-3LT ■ 3 •■äjsf o ■&£.- - o. N - -: 73 *=- ™ ©~ ' 3 -ÍŠ- S-" T O ; < - j -M i- 9 - a-. os; ~n sr m = ca % ' 2 i - C ._ š ca f ŕ Ss^*" s-íS»S^- :-4' 1|*. '-~i-í'.' * .v f ■i ' i.;' 1 'oi i • „ - u* i 'Iti :# _-\ i ■K - .■*■* . . .|- ! « i ' SEW -í »E. ~^!K>"IďĽ*" ■■" Post-Contemporary Interventions POSTMODERNISM^ Series Editors: Stanley Fish and Fredric Jameson Or, The Cu&tural Logic of Late Capital FREDRIC JAMESON DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS DURHAM 70 Introduction It is safest to grasp the concept of the postmodern as an attempt to think the present historically in an age that has forgotten how to think historically in the first place. In that case, it either "expresses" some deeper irrepressible historical impulse (in however distorted a fashion} or effectively "represses" and diverts it, depending on the side of the ambiguity you happen to favor. Postmodernism, postmodern consciousness, may then amount to not much more than theorizing its own condition of possibility, which consists primarily in the sheer enumeration of changes and modifications. Modernism also thought compulsively about the New and tried to watch its coming into being (inventing for that purpose the registering and inscription devices akin to historical time-lapse photography), but the postmodern looks for breaks, for events rather than new worlds, for the telltale instant after which it is no longer the same; for the "When-it-all-changed," as Gibson puts it,1 or, better still, for shifts and irrevocable changes in the representation of things and of the way they change. The moderns were interested in what was likely to come of such changes and their general tendency: they thought about the thing itself, substantively, in Utopian or essential fashion. Postmodernism is more formal in that sense, and more "distracted," as Benjamin might put it; it only clocks the variations themselves, and knows only too well that the contents are just more images. In modernism, as I will try to show later on, some residual zones of "nature" or "being," of the old, the older, the archaic, still subsist; culture can still do something to that nature and work at transforming that "referent." Postmodernism is what you have when the modernization process is complete and nature is gone for good. It is a more fully human world than the older one, but one in which "culture" has become a veritable "second nature." Indeed, what happened x INTRODUCTION to culture may well be one of the more important clues for tracking the postmodern: an immense dilation of its sphere (the sphere of commodities), an immense and historically original acculturation of the Real, a quantum leap in what Benjamin still called the "aestheticiza-tion" of reality (he thought it meant fascism, but we know it's only fun: a prodigious exhilaration with the new order of things, a commodity rush, our "representations" of things tending to arouse an enthusiasm and a mood swing not necessarily inspired by the things themselves). So, in postmodern culture, "culture" has become a product in its own right; the market has become a substitute for itself and fully as much a commodity as any of the items it includes within itself: modernism was still minimally and tendentially the critique of the commodity and the effort to make it transcend itself. Postmodernism is the consumption of sheer commodification as a process. The "life-style" of the superstate therefore stands in relationship to Marx's "fetishism" of commodities as the most advanced monotheisms to primitive animisms or the most rudimentary idol worship; indeed, any sophisticated theory of the postmodern ought to bear something of the same relationship to Horkheimer and Adorno's old "Culture Industry" concept as MTV or fractal ads bear to fifties television series. "Theory" has meanwhile itself also changed and offers its own kind of clue to the mystery. Indeed, one of the more striking features of the postmodern is the way in which, in it, a whole range of tenden-tial analyses of hitherto very different kinds—economic forecasts, marketing studies, culture critiques, new therapies, the (generally official} jeremiad about drugs or permissiveness, reviews of art shows or national film festivals, religious "revivals" or cults—have all coalesced into a new discursive genre, which we might as well call "postmodernism theory," and which demands some attention in its own right. It is clearly a class which is a member of its own class, and I would not want to have to decide whether the following chapters are inquiries into the nature of such "postmodernism theory" or mere examples of it. I have tried to prevent my own account of postmodernism—which stages a series of semiautonomous and relatively independent traits or features—from conflating back into the one uniquely privileged symptom of a loss of historicity, something that by itself could scarcely connote the presence of the postmodernism in any unerring fashion, as witness peasants, aesthetes, children, liberal economists, or analytic philosophers. But it is hard to discuss "postmodernism theory" in any Introduction xi general way without having recourse to the matter of historical deafness, an exasperating condition (provided you are aware of it) that determines a series of spasmodic and intermittent, but desperate, attempts at recuperation. Postmodernism theory is one of those attempts: the efforts to take the temperature of the age without instruments and in a situa-' tion in which we are not even sure there is so coherent a thing as an: "age," or Zeitgeist or "system" or "current situation" any longer.! Postmodernism theory is then dialectical at least insofar as it has the wit to seize on that very uncertainty as its first clue and to hold to its Ariadne's thread on its way through what may not turn out to be a labyrinth at all, but a gulag or perhaps a shopping mall. An enormous Claes Oldenburg thermometer, however, as long as a whole city block, might serve as some mysterious symptom of the process, fallen without warning from the sky like a meteorite. For I take it as axiomatic that "modernist history" is the first casualty and mysterious absence of the postmodernism period (this is essentially Achille Bonito-Oliva's version of postmodernism theory):2 in art, at least, the notion of progress and telos remained alive and well up to very recent times indeed, in its most authentic, least stupid and carica-tural, form, in which each genuinely new work unexpectedly but logically outtrumped its predecessor (not "linear history" this, but rather Shklovsky's "knight's gambit" the action at distance, the quantum leap to the undeveloped or underdeveloped square). Dialectical history, to be sure, affirmed that all history worked this way, on its left foot, as it were, progressing, as Henri Lefebvre once put it, by way of catastrophe and disaster; but fewer ears heard that than believed the modernist aesthetic paradigm, which was on the point of being confirmed as a virtual religious doxa when it unexpectedly vanished without a trace. ("We went out one morning and the Thermometer was gone!") This seems to me a more interesting and plausible stcry than Lyotard's related one about the end of "master narratives" (eschatalogical schemata that were never really narratives in the first place, although I may also have been incautious enough to use the expression from time to time). But it now tells us at least two things about postmodernism theory. First, the theory seems necessarily imperfect or impure:3 in the present case, owing to the "contradiction" whereby Oliva's (or Lyotard's) perception of everything significant about the disappearance of master narratives has itself to be couched in narrative form. Whether, as with Gödel's proof, one can demonstrate the logical impossibility of any inter- xii INTRODUCTION nally self-coherent theory of the postmodern—an antifoundationalism that really eschews all foundations altogether, a nonessentialism without the last shred of an essence in it—is a speculative question; its empirical answer is that none have so far appeared, all replicating within themselves a mimesis of their own title in the way in which they are parasitory on another system (most often on modernism itself], whose residual traces and unconsciously reproduced values and attitudes then become a precious index to the failure of a whole new culture to come to birth. Despite the delirium of some of its celebrants and apologists (whose euphoria, however, is an interesting historical symptom in its ) own right), a truly new culture could only emerge through the collec-[ tive struggle to create a new social system. The constitutive impurity of all postmodernism theory, then (like capital itself, it must be at internal distance from itself, must include the foreign body of alien content), confirms the insight of a periodization that must be insisted on over and over again, namely, that postmodernism is not the cultural dominant of a wholly new social order (the rumor about which, under the name of "postindustrial society," ran through the media a few years ago), but (only the reflex and the concomitant of yet another systemic modification ' of capitalism itself. No wonder, then, that shreds of its older avatars—of realism, even, fully as much as of modernism—live on, to be rewrapped in the luxurious trappings of their putative successor. But this unforeseeable return of narrative as the narrative of the end of narratives, this return of history in the midst of the prognosis of the demise of historical telos, suggests a second feature of postmodernism theory which requires attention, namely, the way in which virtually any observation about the present can be mobilized in the very search for the present itself and pressed into service as a symptom and an index of the deeper logic of the postmodern, which imperceptibly turns into its own theory and the theory of itself. How could it be otherwise where there no longer exists any such "deeper logic" for the surface to manifest and where the symptom has become its own disease (and vice versa, no doubt)? But the frenzy whereby virtually anything in the present is appealed to for testimony as to the latter's uniqueness and radical difference from earlier moments of human time does indeed strike one sometimes as harboring a pathology distinctively autoreferential, as though our utter forgetfulness of the past exhausted itself in the vacant but mesmerized contemplation of a schizophrenic present that is incomparable virtually by definition. However, as will be demonstrated later on, the decision as to whether Introduction xiii one faces a break or a continuity—whether the present is to be seen as a historical originality oras the simple prolongation of more of the same under different sheep's clothing—is not an empirically justifiable or philosophically arguable one, since it is itself the inaugural narrative act that grounds the perception and interpretation of the events to be narrated. In what follows—but for pragmatic reasons I will disclose at í the proper time—I have pretended to believe that the postmodern is as \ unusual as it thinks it is, and that it constitutes a cultural and experien-} tial break worth exploring in greater detail. Nor is this a merely or basely self-fulfilling procedure; or rather, it may well be that, but such procedures are by no means as frequent occurrences and possibilities as their formula suggests (they thereby themselves, predictably enough, become historical objects of study). For the name itself—postmodernism—has crystallized a host of hitherto independent developments which, thus named, prove to have contained the thing itself in embryo and now step forward richly to document its multiple genealogies. It thus turns out that it is not only in love, cratylism, and botany that the supreme act of nomination wields a material impact and, like lightning striking from the superstructure back to the base, fuses its unlikely materials into a gleaming lump or lava surface. The appeal to experience, otherwise so doubtful and untrustworthy —even though it does really seem as if any number of things had changed, perhaps for good!—now recovers a certain authority as what, in retrospect, the new name allowed you to think you felt, because you now have something to call it that other people seem to acknowledge by themselves using the word. The success story of the word postmodernism demands to be written, no doubt in best-seller format; such lexical neoevents, in which the coinage of a neologism has all the reality impact of a corporate merger, are among the novelties of media society which require not merely study but the establishment of a whole new media-lexicological subdiscipline. Why we needed the word postmodernism \ so long without knowing it, why a truly motley crew of strange bedfellows ran to embrace it the moment it appeared, are mysteries that will' remain unclarified until we have been able to grasp the philosophical and social function of the concept, something impossible, in its turn, until we are somehow able to grasp the deeper identity between the two. In the present instance it seems clear that a range of competing formulations ("poststructuralism," "postindustrial society," this or that McLuhanite nomenclature) were unsatisfactory insofar as they were too rigidly specified and marked by their area of provenance (philoso- XiV INTRODUCTION phy, economics, and the media, respectively]; however suggestive, therefore, they could not occupy the mediatory position within the various specialized dimensions of postcontemporary life that was required. "Postmodern," however, seems to havebeen able to welcome in the appropriate areas of daily life or the quotidian; its cultural resonance, appropriately vaster than the merely aesthetic or artistic,4 distracts suitably from the economic while allowing newer economic materials and innovations (in marketing and advertising, for example, but also in business organization) to be recatalogued under the new heading. Nor is the matter of recataloguing and transcoding without its own special kind of significance: the active function—the ethics and the politics—of such neologisms lies in the new work they propose of rewriting all the familiar things in new terms and thus proposing modifications, new ideal perspectives, a reshuffling of canonical feelings and values; if "postmodernism" corresponds to what Raymond Williams meant by his fundamental cultural category, a "structure of feeling" (and one that has become "hegemonic" at that, to use another of Williams's crucial categories), then it can only enjoy that status by dint of profound collective self-transformation, a reworking and rewriting of an older system. That ensures novelty and gives intellectuals and ideologues fresh and socially useful tasks: something also marked by the new term, with its vague, ominous or exhilarating, promise to get rid of whatever you found confining, unsatisfying, or boring about the modern, modernism, or modernity (however you understand those words): in other words, a very modest or mild apocalypse, the merest sea breeze (that has the additional advantage of having already taken place). But this prodigious rewriting operation—which can lead to whole new perspectives on subjectivity as well as on the object world—has the additional result, already touched on above, that everything is grist for its mill and that analyses like the one proposed here are easily reabsorbed into the project as a set of usefully unfamiliar transcoding rubrics. The fundamental ideological task of the new concept, however, must remain that of coordinating new forms of practice and social and mental habits (this is finally what I take Williams to have had in mind by the notion of a "structure of feeling") with the new forms of economic production and organization thrown up by the modification of capitalism —the new global division of labor—in recent years. It is a relatively small and local version of what I elsewhere tried to generalize as "cultural revolution" on the scale of the mode of production itself;5 in the same way the interrelationship of culture and the economic here is not Introduction xv a one-way street but a continuous reciprocal interaction and feedback loop. But just as [for Weber) new inner-directed and more ascetic religious values gradually produced "new people" capable of thriving in the delayed gratification of the emergent "modern" labor process, so also the "postmodern" is to be seen as the production of postmodern people capable of functioning in a very peculiar socioeconomic world indeed, one whose structure and objective features and requirements—if we had a proper account of them—would constitute the situation to which "postmodernism" is a response and would give us something a little more decisive than mere postmodernism theory. I have not done that here, of course, and it should be added that "culture," in the sense of what cleaves almost too close to the skin of the economic to be stripped off and inspected in its own right, is itself a postmodern development not unlike Magritte's shoe-foot. Unfortunately, therefore, the infrastruc-tural description I seem to be calling for here is necessarily itself already cultural and a version of postmodernism theory in advance. I have reprinted my program analysis of the postmodern ("The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism") without significant modifications, since the attention it received at the time (1984) lends it the additional interest of a historical document; other features of the postmodern that have seemed to impose themselves since then are discussed in the conclusion. I have also not modified the sequel, which has been widely reprinted and which offers a combinatoire of positions on the postmodern, for and against, since while a great many more positions have been taken since then, the lineup remains essentially the same. The more fundamental modification in the situation today involves those who were once able to avoid using the word, out of principle; not many of them are left. The remainder of this volume turns essentially on four themes: interpretation, Utopia, survivals of the modem, and "returns of the repressed" of historicity, none of which were present in these forms in my original essay. The problem of interpretation is raised by the nature of the new textuality itself, which, when mainly visual, seems to leave no room for interpretation of the older kind, or, when mainly temporal in its "total flow," leaves no time for it either. The exhibits here are the Videotext as such and also the nouveau roman (the last significant innovation in the novel, about which I will also argue that, within the new reconfiguration of the "fine arts" in postmodernism, it is no longer a very significant form or marker); on the other hand, video can lay some claim to being postmodernism's most distinctive new medium, a medium which, at its best, is a whole new form in itself. xvi INTRODUCTION Utopia is a spatial matter that might be thought to know a potential change in fortunes in so spatialized a culture as the postmodern; but if this last is as dehistoricized and dehistoricizing as I sometimes claim here, the synaptic chain that might lead the Utopian impulse to expression becomes harder to localize. Utopian representations knew an : extraordinary revival in the 1960s; if postmodernism is the substitute for the sixties and the compensation for their political failure, the question of Utopia would seem to be a crucial test of what is left of our capacity to imagine change at all. Such, at least, is the question addressed here to one of the most interesting (and least characteristic) buildings of the postmodern period, Frank Gehry's house in Santa Monica, California; it is also addressed, around and behind the visual, as it were, to contemporary photography and installation art. At any rate, Utopian, in First World postmodernism, has become a powerful [left] political word rather than its opposite. But if Michael Speaks is right, and there is no pure postmodernism as such, then the residual traces of modernism must be seen in another light, less as anachronisms than as necessary failures that inscribe the particular postmodern project back into its context, while at the same time reopening the question of the modern itself for reexamination. That reexamination will not be undertaken here; but the residuality of the modern and its values—most notably irony (in Venturi or DeMan) or the questions of totality and representation—off er the occasion for working out one of the assertions of my initial essay that most troubled some readers; namely, the notion that what was variously called "poststruc-turalism" or even simply "theory" was also a subvariety of the postmodern, or at least proves to be that in hindsight. Theory—I here prefer the more cumbersome formula "theoretical discourse"—has seemed unique, if not privileged, among the postmodern arts and genres in its occasional capacity to defy the gravity of the Zeitgeist and to produce schools, movements, and even avant-gardes where they are no longer supposed to exist. Two very lengthy and disproportionate chapters examine two of the most successful American theoretical avant-gardes, deconstruction and the New Historicism, for traces of their modernity and postmodernity alike. But Simon's old "new novel" could also be the object of this kind of discrimination, which will not take us very far unless—for the urge to classify objects once and for all in the modern, or the postmodern, or even Jencks's "late modern" or other "transitional" categories—we build a model of the contradictions all these categories stage within the text itself. Introduction xvii In any case, this book is not a.survey of the "postmodern," nor even an introduction to it (always supposing such a thing was possible in the first place); nor are any of its textual exhibits characteristic of the postmodern or prime examples of it, "illustrations" of its principal features. That has something to do with the qualities of the characteristic, the exemplary, and the illustrative; but it has more to do with the nature of postmodern texts themselves, which is to say, the nature of a text in the first place, since that is a postmodern category and phenomenon which has replaced the older one of a "work." Indeed, in one of those extraordinary postmodern mutations where the apocalyptic suddenly turns into the decorative (or at least diminishes abruptly into "something you have around the home"), Hegel's legendary "end of art"—the premonitory concept that signaled modernism's supreme anti- or trans aesthetic vocation to be more than art (or religion either, or even "philosophy" in some narrower sense)—now modestly simmers down into the "end of the work of art" and the arrival of the text. But this throws the chicken coops of criticism into commotion fully as much as it stirs those of "creation": the fundamental disparity and incommensurability between text and work means that to select sample texts and, by analysis, to make them bear the universalizing weight of a representative particular, turns them imperceptibly back into that older thing, the work, which is not supposed to exist in the postmodern. This is, as it were, the Heisenberg principle of postmodernism, and the most difficult representational problem for any commentator to come to terms with, save via the endless slide show, "total flow" prolonged into the infinite. The same holds true for my penultimate chapter, on some recent films and some recent representations of history of a new and allegorical type. The word nostalgia in my title, however, does not mean what I normally want to make it mean, and I will therefore exceptionally (other objections being dealt with at some length in the concluding section) comment in advance on an expression, "nostalgia film," about which I have some misunderstandings to regret. I don't remember any longer whether I am responsible for this term, which still seems to me indispensable, provided you understand that the fashion-plate, historicist films it designates are in no way to be grasped as passionate expressions of that older longing once called nostalgia but rather quite the opposite; they are a depersonalized visual curiosity and a "return of the repressed" of the twenties and thirties "without affect" (in another place I try to term it "nostalgia-deco"). But one can no more alter a term like this retroactively than substitute some altogether different word for postmodernism itself. xviii INTRODUCTION The "total flow" of associative conclusions then takes up, in passing, some of the other inveterate but more serious objections to or misunderstandings of my positions and also comments on politics,-demography, nominalism, media and the image, and other topics which ought to , figure in any self-respecting book on the subject. In particular I have : tried to remedy what (rightly) struck some readers as a crucial missing : component of the program essay, namely, the absence of any discussion of "agency," or the lack of what I prefer to call, following old Plekhanov, ,any "social equivalent" for this seemingly disembodied cultural logic. Agency, however, raises the issue of the other unit of my title, \"late capitalism,"('about which something further needs to be said. In particular, people have begun to notice that it functions as a sign of some kind and seems to carry a burden of intent and consequences not clear to the noninitiate.6 It is not my favorite slogan, and I try to vary it with the appropriate synonyms ("multinational capitalism," "spectacle or image society," "media capitalism," "the world system," even "postmodernism" itself); but as the Right has also spotted what evidently seems to them a dangerous new concept and way of speaking (even though some of the economic diagnoses overlap their own, and a term like postindustriell society certainly has a family likeness), this particular terrain of ideological struggle, which unfortunately one rarely chooses oneself, seems a solid one and worth defending. As far as I can see, the general use of the term late capitalism originated with the Frankfurt School;7 it is everywhere in Adorno and Horkheimer, sometimes varied with their own synonyms (for example, "administered society"), which make it clear that a very different conception was involved, of a more Weberian type, which, derived essentially from Grossman and Pollock, stressed two essential features: (1) a tendential web of bureaucratic control (in its more nightmarish forms, a Foucault-like grid avant la lettre), and (2) the interpenetration of government and big business ("state capitalism") such that Nazism and the New Deal are related systems (and some form of socialism, benign or Stalinist, also seems on the agenda). As widely used today, the term late capitalism has very different overtones from these. No one particularly notices the expansion of the state sector and bureaucratization any longer: it seems a simple, "natural" fact of life. What marks the development of the new concept over the older one (which was still roughly consistent with Lenin's notion of a "monopoly stage" of capitalism) is not merely an emphasis on the emergence of new forms of business organization (multinationals, transna- Introduction xix tionals) beyond the monopoly stage but, above all, the vision of a world capitalist system,fundamentally distinct from the older imperialism, which was little more than a rivalry between the various colonial powers. The scholastic, I am tempted to say theological, debates on whether the various notions of "late capitalism" are really consistent with Marxism itself (despite Marx's own repeated evocation, in the Grundrisse, of the "world market" as the ultimate horizon of capitalism)8 turn on this matter of internationalization and how it is to be described (and in particular whether the component of "dependency theory" or of Waller-stein's "world system" theory is a production model, based on social classes). In spite of these theoretical uncertainties, it seems fair to say that today we have some rough idea of this new system {called "late capitalism" in order to mark its continuity with what preceded it rather than the break, rupture, and mutation that concepts like "postindustrial society" wished to underscore). Besides the forms of transnational business mentioned above, its features include the new international division of labor, a vertiginous new dynamic in international banking and the stock exchanges (including the enormous Second and Third World debt), new forms of media interrelationship (very much including transportation systems such as containerization), computers and automation, the flight of production to advanced Third World areas, along with all the more familiar social consequences, including the crisis of traditional labor, the emergence of yuppies, and gentrification on a now-global scale. In periodizing a phenomenon of this kind, we have to complicate the model with all kinds of supplementary epicycles. It is necessary to distinguish between the gradual setting in place of the various (often unrelated) preconditions for the new structure and the "moment" (not exactly chronological) when they all jell and combine into a functional system. This moment is itself less a matter of chronology than it is of a well-nigh Freudian Nachträglichkeit, or retroactivity: people become aware of the dynamics of some new system, in which they are themselves seized, only later on and gradually. Nor is that dawning collective consciousness of a new system (deduced itself intermittently in a fragmentary way from various unrelated crisis symptoms such as factory closings or higher interest rates) exactly the same as the coming into being of fresh cultural forms of expression (Raymond Williams's "structures of feeling" do finally strike one as a very odd way to have to characterize postmodernism culturally). That the various preconditions for a new "structure of feeling" also preexist their moment of combination and crystallization into a relatively hegemonic style everyone acknowledges; XX INTRODUCTION but that prehistory is not in synch with the economic one. Thus Man-del suggests that the basic new technological prerequisites of the new "long wave" of capitalism's third stage (here called "late capitalism") were available by the end of World War II, which also had the effect of reorganizing international relations, decolonizing the colonies, and laying the groundwork for the emergence of a new economic world system. Culturally, however, the precondition is to be found (apart from a wide variety of aberrant modernist "experiments" which are then restructured in the form of predecessors) in the enormous social and psychological transformations of the 1960s, which swept so much of tradition , away on the level of mentalités. Thus the economic preparation of postmodernism or late capitalism began in the 1950s, after the wartime shortages of consumer goods and spare parts had been made up, and new products and new technologies (not least those of the media) could be pioneered. On the other hand, the psychic habitus of the new age demands the absolute break, strengthened by a generational rupture, achieved more properly in the 1960s (it being understood that economic development does not then pause for that, but very much continues along its own level and according to its own logic). If you prefer a now somewhat antiquated language, the distinction is very much the one Althusser used to harp on between a Hegelian "essential cross section" of the present (or coupe d'essence), where a culture critique wants to find a single principle of the "postmodern" inherent in the most varied and ramified features of social life, and that Althusserian "structure in dominance" in which the various levels entertain a semiautonomy over against each other, run at different rates of speed, develop unevenly, and yet conspire to produce a totality. Add to this the unavoidable representational problem that there is no "late capitalism in general" but only this or that specific national form of the thing, and non-North American readers will inevitably deplore the Americanocentrism of my own particular account, which is justified only to the degree that it was the brief "American century" (1945-73) that constituted the hothouse, or forcing ground, of the new system, while the development of the cultural forms of postmodernism may be said to be the first specifically North American global style. Meanwhile, it is my sense that both levels in question, infrastructure and superstructures—the economic system and the cultural "structure of feeling" —somehow crystallized in the great shock of the crises of 1973 (the oil crisis, the end of the international gold standard, for all intents and purposes the end of the great wave of "wars of national Introduction xxi liberation" and the beginning .of the end of traditional communism), which, now that the dust clouds have rolled away, disclose the existence, already in place, of a strange new landscape: the landscape the essays in this book try to describe (along with an increasing number of other probes and hypothetical accounts).9 This matter of periodization is not, however, altogether alien to the signals given off by the expression "late capitalism," which is by now clearly identified as a kind of leftist logo which is ideologically and politically booby-trapped, so that the very act of using it constitutes tacit agreement about a whole range of essentially Marxian social and economic propositions the other side may be far from wanting to endorse. Capitalism was itself always a funny word in this sense: just using the word—otherwise a neutral enough designation for an economic and social system on whose properties all sides agree—seemed to position you in a vaguely critical, suspicious, if not outright socialist stance: only committed right-wing ideologues and full-throated market apologists also use it with the same relish. "Late capitalism" still does some of that, but with a difference: its qualifier in particular rarely means anything so silly as the ultimate senescence, breakdown, and death of the system as such (a temporal vision that would rather seem to belong to modernism than postmodernism). What "late" generally conveys is rather the sense that something has changed, that things are different, that we have gone through a transformation of the life world which is somehow decisive but incomparable with the older convulsions of modernization and industrialization, less perceptible and dramatic, somehow, but more permanent precisely because more thoroughgoing and all-pervasive.10 That means that the expression late capitalism carries the other, cultural half of my title within it as well; not only is it something like a literal translation of the other expression, postmodernism, its temporal index seems already to direct attention to changes in the quotidian and on the cultural level as such. To say that my two terms, the cultural and \ the economic, thereby collapse back into one another and say the same! thing, in an eclipse of the distinction between base and superstructure! that has itself often struck people as significantly characteristic of post-] modernism in the first place, is also to suggest that the base, in the third} stage of capitalism, generates its superstructures with a new kind of/ dynamic. And this may also be what (rightly) worries the unconverted' about the term; it seems to obligate you in advance to talk about cultural phenomena at least in business terms if not in those of political economy. XXii INTRODUCTION As for postmodernism itself, I have not tried to systematize a usage or to impose any conveniently coherent thumbnail meaning, for the concept is not merely contested, it is also internally conflicted and contradictory I will argue that, for good or ill, we cannot not use it. But my argument should also be taken to imply that every time it is used, we are under the obligation to rehearse those inner contradictions and to stage those representational inconsistencies and dilemmas; we have to work all that through every time around. Postmodernism is not something we can settle once and for all and then use with a clear conscience. The concept, if there is one, has to come at the end, and not at the beginning, of our discussions of it. Those are the conditions—the only ones, I think, that prevent the mischief of premature clarification—under which this term can productively continue to be used. The materials assembled in the present volume constitute the third and last section of the penultimate subdivision of a larger project entitled The Poetics of Social Forms. Durham, April 1990 The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism S he last few years have been marked by an inverted millenarianism in which premonitions of the future, catastrophic or redemptive, have been replaced by senses of the end of this or that (the end of ideology, art, or social class; the "crisis" of Leninism, social democracy, or the welfare state, etc., etc.); taken together, all of these perhaps constitute what is increasingly called postmodernism. The case for its existence depends on the hypothesis of some radical break or coupure, generally traced back to the end of the 1950s or the "early 1960s. As the word itself suggests, this break is most often related to notions of the waning or extinction of the hundred-year-old modern movement (or to its ideological or aesthetic repudiation). Thus abstract expressionism in painting, existentialism in philosophy, the final forms of representation in the novel, the films of the great auteurs, or the modernist school of poetry (as institutionalized and canonized in the works of Wallace Stevens) all are now seen as the final, extraordinary flowering of a high-modernist impulse which is spent and exhausted with them. The enumeration of what follows, then, at once becomes empirical, chaotic,. and heterogeneous: Andy Warhol and pop art, but also photorealism, and beyond it, the "new expressionism"; the moment, in music, of John Cage, but also the synthesis of classical and "popular" styles found in composers like Phil Glass and Terry Riley, and also punk and new wave rock {the Beatles and the Stones now standing as the high-modernist moment of that more recent and rapidly evolving tradition); in film, Godard, post-Godard, and experimental cinema and video, but also a whole new type of commercial film (about which more below); Burroughs, Pynchon, or Ishmael Reed, on the one hand, and the French nouveau roman and its succession, on the other, along with alarming 2 POSTMODERNISM new kinds of literary criticism based on some new aesthetic of textuality or écriture . . . The list might be extended indefinitely; but does it imply any more fundamental change or break than the periodic style and fashion changes determined by an older high-modernist imperative of stylistic innovation? It is in the realm of architecture, however, that modifications in aesthetic production are mosf Bramatically visible, and that their theoretical problems have been most centrally raised and articulated; it was indeed from architectural debates that my own conception of postmodernism—as it will be outlined in the following pages—initially began to emerge. More decisively than in the other arts or media, postmodernist positions in architecture have been inseparable from an implacable critique of architectural high modernism and of Frank Lloyd Wright or the so-called international style (Le Čorbusier, Mies, etc), where formal criticism and analysis (of the high-modernist transformation of the building into a virtual sculpture, or monumental "duck," as Robert Venturi puts it)1 are at one with reconsiderations on the level of urban-ism and of the aesthetic institution. High modernism is thus credited with the destruction of the fabric of the traditional city and its older neighborhood culture (by way of the radical disjunction of the new Utopian high-modernist building from its surrounding context), while the prophetic elitism and authoritarianism of the modern movement are remorselessly identified in the imperious gesture of the charismatic Master. Postmodernism in architecture will then logically enough stage itself as a kind of aesthetic populism, as the very title of Venturi's influential manifesto, Learning from Las Vegas, suggests. However we may ultimately wish to evaluate this populist rhetoric,2 it has at least the merit of drawing our attention to one fundamental feature of all the postmodern-isms enumerated above: namely, the effacement in them of the older : (essentially high-modernist) frontier between high culture and so-called mass or commercial culture, and the emergence of new kinds of texts infused with the forms, categories, and contents of that very culture ; industry so passionately denounced by all the ideologues of the modern, from Leavis and the American New Criticism all the way to Adorno and the Frankfurt School. The postmodernisms have, in fact, been fascinated precisely by this whole "degraded" landscape of schlock and kitsch, of TV series and Reader's Digest culture, of advertising and motels, of the late show and the grade-B Hollywood film, of so-called paralitera-ture, with its airport paperback categories of the gothic and the romance, Culture 3 the popular biography, the murder mystery, and the science fiction or fantasy novel: materials they no longer simply "quote," as a Joyce or a Mahler might have done, but incorporate into their very substance. Nor should the break in question be thought of as a purely cultural affair: indeed, theories of the postmodern—whether celebratory or couched in the language of moral revulsion and denunciation—bear a strong family resemblance to all those more ambitious sociological generalizations which, at much the same time, bring us the news of the arrival and inauguration of a whole new type of society, most famously baptized "postindustrial society"- (Daniel Bell) but often also designated consumer society, media society, information society, electronic society or high tech, and the like. Such theories have the obvious ideological; mission of demonstrating, to their own relief, that the new social formation in question no longer obeys the laws of classical capitalism, namely,: the primacy of industrial production and the omnipresence of class, struggle. The Marxist tradition has therefore resisted them with vehe-; mence, with the signal exception of the economist Ernest Mandel, whose book Late Capitalism sets out not merely to anatomize the historic originality of this new society (which he sees as a third stage or moment in the evolution of capital) but also to demonstrate that it is, if anything, a purer stage of capitalism than any of the moments that preceded it. I will return to this argument later; suffice it for the moment to anticipate a point that will be argued in chapter 2, namely, that every position on postmodernism in culture—whether apologia or stigmatization—is also at one and the same time, and necessarily, an implicitly or explicitly political stance on the nature of multinational capitalism today. A last preliminary word on method: what follows is not to be read as stylistic description, as the account of one cultural style or movement among others. I have rather meant to offer a periodizing hypothesis, and that at a moment in which the very conception of historical periodization has come to seem most problematical indeed. I have argued elsewhere that all isolated or discrete cultural analysis always involves a buried or repressed theory of historical periodization; in any case, the conception of the "genealogy" largely lays to rest traditional theoretical worries about so-called linear history, theories of "stages," and teleological historiography. In the present context, however, lengthier theoretical discussion of such (very real) issues can perhaps be replaced by a few substantive remarks. One of the concerns frequently aroused by periodizing hypotheses is i that these tend to obliterate difference and to project an idea of the his-' 4 POSTMODERNISM torical period as massive homogeneity (bounded on either side by inexplicable chronological metamorphoses and punctuation marks). This is, however, precisely why it seems to me essential to grasp postmodernism not as a style but rather as a cultural dominant: a conception which allows for the presence and coexistence of a range of very different, yet subordinate, features. Consider, for example, the powerful alternative position that post-. modernism is itself little more than one more stage of modernism proper (if not, indeed, of the even older romanticism); it may indeed be conceded that all the features of postmodernism I am about to enumerate can be detected, full-blown, in this or that preceding modernism (including such astonishing genealogical precursors as Gertrude Stein, Raymond Roussel, or Marcel Duchamp, who may be considered outright postmodernists, avant la lettre). What has not been taken into account by this view, however, is the social position of the older modernism, or better still, its passionate repudiation by an older Victorian and post-Victorian bourgeoisie for whom its forms and ethos are received as being variously ugly, dissonant, obscure, scandalous, immoral, subversive, and generally "antisocial." It will be argued here, however, that a mutation in the sphere of culture has rendered such attitudes archaic. Not only are Picasso and Joyce no longer ugly; they now strike us, on the whole, as rather "realistic," and this is the result of a canonization and academic institutionalization of the modern movement generally that can be traced to the late 1950s. This is surely one of the most plausible explanations for the emergence of postmodernism itself, since the younger generation of the 1960s will now confront the formerly oppositional modern movement as a set of dead classics, which "weigh like a nightmare on the brains of the living," as Marx once said in a different context. As for the postmodern revolt against all that, however, it must equally be stressed that its own offensive features—from obscurity and sexually explicit material to psychological squalor and overt expressions of social and political defiance, which transcend anything that might have been imagined at the most extreme moments of high modernism—no longer scandalize anyone and are not only received with the greatest complacency but have themselves become institutionalized and are at one with the official or public culture of Western society. What has happened is that aesthetic production today has become integrated into commodity production generally: the frantic economic urgency of producing fresh waves of ever more novel-seeming goods (from clothing to airplanes), at ever greater rates of turnover, now assigns Culture S an increasingly essential structural function and position to aesthetic innovation and experimentation. Such economic necessities then find recognition in the varied kinds of institutional support available for the newer art, from foundations and grants to museums and other forms of patronage. Of all the arts, architecture is the closest constitutively to the \ economic, with which, in the form of commissions and land values, it i has a virtually unmediated relationship. It will therefore not be surpris- ' ing to find the extraordinary flowering of the new postmodern architec- i ture grounded in the patronage of multinational business, whose expan-1 sion and development is strictly contemporaneous with it. Later I will ! suggest that these two new phenomena have an even deeper dialectical interrelationship than the simple one-to-one financing of this or that individual project. Yet this is the point at which I must remind the; reader of the obvious; namely, that this whole global, yet American,/ postmodern culture is the internal and superstructural expression of a/ whole new wave of American military and economic domination; throughout the world: in this sense, as throughout class history, the; underside of culture is blood, torture, death, and terror. í The first point to be made about the conception of periodization in dominance, therefore, is that even if all the constitutive features of postmodernism were identical with and coterminous to those of an older modernism—a position I feel to be demonstrably erroneous but which only an even lengthier analysis of modernism proper could dispel—the two phenomena would still remain utterly distinct in their meaning and social function, owing to the very different positioning of postmodernism in the economic system of late capital and, beyond that, to the transformation of the very sphere of culture in contemporary society., This point will be further discussed at the conclusion of this book. I must now briefly address a different kind of objection to periodization, a concern about its possible obliteration of heterogeneity, one most often expressed by the Left. And it is certain that there is a strange quasi-Sartrean irony—a "winner loses" logic—which tends to surround any effort to describe a "system," a totalizing dynamic, as these are detected in the movement of contemporary society. What happens is that the more powerful the vision of some increasingly total system or logic —the Foucault of the prisons book is the obvious example—the more powerless the reader comes to feel. Insofar as the theorist wins, therefore, by constructing an increasingly closed and terrifying machine, to that very degree he loses, since the critical capacity of his work is thereby paralyzed, and the impulses of negation and revolt, not to speak of those 6 POSTMODERNISM of social transformation, are increasingly perceived as vain and trivial in the face of the model itself. I have felt, however, that it was only in the light of some conception of a dominant cultural logic or hegemonic norm that genuine difference could be measured and assessed. I am very far from feeling that all cultural production today is "postmodern" in the broad sense I will be conferring on this term. The postmodern is, however, the force field in which very different kinds of cultural impulses—what Raymond Williams has usefully termed "residual" and "emergent" forms of cultural production—must make their way. If we do not achieve some general sense of a cultural dominant, then we fall back into a view of present history as sheer heterogeneity, random difference, a coexistence of a host of distinct forces whose effectivity is undecidable. At any rate, this has been the political spirit in which the following analysis was devised: to project some conception of a new systematic cultural norm and its reproduction in order to reflect more adequately on the most effective forms of any radical cultural politics today. The exposition will take up in turn the following constitutive features of the postmodern: a new depthlessness, which finds its prolongation both in contemporary "theory" and in a whole new culture of the image or the simulacrum; a consequent weakening of historicity, both in our relationship to public History and in the new forms of our private temporality, whose "schizophrenic" structure (following Lacan] will determine new types of syntax or syntagmatic relationships in the more temporal arts; a whole new type of emotional ground tone—what I will call "intensities"—which can best be grasped by a return to older theories of the sublime; the deep constitutive relationships of all this to a whole new technology, which is itself a figure for a whole new economic world system; and, after a brief account of postmodernist mutations in the lived experience of built space itself, some reflections on the mission of political art in the bewildering new world space of late or multinational capital. We will begin with one of the canonical works of high modernism in visual art, Van Gogh's well-known painting of the jjeasant shoes, an example which, as you can imagine, has not been innocently or randomly chosen. I want to propose two ways of reading this painting, both of which in some fashion reconstruct the reception of the work in a two-stage or double-level process. Culture 7 I first want to suggest that if this copiously reproduced image is not to sink to the level of sheer decoration, it requires us to reconstruct some initial situation out of which the finished work emerges. Unless that situation—which has vanished into the past—is somehow mentally restored, the painting will remain an inert object, a reified end product impossible to grasp as a symbolic act in its own right, as praxis and as production. This last term suggests that one way of reconstructing the initial situation to which the work is somehow a response is by stressing the raw materials, the initial content, which it confronts and reworks, transforms, and appropriates. In Van Gogh that content, those initial raw materials, are, I will suggest, to be grasped simply as the whole object world of agricultural misery, of stark rural poverty, and the whole rudimentary human world of backbreaking peasant toil, a world reduced to its most brutal and menaced, primitive and marginalized state. Fruit trees in this world are ancient and exhausted sticks coming out of poor soil; the people of the village are worn down to their skulls, caricatures of some ultimate grotesque typology of basic human feature types. How is it, then, that in Van Gogh such things as apple trees explode into a hallucinatory surface of color, while his village stereotypes are suddenly and garishly overlaid with hues of red and green? I will briefly suggest, in this first interpretative option, that the willed and violent transformation of a drab peasant object world into the most glorious materialization of pure color in oil paint is to be seen as a Utopian gesture, an act of compensation which ends up producing a whole new Utopian realm of the senses, or at least of that supreme sense—sight, the visual, the eye—which it now reconstitutes for us as a semiautono-mous space in its own right, a part of some new division of labor in the body of capital, some new fragmentation of the emergent sensorium which replicates the specializations and divisions of capitalist life at the same time that it seeks in precisely such fragmentation a desperate Utopian compensation for them. There is, to be sure, a second reading of Van Gogh which can hardly be ignored when we gaze at this particular painting, and that is Heidegger's central analysis in Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes, which is organized around the idea that the work of art emerges within the gap between Earth and World, or what I would prefer to translate as the meaningless materiality of the body and nature and the meaning endowment of history and of the social. We will return to that particular gap or rift later on; suffice it here to recall some of the famous phrases that model the 8 POSTMODERNISM process whereby these henceforth illustrious peasant shoes slowly re-create about themselves the whole missing object world which was once their lived context. "In them," says Heidegger, "there vibrates the silent call of the earth, its quiet gift of ripening corn and its enigmatic self-refusal in the fallow desolation of the wintry field." "This equipment," he goes on, "belongs to the earth, and it is protected in the world of the peasant woman. . . . Van Gogh's painting is the disclosure of what the equipment, the pair of peasant shoes, is in truth. . . . This entity emerges into the unconcealment of its being,"3 by way of the mediation of the work of art, which draws the whole absent world and earth into revelation around itself, along with the heavy tread of the peasant woman, the loneliness of the field path, the hut in the clearing, the worn and broken instruments of labor in the furrows and at the hearth. Heidegger's account needs to be completed by insistence on the renewed materiality of the work, on the transformation of one form of materiality —the earth itself and its paths and physical objects—into that other materiality of oil paint affirmed and foregrounded in its own right and for its own visual pleasures, but nonetheless it has a satisfying plausibility. At any rate, both readings may be described as hermeneutical, in the sense in which the work in its inert, objectal form is taken as a clue or a symptom for some vaster reality which replaces it as its ultimate truth. Now we need to look at some shoes of a different kind, and it is pleasant to be able to draw for such an image on the recent work of the central figure in contemporary visual art. Andy Warhol's Diamond Dust Shoes evidently no longer speaks to us with any of the immediacy of Van Gogh's footgear; indeed, I am tempted to say that it does not really speak to us at all. Nothing in this painting organizes even a minimal place for the viewer, who confronts it at the turning of a museum corridor or gallery with all the contingency of some inexplicable natural object. On the level of the content, we have to do with what are now far more clearly fetishes, in both the Freudian and the Marxian senses (Derrida remarks, somewhere, about the Heideggerian Paar Bauernschuhe, that the Van Gogh footgear are a heterosexual pair, which allows neither for perversion nor for fetishization). Here, however, we have a random collection of dead objects hanging together on the canvas like so many turnips, as shorn of their earlier life world as the pile of shoes left over from Auschwitz or the remainders and tokens of some incomprehensible and tragic fire in a packed dance hall. There is therefore in Warhol no way to complete the hermeneutic gesture and restore to these oddments that whole larger lived context of the dance hall or the ball, the world of jetset fashion or glamour magazines. Yet this is even more paradoxical in the light of biographical information: Warhol began his artistic career as a commercial illustrator for shoe fashions and a designer of display windows in which various pumps and slippers figured prominently. Indeed, one is tempted to raise here—far too prematurely—one of the central issues about postmodernism itself and its possible political dimensions: Andy Warhol's work in fact turns centrally around. commodification, and the great billboard images of the Coca-Cola bottle or the Campbell's soup can, which explicitly foreground the commodity fetishism of a transition to late capital, ought to be powerful and critical political statements. If they are not that, then one would surely want to know why, and one would want to begin to wonder a little more seriously about the possibilities of political or critical art in the postmodern period of late capital. But there are some other significant differences between the high-modernist and the postmodernist moment, between the shoes of Van Gogh and the shoes of Andy Warhol, on which we must now very briefly; dwell. The first and most evident is the emergence of a new kind of flatness or depthlessness, a new kind of superficiality in the most literal sense, perhaps the supreme formal feature of all the postmodernisms to which we will have occasion to return in a number of other contexts. Then we must surely come to terms with the role of photography and the photographic negative in contemporary art of this kind; and it is this, indeed, which confers its deathly quality to the Warhol image, whose glacéd X-ray elegance mortifies the reified eye of the viewer in a way that would seem to have nothing to do with death or the death obsession or the death anxiety on the level of content. It is indeed as though we had here to do with the inversion of Van Gogh's Utopian gesture: in the earlier work a stricken world is by some Nietzschean fiat and act of the will transformed into the stridency of Utopian color. Here, on the contrary, it is as though the external and colored surface of things —debased and contaminated in advance by their assimilation to glossj advertising images—has been stripped away to reveal the deathly black-and-white substratum of the photographic negative which subtends them. Although this kind of death of the world of appearance becomes thematized in certain of Warhol's pieces, most notably the traffic accidents or the electric chair series, this is not, I think, a matter of content any longer but of some more fundamental mutation both in the object world itself—now become a set of texts or simulacra—and in the disposition of the subject. 10 POSTMODERNISM All of which brings me to a third feature to be developed here, what I will call the waning of affect in postmodern culture. Of course, it would be inaccurate to suggest that all affect, all feeling or emotion, all subjectivity, has vanished from the newer image. Indeed, there is a kind of return of the repressed in Diamond Dust Shoes, a strange, compensatory, decorative exhilaration, explicitly designated by the title itself, which is, of course, the glitter of gold dust, the spangling of gilt sand that seals the surface of the painting and yet continues to glint at us. Think, however, of Rimbaud's magical flowers "that look back at you," or of the august premonitory eye flashes of Rilke's archaic Greek torso which warn the bourgeois subject to change his life; nothing of that sort here in the gratuitous frivolity of this final decorative overlay. In an interesting review of the Italian version of this essay,4 Remo_Ceserani expands this foot fetishism into a fourfold image which adds to the gaping "modernist" expressivity of the Van Gogh-Heidegger shoes the "realist" pathos of Walker Evans and James Agee (strange that pathos should thus require a team!); while what looked like a random assortment of yesteryear's fashions in Warhol takes on, in Magritte, the carnal reality of the human member itself, now more phantasmic than the leather it is printed on. Magritte, unique among the surrealists, survived the sea change from the modern to its sequel, becoming in the process something of a postmodern emblem: the uncanny, Lacanian foreclusion, without expression. The ideal schizophrenic, indeed, is easy enough to please provided only an eternal present is thrust before the eyes, which gaze with equal fascination on an old shoe or the tenaciously growing organic mystery of the human toenail. Ceserani thereby deserves a semiotic cube of his own: MAGIC REALISM the prehensile toe WORK ^ **'' ___7PLAY TRANSFORMATION* * IDLENESS Van Gogh < ^ INDIFFERENCE "~~ \ PHOTOGRAPHY creases on the face THE REALISM OF OLD AGE ' ■c'i-.'w.s-.ťiSäŕá^ ■ \- :r ■*■■■ i-i-■..**;>■■:;,. .-■ '■* Vincent Van Gogh, "A Pair of Boots" h Andy Warhol, "Diamond Dust Shoes' S*: ■ .m tive unconscious in the process of trying to identify its own pr(i, the same time that they illuminate the failure of this attempt, -, , seems to reduce itself to the recombination of various Stereotypie ., ii past. Perhaps, indeed, what follows upon a strongly general ion; | consciousness, such as what the "people of the sixties" felt, is ( peculiar aimlessness. What if the crucial identifying feature of tV ■ "decade" is, for example, a lack of just such strong self-consi ion ■■■ „ which is to say a constitutive lack of identity in the first place? '■ i., what many of us felt about the seventies, whose specificity sen mi* of the time to consist in having no specificity, particularly aľl i uniqueness of the preceding period. Things began to pick up a< i i | the eighties, and in a variety of ways. But the identity process i. ■ cyclical one, and this is essentially the dilemma. Of the eight against the seventies, one could say that there were new political , ■ in the wind, that things were moving again, that some impossible' .1 of the sixties" seemed to be in the air and in the ground. Bui the ■ i ies, politically and otherwise, have not really resembled the j especially, particularly if one tried to define them as a return or a sion. Even that enabling costume-party self-deception of which ' i i spoke—the wearing of the costumes of the great moments of the pa i no longer on the cards in an ahistorical period of history. The £ n ■ tional combinatoire thus seems to have broken down at the moi ■ i confronted serious historicity, and the rather different self-coni ■ "postmodernism" has taken its place. Dick used science fiction to see his present as (past) history; th !. sical nostalgia film, while evading its present altogether, registe ■ ■ historicist deficiency by losing itself in mesmerized fascination i ish images of specific generational pasts. The two 1986 movies, ■ scarcely pioneering a wholly new form (or mode of historicity), ■■ n theless seem, in their allegorical complexity, to mark the end of th ' ' the now open space for something else. IO Secondary Elaborations I. prolegomena to Future Confrontations llolween the Modern and the Postmodern asm and postmodernism: people often seem to find this combination peculiar or paradoxical, and somehow intensely unstable, so that some are led to conclude that, in my own case, having "become" a post modernist 1 must have ceased to be a Marxist in any meaningful (or in other words, stereotypical) sense. For the two terms (in full postmodernism) carry with them a whole freight of pop nostalgia images, "Marxism" perhaps distilling itself into yellowing period photographs of Lenin and the Soviet revolution, and "postmodernism" quickly yielding a vista of Ihe gaudiest new hotels. The overhasty unconscious then rapidly assembles the image of a small, painstakingly reproduced nostalgia restaurant—decorated with old photographs, with Soviet waiters sluggishly serving bad Russian food—hidden away within some gleaming new pink-and-blue architectural extravaganza. ÍÍ1 may indulge in a personal note, it has happened to me before to havo been oddly and comically identified with an object of study: a book I published years ago on structuralism elicited letters, some of which addressed me as a "foremost" spokesperson for structuralism, while the others appealed to me as an "eminent" critic and opponent of that movement. I was really neither of those things, but I have to conclude that I must have been "neither" in some relatively complicated and unusual way that it seemed hard for people to grasp. As far as postmodernism is concerned, and despite the trouble I took in my principu] essay on the subject to explain how it was not possible intellectually or politically simply to celebrate postmodernism or to "disavow" it (whalever that might mean), avant-garde art critics quickly identified 298 POSTMODERNISM me as a vulgar Marxist hatchet man, while some of the more si hearted comrades concluded that, following the example ot so ' * illustrious predecessors, I had finally gone off the deep end andb< • '* a "post-Marxist" (which is to say, in one language, a renegade ■'* turncoat, and in another, someone who would rather switch than n ■ ' Many of these reactions seemed to confuse taste (or opinion) n i," sis, and evaluation, three things I would have thought we had ^ interest in keeping separate. "Taste," in the loosest media sense ill sonal preferences, would seem to correspond to what used to be n 11-and philosophically designated as "aesthetic judgment" (the chai , ■'" codes and the barometrical fall in lexical dignity is at least one in ľ the displacement of traditional aesthetics and the transformation il ij cultural sphere in modern times). "Analysis" I take to be that po u i and rigorous conjuncture of formal and historical analysis that ( >i^ , tutes the specific task of literary and cultural study; to descritn -h further as the investigation of the historical conditions of possib-h ,' specific forms may perhaps convey the way in which these twi i spectives (often thought to be irreconcilable or incommensurable in tli past) can be said to constitute their object and thereby to be inseparabl ■ Analysis in this sense can be seen to be a very different set of operatio5 from a cultural journalism oriented around taste and opinion; what ľ would now be important to secure is the difference between sut i< journalism—with its indispensable reviewing functions—and wha« I will call "evaluation," which no longer turns on whether a work is "«ooii (after the fashion of an older aesthetic judgment), but rather tries ■■ keep alive (or to reinvent) assessments of a sociopolitical kind that intf -rogate the quality of social life itself by way of the text or individu il work of art, or hazard an assessment of the political effects of cultui ■ currents or movements with less utilitarianism and a greater sympatl for the dynamics of everyday life than the imprimaturs and indexes earlier traditions. As far as taste is concerned (and as readers of the preceding cha pie * will have become aware), culturally I write as a relatively enthusiasli consumer of postmodernism, at least of some parts of it: I like the arc! i-tecture and a lot of the newer visual work, in particular the newer ph -tography. The music is not bad to listen to, or the poetry to read: ti novel is the weakest of the newer cultural areas and is considerab . excelled by its narrative counterparts in film and video (at least the hi: ■ literary novel is; subgeneric narratives, however, are very good, indec i and in the Third World of course all this falls out very differently). Fd ■! Conclusion 299 , iockion have also greatly improved, as has the life world generally. pnse is that this is essentially a visual culture, wired for sound it one where the linguistic element (for which some stronger term "standardization" needs to be invented, and which is in addition hied by the worst kind of junk-language, such as "life-style" or "sex- I preference") is slack and flabby, and not to be made interesting with- ingenuity, daring, and keen motivation. lese are tastes, giving rise to opinions; they have little to do with the ysis of the function of such a culture and how it got to be that way. [W case, even the opinions are probably not satisfactory in this form . ' er since the second thing people want to know, for the obvious con-mal reason, is how this compares to an older modernist canon. The i [itecture is generally a great improvement; the novels are much worse. , .tography and video are incomparable (the latter for a very obvious on indeed); also we're fortunate today in having interesting new paint-to look at and poetry to read. ' usic, however (after Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Thomas Mann), oui,ht to lead us into something more interesting and complicated than mere opinion. For one thing, it remains a fundamental class marker, the index of that cultural capital Pierre Bourdieu calls social "distinction": whence the passions that highbrow and lowbrow, or elite and mass, musical tastes (and the theories that correspond to them, Adorno, on the one hand, Simon Frith, on the other) still arouse. Meanwhile, music also includes history in a more thoroughgoing and irrevocable fashion, since, as background and mood stimulus, it mediates our historical past along with our private or existential one and can scarcely be woven out of the memory any longer. The most crucial relationship of music to the postmodern, however, surely passes through space itself (on my analysis, one of the distinguishing or even constitutive traits of the new "culture" or cultural dominant). MTV above all can be taken as a spatialization of music, or, if you prefer, as the telltale revelation that it had already, in our time, become profoundly spatialized in the first place. Technologies of the musical, to be sure, whether of production, reproduction, reception, or consumption, already worked to fashion a new sonorous space around the individual or the collective listener: in music, too, "representationality"—in the sense of drawing up your/auteuil and gazing across at the spectacle unfolded before you—has known its crisis and its specific historical disintegration. You no longer offer a musical object for contemplation and gustation; you wire up the context and make space musical around 300 POSTMODERNISM the consumer. In that situation, narrative offers multiple form mediations between the sounds in time and the be coordinating a narrativized visual fragment—an image s as narrative, which does not have to come from any story yC of—with an event on the sound track. Particularly in the p is crucial to distinguish between narrativization and any si tive segment as such: failure to do so results in confusi "old-fashioned realistic" stories and novels, and putativej postmodern antinarrative ones. The story is, however, on forms narrative or narrativization can take; and it is worth the possibility that today the mere intent to produce a f enough, as in Lem's imaginary book reviews (Ken Russell why he had shifted over into MTV, prophesied that in the century no fiction film would last longer than fifteen mi MTV does to music, therefore, is not some inversion of nineteenth-century form called program music but rather 1 sounds (using Lacan's carpet tacks, no doubt) onto visib spatial segments: here, as in the video form more genera paradigm—that lights up in genealogical hindsight as this cessor (but not the basic influence on it)—is animatio cartoon-—particularly in its more delirious and surreal va the first laboratory in which "text" tried out its vocatio: between sight and sound (think of Walt's own lowbrow ot highbrow music) and ended up spatializing time. We therefore begin to make some progress on turning o "postmodernism theory" when we step back and attend tc of the fine arts" itself: the ratio between the forms and mi the very shape that "media" itself has taken on, supplant genre alike), the way in which the generic system itself, as; tion and a new configuration (however minimally modifie the postmodern, and through it, all the other things that ai___,-,- — to us. But descriptions like these seem not only to involve the obligat comparison with the modern as such, they also let questions back in way of the "canon": surely only a very old-fashioned critic or culti journalist would be interested in proving the obvious, that Yeatf "greater" than Paul Muldoon, or Auden than Bob Perelman—un3 the word great is simply an expression of enthusiasm, in which c you might well sometimes want to do it the other way round. The reje... der here is the rather different one that you cannot even realistically Conclusion 301 the "greatness" of "great writers" within a single paradigm j Adorno's notion of an internecine war among the individual ':' -aesthetic monads that repel each other, is surely the one that L" corresponds to most people's aesthetic experience, explaining why filerable to be asked to decide whether Keats is greater than Words- or to measure the worth of the Pompidou Center on the scale of geenheim, or the preeminence of Dos Passos over Doctorow, let she question of Mallarmé and Ashbery. , (^0 however, make comparisons of this kind and seem to enjoy the -s however meaningless it may be; one can therefore only con- ■ Ljiat such compulsive matchings and rankings must mean some- ■ a gjge. Indeed, I've argued in another place1 that in the political conscious of an age, such comparisons—whether of individual works cultural styles more generally—are in reality the figuration and the nrossive raw material of a deeper comparison between the modes of eduction themselves, which confront and judge each other by way of 3 individual contact between reader and text. The example of the )dern/postmodern, however, shows that this also holds good for stages thin a single mode of production, in this case for the confrontation :we;en the modernist (or imperialist, or monopoly) stage of capitalism d its postmodern (or multinational) stage. ■\1I the enumeration of sheerly cultural traits comes down to this cat-íresis, or four-term metaphor: we concoct some proposition about the alitative superiority of the musical production of the eighteenth-ltury German principalities only in order to censure or to celebrate i commercial-technological engenderment of music in our own. That nifest comparison is the cover and the vehicle for a latent one in ich we try to construct a feeling for daily life in the ancien regime so in a next step, to reconstruct a feeling for what is peculiar and it:i lie, original and historic, in the present, Under the guise of spe-i.iJizud history, therefore, we are still doing general or universal history, which is destined to end up in postmodernism theory, as the sequence of BľKfJxtian estrangement operations outlined above makes plain. These iirtí then the terms and conditions under which we can argue about the respective "greatness" of Mahler and Phil Glass, or Eisenstein and MTV, bul they extend far beyond the aesthetic or the cultural as such, becoming meaningful or intelligible only when they reach the terrain of the production of material life and the limits and potentialities it (dialecti-cally) imposes on human praxis, including cultural praxis. What is now at stake is relative systemic alienation itself and the dialectical relation- 302 POSTMODERNISM ship between the limits of the base and the possibilities of i structure within any given system or systemic moment: its iutc ■ ■■ tient of misery and the determinate potentiality of bodily and transfiguration it also affords, or conquers. That is, for modernism, a whole investigation in its own ri< |, which only a few first notes are here appended. As for the feclm tained about the "end of the modern" within the postmodern another matter entirely, and a constitutive one (which does r-sarily have much to do with historical modernism, or historic nity either). A second set of notes therefore configures this top . .. |,,,. is sometimes confused with the ethical and aesthetic "com-uij.,., ■ between modernism and postmodernism; nor does it afford Is ■■ ,, economic comparison proposed in what follows. IS. Notes Toward a Theory of the Modern The "classics" of the modern can certainly be postmodernized ■ ■ I ,■.,. formed into "texts," if not into precursors of "textuality": the ť-. ■ -.| . tions are relatively different, insofar as the precursors—]\ .■ t-i ,: Roussel, Gertrude Stein, Marcel Duchamp—always fit uneasily i i........ modernist canon anyway. They are the exemplars and the e; ■■ ■ I i--exhibits in some cases for the identity between modernism i ■ . ■■ -,-modernism, since, in them, the slightest modification, the mer .: i :■-.: ■ of perversity in shifting the chairs around, makes what oughl I- ■ ill most classical high modernist aesthetic values into somethin ■ ■ m-fortable and remote (but closer to us!]. It is as though they cc-n i": ■ ■! some opposition within the opposition, an aesthetic negati- ■ i ■ ■ negation; against the already anti-hegemonic minority art of......i- ern, they staged their own even more minoritarian and priv i ■ ■ h-l-lion, which will of course itself become canonical when th- n ■■ ■■. freezes over and becomes a drafty set of museums. As for the mainstream moderns, however, those waiting pr! ■ ■ u line for a room in just such a museum, any number of them si...... ľ i- ble of a thoroughgoing rewriting into the postmodern text (one htfsJlaitJb to think of the process in the same way as the adaptation of a novel to the screen, particularly since one of the features of postmodern cinema is the increasing scarcity of just such screen adaptations). But that wo are rewriting high modernism in new ways today seems to me beyond doubt, at least for certain crucial writers: that besides being a realist. Flaubert also turned into a modernist when Joyce learned him by heart Conclusion 303 unexpectedly turned into something like a postmodernist in the , 0f Nathalie Sarraute—that is a familiar story. As for Joyce him-■•qIxzi MacCabe has projected a new Joyce for us today, a feminist Creole or multiethnic Joyce, which would seem to be very conso-vith the times and to offer at least one Joyce we might be willing to ■ate as postmodern. Meanwhile, on my side, I've tried to invoke a VVorld and anti-imperialist Joyce more consistent with a contem-\j than with a modernist aesthetic.2 But are all the classics of yes-ir rewritable in this fashion? Is the Proust of Gilles Deleuze a todern Proust? Deleuze's Kafka is certainly a postmodern Kafka, a of ethnicity and microgroups, very much a Third World and dia-inority Kafka in tune with postmodern politics and the "new social tnents." But is T. S. Eliot recuperable? What ever happened to as Mann and André Gide? Frank Lentricchia has kept Wallace ns alive throughout this momentous climatological transformation, iul Valery has vanished without a trace, and he was central to the rnist movement internationally. What is suspicious about the mat-id about the questions that it raises, is their overwhelming family iss with familiar discussions of the nature of the classic itself, the haustible" text, capable of being reinvented and used in new ways ;cessive generations—something like a great manor house, handed and redecorated over and over by successive heirs, who can install ;est Parisian fashions or Japanese technology. Meanwhile, the non-'ors are proof that "posterity" really does exist, even in our own lodern media age; the losers are a crucial component of the argu-who document the necessary pastness of the past by showing that 1 its "great books" are still of any interest to us. This approach niently masks out those parts of the problem that reidentify it he older historicist dilemma and prevents us from learning some-about our own postmodernity by way of the boredom inspired by gh modern "classics" we can no longer read. But boredom is a íseful instrument with which to explore the past, and to stage a ng between it and the present. As for the others who did survive—at the price of a certain renova-liun or "immaculation,"3 a certain Urnfunktionierung (Flaubert has to 1)ü read much more slowly, for example, in order to undo the storyline ami I urn the sentences into the moments of a postmodern "text")—they will evidently have something to tell us about a situation of "modernity" we still share. We need, in fact, to inflect the root adjective into Ihren distinct substantives—beyond "modernism" proper, the less famil- 304 POSTMODERNISM iar one of "modernity," and then of "modernization"—in order nr •. to grasp the dimensions of the problem, but to appreciate how i ently the various academic disciplines, as well as the various na! - " traditions, have framed it. "Modernism" has come only recernl-France, "modernity" only recently to us, "modernization" bélo i ■ the sociologists, Spanish has two separate words for the artistic n ,. ments ("modernismo" and "vanguardismo"), etc. A comparativi !■ con would be a four- or five-dimensional affair, registering the cb-logical appearance of these terms in the various language groups, | recording the uneven development observable between them.4 A ■ ■ parative sociology of modernism and its cultures—a sociology ■ „■ like Weber's remained committed to measuring the extraordinary i n , | of capitalism on hitherto traditional cultures, the social and p , , damage done to now irrevocable older forms of human life and p-tion—would alone offer an adequate framework for rethinking lulJl. ernism" today, provided it worked both sides of the street and du» íl-tunnel from both directions; one must, in other words, not only deduc ■ modernism from modernization, but also scan the sedimented traces <■ modernization within the aesthetic work itself. It should also be obvious that it is the fact of the relationship itse that counts and not its content. The various modernisms have just ;■ often constituted violent reactions against modernization as they has-replicated its values and tendencies by their own formal insistence c novelty, innovation, the transformation of older forms, therapeutic ic:or-oclasm and the processing of new (aesthetic) wonder-working tech nob-gies. If, for example, modernization has something to do with industri ! progress, rationalization, reorganization of production and admin i str -tion along more efficient lines, electricity, the assembly line, parliamn tary democracy, and cheap newspapers—then we will have to concUu ■ that at least one strand of artistic modernism is anti-modern and com-into being in violent or muffled protest against modernization, no -grasped as technological progress in the largest sense. These ani modern modernisms sometimes involve pastoral visions or Luddite gt tures but are mostly symbolic, and, especially at the turn of the cent u i involve what is sometimes referred to as a new wave of anti-positivL spiritualistic, irrational reactions against triumphant enlightenment pro; ress or reason. Perry Anderson reminds me, however, that in this respect the deepe and most fundamental feature shared by all the modernisms is not i much their hostility to a technology some (like the Futurists) actual Conclusion 305 »brated, but rather their hostility to the market itself. The centrality ujg feature is then confirmed by its inversion in the various tmodernisms, which, even more wildly different from each other the various modernisms, all at least share a resonant affirmation, •n not an outright celebration, of the market as such, hat the experience of the machine is in any case a crucial marker i can be deduced, in my view, from the rhythm of the successive ,es of aesthetic modernism: a long first wave in the late nineteenth i tury, organized around organic forms and exemplified in some přived way in symbolisme; a second one acquiring its momentum from , turn of the century on and characterized by the dual markers of an iiusiasm for machine technology and an organization into more imilitary-type avant-gardes (Futurism can serve as the strong form iiis moment). To these should be added the modernism of the iso-WJll,d "genius," organized, unlike the two periodic movements (with their emphasis on the organic transformation of the life-world, and on the avant-garde and its social mission, respectively), around the great Work, thu Book of the World—secular scripture, sacred text, ultimate ritual mass (Mallarmé's Livre) for an unimaginable new social order. And we should probably also make some place (but not as late as he does) for what Charles Jencks has come to call "late modernism"—the last survivals of a properly modernist view of art and the world after the great political and economic break of the Depression, where, under Stalinism or the Popular Front, Hitler or the New Deal, some new conception of social realism achieves the status of momentary cultural dominance by way of collective anxiety and world war. Jencks's late moderns are those who persist into postmodernism, and the idea makes sense architecturally; a literary frame of reference, however, throws up names like Borges and Nabokov, Beckett, poets like Olson or Zukovsky, and composers like Milton Babbitt, who had the misfortune to span two eras and the luck to find a time capsule of isolation or exile in which to spin out unseasonable forms. Of the most canonical of these four moments or tendencies, that of llie great demiurges and prophets—Frank Lloyd Wright and his cape and porkpie hat, Proust in his cork-lined room, the "force of nature" I'icasso, and the "tragic," uniquely doomed Kafka (all as idiosyncratic hikI eccentric as the best Great Detectives in the classical detective stories) — something more needs to be said to discourage the view that, from Ihn hindsight of postmodern fashion and commerciality, modernism was still a time of giants and legendary powers no longer available to us. But 306 POSTMODERNISM if the poststructuralist motif of the "death of the subject' thing socially, it signals the end of the entrepreneurial and i individualism, with its "charisma" and its accompanying ci oply of quaint romantic values such as that of the "geniu place. Seen thus, the extinction of the "great moderns" is íly an occasion for pathos. Our social order is richer in inr more literate, and socially, at least, more "democratic" ir the universalization of wage labor (I have always felt that "plebeianization" is politically more suitable and socioli exact in designating this leveling process, which people o surely only welcome); this new order no longer needs seers of the high modernist and charismatic type, whetr cultural producers or its politicians. Such figures no Ion charm or magic for the subjects of a corporate, collect individualistic age; in that case, goodbye to them witho Brecht might have put it: woe to the country that needs gen ets, Great Writers, or demiurges! What one must retain historically is the fact that the did once exist; a postmodern view of the "great" mode ought not to argue away the social and historical specif now doubtful "centered subjects," but rather provide new u standing their conditions of possibility. A beginning is made on that process by grasping the names no longer as characters larger than life or great sou! or another, but rather—non- and anti-anthropomorphicallj that is to say as objective situations in which an ambitiou around the turn of the century could see the objective turning himself into the "greatest painter" (or poet or noi poser) "of the age." That objective possibility is now given, not in jective talent as such or some inner richness or inspiration, but ra '-\ i in strategies of a well-nigh military character, based on superiorit- I technique and terrain, assessment of the counterforces, a shrewd i ■ i\-imization of one's own specific and idiosyncratic resources. This ... proach to "genius," however, which we now associate with the narr" ■ Pierre Bourdieu,5 should be sharply distinguished from a debunkin-.- ■ \ demystifying ressentiment like what Tolstoy seems to have felt alum Shakespeare, and, mutatis mutandis, about the role of "great men" '■-erally in history. Despite Tolstoy, I think we still do admire the é!" -generals (along with their counterparts, the great artists),6 but the acii ■ ration has been displaced from their innate subjectivity to their hist»t i- Conclusion 307 air, their capacity to assess the "current situation" and to evaluate jtential permutation system on the spot. This is, it seems to me, a >rly postmodern revision in biographical historiography, which char-istically substitutes the horizontal for the vertical, space for time, m for depth. t there is a deeper reason for the disappearance of the Great Writer r postmodernism, and it is simply this, sometimes called "uneven [opinent"; in an age of monopolies (and trade unions), of increas-istitutionalized collectivization, there is always a lag. Some parts e economy are still archaic, handicraft enclaves; some are more >rn and futuristic than the future itself. Modern art, in this respect, its power and its possibilities from being a backwater and an archaic over within a modernizing economy: it glorified, celebrated, and .atized older forms of individual production which the new mode oduction was elsewhere on the point of displacing and blotting aesthetic production then offered the Utopian vision of a more in production generally; and in the world of the monopoly stage of alism it exercised a fascination by way of the image it offered of a ian transformation of human life. Joyce in his rooms in Paris single-edly produces a whole world, all by himself and beholden to no but the human beings in the streets outside those rooms have no larable sense of power and control, of human productivity; none of jeling of freedom and autonomy that comes when, like Joyce, you lake or at least share in making your own decisions. As a form of iction, then, modernism (including the Great Artists and produc-;ives off a message that has little to do with the content of the idual works: it is the aesthetic as sheer autonomy, as the satisfac-of handicraft transfigured. Modernism must thus be seen as uniquely corresponding to an uneven moment of social development, or to what Ernst Bloch called the '"situultaniety of the nonsimultaneous" the "synchronicity of the non-synchronous" (Gleichzeitigkeit des l/ngleichzeitigen):7 the coexistence of realities from radically different moments of history—handicrafts alongside the great cartels, peasant fields with the Krupp factories or thfi Ford plant in the distance. But a less programmatic demonstration of unevenness is afforded by the work of Kafka, about which Adorno once said that it stood as a definitive rebuke to anyone who wanted to Ihink about art in terms of pleasure. I think he was wrong about this, at Kisl from a postmodern perspective; the refutation can be staged in a nim:h more wide-ranging way from those perverse-seeming descriptions 308 POSTMODERNISM of Kafka as a "mystical humorist" (Thomas Mann) and as a jo Chaplinesque writer, although it is certain that when you r Chaplin during your reading of Kafka, Chaplin doesn't look any more either. More must therefore be said on the subject of the pleasural even the joyous nature of Kafka's nightmares. Benjamin once that there were at least two current interpretations of Kafkr needed to get rid of for good: one was the psychoanalytic (Kail pus complex—he certainly had one, but his are hardly a psyc works as such); the other was the theological (the idea of sal certainly there in Kafka, but there is nothing otherworldly ah about salvation in general). Perhaps we might today also add thi tial interpretation: the human condition, anxiety, and the like ; only too familiar themes and considerations which, as you m: imagined, can certainly not be judged to be very postmodern) must also briefly reconsider what used to be thought of as th ist" interpretation: The Trial as the representation of the ramshacklt bureaucracy of an Austro-Hungarian Empire on the eve of collapse. Thert is much truth to this interpretation also, except for the suggestion thai the Austro-Hungarian Empire was in any way a nightmare. On the contrary, besides being the last of the old archaic empires, it was also the first multinational and multiethnic state: comfortably inefficient wher compared with Prussia, humane and tolerant when juxtaposed with the czars; finally not a bad arrangement at all, and an intriguing mode] ir our own postnational period, still riven by nationalisms. The K.-aiul-K structure plays a part in Kafka, but not exactly in the way in which the "bureaucracy-as-nightmare" interpretation (the Empire as a foretaste 01 Auschwitz) wants to suggest. Returning to the idea of the simultaneity of the nonsimultaneous, oi the coexistence of distinct moments of history, what you first notice ir reading The Trial is the presence of a modern, well-nigh corporate, workweek and business routine; Joseph K. is a young banker (a "junior executive" or "confidential clerk") who lives for his work, a bachelor who spends his empty evenings in a tavern and whose Sundays are miserable, when they are not made even more miserable by invitations Iron: business colleagues to intolerable professional social outings. Into Ihif boredom of organized modernity something rather different suddenly comes—and it is precisely that archaic, older legal bureaucracy associated with the Empire's political structure. So we have here a very striking coexistence: a modern, or at least modernizing, economy, and ar Conclusion 309 fashioned political structure, something that Orson Welles's great of The Trial captured vividly by way of space itself: Joseph K. lives he worse kind of faceless anonymous modern housing but visits a rt housed in shabby baroque splendor (when not in ancient tenement-. rooms), the interspace being occupied by the empty rubble and ant lots of urban development to come (he will eventually die in one jjose bombed-out spaces). The pleasures of Kafka, the pleasures of nightmare in Kafka, then come from the way in which the archaic ,ns up routine and boredom, and an old-fashioned juridical and eaucratic paranoia enters the empty workweek of the corporate age [ makes something at least happen! The moral would now seem to be t the worst is better than nothing at all, and that nightmares are a come relief from the work week. There is in Kafka a hunger for the er event as such in a situation in which it seems as rare as a miracle; lis language, an avidness to register, in a virtually musical economic ation, the slightest tremors in the life world that might betray the faintest presence of something "taking place." This appropriation of the negative by a positive, indeed Utopian, force that wraps itself in its wolf's clothing, is scarcely psychologically unfamiliar; it is for example well-known, to cite a more postcontemporary malady, how the deeper satisfaction afforded by paranoia and its various delusions of persecution and espionage lies in the reassuring certainty that everyone is always louking at you all the time! It is then, in Kafka as elsewhere, the peculiar overlap of future and past, in this case, the resistance of archaic feudal structures to irresistible modernizing tendencies—of tendential organization and the residual survival of the not yet "modern" in some other sense—that is the condition of possibility for high modernism as such, and for its production of aesthetic forms and messages that may no longer have anything to do with the unevenness from which it alone springs. What follows paradoxically as a consequence is that in that case the postmodern must be characterized as a situation in which the survival, the residue, the holdover, the archaic, has finally been swept away without a trace. In the postmodern, then, the past itself has disappeared (along with the well-known "sense of the past" or historicity and collective memory). Where its buildings still remain, renovation and resto-ration allow them to be transferred to the present in their entirety as those other, very different and postmodern things called simulacra. Everything is now organized and planned; nature has been triumphantly blotted out, along with peasants, petit-bourgeois commerce, handicraft, 310 POSTMODERNISM feudal aristocracies and imperial bureaucracies. Ours is a run geneously modernized condition; we no longer are encutnbr the embarrassment of non-simultaneities and non-synchronir,iti thing has reached the same hour on the great clock of devolo rationalization (at least from the perspective of the "West'*), 'ľ sense in which we can affirm, either that modernism is characi a situation of incomplete modernization, or that postmodernism modern than modernism itself. Perhaps it can also be added that what is also thereby lost postmodern is modernity as such, in the sense in which thai be taken to mean something specific and distinct from either ism and modernization. Indeed, our old friends base and sv. ture seem fatally to reimpose themselves: if modernization is s that happens to the base, and modernism the form the supei takes in reaction to that ambivalent development, then perhat nity characterizes the attempt to make something coherent 01 relationship. Modernity would then in that case describe the w ern" people feel about themselves; the word would seem to hi thing to do not with the products (either cultural or industrial^ the producers and the consumers, and how they feel either p the products or living among them. This modern feeling now consist in the conviction that we ourselves are somehow nt new age is beginning, that everything is possible and nothing be the same again; nor do we want anything to be the same ; want to "make it new," get rid of all those old objects, vames; ties, and ways of doing things, and to be somehow transfigure: étre absolument moderne," cried Rimbaud; we have to be somel lutely, radically modern; which is to say (presumably) that w make ourselves modern, too; it's something we do, not mert thing that happens to us. Is this the way we feel today, in full ernism? We certainly don't feel ourselves living among dusty, tr boring, ancient things and ideas. Apollinaire's great poetic against the ancient buildings of 1910 Europe, and against the v of Europe itself; "A la fin tu es las de ce monde ancien!" (yc denly sick and tired of this antiquated world!) probably does nc the contemporary (the postcontemporary) feeling about the s ket or the credit card. The word new doesn't seem to have resonance for us any longer; the word itself is no longer new oj What does that suggest about the postmodern experience or change or history? Conclusion 311 ■nplies first of all that we are; using "time" or historical "lived ience" and historicity as a mediation between the socioeconomic nre and our cultural and ideological evaluation of it, as well as a -ionally privileged theme by which to stage our systemic compar-,etween the modern and the postmodern moments of capital. Later e will want to develop the matter further in two directions: first, d that sense of unique historical difference from other societies certain experience of the New (in the modern) seems to encour-ld perpetuate; and second, in analyzing the role of new technolo-md their consumption) in a postmodernity evidently disinterested matizing and valorizing the New as such any longer. the moment, we conclude that the keen sense of the New in the m period was only possible because of the mixed, uneven, transi-nature of that period, in which the old coexisted with what was ;oming into being. Apollinaire's Paris included both grimy medi-nonuments and cramped Renaissance tenements, and motorcars Lrplanes, telephones, electricity, and the latest fashions in clothing ulture. You know and experience these last as new and modern lecause the old and traditional are also present. One way of telling Dry of the transition from the modern to the postmodern lies then )wing how at length modernization triumphs and wipes the old letěly out: nature is abolished along with the traditional country-tnd traditional agriculture; even the surviving historical monu-i, now all cleaned up, become glittering simulacra of the past, and i survival. Now everything is new; but by the same token, the very )ry of the new then loses its meaning and becomes itself some-of a modernist survival. oever says "new," however, or deplores the loss of its concept in a lodern age, also fatally raises the spectre of Revolution itself, in nse in which its concept once embodied the ultimate vision of the tn become absolute and extending itself into the smallest crannies 3tails of a lif eworld transformed. The inveterate recourse to a vocab-of political revolution, and the aesthetic avant-garde's often nar-tic affectation of the trappings of their political opposite numbers, st a politicality in the very form of the modernisms that casts some on the reassurances of their academic ideologies, who taught us and again that the moderns were not political, or even socially :onscious. Indeed, their work was said to represent a new "inward and the opening up of some new reflexive deep subjectivity: the ival of interiorized fetishism," Lukács once called it. And certainly 312 POSTMODERNISM modernist texts in their range and variety do seem to offer the j ance of so many Geiger counters picking up all kinds of new sul impulses and signals and registering those in new ways and aci to new "inscription devices." One can also argue against this impression with empirical a graphical evidence about the writers' sympathies. For one thim and Kafka were socialists; even Proust was a Dreyfusard (althou a snob]; Mayakovsky and the surrealists were communists; 1 Mann was at some points at least a progressive and an antifasci; the Anglo-Americans (along with Yeats) were true reactionarie; blackest stamp. But something more fundamental can be argued from the spiri works themselves, and in particular from a renewed scrutiny of tl high-modernist celebration of the self that the anti-political adduced to support a notion of the modernists' subjectivism ( they joined hands with the Stalinist tradition). I want, how< propose the alternative proposition that modernism's intros probing of the deeper impulses of consciousness, and even of the scious itself, was always accompanied by a Utopian sense of the i: ing transformation or transfiguration of the "self" in questioi have to change your life!" Rilke's archaic Greek torso tells him pa] atically; and D. H. Lawrence is filled with intimations of this r tous new sea change from which new people are sure to emergi we now have to grasp is that those feelings, expressed in con with the self, could only come into being in correlation with a feeling about society and the object world itself. It is because the world, in the throes of industrialization and modernization, si tremble at the brink of an equally momentous and even Utopia formation that the "self" can also be felt to be on the point of For this is not merely the moment of Taylorization and the nei ries; it also marks the emergence of most of Europe into a parliai system in which new and vast working-class parties play their the first time, and feel themselves, particularly in Germany, on the point of achieving hegemony. Perry Anderson has argued persuasively that modernism in the arts (although he rejects the category of modernism as such for other reasons) is intimately related to the winds of change blowing from the great new radical social movements.8 High modernism does not express those values as such; rather it emerges in a space opened by them, and its formal values of the New and of innovation, along with its Utopian sense of the transfiguration of the self and the Conclusion 313 j are, in ways that remain to be explored, very much to be seen as es and resonances of the hopes and optimism of that great period inated by the Second International. As for the works themselves, gerger's exemplary essays on cubism9 offer a more detailed analy-,. of the way in which this seemingly very formalist new painting is nfused by a Utopian spirit that will be crushed by the grisly uses of dustrialization Qn t^e battlefields of World War I. This new Utopian-sm is 0I1^y m Part a glorification of new machinery, as in futurism; it 'Xpresses itself across a gamut of impulses and excitement that ultimately touch on the impending transformation of society itself. III. Cultural Reification and the "Belief* o# the Postmodern Vll of this looks very different examined synchronically: in other words, he feeling that postmodern people have about the modern will now jegin to tell us more about postmodernism itself than about the system t supplanted and overthrew. If modernism thought of itself as a prodi-[ious revolution in cultural production, however, postmodernism thinks . í itself as a renewal of production as such after a long period of ossi-ication and dwelling among dead monuments. The very word produc-ion itself—a much-buffeted straw in the wind during the 1960s, but vhich tended then always to signal the most empty and abstract, ascetic-ormalistic endeavors (such as Sollers's early "texts")—turns out now i nt hindsight to have meant something after all and to have signaled a enuine renewal in the thing it was supposed to signify. I think we now have to talk about the relief of the postmodern gener-illy, a thunderous unblocking of logjams and a release of new produc-'.vity that was somehow tensed up and frozen, locked like cramped luscles, at the latter end of the modern period. This release was some-ling a good deal more momentous than a mere generational change my number of generations having succeeded themselves during the gradually canonical reign of the modern proper), although it also did something to the collective sense of what "generations" were in the first place. One cannot too often symbolically underscore the moment {in most U.S. universities, the late 1950s or early 1960s) in which the modern "classics" entered the school system and the college reading lists (before that, we read Pound on our own, English departments only laboriously reaching Tennyson). This was a kind of revolution in its own way, with unexpected consequences, forcing the recognition of the mod- 314 POSTMODERNISM ern texts at the same time that it defused them, like former ■ ■ finally appointed to the cabinet. For the other arts, however, canonization and the "corruptin ence of success will clearly take very different forms. In archil. for instance, it seems clear that the built equivalent of receptů. academy is the appropriation by the state of high modernist fo methods, the readaptation by an expanded state bureaucrac times identified as that of the "welfare state" or social demo Utopian forms now degraded into anonymous forms of large-sc-i1 ing and office construction. The modernist styles then become with just such bureaucratic connotation, so that to break wit] cally produces some feeling of "relief," even though what repl i. neither Utopia nor democracy, but simply the private-corpo: ■ structions of the post-welfare state postmodern. Overdetermi ,i ■ present here to the degree that the literary canonization of the ■ •■> also expressed a prodigious bureaucratic expansion of the u i system in the 1960s. Nor should one in either case underesti ■ i -1 active pressures in such developments of popular demands (am ■ i raphy] of a more truly democratic or "plebeian" kind. What wi n>-i invent is a notion of "overdetermination in ambivalence" in whi become endowed with associations at one and the same timi i ■: ian" and "bureaucratic," with the not unexpected political c i i inherent in such ambivalence. This is only a figure, however, for what needs to be talked a ■. more general way and on a more abstract level—namely, reificať n ■ ■ The word probably directs attention in the wrong direction for ■. ■ ľ since "the transformation of social relations into things" that most insistently to designate has become a second nature. Me ,; the "things" in question have themselves changed beyond reo nil to the point where one might well find people arguing for the i ity of the thinglike in our amorphous day and age.10 Postmodern are in any case not the kind Marx had in mind, even the "casi i i in current banking practices is a good deal more glamorous t thing Carlyle can have "libidinally cathected." The other definition of reification that has been important ■ i i' years is the "effacement of the traces of production" from tl ■ ■ ■ ■' itself, from the commodity thereby produced. This sees the ma ■ ■■■■ the standpoint of the consumer: it suggests the kind of guilt people uie freed from if they are able not to remember the work that went into their toys and furnishings. Indeed, the point of having your own object world. Conclusion 315 rtraUs and muffled distance or. relative silence all around you, is to • apt about all those innumerable others for a while; you don't want to "e to think about Third World women every time you pull yourself up your word processor, or all the other lower-class people with their WPr-class lives when you decide to use or consume your other luxury rod nets: it would be like having voices inside your head; indeed, it 'violates" the intimate space of your privacy and your extended body. -, r a society that wants to forget about class, therefore, reification in his consumer-packaging sense is very functional indeed; consumerism s a culture involves much more than this, but this kind of "efface-nfi]it" is surely the indispensable precondition on which all the rest ■an lie constructed. The reification of culture itself is evidently a somewhat different mater, since those products are "signed"; nor, in consuming culture, do ve particularly want, let alone need, to forget the human producer T. S. lYioi: or Margaret Mitchell or Toscanini or Jack Benny, or even Sam ioltlwyn or Cecil B. deMille. The feature of reification I want to insist m in this realm of cultural products is what generates a radical separa-ion between consumers and producers. Specialization is too weak and i i and clearly potentially organizable when they are not in fact ahi organized in good postmodern fashion. This is the sense in which . if Big Brother is not everywhere watching you, Language is; medi ■ specialized or expert language that seeks tirelessly to classify anc' ■ gorize, to transform the individual into the labeled group, and t< ■ strict and expel the last spaces for what was in Wittgenstein or H • ger, in existentialism or in traditional individualism, the uniqu the unnameable, the mystical private property of the ineffable ai ■. unspeakable horror of the incomparable. Everyone today is, if not i. ized, then at least organizable: and the ideological category that £'■ moves into place to cover the results of such organization is the cc ■■ ■ of the "group" (this last is sharply differentiated, in the political u scious, from the concept of class on the one hand, but also from thai ■ status on the other). What someone once said about Washington, 1). that you only apparently met individuals there, who all eventually tu n ■■ ■ out to be lobbies in the end, is now true of the social life of advam ■ , capitalism generally, except that everyone "represents" several groi ■ all at once. This is the social reality that psychoanalytic currents on ■! ■ left have analyzed in terms of "subject-positions," but in reality the "(■ ter can be grasped only as the forms of identity afforded by group adb ■ ence. Meanwhile, Marx's other insight, that the emergence of collective (universal or abstract) forms encourages the development of concrete historical and social thinking more vigorously than individual or individualistic forms did (which function to conceal the social), is also corroborated: thus we know at once, and reckon into our definition of the "bag people," that they are the consequence of the historical process of land speculation and gentrification at a very precise moment el" the history of the postcontemporary city, while the "new social movements" themselves are immediately enabled by the expansion ol the state sector in the 1960s and bear this causal origin within their consciousness as a badge of identity and a map of political strategy and struggle. (It should be stressed, however, that something fundamental has been achieved by the now more widely shared awareness of the correlation between consciousness and group adherence: this is, indeed, something Conclusion 323 ., fjje postmodern's version of that theory of ideology invented or ľcrovered by Marx himself, which posited a formational relationship nveen consciousness and class adherence. The new or postmodern ipvelopnient, indeed, remains progressive to the degree to which it [■«pels any last illusions as to the autonomy of thought, even though he dissipation of those illusions may reveal a wholly positivist land-ripe from which the negative has evaporated altogether, beneath the teady clarity of what has been identified as "cynical reason." In my .jeiv, the method whereby a healthy sociologization of the cultural nd conceptual can be prevented from disintegrating into the more ibscene consumerist pluralisms of late capitalism as such is by way ,f (he same philosophical strategy adopted by Lukács for the devel-ipment of class-ideological analysis—namely, to generalize its analy-is t if the constructive links between thought and a class or group stand-joint, respectively, and to project a full-blown philosophical theory ,[ the standpoint in which the generative production or transfer point letween conceptuality and collective experience is brought to the foreground.) What is sometimes now called "professionalism" is evidently a further intensification of this "new historical" sense of the relationship between group identity and history, which is also in some peculiar sense self-fulfilling. A historical examination of the disciplines, for example, undermines their claims to correspond to truth or to the structure of reality, by betraying the opportunistic way in which they swiftly rcadapt to this or that current hot topic, for them perceived as an immediate problem or crisis (the topic of postmodernism is just such a crisis). Thus Lester Thurow's Dangerous Currents ends up portraying I lie economists as professionals who have had to scramble from one topical problem area to another in such a way that the field itself, as such, has seemed in the process to dissolve; meanwhile Stanley Aronowitz and his colleagues have discovered that (despite the lag in academic institutional arrangements and the persistence of the onto-lu^ical illusion that the science departments, taken together, some-huvv model the physical world) virtually all research in the hard sciences today involves this or that form of physics, life sciences outside nt molecular biology, for example, having thereby become as archaic as alchemy.14 II does no good, of course, to distinguish origins from validity and to insist patiently that the fact that something can be seen to have emerged historically is not an argument against its truth content (any more than 322 POSTMODERNISM iments have become the "leaders" of various groupuscuJes. Nc media topic illustrates this better than the "bag people" (also ki media euphemism, as the "homeless"). No longer solitary fre eccentrics, they are a henceforth recognized and accredited soc category, the object of the scrutiny and concern of the appropriate and clearly potentially organizable when they are not in fact organized in good postmodern fashion. This is the sense in whi if Big Brother is not everywhere watching you, Language is; m specialized or expert language that seeks tirelessly to classify ŕ gorize, to transform the individual into the labeled group, and to con strict and expel the last spaces for what was in Wittgenstein or Heide». ger, in existentialism or in traditional individualism, the unique and the unnameable, the mystical private property of the ineffable and the unspeakable horror of the incomparable. Everyone today is, if not organized, then at least organizable: and the ideological category that slowly moves into place to cover the results of such organization is the concept of the" group" (this last is sharply differentiated, in the political unconscious, from the concept of class on the one hand, but also from that of status on the other). What someone once said about Washington, D.C., that you only apparently met individuals there, who all eventually turned out to be lobbies in the end, is now true of the social life of advanced capitalism generally, except that everyone "represents" several groups all at once. This is the social reality that psychoanalytic currents on the left have analyzed in terms of "subject-positions." but in reality the latter can be grasped only as the forms of identity afforded by group adherence. Meanwhile, Marx's other insight, that the emergence of collective (universal or abstract] forms encourages the development of concrete historical and social thinking more vigorously than individual or individualistic forms did (which function to conceal the social), is also corroborated: thus we know at once, and reckon into our definition of the "bag people" that they are the consequence of the historical process of land speculation and gentrification at a very precise moment of the history of the postcontemporary city, while the "new social movements" themselves are immediately enabled by the expansion oi I he state sector in the 1960s and bear this causal origin within their consciousness as a badge of identity and a map of political strategy and struggle. (It should be stressed, however, that something fundamental has been achieved by the now more widely shared awareness of the correlation between consciousness and group adherence: this is, indeed, something Conclusion 323 mm ke postmodern's version of that theory of ideology invented or vered by Marx himself, which posited a formational relationship >en consciousness and class adherence. The new or postmodern opment, indeed, remains progressive to the degree to which it Is any last illusions as to the autonomy of thought, even though , issipation of those illusions may reveal a wholly positivist land-. from which the negative has evaporated altogether, beneath the y clarity of what has been identified as "cynical reason." In my the method whereby a healthy sociologization of the cultural Lnd conceptual can be prevented from disintegrating into the more tbscene consumerist pluralisms of late capitalism as such is by way ,f the same philosophical strategy adopted by Lukács for the devel-ipment of class-ideological analysis—namely, to generalize its analy-is of the constructive links between thought and a class or group stand-loint, respectively, and to project a full-blown philosophical theory if the standpoint in which the generative production or transfer point letween conceptuality and collective experience is brought to the ■ oreground.) What is sometimes now called "professionalism" is evidently a fur-tier intensification of this "new historical" sense of the relationship ■etween group identity and history, which is also in some peculiar ense self-fulfilling. A historical examination of the disciplines, for example, undermines their claims to correspond to truth or to the structure of reality, by betraying the opportunistic way in which they swiftly readapt to this or that current hot topic, for them perceived as an immediate problem or crisis (the topic of postmodernism is just such a crisis). Thus Lester Thurow's Dangerous Currents ends up portraying the economists as professionals who have had to scramble from one topical problem area to another in such a way that the field itself, as such, has seemed in the process to dissolve; meanwhile Stanley Aronowitz and his colleagues have discovered that (despite the lag in academic institutional arrangements and the persistence of the onto-logical illusion that the science departments, taken together, somehow model the physical world) virtually all research in the hard sciences today involves this or that form of physics, life sciences outside of molecular biology, for example, having thereby become as archaic as alchemy.14 It does no good, of course, to distinguish origins from validity and to insist patiently that the fact that something can be seen to have emerged historically is not an argument against its truth content (any more than 324 POSTMODERNISM the fall in its scholarly stock-exchange rating testifies to its esseuUa-falsity). Not only is history (and change] still strongly felt 1o be th-opposite of nature and being, what seems to have human and sociü-causes (very often economic ones) is felt to be the contrary of the strut ture of reality or the world. As a consequence, a kind of hisloriea1 thinking develops that reads all that as a kind of self-reinforcing paln(. and it suffices to mention the unmentionable—that all these science-are in historical evolution—for the very rate of that historical modification to be intensified, as though to point out the absence ol an onto logical ground or foundation was suddenly to loose all the mooring that had traditionally held the disciplines in place. Now suddenb. in English departments, the canon, in the very middle of the debat ■ on its existence, begins furiously to melt away, leaving a great rubbl» pile of mass culture and all kinds of other noncanonical and commei cial literature behind it—a kind of "quiet revolution" even more alarming than those in Quebec and Spain where semifascist and cleric;-regimes, under the warming impact of consumer society, turned mt-< swinging sixties-like social spaces overnight (something that now seerr. imminent in the Soviet Union as well and suddenly calls into que: tion all our notions about the traditional, about social inertia, an ■ about Edmund Burke's slow growth of social institutions). Above all we begin to question the temporal dynamics of all that, which ha\ either accelerated, or were always more rapid than we registered in a1 older mind's eye. This is very precisely what has happened in the art world also, and ' vindicates Bonito-Oliva's diagnosis15 of the end of modernism as Ü end of the modernist developmental or historical paradigm, where eac! formal position built dialectically on the previous one and created a whole new kind of production in the empty spaces, or out of the contradictions. But this could be registered from the modernist perspective with a certain pathos: everything has been done; no more formal or stylistic invention is possible, art itself is over and to be replaced by criticism. From the postmodern side of the divide, it does not look like that, and the "end of history" here simply means that anything goes. There remain then the groups themselves and the identities that had seemed to correspond to them. Just because economics, poverty, art, and scientific research have become "historical" in some new sense (which one had better call neohistorical), bag people, economists, art- Conclusion 325 ists, and scientists have not disappeared; rather, the nature of their group identity has been modified and become seemingly more questionable, like a choice of fashion. And indeed neohistory, having nowhere else to channel the increasingly swift currents of its Heracleitean stream, seems almost certain to turn to fashion and the market, that now being understood as a deeper ontological economic reality that is as mysterious and final as nature once was. Neohistorical explanation thus leaves the new croups in place, does away with ontological forms of truth, and pays lip service to some more secular, ultimately determining, instance by anchoring its findings in the market rather than in the modifications of capitalism. The return to history everywhere remarked today demands closer scrutiny in the light of this "historical" perspective—only it is not a return exactly, seeming rather to mean incorporating the "raw material" of history and leaving its function out, a kind of flattening and appropri-aiion (in the sense in which it has lately been said that neo-expressionist German artists today are lucky to have had Hitler). Yet the most systemic and abstract analysis of this tendency—towards a collective organization that envelops business and its underclasses alike—assigns the ultimate systemic condition of possibility for all such group emergence (what used to be called its causalities) to the dynamics of late capitalism itself. This is an objective dialectic that populists have often found repellent and which has often been more narrowly rehearsed in the form of the paradox or the paralogism: the emergent groups as so many new markets for new products, so many new interpellations for the advertising image itself. Is not the fast-food industry the unexpected solution—as with philosophy, its fulfillment and abolition all at once—to the debate on pay for housework? Are minority quotas not to be understood first and foremost as the allocation of segments of television time, and is not the production of the appropriate new group-specific products the truest recognition a business society can bring to its others? Finally, then, is not the very logic of capitalism itself ultimately as dependent on the tif jual right to consumption as it once was to the wage system or a uniform set of juridical categories applicable to everyone? Or, on the other hand, if individualism is really dead after all, is not late capitalism so hungry and thirsty for Luhmannian differentiation and the endless production and proliferation of new groups and neoethnicities of all kinds as to qualify it as the only truly "democratic" and certainly the only "pluralistic" mode of production? 326 POSTMODERNISM Two positions must be distinguished here, which are both wi the one hand, for a properly postmodern "cynical reason," ani r ,■'" spirit of the preceding rhetorical questions, the new social mo ......" are simply the result—the concomitants and the products__of ■ .■ ism itself in its final and most unfettered stage. On the other han I i, radical-liberal populism such movements are always to be seen i ■,' local victories and the painful achievements and conquests ■ ■ n groups of people in struggle (who are themselves figures for cla i gle in general, as that has determined all the institutions of histi ■ ■, much including capitalism itself). In short, and no longer to put so tin* a point on it, are the "new social movements" consequences and aftercf fects of late capitalism? Are they new units generated by the system itself in its interminable inner self-differentiation and self-reproduction? Or are they very precisely new "agents of history" who spring into beino in resistance to the system as forms of opposition to it, forcing it against the direction of its own internal logic into new reforms and internal modifications? But this is precisely a false opposition, about which it would be just as satisfactory to say that both positions are right: tho crucial issue is the theoretical dilemma, replicated in both, of some seeming explanatory choice between the alternatives of agency and system. In reality, however, there is no such choice, and both explanations or models—absolutely inconsistent with each other—are also incommensurable with each other and must be rigorously separated at tho same time that they are deployed simultaneously. But perhaps the alternative of agency or system is just that old dilemma of Marxism—voluntarism versus determinism—wrapped up in new theoretical material. I think this is so, but the dilemma is not limited to Marxists; nor is its fatal reappearance particularly humiliating or shameful for the Marxian tradition, since the conceptual limits it betrays soem to be closer to Kantian limits on the human mind itself. But just as the identification of the base-superstructure dilemma with the old mind-body problem does not necessarily debunk or reduce the former, but rather restages the latter as a distorted and individualistic anticipation of what finally turns out to be a social and historical antinomy, so hero also the identification of earlier precursive philosophical forms of Ihr antinomy between voluntarism and determinism rewrites those genealogically as earlier versions of this. In Kant himself, clearly, such on "earlier version" is offered by the superposition and coexistence ol the two parallel worlds of the noumenon and the phenomenon, which seem rigorously to occupy the same space, but of which (like vravat Conclusion 327 articlesj only one can be "intended" by the mind's eye at any point. ■ .idotn and causality then in Kant rehearse a dialectic altogether com- iblť to this one of agency and system, or—in its practical poli- I or ideological form—voluntarism versus determinism. For the ',. nomenal world in Kant is "determined" at least to the degree that it the laws of causality reign supreme and tolerate no exception. \, would "freedom" be such an exception, exactly, since it evokes n, iher intelligibility altogether and simply does not compute within j, causal system, even as some inversion or negation of this last. Freedom, which equally characterizes the human and social world when its individuals are grasped as things in themselves (they cannot really be so grasped conceptually, but the Kantian resonances of Sartre's existential period give something of a feeling of what that would look like, even though the whole point of the noumenon is that it precisely cannot "look like" anything), in that sense can only be understood as an alternative code for the same realities that are also causal (in another world). Kant showed that we cannot hope to use these codes together or coordinate them in any meaningful way, and above all, that it would be vain (and metaphysical) to hammer them together into a "synthesis." He did not exactly suggest, I think, that we were thereby condemned to an alternation between them; but that would seem to be the only conclusion to draw. An even earlier precursor of this Kantian version of what would seem to be the antinomy of historical change and collective praxis redirects our attention to a rather different feature of the dilemma, since this version—more actively ethical than Kant's {who simply presupposes the existence and possibility of a proper conduct)—seeks in some distress to reconcile "causality," or "determinism," with the very possibility of action itself. The predestination debate16 is, of course, more dramatically contradictory than the later and more secular bourgeois and proletarian forms we have been considering in Kant and Marx; the awkwardness of its "solutions" are more embarrassing for the modern mind. Nonetheless, some conception of divine pansynchronism, of the providential anticipation or the thoroughgoing predestination of all the acts of history, is surely the first mystified form whereby people (in the "West") attempted to conceptualize the logic of history as a whole, and to formulate its dialectical interrelationship and its telos. To wonder, then, how the necessity of my future acts is to be squared with any active obligation on my part to struggle to make them come out right is to tap the same anxiety that will confront political activ- 328 POSTMODERNISM ists later on when a doctrine of historical necessity and inevi' seems on the point of sapping their militant resolve. The equiv il James Hogg's well-known reductio ad absurdum (in which om elect concludes that he is then free to commit any crime or ei •■ that passes through his head)17 would then turn out to be__.■ ■, mutandis—the seemingly more respectable figure of the Kai- Sozialist, or perhaps the "renegades" and revisionists of the ......i International. Yet it seems possible that the ideologues of the predestination , | found a "solution" which on a little reflection is nowhere near , crous as one might first presume, and furthermore proves to b ■ .. , inely dialectical or, at the very least, an admirably creative leaj . i ,,. philosophical imagination. "The outward and visible signs of ■ , | election": the formula has the merit of including and acknowle I ■ , freedom that it outsmarts and outflanks at the same time. Its é ...... conceptual rigor solves its problems by disqualifying it at the sar i ■ i -.. that it raises it to a higher level: your free choice of right action dons not then qualify you for election or earn your right to salvation, but il is the latter's sign and external mark. Your freedom and praxis is thereby ilsdi' enveloped within the larger "deterministic" scheme, which foresees your capacity for just this agonizing encounter with free choice in the first place. The later distinction between individual and collective can tlmn clarify this antiquated machinery of clarification, since it makes a little clearer how the very condition of possibility of individual commitment and action is given within the development of the collective itself, in that sense, there never is an alternative between voluntarism and determinism (which is exactly what the theologians sought to argue): your commitment to praxis is then not a disproof of the doctrine of objectiv a circumstances (the situation being or not being "ripe") but, on the contrary, testifies to this last from the inside and confirms it, just as "infantile" or suicidal voluntarism confirms it the other way round, being its«] í fully as much a product of social circumstances as collective praxis. The distinction clearly solves nothing from the individual or existent ial point of view, for, like Hegel's "ruse of reason" or Adam Smith's "invisible hand" (not to speak of Mandeville's Fable of the Bees), the whole point is to follow one's nature and one's passion in the first place. The point where "determinism" or a collective logic of history spirals around those choices and passions and reincludes them at a higher level can he glimpsed when we reflect not merely that such passions and values are Conclusion 329 ujselves social but that the very proclivity to be demoralized and . r0Uraged by a logic of circumstances, the appropriation of that as an ruse and an alibi for passivity and for temporizing withdrawal, is i n social and is thus factored into the larger perspective while still maining a free choice in the individual sense. One's reaction to neces-"tv in other words, is itself an expression of freedom. Meanwhile, the two versions we have examined, the theological and he dialectical, both seem to cheat on the present and its agonizing hoices by shifting the perspective to the very ends of time: theology -nreading everything forward from a beginning in which it is all fore-,jd in the first place; the dialectic "winging its flight at dusk" and ,ronouncing on the historic necessity of what has already taken place ■f it happened that way, it is because it had to happen that way). But /hat had to happen included all the forms of individual agency, very auch including their convictions as to their own freedom and their wn efficacity. It is a fable one can tell, the other way round, perhaps, about the Cuban Revolution, in which, notoriously, the old Cuban Communist party failed to participate until very late in the day, owing to its assessment of "objective historical possibility." One can then deduce a facile lesson about the debilitating effect of a belief in historical inevitability and the energizing capacities of certain voluntarisms. On a larger \ iew, however, it has been argued that18 whatever the immediate assessment and practical decision of the party in the fire of the event, its own work among Cuban workers in the previous decades played an incalculable part in an ultimate revolutionary victory for which it was not itself immediately responsible. The creation of a revolutionary culture and consciousness—along the lines of Marx's image of the "mole of history" -is no less a form of agency than the final struggle: but it is also itself part of the objective circumstances and the historical necessities that trom a more immediate angle of praxis seem incompatible with action and agency in the first place. Such "philosophical solutions," which proceed, as we have said, by a differentiation of incompatible codes and models (and which I have tried to reformulate in the doctrine of levels in The Political Unconscious), of course, themselves still lie in the phenomenal world and are thus susceptible to transformation into ideological alibis: all science is also necessarily ideology at one and the same time, insofar as we cannot but take the position of the individual subject on what vainly attempted to stand beyond the perspectives of individual subjectivity. 330 POSTMODERNISM Nonetheless, the proposal is clearly immediately relevant toi i . " the "new social movements" and their relationship to capitíil '• " yt!l far as it provides the simultaneous possibility of active polu . ' "!)~ mitment along with disabused systemic realism and contemn I i, . "'" not some sterile choice between those two things. " UI Meanwhile, if we object that the philosophical dilemma oj