ABSTRACT
This description of the state of contemporary culture by the late Jean-François Lyotard is, of course, partly tongue-in-cheek. Nevertheless, it should not be ignored that the short book from which it is taken, The Postmodern Condition, is subtitled ‘A Report on Knowledge’, and was intended as an analysis of the globalization of communication and information systems which precipitated a world network and culture. It is easy to miss the other side of the equation which Lyotard’s witty parody of Marx emphasizes.4 While the consumption of eclectic culture by a public greedy for eclectic works points to the startling reality of what was once referred to as the ‘global village’, it also emphasizes the stubborn refusal of local cultures to quietly disappear. Indeed, the one depends on the other, for without specific cultures the possibility of eclecticism evaporates. This point has been made by numerous post-colonial critics, tired of what they perceive as the blithe optimism of postmodern theorists who celebrate the avant garde absurdities of Las Vegas when vast sections of the world’s population live in shanty towns under Coca-Cola boxes. The Turkish historian, Arif Dirlik, has made a particularly virulent expression of such views:
Within the institutional site of the First World academy, fragmentation of earlier metanarratives appears benign (except to hidebound conservatives) for its promise of more democratic, multicultural, and cosmopolitan epistemologies. In the world outside the academy, however, it shows in murderous ethnic conflict, continued inequalities among societies, classes, and genders, and the absence of oppositional possibilities that, always lacking in coherence, are rendered even more impotent than earlier by the fetishization of difference, fragmentation, and so on [my emphasis].5
