Postmodern subjectivity replaced the heroic vanguard self with shifting affinity coalitions

Evidence

The key shift from dominant modern to emergent postmodern connections of politics to subjectivity here turns on the pivot of this sixties notion of subjective political performance, or political performance of subjectivity. This pivot is based on the replacement of the exemplary, heroic, struggling, unique, modernist individual, defying convention in order to adumbrate a transformed culture and society, parallel to the revolutionary vanguard of sixties ideologies (still dominant in Mailer as in sixties texts in general), by a popular, egalitarian notion of all subjectivity. This egalitarian subjectivity is limitlessly differentiable both from others and from itself, constituting and constituted by the infinitely, continually shifting fields and flows of difference of postmodernity. At the same time, this modern-to-postmodern shift also encompasses the replacement of a vision of universal, utopian socialpolitical transformation—led by this heroic individual or vanguard—by temporary affinity groupings constituted around local, particular, limited, clearly defined issues. In these temporary coalitions of affinity, certain interests, forming a small piece of these continually shifting, performatively produced, nonessential, non-self-identical subjectivities, can be seen temporarily to coincide. — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited, 648

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: The particular marked body replaces the abstract universal subject in postmodernity — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited: The Sixties and the…, 549; Black feminist identity politics lodged universal revolution within a particular identity category. — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited: The Sixties and the…, 830; The shift to subjectivity-based politics relocated rather than abandoned the political — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited: The Sixties and the…, 996 (+4 more)

Broader Connections

• Postmodern collaboration abandons the manifesto-driven vanguard project entirely #expands (0.90) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 390
• Postmodern thought replaces class-based ideology with group-based consciousness. #expands (0.88) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 699
• The shift to subjectivity-based politics relocated rather than abandoned the political #expands (0.85) — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited, 996
• Micropolitics and identity-group organizing are themselves postmodern phenomena #expands (0.80)
• The discursive perspective reintroduces non-unitary subjectivity that structuralism had abolished #corroborates (0.72)