Postmodernism transformed the modernist experience of self-loss into a celebrated utopia of unbelonging

Evidence

Alongside the lovelessness of the fictions, the repeated intrusions of a misogynistic streak, and a certain spontaneous belief in the universality of betrayal – which Orwell too had begun displaying since his earliest writings, from Burmese Days onwards – Rushdie has also deployed that same stance of unbelonging, of the lone individual occupying a moral high ground above the chimeras of politics’ (Rushdie’s phrase), delivering his denunciations of Left and Right alike: Indira Gandhi, the Pakistani Generals, the Communist Parties, the Naxalites, film stars, prophets, the short-lived banning of La Prensa. On certain issues – racism, religiosity, dictatorship, empire, and the like – one could take a position, and one could also, in a general way, speak of oneself as a man of the Left, as Orwell himself frequently did; but there was no actual Left, no existing community of praxis, within that world which had given one’s imagination and fictions their energy, with which one felt in any fundamental way bonded, accepting and struggling with the risks and the restrictions and the suffering that such bonding often implies. From all such groundings one had ‘floated upwards’, even as one constantly thrashed about denouncing all, undifferentiatedly, that one had left behind. In an earlier time, right into the heart of modernism, such desolations of the self were still experienced quite frequently as a loss; what postmodernism has done is to validate precisely the pleasures of such unbelonging, which is rehearsed now as a utopia, so that belonging nowhere is nevertheless construed as the perennial pleasure of belonging everywhere. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 271

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the earlier chapters’ discussion of exile, vagrancy, and the colonial writer’s fraught relationship to Left politics and the Nation. — connects to: Lyotard defines postmodernism as a modernism that celebrates the loss of ordered totality; Postmodern ‘waning of affect’ fragments the subject into depthless, spasmodic flux. — Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, 154; Commodified modernism collapses the distinction between real and imaginary negation. (+7 more)

Related

• Postmodern celebration of exilic multiplicity suppresses acknowledgment of exile’s pains (similarity 0.87)
• Postmodernism transforms the pain of unbelonging into a celebrated utopia (similarity 0.87)
• Commodified modernism collapses the distinction between real and imaginary negation. (similarity 0.83)