely explore space--the limits of her body--until she is ready to grow up. In the narrative guise of a dream, Alice goes through a series of adventures that confuse her sense of physical identity, in an experience similar to that of postmodern culture: she floats among domestic objects that fail to give her any hold--gravity, like referentiality, has been suspended and is later completely lost in Wonderland, where signs are decieving, animals and plants talk and transmute themselves (the Cheshire cat appears as a smile or stripes), and she grows or shrinks at the arbitrary will of mysterious mushrooms, cakes, and potions.
"Complete with a compulsive repetition of time (the Mad Hatter's tea party that starts every other minute) and a voluntary simulation devised to please the fooled senses (the Queen's white roses painted red), Wonderland is a place where reality and appearance merge into one. In Wonderland logic, time and space are highly evanescent and can only be reconstituted through repetitive linguistic riddles. Yet Alice manages to break with the compulsion that binds the other characters to perpetual loss in a word-and-image-filled magic land. She does so by verbally distinguishing between reality and simulation: she questions the logic behind all the characters' games and exposes their "silliness," she names her loss in this strange universe, and she finally dares to call out the Queen of Heart's theatrics for all they're worth. This open confrontation of authority results in here being chased out of Wonderland's dream" (Olalaquiaga, 1992).
Postmodernism does offer us a nice dream-like state. Anything we want to do or anything we claim is true is absolutely ok, even if it is cruel or false. Such a relativism with its preference of the image and appearance of something over its textual underpinnings and reality, legitmizes a type of voluntary ignorance, an ignorance which can be costly, and I take Ronald Reagen as a classic example here. Ronald Reagen is the embodiment of where postmodernism takes us politically in our globally connected and complex world. People seeking simple solutions feel rest assured in such a charming friendly man. The image was all they needed. But behind the image, was a lot of text which people didn't bother to read. For behind Ronny's heart warming smile, U.S. Contras were busy terrorizing the countryside of Nicaragua undermining a poor country's quest for soveriegnty, social programs in for the poor were being slashed, and the gap between the richest and poorest reached the greatest heights in American history.
So to all postmodernists out there, I simply say, rationality and objectivity are not inherently bad, and should not be dismissed on the whim. And yes, maybe Hediegger was right in believing that "rational evidence can't overcome irrational prejudice" (Rorty, 32) but to give up the struggle is like a whole flock of Canadian Geese deciding one winter, "heck, we're sick of flying south, let's just stay right here!" Such a decision would not only throw out of balance the whole ecosytem, it would threaten their collective survival. So instead of giving up, instead of saying heck its all just the same, truth and fantasy, right and wrong, someone somewhere in this rootless, ungrounded postmodern dream, needs to "dare to call out the Queen of Heart's theatrics for all they're worth," to help slow down transnational corporations' race to the bottom, to help slow down the liquidation of ethical standards and place, and to rise out of this relative paralysis and draw the line in the sand.