Material culture and antihuman subjectivities in postmodernist literature

Abstract

The relation between subject and object in contemporary societies is a key concern of much postmodernist literature, authors often denouncing the superfluous pervasiveness of material culture in our lives and our absurd dependence on the artificial systems of meaning that we project on the world of things.

The antihumanism that is commonly identified with postmodern culture finds a congenial formulation in Postructuralist theories, which consider meaning not as an absolute concept, but always arising of a web of signs that interrelate; the key issue is that for most Postructuralist thinkers –among them Jean Baudrillard and his definition of the ‘hyperreal’– these codes on which culture is founded always precede the individual subject, annihilating all prospects of human agency.

Postmodern authors like Thomas Pynchon, Don Delillo or William Gibson foster the debate on the nature of those underlying structures, and offer manifold portraits of these frail, commodified, and antihuman subjectivities that are very often the product of progress