The Tao of Representation: Postmodernity, Asia and the West Book

The keywords for the last decade of the 20th century include among others: contingency, decentering, destabilization, disorganization, fatalism, imaginary, implosion, indeterminacy, melancholy, paradox, pluralism, reflexivity, risk, and uncertainty - all seemingly related to the purported upheavals in the culture, economy, and polity of the Western metropolises. On the one hand, these words appear to reflect the acceleration of an anxiety associated with the crisis of the Western world as the century draws to a close. Western intellectuals and policy-makers are deadlocked over the meaning of progress - whether it should be dispensed with or revived in various degrees for the completion of the Enlightenment project. Certainly in time to come, the 1990s will be remembered as the halcyon days of culture-making that juxtapose the weariness of technology with the potential for reordering perceptions of creativity and critical inquiry. On the other hand, the upsurge of economic activities and the growing affluence in certain regions of the non-Western world, particularly East and Southeast Asia, have raised questions concerning the survival and transformation of modernity. That is to say, the torch of progress has seemingly been passed to the Asian economies at a time when the Western nation-states face formidable challenges to their sociopolitical systems. This is not to imply that the more prosperous regions in the non-Western world have succeeded while the Western world has failed economically and politically, but that the apparent reversal of fortunes has given a new lease of life to modernity and with it the necessity for ideological changes.Read More