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finally does tip over into the postmodern, although only reluctantly so, as Jelinek finally favours an Arendt who capitulates to “the new myths of a self-conscious New Age ideology” rather than one who “took her experiences with Nazi fascism as the departure point for her work on totalitarianism” (202 in this volume).
Each of the remaining essays in the collection is similarly concerned with playwrights who decry how the antirationalism often associated with postmodernism is potentially disruptive of progressive politics, and they describe how these playwrights make various theatrical concessions that cause their work to tip away from the postmodern. In turn, these essays indicate how self-consciousness about the tension between political progressivism and postmodernity is fast becoming the most salient feature of a post-postmodern climate.
Set in a 1960s Germany struggling to move beyond its Nazi era indiscretions, Peter Weiss’s The Investigation, as Scott Windham explains it, is engaged at least in part with exploring the tension between postmodern aesthetics and moral and political judgments for how it “uses the postmodernist strategy of implicating the audience in the performance… in order to achieve the modernist goal of providing a clear, morally informed, politically actionable lesson to the audience” (207 in this volume). Windham, however, is pessimistic about the potential of Weiss’ approach:
According to Windham’s reading, The Investigation is a transitional piece that seeks to employ postmodern aesthetics to political ends without being fully cognizant of how this tension potentially undermines his agenda.