The Postmodern Condition - Critical or Hypercritical?

   The myriad-mind of postmodernism is a smoke and mirrors trick that's here to stay. According to Lyotard, postmodernism situates the artist as "condemned to generate a multiplicity in the space it inherits, and to give up the project of a last rebuilding of the whole space occupied by humanity" (1466).  There is a selfless nature to this kind of pursuit that is at odds with the steadying compass of morality, or as the Daedelus-like maze maker Jorge Luis Borges puts it: "There is nothing built on stone. Everything is built on sand, but it is our duty to edify as if the sand should be stone." In attempt to mimetically duplicate the "motricity" (1467) of the modern world, the "process of complexification" (1467) has often served to render postmodern works readable only by the elite few who can wade through the simulacra. Lyotard describes the difference of postmodernism from modernism as a "coming back or flashing back, feeding back, ana-lysing, ana-mnesing, of reflecting"(1467) - there is a self-awareness at work that announces itself as artist and so can build hybrid identity, grabbing from many sources to underscore the arbitrary nature of design - many postmodern works get bogged down though, creating artifacts eerily reminiscent of a Google search or Wikipedia article. Therefore Italo Calvino and his five memos for modern fiction become important (especially quickness which salvages the immediacy and pure entertainment of classical forms such as the fable.)
   As Baudrillard puts it: "the territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it" (1557) Therefore literature finds itself in a frightening situation where nothing 'fixed' is referred to except that very postulate of postmodern fluidity - in other words, postmodernism has become another construct which seeks to appease the others and become invisible. Peeking out from behind postmodernism are the agents of society that Foucault describes as "technicians of behavior" (1491). The "network of permanent observation" (1492) is a palpable absence that each of us carry like a Normative Handbook - perhaps the multiplicities we find ourselves drowning in today are only frightening because we hope to be justified by the same fragmented reality that is quaking beneath our feet (or, as Foucault says, power has "inculcated docility and produced deliquency by the same mechanisms") (1496).
    When I was a kid I had a dream where I was falling back into a mirror image of myself pushing forwards - I was forever falling into a mirror image of myself pulling out of it - and in that suspended state, I noticed in my peripheries a single eye watching without blinking. That seems a suitable metaphor for how the panopticon intersects with the multiplicities of modern man.

 Foucault. "Discipline and Punish." ed. Leitch, Vincent B. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. 2nd ed. New York: W. W. Norton &, 2010. Print. 

 Baudrillard. "The Precession of Simulacra." ed. Leitch, Vincent B. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. 2nd ed. New York: W. W. Norton &, 2010. Print.

 Lyotard. "Defining the Postmodern."  ed. Leitch, Vincent B. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. 2nd ed. New York: W. W. Norton &, 2010. Print.

Borges, Jorge. "Jorge Luis Borges quotes." Thinkexist. N.p., n.d. Web. <http://thinkexist.com/quotes/jorge_luis_borges/>.