ABSTRACT
Much debate surrounding postmodernism focuses on the question of whether this aesthetic and philosophical mode is capable of having an ethical dimension. Does postmodern thinking, producing, reading, viewing (etc.) presuppose an attitude that encourages ethical indifference, apathy and a concern with the ‘superficial’ rather than the ‘profound’? Does it, in short, usher in ‘the demise of the ethical’?1 In an essay on the history of the ethics of cultural studies, Slack and Whitt argue along just these lines, as they see the turn to postmodernism as ‘the loss of criteria for moral judgement’2 and as having ‘serious and disturbing implications for a politics and ethics’.3
Such assessments follow Jean Baudrillard’s speculations on the postmodern condition, which are often accused of a spirit of apathy and indifference. For Baudrillard, in America (1986), the Californian desert is the best metaphor with which to describe postmodernism. It is, he claims, a cultural ‘monument valley’, a place where nature and simulacra exist side by side. The desert represents the site of the same, the elimination of difference and texture. Baudrillard states that: ‘culture has to be a desert so that everything can be equal and shine out in the same supernatural form.’4 For Baudrillard,
postmodernity is that cultural state in which nothing is real; instead everything is hyper-real. In such a climate, it has been argued, catastrophe can become banal. Television, film and the internet proliferate a non-stop stream of scenes of atrocity, alternating footage of massacre, nuclear warfare and genocide with the designer violence endemic to popular entertainment. Images of violence no longer ring the warning bell of any second coming, but create instead the effect of the numbing repetition of the same. One cannot but lack all conviction. This has been termed ‘the atrocity of the consensual’.5
