Modern/postmodern

In “Postmodern and Periphery,” Nelly Richard discusses how Modernism, specifically its assumption of an “objective consciousness of an absolute metasubject” (351) was bound to show its flaws eventually due to its tendency to spread and globalize. She points out that this outward expansion from a false center is linked to “industrial progress” and thus to “multinational capitalism and its logic of the market place, centred on the metropolis and its control of economic exchanges” (351). This spreading culture attempts to create a “consensus around the models of truth and consumption which it proposes” (351). The problem is that as this expansion occurs, it encounters cultures with perspectives and their own truths, which disagree with Modernism. When this encounter occurs, forces acting under Modernist ideals try to “suppress any notion of ‘difference’… which could possibly interfere with the fiction of universality,” (352).
Examples of these encounters are colonization, wars to contain a different type of government or economy, and in the industrialization and exploitation of impoverished countries. All these can be “justified” if one first assumes the validity of Modernist goals and conclusions. For Richard, postmodernism, which “postulates the destabilization of meaning” (355), avoids assuming hierarchies and universality. A more postmodern way of thinking is hesitant to believe that this one of doing things is the only way. Modernism’s flaw becomes evident when those cultures being colonized reject the incoming culture’s worldview, sometimes violently. If Modernism did contain universal truth, it would not require “progress” especially not out from a small center. For some this realization might be troubling, a catalyst for some type of postmodern malaise. However, Richard emphasizes that cultures on the periphery need not feel “threatened by this collapse” (357). Such cultures can feel free to nurture their own subjects and narratives. Moreover, to mourn the loss of a Modernist era would still be assuming “Eurocentric prerogatives” (357).

Nelly Richard. “Postmodern and Periphery.” Theory in Contemporary Art since 1985. Ed. Zoya Kocur and Simon Leung. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005. 351-359