Abstract:
The last issue of ‘Arena Magazine’ contained substantial debate over the importance of technology in the constitution of social life and politics. It also continued an exchange between Guy Rundle, Matthew Sharpe and Geoff Boucher over ‘postmodern conservatism’. While presented as separate debates I’d like to draw parts of them together. In the debate over postmodern conservatism, Rundle remarked that whatever faults lie with postmodernism it was ‘more on the money as a description of the changed nature of existence’ than anything the residual left could come up with. In responding Sharpe and Boucher quote this observation but never really engage with it. Is postmodernism largely a form of cultural relativism as Sharpe and Boucher would have it? Or is it something more substantial – an increasingly dominant form of engaging with the world, largely produced by the fusion of technology with the market and, in key respects, profoundly calling for a questioning of limits?
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