Postmodernity

Postmodernity appears here less as a self-contained historical period than as a test of how plurality, historical change, and systemic antagonism are understood. The account disputes the reassuring idea that many distinct modernities or self-contained worlds can be recognized without confronting the capitalist relations and political conflicts that connect them.

Plural Modernities and Their Shared System

Drawing on Fredric Jameson’s critique, the discussion argues that the language of alternative modernities can make cultural difference seem to resolve the problem of modernity. It allows societies to imagine distinct, locally fashioned paths in place of a single hegemonic Anglo-Saxon model, but can thereby set aside modernity’s other fundamental meaning: worldwide capitalism. The issue is not that modernity must have one fixed essence; it is that multiplying its versions can obscure the antagonism built into the shared system and recast that antagonism as merely one historical variant.

Fascism and Communism serve as examples of projects that presented themselves as alternatives to Western liberal-capitalist modernity. In the account of Fascism, the claim to offer an alternative could preserve the core of capitalist modernity while casting its conflicts as the product of a contingent distortion. The rapid industrialization of the Soviet Union in the late 1920s likewise pursued a form of modernization distinct from the Western-capitalist model. These examples complicate any account in which cultural or national variation, by itself, escapes the larger systemic conflict.

Worlds, Language, and Truth

The discussion connects postmodern relativism to the image of a multitude of worlds, each sustained by its own language-game and by the narratives through which its members understand themselves. If those worlds share no common ground, truth becomes a problem of identifying what can remain the same across them. Against the reduction of truth to the self-description of separate communities, the passage turns to Alain Badiou’s idea of a decisive point: a Yes-or-No decision that stabilizes a world. This decision is linked to the symbolic ordering through which a world becomes intelligible.

The proposed passage beyond the limits of particular languages is not a return to a single, harmonious worldview. It is a movement from language toward letters and mathematical formulas that can cut diagonally across multiple worlds. The contrast shifts the question from whether different worlds exist to whether something can be articulated across their divisions. Plurality remains, but it does not automatically make each world’s account of itself the final measure of truth.

Revolution, Transformation, and Historical Judgment

The treatment of the Soviet case gives historical weight to the problem of alternatives. Sheila Fitzpatrick’s account places collectivization and rapid industrialization within the internal dynamic of the October Revolution, rather than treating the transformation as simply unrelated to the revolutionary sequence. On this reading, that sequence ended only in 1937, when the purges were curtailed and the Party nomenklatura consolidated into a new class. The revolutionary inheritance persisted in a distorted form: purges repeatedly returned as a violent reminder of the tensions the new order had not resolved.

The contrast among periods makes the scale of the change concrete. The years from 1917 to 1921 were difficult but marked by a society-wide state of emergency; the Soviet New Economic Policy period consolidated state power while leaving much of social life intact. The thrust beginning in 1928, by contrast, aimed directly at changing society’s composition: peasants were liquidated as a class of individual owners, and an older intelligentsia of teachers, doctors, scientists, engineers, and technicians was replaced by a new one. An emigrant returning to Moscow in 1924 might still recognize its shops, offices, theaters, and many people in charge; returning in 1934, the same emigrant would find the texture of social life transformed. The violence of the push forward coexisted with a sincere and enthusiastic drive to remake the state, intelligentsia, and legal system.

This account rejects two simple verdicts on the revolution: that Stalinism was merely a contingent deviation, and that the Communist project was totalitarian at its core. Isaac Deutscher’s interpretation of forced collectivization stresses how a revolutionary dynamic compressed within the Soviet Union turned inward, violently reshaping Soviet society. Industrialization and collectivization became substitutes for revolutionary expansion abroad, while the liquidation of the kulaks stood in for the overthrow of bourgeois rule elsewhere. The historical argument thus keeps emancipatory potential and disastrous outcome in view at once, rather than using either to erase the other.

Modernity’s Two Social Logics

The account also describes modernity through the tension between biopolitical administration and capitalist reproduction. Biopolitical power presents itself as the pursuit of individual happiness and the prevention of shocks that might obstruct self-realization; individuals, in turn, regulate themselves through practices such as exercise, attention to safe sex, and healthy eating. The subject seeking self-realization is thereby also treated as an object of control. This is not presented as the whole of modernity, but as one side of a broader social relation.

The other side is a capitalist system propelled by surplus and continual self-revolutionizing. Capitalism does not merely contain excess as an exception to ordinary social life: it makes the production and appropriation of excess part of its ongoing reproduction. These two logics are related but cannot be translated into one another as though one were merely the appearance of the other. Their relation is a tension between economic surplus, which drives the system to transform itself, and political excess, which arises in the exercise of power and in the gap between representation and those represented.

Lacan’s four discourses provide a historical account of how these social forms emerge. The Master’s discourse is associated not with a premodern master but with absolute monarchy, exemplified by Louis XIV. As direct mastery vacillates, bureaucratic expertise develops into administration and biopolitical regulation, while capitalist subjectivity incorporates questioning and excess into its own continuing reproduction. On this account, capitalism’s permanent revolution is not external to modern social life: ceaseless transformation becomes one of its normal operating principles.

The Contemporary Social Link

The Analyst’s discourse is initially presented as the possibility of revolutionary-emancipatory subjectivity: it addresses the subject from the position of knowledge in order to isolate the Master-Signifier that organizes the subject’s ideological unconscious. But this emancipatory reading is complicated by Jacques-Alain Miller’s suggestion that contemporary civilization itself may follow the Analyst’s formula. In that version, surplus-enjoyment occupies the position of social agent, issuing an injunction to enjoy; the divided subject is put to work to satisfy it, while scientific and expert knowledge helps the subject manage the demand and pursue self-mastery.

The further complication is that the same formula can describe a perverse social link. There, the agent presents itself as an instrument of the Other’s desire, claims knowledge of what the other wants, and produces a Master-Signifier in the position of mastery. The difference between this arrangement and analysis depends on the ambiguity of objet petit a: it can function as an enticing screen, or as the void that the screen conceals. The contemporary demand to enjoy is therefore not simply a new freedom succeeding older forms of authority. It can reproduce mastery through the very excess, choice, and self-management that appear to loosen it.