ABSTRACT
Of the many successes in critical and cultural theory of the two decades leading up to (say) the Gulf War, none perhaps was as absolute as the rout of essentialism. One by one the touchstones of essential identity gave away as the author was killed, the subject interpellated, and the world itself reissued in the form of the hyper-real. It was a glittering victory, one quickly institutionalized within the humanities departments of progressive universities where constructionism became (not without irony) the a priori order of the day. All triumph suffers reversal, of course, and for many Western, male intellectuals the Gulf War was the sticking point; here, striking evidence of the extent to which the real had indeed found a kind of sublimation in something like an arcade video game, complete with ‘smart’ weapons, high-tech control and CAD visuals, was slowly and confusedly undone by the more sombre evidence of the uncomfortably low-tech outcomes of good old-fashioned dumb weapons, brutal ethnic violence, and massive environmental destruction. Touted as the first media war, a kind of ethereal, electronic conflict, it turned out in the end to be as solidly corporeal as any other war, and that in turn was read as cause enough to abandon the postmodern, video-crazed epistemic laissez-faire in favour of the virtues of sober realism, together with the essentialism thought to be thereby entailed.
