The postmodern subject is a subject that has lost their individuality.
In many ways, this person might appear almost childish. They’re baffled by basic concepts of social obligation. You ask them who they are, and it’s like watching a collapsing star.
Without a sense of self, they are inculcated from any sense of social obligation that might otherwise not be immediately to their benefit. Locked into a level of fearful self-obsession bordering on an anxious narcissism, the post-modern subject is locked into a death battle with themselves, struggling each day to prove the necessity of their own existence. Identity is displaced, with “I” being replaced with a panopticon of ideologies and identities from which to satiate the existential wound from which they suffer. The postmodern subject performs identity rather than possessing it. They’re battered from all sides by the forces of id and superego, desperately trying to navigate these straits without a sense of self from which to mediate.
Without an organizing ego, there is no stable ground for reflection, memory, or moral development. This calls into question whether such a subject can truly grow, learn, or be held accountable to anyone or anything. The only organizing forces that the postmodern subject is responsible to are the innate desires they yield from their body–pornographic, visceral, violent, or that are minimal social obligations and appearances, external validation from the easiest social body to grasp onto, the attention economy, the internet, and social media. This person careens from the anarchic to the tyrannical, depending on how the issue at hand relates to themselves.
In a modern sense of identity, the individual, even if they are autonomous, their sense of self is embedded in a shared moral framework. The postmodern subject, however, does not see obligations as genuinely important constructs but rather treats them as concepts to be gleefully thwarted. If identity is constructed by discourse and is inherently unstable, then so too is any fixed notion of moral agency. This unbound state of identity creates forms of subjectivity that resist any fixed obligations or long-term ethical engagement. The postmodern subject struggles to conceive of obligations and relationships to other people as important other than in a self-interested or performative sense. That which is done, which is unseen, isn’t socially real in the eyes of the postmodern subject. Their sense of self amounts to playing dress up from week to week, month to month, with a wardrobe of ideologies and identities for which to satiate the existential wound from which they suffer.
The postmodern subject thrives on this contradiction, not because it seeks dialectical truth, but because this very contradiction offers a convenient escape from commitment. To believe in something is to open oneself up ultimately to vulnerability. This person seeks not emancipation but evasion. The postmodern subject questions everything not out of curiosity, but out of insecurity. They don’t stand for anything, merely deconstructing everyone else’s beliefs to allay the risk of forming their own.
The postmodern subject is a being terrified of being defined because definition implies limitation, and limitation implies responsibility for one’s choices, one’s place in the world, and one’s values. Rather than risk being pinned down by any stable point of view, the postmodern subject floats in a sea of semantic play, using irony as armor and relativism as a shield. It doesn’t stand for anything because to stand for something is to risk being wrong, or worse, to be held accountable.
They can’t conceive of obligations to a social whole because they belong to no one, to nothing, not even themselves, since their sense of self lacks definition. This person ultimately lives life seeking palliative relief, as if it were possible to physically outpace the gnawing existential hole that hounds them with a malign relief of drugs, distractions, and a series of relationships that are self-destructive to a point. Without a shared sense of obligation or internally bound sense of self, the postmodern subject doesn’t act coherently, fails to commit socially, and ultimately is bound to a deep lack of care in all aspects of life and nihilistic submission.
The postmodern subject is what remains after the death of structure, the collapse of stable meaning, and the dissolution of the self. It is the residue of critique unmoored from construction, the afterbirth of skepticism without renewal. It is a subject that speaks endlessly about “subjectivity” while avoiding the burden of existence. In the end, the postmodern subject is less a person than a posture. It is “existence” in quotation marks. The postmodern subject might as well be a ghost haunting the ruins of reason, still talking, still performing, still consuming, but no longer grounded in anything that might be called truth, purpose, or an authentic existence.