Framing the Margins

: the social logic of postmodern culture. Harper, Phillip Brian. (1994). New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Introduction: the postmodern, the marginal, and the minor (pp. 3-29)

According to Harper, postmodernism begins with its specific ontological perspective: the individual human psyche is fundamentally incoherent, fragmented, or decentered. This decenteredness is on Harper's focus. Within this context, Harper restates the argument between Habermas and Lyotard on the topic of modernity and postmodernity and stresses that both regards the decentered experience as the postmodern condition despite their positions constitutes. Harper writes:

Habermas characterizes modernity as a motivated undertaking based in the Enlightenment impulse to provide for "the rational organization of everyday social life" This rational organization would follow from the establishment of effective communicative interaction among the three spheres of "objective science, universal morality and law, and the autonomous art," which, in the context of early modernity, had been developed as specialized realms "according to their inner logic"...Habermas identifies as postmodern the acquiescence to or embracement of the disengaged autonomy that characterizes the specialized realms of human activity in the contemporary era. This disengagement itself manifests as decenteredness in that, if there is no effective interplay among the different spheres of activity, then neither can there be any centralized "legitimating" narrative that comprises them all; but insofar as social progress for Habermas depends on just such a (modernistic) synthesizing vision, postmodernist decenteredness presents itself to him as a fundamentally conservative phenomenon to be vigorously resisted. (p. 5)

On the other hand, Harper notes that for Lyotard transparent communication as a basis of consensus consensus is both false and dangerous because of its tendency toward totalization. Harper interprets Lyotard's position:

Lyotard, in theorizing the postmodern as approximating the experience of the Kantian sublime--which is itself founded on a sort of cognitive gap, the difference between out ability to conceive of certain ideas and our inability to represent them--specifies subjective disjunction and fragmentation as key factors in the postmodern condition. (p. 8)

As to the political significance of fragmentation, Harper states that whereas for Habermas, it is a fundamentally conservative development in contemporary society, for Lyotard, it is a progressive strategy of demystification.

Harper characterizes postmodernism as the presentation of a decentered human subjectivity--here he means incoherent fragmentation of an individual psyche. He suggests that the marginalized groups' experience of decenteredness--hooks' term 'uncertainty'--is an unacknowledged factor of the general postmodern condition. Within this theoretical foundation, Harper looks into social marginality in literature. He delineates as social marginality a phenomenon reflecting political disenfranchisement due to class, gender, sexual orientation, and racial identification, and so on.