Truths And Strategies: Prospects For Resistance Under Postmodernism

Upon what can we base political praxis and theories of change in an era of fragmented and contested truth? How are old political projects rendered ineffective today? What “operative truths” are taken for granted in the everyday lives of our so-called “post-ideological society”? A great many retreats have been justified in the name of the “postmodern condition”. Postmodernism is what Jean-François Lyotard, “[s]implifying to the extreme”, has described “as incredulity toward metanarratives.” The refusal of monolithic truths, particularly about society and culture, has been the intellectual basis upon which many emancipatory projects have been disassembled and dismantled. Yet arguably, this rejection of epochal thinking, while it may be anathema to revolutions that would base themselves upon dogmatic, unified knowledges, also does provide a new basis for more nuanced, intelligent and plural strategies for political emancipation. This week, Roy Fisher will help us to explore the broadened horizons of resistance and alternative that the fragmentation of narratives opens up, touching on such concepts as adjacency, parazones, and parasitism, as well as other possibilities, forms and modes of praxis that the present state(s) of knowledge enable and justify. Roy is a PhD candidate in the Near Eastern Studies department at UC Berkeley, where he works on a variety of poststructuralist positionalities, from Michel Foucault to Gilles Deleuze to more contemporary thinkers such as Paul Rabinow, with whom Roy works closely.