The Politics of Postmodern Feminism, Revisited

In a recent essay entitled Contingent Foundations: Feminism and the Question of'Postmodernism,' Judith Butler tries to circumvent the generic term on the grounds that there is no unity within the field nor linking thread that could tie together the disparate body of work that gets called (3-6). In other words, the postmodern is a fragmented, incoherent heteroglossia of contested meanings. The only thing surprising in this claim is that Butler asserts it without any trace of irony. But, of course, Butler is absolutely right. On the one hand, we have Lyotard's celebration of capitalism as a force toward unfettering signification, while on the other hand, we have Foucault's dismal portrayal of contemporary society as a disciplined and disciplining panopticon. Richard Rorty uses postmodernism to defend liberal traditions as if he's still fighting the Cold War, whereas Ranajit Guha uses it to reveal the inherent colonialism within liberal concepts of oppression as well as of liberation. The term itself has no agreed upon referent. For Jameson, it is