ABSTRACT
In her essay ‘Material girl: the effacements of postmodern culture’, Susan Bordo makes the point that the celebration of difference in ‘academic postmodernism’ is in many ways complicit with a popular discourse which actually functions to preempt recognition of significant socio-cultural distinctions. Her discussion centres on talk-shows like Donahue and the familiar, recurring patterns they display. Any participant's attempt to advance ‘some critically charged generalization’ is drowned out in the automatic reassertion of a censoring individualism: What I do or you do is ‘not something sociological’ and to suggest that it is amounts to a personal affront. Here, or—the reverse side of the same coin—where guests display some superficially bizarre activity or appearance in conjunction with the assertion that they are perfectly ‘normal’ and the demand that they be treated ‘just like anyone else’, difference is neutralized as spectacle and then distributed evenly so that it is at once significant and insignificant. ‘Everything is the same in an unvalenced difference’ (p.275) because difference is possessed absolutely and equally by whoever is speaking. Difference can only ever be aligned with the ‘positive’ as lived or embodied critique of some ‘prejudice’ or celebrated because it originates and is entirely contained inside the volition of the subject concerned, or, ideally, by a sort of magic that only this logic can accomplish, it can be both at once—social critique and entirely personal choice. It must always be expressed at the level of the particular individual so that sameness—read ‘hypocritical moralism’ or (in the academic version) ‘totalization’—can be positioned outside or beyond the individual concerned in any particular case. This is individualism's false modesty—it rhetorically secures for itself a place which may be particular, but by virtue of this is absolute.
