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Title: The Catastrophe of Postmodernism
Author: John Zerzan
Date: 1991
Language: en
Topics: anti-civ, postmodernity, post-structuralist
Source: Retrieved on February 12th, 2009 from http://www.primitivism.com/postmodernism.htm

John Zerzan

The Catastrophe of Postmodernism

Madonna, “Are We Having Fun Yet?”, supermarket tabloids, Milli Vanilli,

virtual reality, “shop ‘till you drop,” PeeWee’s Big Adventure, New

Age/computer ‘empowerment’, mega-malls, Talking Heads, comic-strip

movies, ‘green’ consumption. A build-up of the resolutely superficial

and cynical. Toyota commercial: “New values: saving, caring — all that

stuff;” Details magazine: “Style Matters;” “Why Ask Why? Try Bud Dry;”

watching television endlessly while mocking it. Incoherence,

fragmentation, relativism — up to and including the dismantling of the

very notion of meaning (because the record of rationality has been so

poor?); embrace of the marginal, while ignoring how easily margins are

made fashionable. “The death of the subject” and “the crisis of

representation.”

Postmodernism. Originally a theme within aesthetics, it has colonized

“ever wider areas,” according to Ernesto Laclau, “until it has become

the new horizon of our cultural, philosophical, and political

experience.” “The growing conviction,” as Richard Kearney has it, “that

human culture as we have known it...is now reaching its end.” It is,

especially in the U.S., the intersection of poststructuralist philosophy

and a vastly wider condition of society: both specialized ethos and, far

more importantly, the arrival of what modern industrial society has

portended. Postmodernism is contemporaneity, a morass of deferred

solutions on every level, featuring ambiguity, the refusal to ponder

either origins or ends, as well as the denial of oppositional

approaches, “the new realism.” Signifying nothing and going nowhere, pm

[postmodernism] is an inverted millenarianism, a gathering fruition of

the technological ‘life’-system of universal capital. It is not

accidental that Carnegie-Mellon University, which in the ’80s was the

first to require that all students be equipped with computers, is

establishing “the nation’s first poststructuralist undergraduate

curriculum.”

Consumer narcissism and a cosmic “what’s the difference?” mark the end

of philosophy as such and the etching of a landscape, according to

Kroker and Cook, of “disintegration and decay against the background

radiation of parody, kitsch and burnout.” Henry Kariel concludes that

“for postmodernists, it is simply too late to oppose the momentum of

industrial society.” Surface, novelty, contingency — there are no

grounds available for criticizing our crisis. If the representative

postmodernist resists summarizable conclusions, in favor of an alleged

pluralism and openness of perspective, it is also reasonable (if one is

allowed to use such a word) to predict that if and when we live in a

completely pm culture, we would no longer know how to say so.

The primacy of language & the end of the subject

In terms of systematic thought, the growing preoccupation with language

is a key factor accounting for the pm climate of narrowed focus and

retreat. The so-called “descent into language,” or the “linguistic turn”

has levied the postmodernist— poststructuralist assumption that language

constitutes the human world and the human world constitutes the whole

world. For most of this century language has been moving to center stage

in philosophy, among figures as diverse as Wittgenstein, Quine,

Heidegger, and Gadamer, while growing attention to communication theory,

linguistics, cybernetics, and computer languages demonstrates a similar

emphasis over several decades in science and technology. This very

pronounced turn toward language itself was embraced by Foucault as a

“decisive leap towards a wholly new form of thought.” Less positively,

it can be at least partially explained in terms of pessimism following

the ebbing of the oppositional moment of the ’60s. The ’70s witnessed an

alarming withdrawal into what Edward Said called the “labyrinth of

textuality,” as contrasted with the sometimes more insurrectionary

intellectual activity of the preceding period.

Perhaps it isn’t paradoxical that “the fetish of the textual,” as Ben

Agger judged, “beckons in an age when intellectuals are dispossessed of

their words.” Language is more and more debased; drained of meaning,

especially in its public usage. No longer can even words be counted on,

and this is part of a larger anti-theory current, behind which stands a

much larger defeat than the ’60s: that of the whole train of

Enlightenment rationality. We have depended on language as the

supposedly sound and transparent handmaiden of reason and where has it

gotten us? Auschwitz, Hiroshima, mass psychic misery, impending

destruction of the planet, to name a few. Enter postmodernism, with its

seemingly bizarre and fragmented turns and twists. Edith Wyschograd’s

Saints and Postmodernism (1990) not only testifies to the ubiquity of

the pm ‘approach’ — there are apparently no fields outside its ken — but

also comments cogently on the new direction: “postmodernism as a

‘philosophical’ and ‘literary’ discursive style cannot straightforwardly

appeal to the techniques of reason, themselves the instruments of

theory, but must forge new and necessarily arcane means for undermining

the pieties of reason.”

The immediate antecedent of postmodernism/poststructuralism, reigning in

the ’50s and much of the ’60s, was organized around the centrality it

accorded the linguistic model. Structuralism provided the premise that

language constitutes our only means of access to the world of objects

and experience and its extension, that meaning arises wholly from the

play of differences within cultural sign systems. Levi-Strauss, for

example, argued that the key to anthropology lies in the uncovering of

unconscious social laws (e.g. those that regulate marriage ties and

kinship), which are structured like language. It was the Swiss linguist

Saussure who stressed, in a move very influential to postmodernism, that

meaning resides not in a relationship between an utterance and that to

which it refers, but in the relationship of signs to one another. This

Saussurian belief in the enclosed, self-referential nature of language

implies that everything is determined within language, leading to the

scrapping of such quaint notions as alienation, ideology, repression,

etc. and concluding that language and consciousness are virtually the

same.

On this trajectory, which rejects the view of language as an external

means deployed by consciousness, appears the also very influential

neo-Freudian, Jacques Lacan. For Lacan, not only is consciousness

thoroughly permeated by language and without existence for itself apart

from language, even the “unconscious is structured like a language.”

Earlier thinkers, most notably Nietzsche and Heidegger, had already

suggested that a different language or a changed relationship to

language might somehow bring new and important insights. With the

linguistic turn of more recent times, even the concept of an individual

who thinks as the basis of knowledge becomes shaky. Saussure discovered

that “language is not a function of the speaking subject,” the primacy

of language displacing who it is that gives voice to it. Roland Barthes,

whose career joins the structuralist and poststructuralist periods,

decided “It is language that speaks, not the author,” paralleled by

Althusser’s observation that history is “a process without a subject.”

If the subject is felt to be essentially a function of language, its

stifling mediation and that of the symbolic order in general ascends

toward the top of the agenda. Thus does postmodernism flail about trying

to communicate what lies beyond language, “to present the

unpresentable.” Meanwhile, given the radical doubt introduced as to the

availability to us of a referent in the world outside of language, the

real fades from consideration. Jacques Derrida, the pivotal figure of

the postmodernism ethos, proceeds as if the connection between words and

the world were arbitrary. The object world plays no role for him. The

exhaustion of modernism & the rise of postmodernism ut before turning to

Derrida, a few more comments on precursors and the wider change in

culture. Postmodernism raises questions about communication and meaning,

so that the category of the aesthetic, for one, becomes problematic. For

modernism, with its sunnier belief in representation, art and literature

held at least some promise for providing a vision of fulfilment or

understanding. Until the end of modernism, “high culture” was seen as a

repository of moral and spiritual wisdom. Now there seems to be no such

belief, the ubiquity of the question of language perhaps telling as to

the vacancy left by the failure of other candidates of promising

starting points of human imagination. In the ’60s modernism seems to

have reached the end of its development, the austere canon of its

painting (e.g. Rothko, Reinhardt) giving way to pop art’s uncritical

espousal of the consumer culture’s commercial vernacular. Postmodernism,

and not just in the arts, is modernism without the hopes and dreams that

made modernity bearable.

A widespread “fast food” tendency is seen in the visual arts, in the

direction of easily consumable entertainment. Howard Fox finds that

“theatricality may be the single most pervasive property of postmodern

art.” A decadence or exhaustion of development is also detected in the

dark paintings of an Eric Fischl, where often a kind of horror seems to

lurk just below the surface. This quality links Fischl, America’s

quintessential pm painter, to the equally sinister Twin Peaks and pm’s

quintessential television figure, David Lynch. The image, since Warhol,

is self-consciously a mechanically reproducible commodity and this is

the bottom-line reason for both the depthlessness and the common note of

eeriness and foreboding.

Postmodern art’s oft-noted eclecticism is an arbitrary recycling of

fragments from everywhere, especially the past, often taking the form of

parody and kitsch. Demoralized, derealized, dehistoricized: art that can

no longer take itself seriously. The image no longer refers primarily to

some ‘original’, situated elsewhere in the ‘real’ world; it increasingly

refers only to other images. In this way it reflects how lost we are,

how removed from nature, in the ever more mediated world of

technological capitalism.

The term postmodernism was first applied, in the ’70s, to architecture.

Christopher Jencks wrote of an anti-planning, pro-pluralism approach,

the abandoning of modernism’s dream of pure form in favor of listening

to “the multiple languages of the people.” More honest are Robert

Venturi’s celebration of Las Vegas and Piers Gough’s admission that pm

architecture is no more caring for people than was modernist

architecture. The arches and columns laid over modernist boxes are a

thin facade of playfulness and individuality, which scarcely transforms

the anonymous concentrations of wealth and power underneath.

Postmodernist writers question the very grounds for literature instead

of continuing to create the illusion of an external world. The novel

redirects its attention to itself; Donald Barthelme, for example, writes

stories that seem to always remind the reader that they are artifices.

By protesting against statement, point of view and other patterns of

representation, pm literature exhibits its discomfort with the forms

that tame and domesticate cultural products. As the wider world becomes

more artificial and meaning less subject to our control, the new

approach would rather reveal the illusion even at the cost of no longer

saying anything. Here as elsewhere art is struggling against itself, its

prior claims to help us understand the world evaporating while even the

concept of imagination loses its potency.

For some the loss of narrative voice or point of view is equivalent to

the loss of our ability to locate ourselves historically. For

postmodernists this loss is a kind of liberation. Raymond Federman, for

instance, glories in the coming fiction that “will be seemingly devoid

of any meaning...deliberately illogical, irrational, unrealistic, non

sequitur, and incoherent.”

Fantasy, on the rise for decades, is a common form of the post-modern,

carrying with it the reminder that the fantastic confronts civilization

with the very forces it must repress for its survival. But it is a

fantasy that, paralleling both deconstruction and high levels of

cynicism and resignation in society, does not believe in itself to the

extent of very much understanding or communicating. Pm writers seem to

smother in the folds of language, conveying little else than their

ironic stance regarding more traditional literature’s pretensions to

truth and meaning. Perhaps typical is Laurie Moore’s 1990 novel, Like

Life, whose title and content reveal a retreat from living and an

inversion of the American Dream, in which things can only get worse.

The celebration of impotence

Postmodernism subverts two of the over-arching tenets of Enlightenment

humanism: the power of language to shape the world and the power of

consciousness to shape a self. Thus we have the postmodernist void, the

general notion that the yearning for emancipation and freedom promised

by humanist principles of subjectivity cannot be satisfied. Pm views the

self as a linguistic convention; as William Burroughs put it, “Your ‘I’

is a completely illusory concept.”

It is obvious that the celebrated ideal of individuality has been under

pressure for a long time. Capitalism in fact has made a career of

celebrating the individual while destroying him/her. And the works of

Marx and Freud have done much to expose the largely misdirected and

naive belief in the sovereign, rational Kantian self in charge of

reality, with their more recent structuralist interpreters, Althusser

and Lacan, contributing to and updating the effort. But this time the

pressure is so extreme that the term ‘individual’ has been rendered

obsolete, replaced by ‘subject’, which always includes the aspect of

being subjected (as in the older “a subject of the king,” for example).

Even some libertarian radicals, such as the Interrogations group in

France, join in the postmodernist chorus to reject the individual as a

criterion for value due to the debasing of the category by ideology and

history.

So pm reveals that autonomy has largely been a myth and cherished ideals

of mastery and will are similarly misguided. But if we are promised

herewith a new and serious attempt at demystifying authority, concealed

behind the guises of a bourgeois humanist ‘freedom’, we actually get a

dispersal of the subject so radical as to render it impotent, even

nonexistent, as any kind of agent at all. Who or what is left to achieve

a liberation, or is that just one more pipe dream? The postmodern stance

wants it both ways: to put the thinking person “under erasure,” while

the very existence of its own critique depends on discredited ideas like

subjectivity. Fred Dallmayr, acknowledging the widespread appeal of

contemporary anti-humanism, warns that primary casualties are reflection

and a sense of values. To assert that we are instances of language

foremost is obviously to strip away our capacity to grasp the whole, at

a time when we are urgently required to do just that. Small wonder that

to some, pm amounts, in practice, to merely a liberalism without the

subject, while feminists who try to define or reclaim an authentic and

autonomous female identity would also likely be unpersuaded.

The postmodern subject, what is presumably left of subject-hood, seems

to be mainly the personality constructed by and for technological

capital, described by the marxist literary theorist Terry Eagleton as a

“dispersed, decentered network of libidinal attachments, emptied of

ethical substance and psychical interiority, the ephemeral function of

this or that act of consumption, media experience, sexual relationship,

trend or fashion.” If Eagleton’s definition of today’s non-subject as

announced by pm is unfaithful to their point of view, it is difficult to

see where, to find grounds for a distancing from his scathing summary.

With postmodernism even alienation dissolves, for there is no longer a

subject to be alienated! Contemporary fragmentation and powerlessness

could hardly be heralded more completely, or existing anger and

disaffection more thoroughly ignored.

Derrida, deconstruction & différance

Enough, for now, on background and general traits. The most influential

specific postmodern approach has been Jacques Derrida’s, known since the

’60s as deconstruction. Postmodernism in philosophy means above all the

writings of Derrida, and this earliest and most extreme outlook has

found a resonance well beyond philosophy, in the popular culture and its

mores.

Certainly the “linguistic turn” bears on the emergence of Derrida,

causing David Wood to call deconstruction “an absolutely unavoidable

move in philosophy today,” as thought negotiates its inescapable

predicament as written language. That language is not innocent or

neutral but bears a considerable number of presuppositions it has been

his career to develop, exposing what he sees as the fundamentally

self-contradictory nature of human discourse. The mathematician Kurt

Gödel’s “Incompleteness Theorem” states that any formal system can be

either consistent or complete, but not both. In rather parallel fashion,

Derrida claims that language is constantly turning against itself so

that, analyzed closely, we can neither say what we mean or mean what we

say. But like semiologists before him, Derrida also suggests, at the

same time, that a deconstructive method could demystify the ideological

contents of all texts, interpreting all human activities as essentially

texts. The basic contradiction and cover-up strategy inherent in the

metaphysics of language in its widest sense might be laid bare and a

more intimate kind of knowing result.

What works against this latter claim, with its political promise

constantly hinted at by Derrida, is precisely the content of

deconstruction; it sees language as a constantly moving independent

force that disallows a stabilizing of meaning or definite communication,

as referred to above. This internally-generated flux he called

‘différance’ and this is what calls the very idea of meaning to

collapse, along with the self-referential nature of language, which, as

noted previously, says that there is no space outside of language, no

“out there” for meaning to exist in anyway. Intention and the subject

are overwhelmed, and what is revealed are not any “inner truths” but an

endless proliferation of possible meanings generated by différance, the

principle that characterizes language. Meaning within language is also

made elusive by Derrida’s insistence that language is metaphorical and

cannot therefore directly convey truth, a notion taken from Nietzsche,

one which erases the distinction between philosophy and literature. All

these insights supposedly contribute to the daring and subversive nature

of deconstruction, but they surely provoke some basic questions as well.

If meaning is indeterminate, how are Derrida’s argument and terms not

also indeterminate, un-pin-downable? He has replied to critics, for

example, that they are unclear as to his meaning, while his ‘meaning’ is

that there can be no clear, definable meaning. And though his entire

project is in an important sense aimed at subverting all systems’ claims

to any kind of transcendent truth, he raises différance to the

transcendent status of any philosophical first principle.

For Derrida, it has been the valorizing of speech over writing that has

caused all of Western thought to overlook the downfall that language

itself causes philosophy. By privileging the spoken word a false sense

of immediacy is produced, the invalid notion that in speaking the thing

itself is present and representation overcome. But speech is no more

‘authentic’ than the written word, not at all immune from the built-in

failure of language to accurately or definitely deliver the

(representational) goods. It is the misplaced desire for presence that

characterizes Western metaphysics, an unreflected desire for the success

of representation. It is important to note that because Derrida rejects

the possibility of an unmediated existence, he assails the efficacy of

representation but not the category itself. He mocks the game but plays

it just the same. Différance (later simply ‘difference’) shades into

indifference, due to the unavailability of truth or meaning, and joins

the cynicism at large.

Early on, Derrida discussed philosophy’s false steps in the area of

presence by reference to Husserl’s tortured pursuit of it. Next he

developed his theory of ‘grammatology’, in which he restored writing to

its proper primacy as against the West’s phonocentric, or speech-valued,

bias. This was mainly accomplished by critiques of major figures who

committed the sin of phonocentrism, including Rousseau, Heidegger,

Saussure, and Levi-Strauss, which is not to overlook his great

indebtedness to the latter three of these four.

As if remembering the obvious implications of his deconstructive

approach, Derrida’s writings shift in the ’70s from the earlier, fairly

straightforward philosophical discussions. Glas (1974) is a mishmash of

Hegel and Gent, in which argument is replaced by free association and

bad puns. Though baffling to even his warmest admirers, Glas certainly

is in keeping with the tenet of the unavoidable ambiguity of language

and a will to subvert the pretensions of orderly discourse. Spurs (1978)

is a book-length study of Nietzsche that ultimately finds its focus in

nothing Nietzsche published, but in a handwritten note in the margin of

one of his notebooks: “I have forgotten my umbrella.” Endless,

undecidable possibilities exist as to the meaning or importance-if

any-of this scrawled comment. This, of course, is Derrida’s point, to

suggest that the same can be said for everything Nietzsche wrote. The

place for thought, according to deconstruction, is clearly (er, let us

say unclearly) with the relative, the fragmented, the marginal.

Meaning is certainly not something to be pinned down, if it exists at

all. Commenting on Plato’s Phaedrus, the master of de-composition goes

so far as to assert that “like any text [it] couldn’t not be involved,

at least in a virtual, dynamic, lateral manner, with all the words that

composed the system of the Greek language.”

Related is Derrida’s opposition to binary opposites, like

literal/metaphorical, serious/playful, deep/superficial, nature/culture,

ad infinitum. He sees these as basic conceptual hierarchies, mainly

smuggled in by language itself, which provide the illusion of definition

or orientation. He further claims that the deconstructive work of

overturning these pairings, which valorize one of the two over the

other, leads to a political and social overturning of actual,

non-conceptual hierarchies. But to automatically refuse all binary

oppositions is itself a metaphysical proposition; it in fact bypasses

politics and history out of a failure to see in opposites, however

imprecise they may be, anything but a linguistic reality. In the

dismantling of every binarism, deconstruction aims at “conceiving

difference without opposition.” What in a smaller dosage would seem a

salutary approach, a skepticism about neat, either/or characterizations,

proceeds to the very questionable prescription of refusing all

unambiguity. To say that there can be no yes or no position is

tantamount to a paralysis of relativism, in which ‘impotence’ becomes

the valorized partner to ‘opposition’.

Perhaps the case of Paul De Man, who extended and deepened Derrida’s

seminal deconstructive positions (surpassing him, in the opinion of

many), is instructive. Shortly after the death of De Man in 1985, it was

discovered that as a young man he had written several anti-semitic,

pro-Nazi newspaper articles in occupied Belgium. The status of this

brilliant Yale deconstructor, and indeed to some, the moral and

philosophical value of deconstruction itself, were called into question

by the sensational revelation. De Man, like Derrida, had stressed “the

duplicity, the confusion, the untruth that we take for granted in the

use of language.” Consistent with this, albeit to his discredit, in my

opinion, was Derrida’s tortuous commentary on De Man’s collaborationist

period: in sum, “how can we judge, who has the right to say?” A shabby

testimony for deconstruction, considered in any way as a moment of the

anti-authoritarian.

Derrida announced that deconstruction “instigates the subversion of

every kingdom.” In fact, it has remained within the safely academic

realm of inventing ever more ingenious textual complications to keep

itself in business and avoid reflecting on its own political situation.

One of Derrida’s most central terms, dissemination, describes language,

under the principle of difference, as not so much a rich harvest of

meanings but a kind of endless loss and spillage, with meaning appearing

everywhere and evaporating virtually at once. This flow of language,

ceaseless and unsatisfying, is a most accurate parallel to that of the

heart of consumer capital and its endless circulation of

non-significance. Derrida thus unwittingly eternalizes and universalizes

dominated life by rendering human communication in its image. The “every

kingdom” he would see deconstruction subverting is instead extended and

deemed absolute.

Derrida represents both the well-travelled French tradition of

explication de texte and a reaction against the Gallic veneration of

Cartesian classicist language with its ideals of clarity and balance.

Deconstruction emerged also, to a degree, as part of the original

element of the near-revolution of 1968, namely the student revolt

against rigidified French higher education. Some of its key terms (e.g.

dissemination) are borrowed from Blanchot’s reading of Heidegger, which

is not to deny a significant originality in Derridean thought. Presence

and representation constantly call each other into question, revealing

the underlying system as infinitely fissured, and this in itself is an

important contribution.

Unfortunately, to transform metaphysics into the question of writing, in

which meanings virtually choose themselves and thus one discourse (and

therefore mode of action) cannot be demonstrated to be better than

another, seems less than radical. Deconstruction is now embraced by the

heads of English departments, professional societies, and other

bodies-in-good-standing because it raises the issue of representation

itself so weakly. Derrida’s deconstruction of philosophy admits that it

must leave intact the very concept whose lack of basis it exposes. While

finding the notion of a language-independent reality untenable, neither

does deconstruction promise liberation from the famous “prison house of

language.” The essence of language, the primacy of the symbolic, are not

really tackled, but are shown to be as inescapable as they are

inadequate to fulfilment. No exit; as Derrida declared: “It is not a

question of releasing oneself into an unrepressive new order (there are

none).”

The crisis of representation

If deconstruction’s contribution is mainly just an erosion of our

assurance of reality, it forgets that reality — advertising and mass

culture to mention just two superficial examples — has already

accomplished this. Thus this quintessentially postmodern point of view

bespeaks the movement of thinking from decadence to its elegiac, or

post-thought phase, or as John Fekete summarized it, “a most profound

crisis of the Western mind, a most profound loss of nerve.”

Today’s overload of representation serves to underline the radical

impoverishment of life in technological class society — technology is

deprivation. The classical theory of representation held that meaning or

truth preceded and prescribed the representations that communicated it.

But we may now inhabit a postmodern culture where the image has become

less the expression of an individual subject than the commodity of an

anonymous consumerist technology. Ever more mediated, life in the

Information Age is increasingly controlled by the manipulation of signs,

symbols, marketing and testing data, etc. Our time, says Derrida, is “a

time without nature.”

All formulations of the postmodern agree in detecting a crisis of

representation. Derrida, as noted, began a challenge of the nature of

the philosophical project itself as grounded in representation, raising

some unanswerable questions about the relationship between

representation and thought. Deconstruction undercuts the epistemological

claims of representation, showing that language, for example, is

inadequate to the task of representation. But this undercutting avoids

tackling the repressive nature of its subject, insisting, again, that

pure presence, a space beyond representation, can only be a utopian

dream. There can be no unmediated contact or communication, only signs

and representations; deconstruction is a search for presence and

fulfilment interminably, necessarily, deferred.

Jacques Lacan, sharing the same resignation as Derrida, at least reveals

more concerning the malign essence of representation. Extending Freud,

he determined that the subject is both constituted and alienated by the

entry into the symbolic order, namely, into language. While denying the

possibility of a return to a pre-language state in which the broken

promise of presence might be honored, he could at least see the central,

crippling stroke that is the submission of free-ranging desires to the

symbolic world, the surrender of uniqueness to language. Lacan termed

jouissance unspeakable because it could properly occur only outside of

language: that happiness which is the desire for a world without the

fracture of money or writing, a society without representation.

The inability to generate symbolic meaning is, somewhat ironically, a

basic problem for postmodernism. It plays out its stance at the frontier

between what can be represented and what cannot, a half-way resolution

(at best) that refuses to refuse representation. (Instead of providing

the arguments for the view of the symbolic as repressive and alienating,

the reader is referred to the first five essays of my Elements of

Refusal [Left Bank Books, 1988], which deal with time, language, number,

art, and agriculture as cultural estrangements owing to symbolization.)

Meanwhile an estranged and exhausted public loses interest in the

alleged solace of culture, and with the deepening and thickening of

mediation emerges the discovery that perhaps this was always the meaning

of culture. It is certainly not out of character, however, to find that

postmodernism does not recognize reflection on the origins of

representation, insisting as it does on the impossibility of unmediated

existence.

In response to the longing for the lost wholeness of pre-civilization,

postmodernism says that culture has become so fundamental to human

existence that there is no possibility of delving down under it. This,

of course, recalls Freud, who recognized the essence of civilization as

a suppression of freedom and wholeness, but who decided that work and

culture were more important. Freud at least was honest enough to admit

the contradiction or non-reconciliation involved in opting for the

crippling nature of civilization, whereas the postmodernists do not.

Floyd Merrell found that “a key, perhaps the principal key to Derridean

thought” was Derrida’s decision to place the question of origins off

limits. And so while hinting throughout his work at a complicity between

the fundamental assumptions of Western thought and the violences and

repressions that have characterized Western civilization, Derrida has

centrally, and very influentially, repudiated all notions of origins.

Causative thinking, after all, is one of the objects of scorn for

postmodernists. ‘Nature’ is an illusion, so what could ‘unnatural’ mean?

In place of the situationists’ wonderful “Under the pavement it’s the

beach,” we have Foucault’s famous repudiation, in The Order of Things,

of the whole notion of the “repressive hypothesis.” Freud gave us an

understanding of culture as stunting and neurosis-generating; pm tells

us that culture is all we can ever have, and that its foundations, if

they exist, are not available to our understanding. Postmodernism is

apparently what we are left with when the modernization process is

complete and nature is gone for good.

Not only does pm echo Beckett’s comment in Endgame, “there’s no more

nature,” but it also denies that there ever was any recognizable space

outside of language and culture. ‘Nature’, declared Derrida in

discussing Rousseau, “has never existed.” Again, alienation is ruled

out; that concept necessarily implies an idea of authenticity which

postmodernism finds unintelligible. In this vein, Derrida cited “the

loss of what has never taken place, of a self-presence which has never

been given but only dreamed of...” Despite the limitations of

structuralism, Levi-Strauss’ sense of affiliation with Rousseau, on the

other hand, bore witness to his search for origins. Refusing to rule out

liberation, either in terms of beginnings or goals, Levi-Strauss never

ceased to long for an ‘intact’ society, a non-fractured world where

immediacy had not yet been broken. For this Derrida, pejoratively to be

sure, presents Rousseau as a utopian and Levi-Strauss as an anarchist,

cautioning against a “step further toward a sort of original an-archy,”

which would be only a dangerous delusion.

The real danger consists in not challenging, at the most basic level,

the alienation and domination threatening to completely overcome nature,

what is left of the natural in the world and within ourselves. Marcuse

discerned that “the memory of gratification is at the origin of all

thinking, and the impulse to recapture past gratification is the hidden

driving power behind the process of thought.” The question of origins

also involves the whole question of the birth of abstraction and indeed

of philosophical conceptuality as such, and Marcuse came close, in his

search for what would constitute a state of being without repression, to

confronting culture itself. He certainly never quite escaped the

impression “that something essential had been forgotten” by humanity.

Similar is the brief pronouncement by Novalis, “Philosophy is

homesickness.” By comparison, Kroker and Cook are undeniably correct in

concluding that “the postmodern culture is a forgetting, a forgetting of

origins and destinations.”

Barthes, Foucault & Lyotard

Turning to other poststructuralist/ postmodern figures, Roland Barthes,

earlier in his career a major structuralist thinker, deserves mention.

His Writing Degree Zero expressed the hope that language can be used in

a utopian way and that there are controlling codes in culture that can

be broken. By the early ’70s, however, he fell into line with Derrida in

seeing language as a metaphorical quagmire, whose metaphoricity is not

recognized. Philosophy is befuddled by its own language and language in

general cannot claim mastery of what it discusses. With The Empire of

Signs (1970), Barthes had already renounced any critical, analytical

intention. Ostensibly about Japan, this book is presented “without

claiming to depict or analyze any reality whatsoever.” Various fragments

deal with cultural forms as diverse as haiku and slot machines, as parts

of a sort of anti-utopian landscape wherein forms possess no meaning and

all is surface. Empire may qualify as the first fully postmodern

offering, and by the mid-’70s its author’s notion of the pleasure of the

text carried forward the same Derridean disdain for belief in the

validity of public discourse. Writing had become an end in itself, a

merely personal aesthetic the overriding consideration. Before his death

in 1980, Barthes had explicitly denounced “any intellectual mode of

writing,” especially anything smacking of the political. By the time of

his final work, Barthes by Barthes, the hedonism of words, paralleling a

real-life dandyism, considered concepts not in terms of their validity

or invalidity but only for their efficacy as tactics of writing.

In 1985 AIDS claimed the most widely known influence on postmodernism,

Michel Foucault. Sometimes called “the philosopher of the death of man”

and considered by many the greatest of Nietzsche’s modern disciples, his

wideranging historical studies (e.g. on madness, penal practices,

sexuality) made him very well known and in themselves suggest

differences between Foucault and the relatively more abstract and

ahistorical Derrida. Structuralism, as noted, had already forcefully

devalued the individual on largely linguistic grounds, whereas Foucault

characterized “man (as) only a recent invention, a figure not yet two

centuries old, a simple fold in our knowledge that will soon disappear.”

His emphasis lies in exposing ‘man’ as that which is represented and

brought forth as an object, specifically as a virtual invention of the

modern human sciences. Despite an idiosyncratic style, Foucault’s works

were much more popular than those of Horkheimer and Adorno (e.g. The

Dialectic of Enlightenment) and Erving Goffman, in the same vein of

revealing the hidden agenda of bourgeois rationality. He pointed to the

‘individualizing’ tactic at work in the key institutions in the early

1800s (the family, work, medicine, psychiatry, education), bringing out

their normalizing, disciplinary roles within emerging capitalist

modernity, as the ‘individual’ is created by and for the dominant order.

Foucault, typically pm, rejects originary thinking and the notion that

there is a ‘reality’ behind or underneath the prevailing discourse of an

era. Likewise, the subject is a delusion essentially created by

discourse, an ‘I’ created out of the ruling linguistic usages. And so

his detailed historical narratives, termed ‘archaeologies’ of knowledge,

are offered instead of theoretical overviews, as if they carried no

ideological or philosophical assumptions. For Foucault there are no

foundations of the social to be apprehended outside the contexts of

various periods, or epistemes, as he called them; the foundations change

from one episteme to another. The prevailing discourse, which

constitutes its subjects, is seemingly self-forming; this is a rather

unhelpful approach to history resulting primarily from the fact that

Foucault makes no reference to social groups, but focuses entirely on

systems of thought. A further problem arises from his view that the

episteme of an age cannot be known by those who labor within it. If

consciousness is precisely what, by Foucault’s own account, fails to be

aware of its relativism or to know what it would have looked like in

previous epistemes, then Foucault’s own elevated, encompassing awareness

is impossible. This difficulty is acknowledged at the end of The

Archaeology of Knowledge (1972), but remains unanswered, a rather

glaring and obvious problem.

The dilemma of postmodernism is this: how can the status and validity of

its theoretical approaches be ascertained if neither truth nor

foundations for knowledge are admitted? If we remove the possibility of

rational foundations or standards, on what basis can we operate? How can

we understand what the society is that we oppose, let alone come to

share such an understanding? Foucault’s insistence on a Nietzschean

perspectivism translates into the irreducible pluralism of

interpretation. He relativized knowledge and truth only insofar as these

notions attach to thought-systems other than his own, however. When

pressed on this point, Foucault admitted to being incapable of

rationally justifying his own opinions. Thus the liberal Habermas claims

that postmodern thinkers like Foucault, Deleuze, and Lyotard are

‘neoconservative’ for offering no consistent argumentation to move in

one social direction rather than another. The pm embrace of relativism

(or ‘pluralism’) also means there is nothing to prevent the perspective

of one social tendency from including a claim for the right to dominate

another, in the absence of the possibility of determining standards.

The topic of power, in fact, was a central one to Foucault and the ways

he treated it are revealing. He wrote of the significant institutions of

modern society as united by a control intentionality, a “carceral

continuum” that expresses the logical finale of capitalism, from which

there is no escape. But power itself, he determined, is a grid or field

of relations in which subjects are constituted as both the products and

the agents of power. Everything thus partakes of power and so it is no

good trying to find a ‘fundamental’, oppressive power to fight against.

Modern power is insidious and “comes from everywhere.” Like God, it is

everywhere and nowhere at once.

Foucault finds no beach underneath the paving stones, no ‘natural’ order

at all. There is only the certainty of successive regimes of power, each

one of which must somehow be resisted. But Foucault’s characteristically

pm aversion to the whole notion of the human subject makes it quite

difficult to see where such resistance might spring from,

notwithstanding his view that there is no resistance to power that is

not a variant of power itself. Regarding the latter point, Foucault

reached a further dead-end in considering the relationship of power to

knowledge. He came to see them as inextricably and ubiquitously linked,

directly implying one another. The difficulties in continuing to say

anything of substance in light of this interrelationship caused Foucault

to eventually give up on a theory of power. The determinism involved

meant, for one thing, that his political involvement became increasingly

slight. It is not hard to see why Foucaultism was greatly boosted by the

media, while the situationists, for example, were blacked out.

Castoriadis once referred to Foucault’s ideas on power and opposition to

it as, “Resist if it amuses you — but without a strategy, because then

you would no longer be proletarian, but power.” Foucault’s own activism

had attempted to embody the empiricist dream of a theory — and ideology

— free approach, that of the “specific intellectual” who participates in

particular, local struggles. This tactic sees theory used only

concretely, as ad hoc “tool kit” methods for specific campaigns. Despite

the good intentions, however, limiting theory to discrete, perishable

instrumental ‘tools’ not only refuses an explicit overview of society

but accepts the general division of labor which is at the heart of

alienation and domination. The desire to respect differences, local

knowledge and the like refuses a reductive, totalitarian-tending

overvaluing of theory, but only to accept the atomization of late

capitalism with its splintering of life into the narrow specialties that

are the province of so many experts. If “we are caught between the

arrogance of surveying the whole and the timidity of inspecting the

parts,” as Rebecca Comay aptly put it, how does the second alternative

(Foucault’s) represent an advance over liberal reformism in general?

This seems an especially pertinent question when one remembers how much

Foucault’s whole enterprise was aimed at disabusing us of the illusions

of humanist reformers throughout history. The “specific intellectual” in

fact turns out to be just one more expert, one more liberal attacking

specifics rather than the roots of problems. And looking at the content

of his activism, which was mainly in the area of penal reform, the

orientation is almost too tepid to even qualify as liberal. In the ’80s

“he tried to gather, under the aegis of his chair at the College de

France, historians, lawyers, judges, psychiatrists and doctors concerned

with law and punishment,” according to Keith Gandal. All the cops. “The

work I did on the historical relativity of the prison form,” said

Foucault, “was an incitation to try to think of other forms of

punishment.” Obviously, he accepted the legitimacy of this society and

of punishment; no less unsurprising was his corollary dismissal of

anarchists as infantile in their hopes for the future and faith in human

potential.

The works of Jean-Francois Lyotard are significantly contradictory to

each other — in itself a pm trait — but also express a central

postmodern theme: that society cannot and should not be understood as a

whole. Lyotard is a prime example of anti-totalizing thought to the

point that he has summed up postmodernism as “incredulity toward

metanarratives” or overviews. The idea that it is unhealthy as well as

impossible to grasp the whole is part of an enormous reaction in France

since the ’60s against marxist and Communist influences. While Lyotard’s

chief target is the marxist tradition, once so very strong in French

political and intellectual life, he goes further and rejects social

theory in toto. For example, he has come to believe that any concept of

alienation — the idea that an original unity, wholeness, or innocence is

fractured by the fragmentation and indifference of capitalism — ends up

as a totalitarian attempt to unify society coercively.

Characteristically, his mid-’70s Libidinal Economy denounces theory as

terror.

One might say that this extreme reaction would be unlikely outside of a

culture so dominated by the marxist left, but another look tells us that

it fits perfectly with the wider, disillusioned postmodern condition.

Lyotard’s wholesale rejection of post-Kantian Enlightenment values does,

after all, embody the realization that rational critique, at least in

the form of the confident values and beliefs of Kantian, Hegelian and

Marxist metanarrative theory, has been debunked by dismal historical

reality. According to Lyotard, the pm era signifies that all consoling

myths of intellectual mastery and truth are at an end, replaced by a

plurality of ‘language-games’, the Wittgensteinian notion of ‘truth’ as

provisionally shared and circulating without any kind of epistemological

warrant or philosophical foundation. Language-games are a pragmatic,

localized, tentative basis for knowledge; unlike the comprehensive views

of theory or historical interpretation, they depend on the agreement of

participants for their use-value. Lyotard’s ideal is thus a multitude of

“little narratives” instead of the “inherent dogmatism” of

metanarratives or grand ideas. Unfortunately, such a pragmatic approach

must accommodate to things as they are, and depends upon prevailing

consensus virtually by definition. Thus Lyotard’s approach is of limited

value for creating a break from the everyday norms. Though his healthy,

anti-authoritarian skepticism sees totalization as oppressive or

coercive, what he overlooks is that the Foucaultian relativism of

language-games, with their freely contracted agreement as to meaning,

tends to hold that everything is of equal validity. As Gerard Raulet

concluded, the resultant refusal of overview actually obeys the existing

logic of homogeneity rather than somehow providing a haven for

heterogeneity.

To find progress suspect is, of course, prerequisite to any critical

approach, but the quest for heterogeneity must include awareness of its

disappearance and a search for the reasons why it disappeared.

Postmodern thought generally behaves as if in complete ignorance of the

news that division of labor and commodification are eliminating the

basis for cultural or social heterogeneity. Pm seeks to preserve what is

virtually non-existent and rejects the wider thinking necessary to deal

with impoverished reality. In this area it is of interest to look at the

relationship between pm and technology, which happens to be of decisive

importance to Lyotard.

Adorno found the way of contemporary totalitarianism prepared by the

Enlightenment ideal of triumph over nature, also known as instrumental

reason. Lyotard sees the fragmentation of knowledge as essential to

combatting domination, which disallows the overview necessary to see

that, to the contrary, the isolation that is fragmented knowledge

forgets the social determination and purpose of that isolation. The

celebrated ‘heterogeneity’ is nothing much more than the splintering

effect of an overbearing totality he would rather ignore. Critique is

never more discarded than in Lyotard’s postmodern positivism, resting as

it does on the acceptance of a technical rationality that forgoes

critique. Unsurprisingly, in the era of the decomposition of meaning and

the renunciation of seeing what the ensemble of mere ‘facts’ really add

up to, Lyotard embraces the computerization of society. Rather like the

Nietzschean Foucault, Lyotard believes that power is more and more the

criterion of truth. He finds his companion in the post-modern pragmatist

Richard Rorty who likewise welcomes modern technology and is deeply

wedded to the hegemonic values of present-day industrial society.

In 1985 Lyotard put together a spectacular high-tech exhibition at the

Pompidou Center in Paris, featuring the artificial realities and

microcomputer work of such artists as Myron Krueger. At the opening, its

planner declared, “We wanted...to indicate that the world is not

evolving toward greater clarity and simplicity, but rather toward a new

degree of complexity in which the individual may feel very lost but in

which he can in fact become more free.” Apparently overviews are

permitted if they coincide with the plans of our masters for us and for

nature. But the more specific point lies with ‘immateriality’, the title

of the exhibit and a Lyotardian term which he associates with the

erosion of identity, the breaking down of stable barriers between the

self and a world produced by our involvement in labyrinthine

technological and social systems. Needless to say, he approves of this

condition, celebrating, for instance, the ‘pluralizing’ potential of new

communications technology — of the sort that de-sensualizes life,

flattens experience and eradicates the natural world. Lyotard writes:

“All peoples have a right to science,” as if he has the very slightest

understanding of what science means. He prescribes “public free access

to the memory and data banks.” A horrific view of liberation, somewhat

captured by: “Data banks are the encyclopedia of tomorrow; they are

‘nature’ for postmodern men and women.”

Frank Lentricchia termed Derrida’s deconstructionist project “an

elegant, commanding overview matched in philosophic history only by

Hegel.” It is an obvious irony that the postmodernists require a general

theory to support their assertion as to why there cannot and should not

be general theories or metanarratives. Sartre, gestalt theorists and

common sense tell us that what pm dismisses as “totalizing reason” is in

fact inherent in perception itself: one sees a whole, as a rule, not

discrete fragments. Another irony is provided by Charles Altieri’s

observation of Lyotard,” that this thinker so acutely aware of the

dangers inherent in master narratives nonetheless remains completely

committed to the authority of generalized abstraction.” Pm announces an

anti-generalist bias, but its practitioners, Lyotard perhaps especially,

retain a very high level of abstraction in discussing culture, modernity

and other such topics which are of course already vast generalizations.

“A liberated humanity,” wrote Adorno, “would by no means be a totality.”

Nonetheless, we are currently stuck with a social world that is one and

which totalizes with a vengeance. Postmodernism, with its celebrated

fragmentation and heterogeneity, may choose to forget about the

totality, but the totality will not forget about us.

Deleuze, Guattari & Baudrillard

Gilles Deleuze’s ‘schizo-politics’ flow, at least in part, from the

prevailing pm refusal of overview, of a point of departure. Also called

‘nomadology’, employing “rhizomatic writing,” Deleuze’s method champions

the deterritorialization and decoding of structures of domination, by

which capitalism will supersede itself through its own dynamic. With his

sometime partner, Felix Guattari, with whom he shares a specialization

in psychoanalysis, he hopes to see the system’s schizophrenic tendency

intensified to the point of shattering. Deleuze seems to share, or at

least comes very close to, the absurdist conviction of Yoshimoto Takai

that consumption constitutes a new form of resistance.

This brand of denying the totality by the radical strategy of urging it

to dispose of itself also recalls the impotent pm style of opposing

representation: meanings do not penetrate to a center, they do not

represent something beyond their reach. “Thinking without representing,”

is Charles Scott’s description of Deleuze’s approach. Schizo-politics

celebrates surfaces and discontinuities; nomadology is the opposite of

history.

Deleuze also embodies the postmodern “death of the subject” theme, in

his and Guattari’s best-known work, Anti-Oedipus, and subsequently.

‘Desiringmachines’, formed by the coupling of parts, human and nonhuman,

with no distinction between them, seek to replace humans as the focus of

his social theory. In opposition to the illusion of an individual

subject in society, Deleuze portrays a subject no longer even

recognizably anthropocentric. One cannot escape the feeling, despite his

supposedly radical intention, of an embrace of alienation, even a

wallowing in estrangement and decadence.

In the early ’70s Jean Baudrillard exposed the bourgeois foundations of

marxism, mainly its veneration of production and work, in his Mirror of

Production (1972). This contribution hastened the decline of marxism and

the Communist Party in France, already in disarray after the reactionary

role played by the Left against the upheavals of May ’68. Since that

time, however, Baudrillard has come to represent the darkest tendencies

of postmodernism and has emerged, especially in America, as a pop star

to the ultra-jaded, famous for his fully disenchanted views of the

contemporary world. In addition to the unfortunate resonance between the

almost hallucinatory morbidity of Baudrillard and a culture in

decomposition, it is also true that he (along with Lyotard) has been

magnified by the space he was expected to fill following the passing, in

the ’80s, of relatively deeper thinkers like Barthes and Foucault.

Derrida’s deconstructive description of the impossibility of a referent

outside of representation becomes, for Baudrillard, a negative

metaphysics in which reality is transformed by capitalism into

simulations that have no backing. The culture of capital is seen as

having gone beyond its fissures and contradictions to a place of

self-sufficiency that reads like a rather science-fiction rendering of

Adorno’s totally administered society. And there can be no resistance,

no “going back,” in part because the alternative would be that nostalgia

for the natural, for origins, so adamantly ruled out by postmodernism.

“The real is that of which it is possible to give an equivalent

reproduction.” Nature has been so far left behind that culture

determines materiality; more specifically, media simulation shapes

reality. “The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth — it is

the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true.”

Debord’s “society of the spectacle” — but at a stage of implosion of

self, agency, and history into the void of simulations such that the

spectacle is in service to itself alone.

It is obvious that in our “Information Age,” the electronic media

technologies have become increasingly dominant, but the overreach of

Baudrillard’s dark vision is equally obvious. To stress the power of

images should not obscure underlying material determinants and

objectives, namely profit and expansion. The assertion that the power of

the media now means that the real no longer exists is related to his

claim that power “can no longer be found anywhere”; and both claims are

false. Intoxicating rhetoric cannot erase the fact that the essential

information of the Information Age deals with the hard realities of

efficiency, accounting, productivity and the like. Production has not

been supplanted by simulation, unless one can say that the planet is

being ravaged by mere images, which is not to say that a progressive

acceptance of the artificial does not greatly assist the erosion of what

is left of the natural.

Baudrillard contends that the difference between reality and

representation has collapsed, leaving us in a ‘hyperreality’ that is

always and only a simulacrum. Curiously, he seems not only to

acknowledge the inevitability of this development, but to celebrate it.

The cultural, in its widest sense, has reached a qualitatively new stage

in which the very realm of meaning and signification has disappeared. We

live in “the age of events without consequences” in which the ‘real’

only survives as formal category, and this, he imagines, is welcomed.

“Why should we think that people want to disavow their daily lives in

order to search for an alternative? On the contrary, they want to make a

destiny of it...to ratify monotony by a grander monotony.” If there

should be any ‘resistance’, his prescription for that is similar to that

of Deleuze, who would prompt society to become more schizophrenic. That

is, it consists wholly in what is granted by the system: “You want us to

consume — O.K., let’s consume always more, and anything whatsoever; for

any useless and absurd purpose.” This is the radical strategy he names

‘hyperconformity’.

At many points, one can only guess as to which phenomena, if any,

Baudrillard’s hyperbole refers. The movement of consumer society toward

both uniformity and dispersal is perhaps glimpsed in one passage...but

why bother when the assertions seem all too often cosmically inflated

and ludicrous. This most extreme of the postmodern theorists, now

himself a top-selling cultural object, has referred to the “ominous

emptiness of all discourse,” apparently unaware of the phrase as an apt

reference to his own vacuities.

Japan may not qualify as ‘hyperreality’, but it is worth mentioning that

its culture seems to be even more estranged and postmodern than that of

the U.S. In the judgment of Masao Miyoshi, “the dispersal and demise of

modern subjectivity, as talked about by Barthes, Foucault, and many

others, have long been evident in Japan, where intellectuals have

chronically complained about the absence of selfhood.” A flood of

largely specialized information, provided by experts of all kinds,

highlights the Japanese high-tech consumer ethos, in which the

indeterminacy of meaning and a high valuation of perpetual novelty work

hand in hand. Yoshimoto Takai is perhaps the most prolific national

cultural critic; somehow it does not seem bizarre to many that he is

also a male fashion model, who extols the virtues and values of

shopping.

Yasuo Tanaka’s hugely popular Somehow, Crystal (1980) was arguably the

Japanese cultural phenomenon of the ’80s, in that this vacuous,

unabashedly consumerist novel, awash with brand names (a bit like Bret

Easton Ellis’s 1991 American Psycho), dominated the decade. But it is

cynicism, even more than superficiality, that seems to mark that full

dawning of postmodernism which Japan seems to be: how else does one

explain that the most incisive analyses of pm there — Now is the

Meta-Mass Age, for example — are published by the Parco Corporation, the

country’s trendiest marketing and retailing outlet. Shigesatu Itoi is a

top media star, with his own television program, numerous publications,

and constant appearances in magazines. The basis of this idol’s fame?

Simply that he wrote a series of state-of-the-art (flashy, fragmented,

etc.) ads for Seibu, Japan’s largest and most innovative department

store chain. Where capitalism exists in its most advanced, postmodern

form, knowledge is consumed in exactly the way that one buys clothes.

‘Meaning’ is pass‚, irrelevant; style and appearance are all.

We are fast arriving at a sad and empty place, which the spirit of

postmodernism embodies all too well. “Never in any previous civilization

have the great metaphysical preoccupations, the fundamental questions of

being and the meaning of life, seemed so utterly remote and pointless,”

in Frederic Jameson’s judgment. Peter Sloterdijk finds that “the

discontent in culture has assumed a new quality: it appears as

universal, diffuse cynicism.” The erosion of meaning, pushed forward by

intensified reification and fragmentation, causes the cynic to appear

everywhere. Psychologically “a borderline melancholic,” he is now “a

mass figure.”

The postmodern capitulation to perspectivism and decadence does not tend

to view the present as alienated — surely an old-fashioned concept — but

rather as normal and even pleasant. Robert Rauschenberg: “I really feel

sorry for people who think things like soap dishes or mirrors or Coke

bottles are ugly, because they’re surrounded by things like that all day

long, and it must make them miserable.” It isn’t just that “everything

is culture,” the culture of the commodity, that is offensive; it is also

the pm affirmation of what is by its refusal to make qualitative

distinctions and judgments. If the postmodern at least does us the

favor, unwittingly, of registering the decomposition and even depravity

of a cultural world that accompanies and abets the current frightening

impoverishment of life, that may be its only ‘contribution’.

We are all aware of the possibility that we may have to endure, until

its self-destruction and ours, a world fatally out of focus. “Obviously,

culture does not dissolve merely because persons are alienated,” wrote

John Murphy, adding, “A strange type of society has to be invented,

nonetheless, in order for alienation to be considered normative.”

Meanwhile, where are vitality, refusal, the possibility of creating a

non-mutilated world? Barthes proclaimed a Nietzschean “hedonism of

discourse;” Lyotard counselled, “Let us be pagans.” Such wild

barbarians! Of course, their real stuff is blank and dispirited, a

thoroughly relativized academic sterility. Postmodernism leaves us

hopeless in an unending mall; without a living critique; nowhere.