Textuality and the postmodernist neglect of the politics of representation

Those in the vanguard of postmodernist theorising, who have collectively been labelled "skeptical postmodemists," have produced a discourse that has said much about the issues of textuality and the `linguistic turn'. In the rush to dismiss modernity and view the world through an optic of textuality, we are left with a view of the individual as a mere textual creation, with an identity that is disembodied and fragmented, making its appearance in scattered traces. The attempted textual exegesis of the subject simultaneously does away with the tools of modem inquiry, namely causality and agency. Whilst this rendering of identity is itself contested terrain, what has been repressed or neglected is the text as a product and site of political struggle. The issues of agency and the politics of representation seem to vanish with the disposal of the subject and the author. We, however, find these issues have an unacknowledged presence in skeptical postmodernist theorising. Having outlined the argument in this manner, we use the optic of dialectics to reframe the question and revisit the issues of identity and agency afresh. The central argument that we pose is that text is both a product and site of political struggle, and only by understanding text in such a way does the multi-authorship of identity itself become understandable along with the limitations and possibilities for self-authorship of identity.