George Pataki as a postmodern figure
Hearn, Frank
The two appear to have nothing in common but an appearance on David Letterman's The Late Show. Relaxed, smoking a cigar, and toying with the host, she broke the record for vulgarity on...
...Anticipating the culural postmodernists' attack on the patriarchal Western canon (and Madonna's cry of "Papa don't preach...
...both Madonna and the governor are, as their supporters claim, revolutionaries...
...Hence, Madonna as revolutionary icon...
...His proposed budget would slash the taxes and regulations that constrain corporate flexibility and would reduce state expenditures on education and welfare programs...
...Indeed, the architects of the flexible corporation, recently featured in cover stories in Business Week and Fortune, make their own contributions to the Porno vocabulary...
...The governor's plan is to democratize and multiculturalize the postmodern condition of unpredictability, bringing the liberating air of anxious uncertainty equally to the daughter of a middle-income African-American family attending the State University of New York, to the severely arthritic middle-aged woman whose meager check from the Home Relief program keeps her just this side of homelessness, and to the gay paraplegic who finds companionship and rehabilitation in an adult-care center...
...Like other Republican revolutionaries, George Pataki fits the bill...
...It is a truly revolutionary force...
...For them, the postmodern condition of unpredictability is a mean-spirited and stupid human trick...
...Madonna's revolutionary credentials are validated by postmodern intellectuals and academics...
...Relaxed, smoking a cigar, and toying with the host, she broke the record for vulgarity on network television...
...To do this, it needs the assistance of real postmodernists...
...She ruptures boundaries, breaches conventional roles and rules, and breaks through the repressive restraints of gender, race, and other traditional markers of identity...
...the postmodern corporation has fought to do away with such paternalistic protections as job security, health insurance, pension plans, union contracts, government safety regulations, and income-maintenance programs...
...Unburdened by lifetime employment SUMMER • 1995 • 301 The Electronic Newsstand A of ht n Ilidnre Illuminating the Internet READ AND SURSCRIDE TO DISSENT AND MORE THAN 300 OF THE WORLD S LEADING PUBLICATIONS PLUS A GROWING LIST 14 BUSINESS INFORMATION PROVIDERS FREE The Newsstand Home Page . l I:1 gopher, telnet O r i 800-403-6397 302 • DISSENT Comments and Opinions and job security, it is a "post-job organization" that replaces conventional job roles with ever-changing "part-time and temporary work situations," and that relies on "post-job employees," members of an impermanent, contingent work force, who, in the absence of career-based boundaries and identities, acquire the freedom to regularly reconstitute themselves as well...
...In those without the right amount of money or the right kind of education or talent, the world of postmodern capitalism evokes the bewilderment, the distrust, and the sense of danger and foreboding usually produced by disaster and extreme adversity...
...Given their capacity to quickly alter what they do and who they are, postmodern corporations and their post-job employees, we're told, welcome instability and unpredictability...
...She, of course, is Madonna—flamboyant celebrant of out-of-wedlock birth and virtually all other transgressions of papa's preachings...
...In this context, the governor and Madonna might consider a joint appearance on an upcoming Letterman show...
...Beneath these stylistic differences lies a common force—postmodern capitalism...
...The postmodern corporation must be capable of "continually reinventing" itself...
...He is George Pataki, the staid governor of New York, recently elected in part for his promise to punish illegitimacy and restore respect for conventional conduct...
...Hers is the fluid and chaotic world of the contingent and the impermanent, a world bereft of certainties, and thus a liberated world where people are free to reinvent themselves at will...
...Smiling nervously and awkwardly swinging his hands, he stood at a distance from Dave, shouting "Patooki" to illustrate one of the top ten ways of mispronouncing his name...
...The beast—modern structures affording stability, continuity, and some small peace of mind— was defanged long before the cultural postmodernists plunged the sword of deconstruction into its chest...
...For twenty years, American corporations have been restructuring with a vengeance in an effort to achieve the flexibility demanded by the chaotic, volatile market conditions of postmodern global capitalism...
...The postmodern corporation is better positioned than postmodern intellectuals to usher in the no-guarantee world of short-term, part-time relations and identities...
...These cultural postmodernists lead the revolution against the modem by exposing its core—stable, ordered, permanent arrangements, attachments, and identities that structure human existence in ways that serve the interests of white heterosexual males...
Vol. 42 • July 1995 • No. 3
