Composing Subjects in Postmodern Culture: Baudrillard, Psychoanalysis, and Composition Studies

To write and to teach writing in this postmodern age requires a series of techniques and concepts that counter the endless flow of meaningless signs, images, and representations that often dominate in our current social orders. By analyzing Jean Baudrillard's descriptions of postmodernity, I will develop a psychoanalytic theory of composition that works against the debilitating and nihilistic aspects of mass consumer culture. In order to fight against the reign of indifference that Baudrillard describes, we need to develop a differentiated model of subjectivity that is based on the Lacanian distinction between the real, the imaginary, and the symbolic realms of human existence.

In the first chapter of his book The Transparency of Evil, Baudrillard argues that we live in a post-liberation period, “where all goals of liberation are already behind us” (3). This argument, in part, stems from his idea that all forms of sexual, political, and economic oppression have been overcome or at least have been challenged. For Baudrillard, we live in a period that is dominated by the unlimited proliferation of economic exchanges, sexual relations, and political simulations. His position appears to be both fatalistic and celebratory through its insistence that there is nothing that we can do but replay old scenarios and modes of liberation in a state of utter indifference (4). Baudrillard's theory is thus predicated on the ideas that there is no hope for future change and that no one is really committed to change in the first place.

I believe that the first step that the composing subject must take in relation to this type of discourse is to affirm a commitment to the possibility of social liberation and transformation. This initial act requires a desire to actively participate in culture while one overcomes the subjective uncertainty underpinning the indeterminacy of the postmodern social order. In other terms, the writing subject must allow himself or herself to take “provisional s