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- Title
Postmodern Melancholia.
- Authors
Ewick, Patricia
- Abstract
The article presents a comment by the author on the presidential address given by researcher Joel Handler in 1992 regarding the recent changes in the character of social protest and the scholarship that seeks to understand these resistant practices. On its face, the story of change that Handler tells is as sad as any of the so-called postmodern narratives he criticizes. His ambivalence seems to reflect a particular construction and understanding of the postmodern, an understanding that positions him precariously straddling both sides of the postmodern debate. On one hand, he asks to assess postmodernity in terms of its "value" which implies that postmodernity is a strategic option for subordinate or marginal groups. This conception of the postmodern as representing possibility and choice is at odds with more materialist accounts of the postmodern condition as a pathological consequence of late or post-Fordist capitalism. He seems caught between these two views of the postmodern condition. Alternating between both images, he traces the postmodern condition to changes in the social order, the failure of European socialism, and a general crisis in left-wing politics.
- Subjects
POSTMODERNISM (Philosophy); SOCIAL conflict; SPEECHES, addresses, etc.; HANDLER, Joel; FORDISM; CAPITALISM; SOCIALISM
- Publication
Law & Society Review, 1992, Vol 26, Issue 4, p755
- ISSN
0023-9216
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.2307/3053814