Mapping the Void

The postmodern experience has been described as a blurring or fragmentation of the outlines on the map. Yet many existing contours have been blocked in all the more boldly. Religious, cultural and political fundamentalisms continue to thrive. Both modernity and postmodernity have, in various accounts, been depicted as a sweeping away of existing cartographies. In Marx and Engels’ classic phrase, adopted by Marshall Berman as the title of his study of modernity, ‘all that is solid melts into air’ 2 in the face of the ongoing rush of change under the relentlessly revolutionizing logic of capitalist forces and relations of production. For Marx this process entails the reduction of everything to the particular narrow rationality of capitalism. Professionals are reduced to the status of wage-labourers; familial relations and national differences are obliterated; law, morality and religion alike are stripped of their facades. There is also a countermovement, however, equally important to the maintenance and reproduction of the regime: a reassertion of structures where others have been dissolved, a redrawing of the lines on the map rather than a submission to the void. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Aesthetics · Capitalism · Epistemology · Modernity · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Postmodernism · Postmodernity · Rationality · Reproduction · Sociology · Law · Philosophy · Political Economy and Marxism