Laughing at/in Moloch

Jameson suggests through a series of historical comparisons that a subject of the postmodern state is characterized chiefly by her fragmentation, and it seems such fracture would dramatically reduce agency. In contrast with the anxieties of Modernism, which centered themselves around a confronted subject (Freudian, Warholian, Van Goghian, etc.), the postmodern subject finds her own identity woven into a shallow, lateral field, void of the oppositions which give "content," the opportunity to figure oneself. Moreover, as "there is no longer a self present to do the feeling" (15), the decline of affect sets in.

However, in this academic fervor to map our conditions, to debate their usefulness, and to potentially craft détournements, is not the opposite revealed? As Jameson writes, "cannot something be said about the way in which this strange new surface in its own peremptory way renders our older systems of perception of the city somehow archaic and aimless, without offering another in their place?" (14) That is to say, could it be that, lingual beings we are, the language of postmodernism does not offer the opportunity for expression? That the impulse (in-pulse) remains, but the means of enacting have been short-circuited, the landscape suddenly growing inappropriate for such events? Moreover, even as we see an ever-obfuscated and slippery monolithic system of power weaving itself into our lives, and even if we grant briefly the logical extreme of (post)structuralism, is not the will to agency something extra-systemic, radical, autonomizing in itself? I question the overdetermination of contemporary zero-sum modeling-- not in relation to truth, but intent. As cliché as this Baudrillard quote may be, "the map precedes the territory" (and even if on some level it doesn't, we can only behave as though it does). It seems to me that what we are dealing with is the circulation of power.