His serial linkages of transparent information, culture, and racial superiority, and his notions of the high-level information society are ones that increasingly condense aspects of a Japanese situation that many would call postmodern. Almost all formulations of the postmodern agree in detecting a crisis of representation. This crisis is grounded in the extremity of the contemporary moment, one defined by the dominance of multinational corporations, the nuclear sublime, and the extraordinary speed and replication of information created by computerization. In this contemporary postmodern moment, the virulence of capital has turned everything into pure commodified signs. National borders give way as information circulates at blinding speeds.
Signification is torn apart.
Knowledge is a matter of TV games, as the philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard states. Lyotard makes this changing status of knowledge in postindustrial societies the focus of his work The Postmodern Condition . In Lyotard's analysis, knowledge has become the major stake in the global struggle for power. We can thus sense more clearly the edge to Nakasone's rhetoric, in which he grasps the necessity for politics to keep pace with the dense and homogeneous communications flows in Japan. Nakasone's very insistence on appealing to an increasingly discredited narrative of legitimation, in which the productive consensus is justified in racial terms, indicates the lag between his politics and this postmodern situation as Lyotard describes it.