The postmodern bias against architectonic thoughts, especially the teleological, favors the prosaic, the parochial, the tribal. (It also set the terms and conditions for "culture wars.")
See, for example, Michael Andre Bernstein in FOREGONE CONCLUSIONS. Bernstein celebrates the Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai because he creates "a way to make us ctually turn our gaze away from the central, apocalyptic expectations of a uniquely redemptive history, toward the prosaics of a history figured in terms of its most quotidian exigencies." (p. 126)
Behind this bias lies the idea of the death of God and all of God's failed permutations. These include the Enlightenment, the Transcendental-Romantic apotheosis, Marxism, and modernist structural artifacts of various kinds--anything with the odor of hegemony upon it.
We have not seen a postmodern writer, though, who disapproves of the prevailing predisposition at this time in history to think a certain way. The critical consensus at this moment in the agora has a defining influence on the conversation. It is hard to imagine the conversation in terms other than those that burst like an efflorescence from poststructural ideas. The pendulum has swung toward the many postmodern voices that have redefined reality into a vision of "reality."
In brief, the prevailing take on experience is "negatively teleological." The denial of an architectonic control is as defining and delimiting as its affirmation once was. It foregoes the possibility of a grand cause or an ultimate signifier, either from within the whole bloody thing or from somewhere outside it. It is a given that there is none. Let the debate move elsewhere.
For the most part, postmodern critics do not ordinarily see themselves as players in a dialectic game that stretches through time and that overrides the postmodern project itself. In its label is its origin and fate: "modern" makes the "postmodern." And as tomorrow follows today there will be a project that will envelop or ignore the postmodern. It will historicize what is now the contemporary.
The grander game need not be Hegelian to be acknowledged as a give-and-take. Call it a continuous spinning out of the talk around the fire. The talk and the fire are the essentials; the prevailing terms of discourse are like the smoke. They take a certain form and go up the chimney in time; and it makes no difference as long as the fire keeps on burning so that the talk can continue. The real issue, as always, is the threat of the cold and the loneliness outside the door.
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