Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Archive

Postmodernism

First published Fri Sep 30, 2005; substantive revision Thu Feb 5, 2015

That postmodernism is indefinable is a truism. However, it can bedescribed as a set of critical, strategic and rhetorical practicesemploying concepts such as difference, repetition, the trace, thesimulacrum, and hyperreality to destabilize other concepts such aspresence, identity, historical progress, epistemic certainty, and theunivocity of meaning.

The term “postmodernism” first entered the philosophicallexicon in 1979, with the publication ofThe PostmodernCondition by Jean-François Lyotard. I therefore giveLyotard pride of place in the sections that follow. An economy ofselection dictated the choice of other figures for this entry. I haveselected only those most commonly cited in discussions ofphilosophical postmodernism, five French and two Italian, althoughindividually they may resist common affiliation. Ordering them bynationality might duplicate a modernist schema they would question,but there are strong differences among them, and these tend to dividealong linguistic and cultural lines. The French, for example, workwith concepts developed during the structuralist revolution in Parisin the 1950s and early 1960s, including structuralist readings of Marxand Freud. For this reason they are often called“poststructuralists.” They also cite the events of May1968 as a watershed moment for modern thought and its institutions,especially the universities. The Italians, by contrast, draw upon atradition of aesthetics and rhetoric including figures such asGiambattista Vico and Benedetto Croce. Their emphasis is stronglyhistorical, and they exhibit no fascination with a revolutionarymoment. Instead, they emphasize continuity, narrative, and differencewithin continuity, rather than counter-strategies and discursivegaps. Neither side, however, suggests that postmodernism is an attackupon modernity or a complete departure from it. Rather, itsdifferences lie within modernity itself, and postmodernism is acontinuation of modern thinking in another mode.

Finally, I have included a summary of Habermas's critique ofpostmodernism, representing the main lines of discussion on both sidesof the Atlantic. Habermas argues that postmodernism contradicts itselfthrough self-reference, and notes that postmodernists presupposeconcepts they otherwise seek to undermine, e.g., freedom,subjectivity, or creativity. He sees in this a rhetorical applicationof strategies employed by the artistic avant-garde of the nineteenthand twentieth centuries, an avant-garde that is possible only becausemodernity separates artistic values from science and politics in thefirst place. On his view, postmodernism is an illicitaestheticization of knowledge and public discourse. Against this,Habermas seeks to rehabilitate modern reason as a system of proceduralrules for achieving consensus and agreement among communicatingsubjects. Insofar as postmodernism introduces aesthetic playfulnessand subversion into science and politics, he resists it in the name ofa modernity moving toward completion rather thanself-transformation.

1. Precursors

The philosophical modernism at issue in postmodernism begins withKant's “Copernican revolution,” that is, his assumptionthat we cannot know things in themselves and that objects of knowledgemust conform to our faculties of representation (Kant 1787). Ideassuch as God, freedom, immortality, the world, first beginning, andfinal end have only a regulative function for knowledge, since theycannot find fulfilling instances among objects of experience. WithHegel, the immediacy of the subject-object relation itself is shown tobe illusory. As he states inThe Phenomenology of Spirit,“we find that neither the one nor the other isonlyimmediately present in sense-certainty, but each is atthe same timemediated” (Hegel 1807, 59), becausesubject and object are both instances of a “this” and a“now,” neither of which are immediately sensed. So-calledimmediate perception therefore lacks the certainty of immediacyitself, a certainty that must be deferred to the working out of acomplete system of experience. However, later thinkers point out thatHegel's logic pre-supposes concepts, such as identity and negation(see Hegel 1812), which cannot themselves be accepted as immediatelygiven, and which therefore must be accounted for in some other,non-dialectical way.

The later nineteenth century is the age of modernity as an achievedreality, where science and technology, including networks of masscommunication and transportation, reshape human perceptions. There isno clear distinction, then, between the natural and the artificial inexperience. Indeed, many proponents of postmodernism challenge theviability of such a distinctiontout court, seeing inachieved modernism the emergence of a problem the philosophicaltradition has repressed. A consequence of achieved modernism is whatpostmodernists might refer to as de-realization. De-realizationaffects both the subject and the objects of experience, such thattheir sense of identity, constancy, and substance is upset ordissolved. Important precursors to this notion are found inKierkegaard, Marx and Nietzsche. Kierkegaard, for example, describesmodern society as a network of relations in which individuals areleveled into an abstract phantom known as “the public”(Kierkegaard 1846, 59). The modern public, in contrast to ancient andmedieval communities, is a creation of the press, which is the onlyinstrument capable of holding together the mass of unreal individuals“who never are and never can be united in an actual situation ororganization” (Kierkegaard 1846, 60). In this sense, society hasbecome a realization of abstract thought, held together by anartificial and all-pervasive medium speaking for everyone and for noone. In Marx, on the other hand, we have an analysis of the fetishismof commodities (Marx 1867, 444–461) where objects lose thesolidity of their use value and become spectral figures under theaspect of exchange value. Their ghostly nature results from theirabsorption into a network of social relations, where their valuesfluctuate independently of their corporeal being. Human subjectsthemselves experience this de-realization because commodities areproducts of their labor. Workers paradoxically lose their being inrealizing themselves, and this becomes emblematic for those professinga postmodern sensibility.

We also find suggestions of de-realization in Nietzsche, who speaks ofbeing as “the last breath of a vaporizing reality” andremarks upon the dissolution of the distinction between the“real” and the “apparent”world. InTwilight of the Idols, he traces the history ofthis distinction from Plato to his own time, where the “trueworld” becomes a useless and superfluous idea (1889,485–86). However, with the notion of the true world, he says, wehave also done away with the apparent one. What is left is neitherreal nor apparent, but something in between, and therefore somethingakin to the virtual reality of more recent vintage.

The notion of a collapse between the real and the apparent issuggested in Nietzsche's first book,The Birth of Tragedy(Nietzsche 1872), where he presents Greek tragedy as a synthesis ofnatural art impulses represented by the gods Apollo andDionysus. Where Apollo is the god of beautiful forms and images,Dionysus is the god of frenzy and intoxication, under whose sway thespell of individuated existence is broken in a moment ofundifferentiated oneness with nature. While tragic art islife-affirming in joining these two impulses, logic and science arebuilt upon Apollonian representations that have become frozen andlifeless. Hence, Nietzsche believes only a return of the Dionysian artimpulse can save modern society from sterility and nihilism. Thisinterpretation presages postmodern concepts of art and representation,and also anticipates postmodernists' fascination with the prospect ofa revolutionary moment auguring a new, anarchic sense ofcommunity.

Nietzsche is also a precursor for postmodernism in his genealogicalanalyses of fundamental concepts, especially what he takes to be thecore concept of Western metaphysics, the “I”. OnNietzsche's account, the concept of the “I” arises out ofa moral imperative to be responsible for our actions. In order to beresponsible we must assume that we are the cause of our actions, andthis cause must hold over time, retaining its identity, so thatrewards and punishments are accepted as consequences for actionsdeemed beneficial or detrimental to others (Nietzsche 1889, 482-83;1887, 24-26, 58-60). In this way, the concept of the “I”comes about as a social construction and moral illusion. According toNietzsche, the moral sense of the “I” as an identicalcause is projected onto events in the world, where the identity ofthings, causes, effects, etc., takes shape in easily communicablerepresentations. Thus logic is born from the demand to adhere tocommon social norms which shape the human herd into a society ofknowing and acting subjects.

For postmodernists, Nietzsche's genealogy of concepts in “OnTruth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense” (Nietzsche 1873,77–97) is also an important reference. In this text, Nietzscheputs forward the hypothesis that scientific concepts are chains ofmetaphors hardened into accepted truths. On this account, metaphorbegins when a nerve stimulus is copied as an image, which is thenimitated in sound, giving rise, when repeated, to the word, whichbecomes a concept when the word is used to designate multipleinstances of singular events. Conceptual metaphors are thus liesbecause they equate unequal things, just as the chain of metaphorsmoves from one level to another. Hegel's problem with the repetitionof the “this” and the “now” is thus expandedto include the repetition of instances across discontinuous gapsbetween kinds and levels of things.

In close connection with this genealogy, Nietzsche criticizes thehistoricism of the nineteenth century in the 1874 essay, “Onthe Uses and Disadvantage of History for Life” (Nietzsche 1874,57–123). On Nietzsche's view, the life of an individual and aculture depend upon their ability to repeat an unhistorical moment, akind of forgetfulness, along with their continuous developmentthrough time, and the study of history ought therefore to emphasizehow each person or culture attains and repeats this moment. There isno question, then, of reaching a standpoint outside of history or ofconceiving past times as stages on the way to the present. Historicalrepetition is not linear, but each age worthy of its designationrepeats the unhistorical moment that is its own present as“new.” In this respect, Nietzsche would agree withCharles Baudelaire, who describes modernity as “the transient,the fleeting, the contingent” that is repeated in all ages(Cahoone 2003, 100), and postmodernists read Nietzsche's remarks onthe eternal return accordingly.

Nietzsche presents this concept inThe Gay Science(Nietzsche 1974 [1882], 273), and in a more developed forminThus Spoke Zarathustra (Nietzsche 1883–1891,269–272). Many have taken the concept to imply an endless,identical repetition of everything in the universe, such that nothingoccurs that has not already occurred an infinite number of timesbefore. However, others, including postmodernists, read thesepassages in conjunction with the notion that history is therepetition of an unhistorical moment, a moment that is always new ineach case. In their view, Nietzsche can only mean that the neweternally repeats as new, and therefore recurrence is a matter ofdifference rather than identity. Furthermore, postmodernists join theconcept of eternal return with the loss of the distinction betweenthe real and the apparent world. The distinction itself does notreappear, and what repeats is neither real nor apparent in thetraditional sense, but is a phantasm or simulacrum.

Nietzsche is a common interest between postmodern philosophers andMartin Heidegger, whose meditations on art, technology, and thewithdrawal of being they regularly cite and comment upon. Heidegger'scontribution to the sense of de-realization of the world stems fromoft repeated remarks such as: “Everywhere we are underway amidbeings, and yet we no longer know how it stands with being”(Heidegger 2000 [1953], 217), and “precisely nowhere doesman today any longer encounter himself, i.e., his essence”(Heidegger 1993, 332). Heidegger sees modern technology as thefulfillment of Western metaphysics, which he characterizes as themetaphysics of presence. From the time of the earliest philosophers,but definitively with Plato, says Heidegger, Western thought hasconceived of being as the presence of beings, which in the modernworld has come to mean the availability of beings for use. In fact,as he writes inBeing and Time, the presence of beings tendsto disappear into the transparency of their usefulness as thingsready-to-hand (Heidegger 1962 [1927], 95-107). The essence oftechnology, which he names “the enframing,” reduces thebeing of entities to a calculative order (Heidegger 1993,311-341). Hence, the mountain is not a mountain but a standing supplyof coal, the Rhine is not the Rhine but an engine for hydro-electricenergy, and humans are not humans but reserves of manpower. Theexperience of the modern world, then, is the experience of being'swithdrawal in face of the enframing and its sway overbeings. However, humans are affected by this withdrawal in moments ofanxiety or boredom, and therein lies the way to a possible return ofbeing, which would be tantamount to a repetition of the experience ofbeing opened up by Parmenides and Heraclitus.

Heidegger sees this as the realization of the will to power, anotherNietzschean conception, which, conjoined with the eternal return,represents the exhaustion of the metaphysical tradition (Heidegger1991a, 199-203). For Heidegger, the will to power is the eternalrecurrence as becoming, and the permanence of becoming is theterminal moment of the metaphysics of presence. On this reading,becoming is the emerging and passing away of beings within and amongother beings instead of an emergence from being. Thus, for Heidegger,Nietzsche marks the end of metaphysical thinking but not a passagebeyond it, and therefore Heidegger sees him as the last metaphysicianin whom the oblivion of being is complete (Heidegger 1991a, 204-206;1991b, 199-203). Hope for a passage into non-metaphysical thinkinglies rather with Hölderlin, whose verses give voice to signsgranted by being in its withdrawal (Heidegger 1994 [1937–1938],115-118). While postmodernists owe much to Heidegger's reflections onthe non-presence of being and the de-realization of beings throughthe technological enframing, they sharply diverge from his reading ofNietzsche.

Many postmodern philosophers find in Heidegger a nostalgia for beingthey do not share. They prefer, instead, the sense of cheerfulforgetting and playful creativity in Nietzsche's eternal return as arepetition of the different and the new. Some have gone so far as toturn the tables on Heidegger, and to read his ruminations onmetaphysics as the repetition of an original metaphysical gesture,the gathering of thought to its “proper” essence andvocation (see Derrida 1989 [1987]). In this gathering, which followsthe lineaments of an exclusively Greco-Christian-German tradition,something more original than being is forgotten, and that is thedifference and alterity against which, and with which, the traditioncomposes itself. Prominent authors associated with postmodernismhave noted that the forgotten and excluded “other” of theWest, including Heidegger, is figured by the Jew (see Lyotard 1990[1988], and Lacoue-Labarthe 1990 [1988]). In this way, they are ableto distinguish their projects from Heidegger's thinking and tocritically account for his involvement with National Socialism andhis silence about the Holocaust, albeit in terms that do not addressthese as personal failings. Those looking for personal condemnationsof Heidegger for his actions and his “refusal to acceptresponsibility” will not find them in postmodernistcommentaries. They will, however, find many departures from Heideggeron Nietzsche's philosophical significance (see Derrida 1979 [1978]),and many instances where Nietzsche's ideas are critically activatedagainst Heidegger and his self-presentation.

Nevertheless, Heidegger and Nietzsche are both important sourcesfor postmodernism's critical de-structuring or displacement of thesignature concept of modern philosophy, the “subject,”which is generally understood as consciousness, or its identity,ground, or unity, and designated as the “I.” WhereNietzsche finds in this concept the original metaphysical errorproduced by morality and the communicative needs of the herd,Heidegger sees in it the end and exhaustion of the metaphysicaltradition, inaugurated by the Greeks, in which being is interpreted aspresence. Here, being is the underlying ground of the being ofbeings, thesubiectum that is enacted in modern philosophy asthe subject of consciousness. But inBeing and Time Heideggerconceives the human being asDasein, which is not simply apresent consciousness, but an event of ecstatic temporality that isopen to a past (Gewesensein) that was never present(itsalready being-there) and a future (Zu-kunft) thatis always yet to come (the possibility of death). The finitudeofDasein therefore cannot be contained within the limits ofconsciousness, nor within the limits of the subject, whether it isconceived substantively or formally.

In addition to the critiques of the subject offered by Nietzscheand Heidegger, many postmodernists also borrow heavily from thepsycho-analytic theories of Jacques Lacan. Lacan's distinctivegesture is his insistence that the Freudian unconscious is a function,or set of functions, belonging to language and particularly to theverbal exchanges between the analyst and analysand during the analyticsession (see Lacan 1953–55). For Lacan, the subject is always thesubject of speech, and that means speech directed towardanother in relation to whom the subject differentiates andidentifies itself. On this view, language is a feature of the“symbolic order” of society, which is constituted as aneconomy of signifiers, through which animal need becomes human desire,whose first object is to be recognized by the other. However, desireultimately aims for something impossible: to possess, to“be,” or to occupy the place of the signifier ofsignifiers, i.e. the phallus. Insofar as the phallus is nothing butthe signifying functionas such, it does not exist. It is notan object to be possessed, but is that through which the subject andthe other are brought into relation to begin with, and it thus imposesitself upon the subject as a fundamental absence or lack that is atonce necessary and irremediable (Lacan 1977, 289). Hence the subjectis forever divided from itself and unable to achieve final unity oridentity. As the subject of desire, it remains perpetuallyincomplete, just asDasein in Heidegger exists “beyonditself” in temporal ecstasis.

2. The Postmodern Condition

The term “postmodern” came into the philosophical lexiconwith the publication of Jean-François Lyotard'sLaCondition Postmoderne in 1979 (in English:The PostmodernCondition: A Report on Knowledge, 1984), where he employsWittgenstein's model of language games (see Wittgenstein 1953) andconcepts taken from speech act theory to account for what he calls atransformation of the game rules for science, art, and literaturesince the end of the nineteenth century. He describes his text as acombination of two very different language games, that of thephilosopher and that of the expert. Where the expert knows what heknows and what he doesn't know, the philosopher knows neither, butposes questions. In light of this ambiguity, Lyotard states that hisportrayal of the state of knowledge “makes no claims to beingoriginal or even true,” and that his hypotheses “shouldnot be accorded predictive value in relation to reality, butstrategic value in relation to the questions raised” (Lyotard1984 [1979], 7). The book, then, is as much an experiment in thecombination of language games as it is an objective“report.”

On Lyotard's account, the computer age has transformed knowledge intoinformation, that is, coded messages within a system of transmissionand communication. Analysis of this knowledge calls for a pragmaticsof communication insofar as the phrasing of messages, theirtransmission and reception, must follow rules in order to be acceptedby those who judge them. However, as Lyotard points out, the positionof judge or legislator is also a position within a language game, andthis raises the question of legitimation. As he insists, “thereis a strict interlinkage between the kind of language called scienceand the kind called ethics and politics” (Lyotard 1984 [1979],8), and this interlinkage constitutes the cultural perspective of theWest. Science is therefore tightly interwoven with government andadministration, especially in the information age, where enormousamounts of capital and large installations are needed forresearch.

Lyotard points out that while science has sought to distinguishitself from narrative knowledge in the form of tribal wisdomcommunicated through myths and legends, modern philosophy has soughtto provide legitimating narratives for science in the form of“the dialectics of Spirit, the hermeneutics of meaning, theemancipation of the rational or working subject, or the creation ofwealth,” (Lyotard 1984 [1979], xxiii). Science, however, playsthe language game of denotation to the exclusion of all others, andin this respect it displaces narrative knowledge, including themeta-narratives of philosophy. This is due, in part, to what Lyotardcharacterizes as the rapid growth of technologies and techniques inthe second half of the twentieth century, where the emphasis ofknowledge has shifted from the ends of human action to its means(Lyotard 1984 [1979], 37). This has eroded the speculative game ofphilosophy and set each science free to develop independently ofphilosophical grounding or systematic organization. “Idefinepostmodern as incredulity towardmeta-narratives,” says Lyotard (Lyotard 1984 [1979], xxiv). Asa result, new, hybrid disciplines develop without connection to oldepistemic traditions, especially philosophy, and this means scienceonly plays its own game and cannot legitimate others, such as moralprescription.

The compartmentalization of knowledge and the dissolution ofepistemic coherence is a concern for researchers and philosophersalike. As Lyotard notes, “Lamenting the ‘loss ofmeaning’ in postmodernity boils down to mourning the fact thatknowledge is no longer principally narrative” (Lyotard 1984[1979], 26). Indeed, for Lyotard, the de-realization of the worldmeans the disintegration of narrative elements into“clouds” of linguistic combinations and collisions amonginnumerable, heterogeneous language games. Furthermore, within eachgame the subject moves from position to position, now as sender, nowas addressee, now as referent, and so on. The loss of a continuousmeta-narrative therefore breaks the subject into heterogeneousmoments of subjectivity that do not cohere into an identity. But asLyotard points out, while the combinations we experience are notnecessarily stable or communicable, we learn to move with a certainnimbleness among them.

Postmodern sensibility does not lament the loss of narrativecoherence any more than the loss of being. However, the dissolutionof narrative leaves the field of legitimation to a new unifyingcriterion: the performativity of the knowledge-producing system whoseform of capital is information. Performative legitimation meansmaximizing the flow of information and minimizing static(non-functional moves) in the system, so whatever cannot becommunicated as information must be eliminated. The performativitycriterion threatens anything not meeting its requirements, such asspeculative narratives, with de-legitimation andexclusion. Nevertheless, capital also demands the continualre-invention of the “new” in the form of new languagegames and new denotative statements, and so, paradoxically, acertainparalogy is required by the system itself. In thisregard, the modern paradigm of progress as new moves underestablished rules gives way to the postmodern paradigm of inventingnew rules and changing the game.

Inventing new codes and reshaping information is a large part of theproduction of knowledge, and in its inventive moment science does notadhere to performative efficiency. By the same token, themeta-prescriptives of science, its rules, are themselves objects ofinvention and experimentation for the sake of producing newstatements. In this respect, says Lyotard, the model of knowledge asthe progressive development of consensus is outmoded. In fact,attempts to retrieve the model of consensus can only repeat thestandard of coherence demanded for functional efficiency, and theywill thus lend themselves to the domination of capital. On the otherhand, the paralogical inventiveness of science raises the possibilityof a new sense of justice, as well as knowledge, as we move among thelanguage games now entangling us.

Lyotard takes up the question of justice inJust Gaming (seeLyotard 1985 [1979]) andThe Differend: Phrases inDispute (see Lyotard 1988 [1983]), where he combines the modelof language games with Kant's division of the faculties(understanding, imagination, reason) and types of judgment(theoretical, practical, aesthetic) in order to explore the problemof justice set out inThe Postmodern Condition. Without theformal unity of the subject, the faculties are set free to operate ontheir own. Where Kant insists that reason must assign domains andlimits to the other faculties, its dependence upon the unity of thesubject for the identity of concepts as laws or rules de-legitimizesits juridical authority in the postmodern age. Instead, because weare faced with an irreducible plurality of judgments and“phrase regimes,” the faculty of judgment itself isbrought to the fore. Kant's thirdCritique thereforeprovides the conceptual materials for Lyotard's analysis, especiallythe analytic of aesthetic judgment (see Kant 1790).

As Lyotard argues, aesthetic judgment is the appropriate model forthe problem of justice in postmodern experience because we areconfronted with a plurality of games and rules without a conceptunder which to unify them. Judgment must therefore be reflectiverather than determining. Furthermore, judgment must be aestheticinsofar as it does not produce denotative knowledge about adeterminable state of affairs, but refers to the way our facultiesinteract with each other as we move from one mode of phrasing toanother, i.e. the denotative, the prescriptive, the performative, thepolitical, the cognitive, the artistic, etc. In Kantian terms, thisinteraction registers as an aesthetic feeling. Where Kant emphasizesthe feeling of the beautiful as a harmonious interaction betweenimagination and understanding, Lyotard stresses the mode in whichfaculties (imagination and reason,) are in disharmony, i.e. thefeeling of the sublime. For Kant, the sublime occurs when ourfaculties of sensible presentation are overwhelmed by impressions ofabsolute power and magnitude, and reason is thrown back upon its ownpower to conceive Ideas (such as the moral law) which surpass thesensible world. For Lyotard, however, the postmodern sublime occurswhen we are affected by a multitude of unpresentables withoutreference to reason as their unifying origin. Justice, then, wouldnot be a definable rule, but an ability to move and judge among rulesin their heterogeneity and multiplicity. In this respect, it would bemore akin to the production of art than a moral judgment in Kant'ssense.

In “What is Postmodernism?,” which appears as an appendixto the English edition ofThe Postmodern Condition, Lyotardaddresses the importance of avant-garde art in terms of the aestheticof the sublime. Modern art, he says, is emblematic of a sublimesensibility, that is, a sensibility thatthere is somethingnon-presentable demanding to be put into sensible form and yetoverwhelms all attempts to do so. But where modern art presents theunpresentable as a missing content within a beautiful form, as inMarcel Proust, postmodern art, exemplified by James Joyce, putsforward the unpresentable by forgoing beautiful form itself, thusdenying what Kant would call the consensus of taste. Furthermore,says Lyotard, a work can become modern only if it is firstpostmodern, for postmodernism is not modernism at its end but in itsnascent state, that is, at the moment it attempts to present theunpresentable, “and this state is constant” (Lyotard 1984[1979], 79). The postmodern, then, is a repetition of the modern asthe “new,” and this means the ever-new demand for anotherrepetition.

3. Genealogy and Subjectivity

The Nietzschean method of genealogy, in its application to modernsubjectivity, is another facet of philosophical postmodernism. MichelFoucault's application of genealogy to formative moments inmodernity's history and his exhortations to experiment withsubjectivity place him within the scope of postmodern discourse. Inthe 1971 essay “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” Foucaultspells out his adaptation of the genealogical method in hishistorical studies. First and foremost, he says, genealogy“opposes itself to the search for ‘origins’”(Foucault 1977, 141). That is, genealogy studies the accidents andcontingencies that converge at crucial moments, giving rise to newepochs, concepts, and institutions. As Foucault remarks: “Whatis found at the historical beginning of things is not the inviolableidentity of their origin; it is the dissension of other things. It isdisparity” (Foucault 1977, 142). In Nietzschean fashion,Foucault exposes history conceived as the origin and development ofan identical subject, e.g., “modernity,” as a fictionmodern discourses invent after the fact. Underlying the fiction ofmodernity is a sense of temporality that excludes the elements ofchance and contingency in play at every moment. In short, linear,progressive history covers up the discontinuities and interruptionsthat mark points of succession in historical time.

Foucault deploys genealogy to create what he calls a“counter-memory” or “a transformation of historyinto a totally different form of time” (Foucault 1977,160). This entails dissolving identity for the subject in history byusing the materials and techniques of modern historicalresearch. Just as Nietzsche postulates that the religious will totruth in Christianity results in the destruction of Christianity byscience (see Nietzsche 1974 [1882], 280–83), Foucaultpostulates that genealogical research will result in thedisintegration of the epistemic subject, as the continuity of thesubject is broken up by the gaps and accidents that historicalresearch uncovers. The first example of this research isHistoirede la folie à l'age classique, published in 1961, thefull version of which was published in English asHistory ofMadness in 2006. Here, Foucault gives an account of thehistorical beginnings of modern reason as it comes to define itselfagainst madness in the seventeenth century. His thesis is that thepractice of confining the mad is a transformation of the medievalpractice of confining lepers in lazar houses. These institutionsmanaged to survive long after the lepers disappeared, and thus aninstitutional structure of confinement was already in place when themodern concept of madness as a disease took shape. However, whileinstitutions of confinement are held over from a previous time, thepractice of confining the mad constitutes a break with the past.

Foucault focuses upon the moment of transition, as modern reasonbegins to take shape in a confluence of concepts, institutions, andpractices, or, as he would say, of knowledge and power. In itsnascency, reason is a power that defines itself against an other, another whose truth and identity is also assigned by reason, thusgiving reason the sense of originating from itself. For Foucault, theissue is that madness is not allowed to speak for itself and is atthe disposal of a power that dictates the terms of theirrelationship. As he remarks: “What is originative is thecaesura that establishes the distance between reason and non-reason;reason's subjugation of non-reason, wresting from it its truth asmadness, crime, or disease, derives explicitly from thispoint” (Foucault 1965, x). The truth of reason is foundwhen madness comes to stand in the place of non-reason, when thedifference between them is inscribed in their opposition, but is notidentical to its dominant side. In other words, the reason thatstands in opposition to madness is not identical to the reason thatinscribes their difference. The latter would be reason without anopposite, a free-floating power without definite shape. As Foucaultsuggests, this free-floating mystery might be represented in the shipof fools motif, which, in medieval times, represented madness. Suchis the paradoxical structure of historical transformation.

In his later writings, most notably inThe Use of Pleasure(Foucault 1985 [1984]), Foucault employs historical research to openpossibilities for experimenting with subjectivity, by showing thatsubjectivation is a formative power of the self, surpassing thestructures of knowledge and power from out of which it emerges. Thisis a power of thought, which Foucault says is the ability of humanbeings to problematize the conditions under which they live. Forphilosophy, this means “the endeavor to know how and to whatextent it might be possible to think differently, instead oflegitimating what is already known” (Foucault 1985 [1984],9). He thus joins Lyotard in promoting creative experimentation as aleading power of thought, a power that surpasses reason, narrowlydefined, and without which thought would be inert. In this regard,Foucault stands in league with others who profess a postmodernsensibility in regard to contemporary science, art, and society. Weshould note, as well, that Foucault's writings are a hybrid ofphilosophy and historical research, just as Lyotard combines thelanguage games of the expert and the philosopher inThePostmodern Condition. This mixing of philosophy with conceptsand methods from other disciplines is characteristic of postmodernismin its broadest sense.

4. Productive Difference

The concept of difference as a productive mechanism, rather than anegation of identity, is also a hallmark of postmodernism inphilosophy. Gilles Deleuze deploys this concept throughout his work,beginning withNietzsche and Philosophy (1962, in English1983), where he sets Nietzsche against the models of thinking at workin Kant and Hegel. Here, he proposes to thinkagainst reasonin resistance to Kant's assertion of the self-justifying authority ofreason alone (Deleuze 1983 [1962], 93). In a phrase echoed byFoucault, he states that the purpose of his critique of reason“is not justification but a different way of feeling: anothersensibility” (Deleuze 1983 [1962], 94). Philosophical critique,he declares, is an encounter between thought and what forces it intoaction: it is a matter of sensibility rather than a tribunal wherereason judges itself by its own laws (see Kant 1787, 9). Furthermore,the critique of reason is not a method, but is achieved by“culture” in the Nietzschean sense: training, discipline,inventiveness, and a certain cruelty (see Nietzsche 1887). Sincethought cannot activate itself asthinking, Deleuze says itmust suffer violence if it is to awaken and move. Art, science, andphilosophy deploy such violence insofar as they are transformativeand experimental.

Against Hegel, Deleuze asserts that while dialectic is structured bynegation and opposition within a posited identity, “differenceis the only principle of genesis or production” (Deleuze 1983[1962], 157). Opposition occurs on the same logical plane, butdifference moves across planes and levels, and not only in onedirection. Furthermore, where Hegel takes the work of the negative tobe dialectic's driving power, Deleuze declares that difference isthinkable only as repetition repeating itself (as in Nietzsche'seternal return), where difference affirms itself in eternallydiffering from itself. Its movement is productive, butwithout logical opposition, negation, or necessity. Instead, chanceand multiplicity are repeated, just as a dice-throw repeats therandomness of the throw along with every number. On the other hand,dialectic cancels out chance and affirms the movement of the negativeas a working out of identity, as in the Science of Logicwhere being in its immediacy is posited as equal only to itself(Hegel 1812, 82). For Deleuze, however, sensibility introduces analeatory moment into thought's development, making accidentality andcontingency conditions for thinking. These conditions upset logicalidentity and opposition, and place the limit of thinking beyond anydialectical system.

InDifference and Repetition (1968, in English 1994),Deleuze develops his project in multiple directions. His work, hesays, stems from the convergence of two lines of research: theconcept of difference without negation, and the concept ofrepetition, in which physical and mechanical repetitions are masksfor a hidden differential that is disguised and displaced. His majorfocus is a thoroughgoing critique of representational thinking,including identity, opposition, analogy, and resemblance (Deleuze1994 [1968], 132). For Deleuze, “appearances of” are notrepresentations, but sensory intensities free of subjective orobjective identities (Deleuze 1994 [1968], 144). Without theseidentities, appearances are simulacra of an non-apparent differentialhe calls the “dark precursor” or “the in-itself ofdifference” (Deleuze 1994 [1968], 119). This differential isthe non-sensiblebeing of the sensible, a being notidentical to the sensible, or to itself, but irreducibly problematicinsofar as it forces us to encounter the sensible as“given.”

Furthermore, any move against representational thinking impinges uponthe identity of the subject. Where Kant founds the representationalunity of space and time upon the formal unity of consciousness (Kant1787, 135-137), difference re-distributes intuitions of past,present, and future, fracturing consciousness into multiple statesnot predicable of a single subject. Intensive qualities areindividuating by themselves, says Deleuze, and individuality is notcharacteristic of a self or an ego, but of a differential foreverdividing itself and changing its configuration (Deleuze 1994 [1968],246, 254, 257). In Nietzschean fashion, the “I” refersnot to the unity of consciousness, but to a multitude of simulacrawithout an identical subjectfor whom this multitudeappears. Instead, subjects arise and multiply as“effects” of the intensive qualities saturating space andtime. This leads Deleuze to postulate multiple faculties forsubjectivity, which are correlates of the sensible insofar as itgives rise to feeling, thought, and action. “Each faculty,including thought, has only involuntary adventures,” he says,and “involuntary operation remains embedded in theempirical” (Deleuze 1994 [1968], 145). Subjectively, theparadox of the differential breaks up the faculties' common functionand places them before their own limits: thought before theunthinkable, memory before the immemorial, sensibility before theimperceptible, etc. (Deleuze 1994, 227). This fracturing andmultiplying of the subject, he notes, leads to the realization that“schizophrenia is not only a human fact but also a possibilityfor thought” (Deleuze 1994 [1968], 148), thus expanding theterm into a philosophical concept, beyond its clinicalapplication.

The dissolution of the subject and its implications for society isthe theme ofAnti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia,which Deleuze published with Félix Guattari in 1972 (inEnglish 1983). The book, in large part, is written against anestablished intellectual orthodoxy of the political Left in Franceduring the 1950s and 1960s, an orthodoxy consisting of Marx, Freud,and structuralist concepts applied to them by Louis Althusser andJacques Lacan. Deleuze and Guattari argue that this mixture is stilllimited by representational thinking, including concepts ofproduction based upon lack, and concepts of alienation based uponidentity and negation. Furthermore, the Oedipus concept inpsychoanalysis, they say, institutes a theater of desire in which thepsyche is embedded in a family drama closed off from theextra-familial and extra-psychic forces at work in society. Theycharacterize these forces as “desiring machines” whosefunction is to connect, disconnect, and reconnect with one anotherwithout meaning or intention.

The authors portray society as a series of“territorializations” or inscriptions upon the“body without organs,”or the free-flowing matter ofintensive qualities filling space in their varying degrees. The firstinscriptions are relations of kinship and filiation structuringprimitive societies, often involving the marking and scarring ofhuman bodies. As an interruption and encoding of “flows,”the primitive inscriptions constitute a nexus of desiring machines,both technical and social, whose elements are humans and theirorgans. The full body of society is the sacred earth, whichappropriates to itself all social products as their natural or divineprecondition, and to whom all members of society are bound by directfiliation (Deleuze 1983 [1962], 141-42). These first inscriptions arethen de-territorialized and re-coded by the “despoticmachine,” establishing new relations of alliance and filiationthrough the body of the ruler or emperor, who alone stands in directfiliation to the deity (Deleuze 1983 [1962], 192) and who institutesthe mechanism of the state upon pre-existing social arrangements.Finally, capitalism de-territorializes the inscriptions of thedespotic machine and re-codes all relations of alliance and filiationinto flows of money (Deleuze 1983 [1962], 224-27). The organs ofsociety and the state are appropriated into the functioning ofcapital, and humans become secondary to the filiation of money withitself.

Deleuze and Guattari see in the capitalist money system “anaxiomatic of abstract quantities that keeps moving further andfurther in the direction of the deterritorialization of thesocius” (Deleuze and Guattari 1983 [1972], 33), which is to saythat capital is inherently schizophrenic. However, because capitalalso re-territorializes all flows into money, schizophrenia remainscapitalism's external limit. Nevertheless, it is precisely that limitagainst which thinking can subject capitalism to philosophicalcritique. Psychoanalysis, they say, is part of the reign of capitalbecause it re-territorializes the subject as “private”and “individual,” instituting psychic identity throughimages of the Oedipal family. However, the Oedipal triangle is merelya representational simulacrum of kinship and filiation, re-codedwithin a system of debt and payment. In this system, they insist,flows of desire have become mere representations of desire, cut offfrom the body without organs and the extra-familial mechanisms ofsociety. A radical critique of capital cannot therefore beaccomplished by psychoanalysis, but requiresaschizoanalysis “to overturn the theater ofrepresentation into the order of desiring-production” (Deleuze1983 [1962], 271). Here, the authors see a revolutionary potential inmodern art and science, where, in bringing about the“new,” they circulate de-coded and de-territorializedflows within society without automatically re-coding them into money(Deleuze and Guattari 1983 [1972], 379). In this revolutionaryaspect,Anti-Oedipus reads as a statement of the desire thattook to the streets of Paris in May of 1968, and which continues,even now, to make itself felt in intellectual life.

5. Deconstruction

The term “deconstruction,” like“postmodernism,” has taken on many meanings in thepopular imagination. However, in philosophy, it signifies certainstrategies for reading and writing texts. The term was introducedinto philosophical literature in 1967, with the publication of threetexts by Jacques Derrida:Of Grammatology (in English1974),Writing and Difference (in English 1978),andSpeech and Phenomena (in English 1973). This so-called“publication blitz” immediately established Derrida as amajor figure in the new movement in philosophy and the human sciencescentered in Paris, and brought the idiom “deconstruction”into its vocabulary. Derrida and deconstruction are routinelyassociated with postmodernism, although like Deleuze and Foucault, hedoes not use the term and would resist affiliation with“-isms” of any sort. Of the three books from 1967,OfGrammatology is the more comprehensive in laying out thebackground for deconstruction as a way of reading modern theories oflanguage, especially structuralism, and Heidegger's meditations onthe non-presence of being. It also sets out Derrida's difference withHeidegger over Nietzsche. Where Heidegger places Nietzsche within themetaphysics of presence, Derrida insists that “reading, andtherefore writing, the text were for Nietzsche‘originary’ operations,” (Derrida 1974 [1967], 19),and this puts him at the closure of metaphysics (not the end), aclosure that liberates writing from the traditional logos, whichtakes writing to be a sign (a visible mark) for another sign(speech), whose “signified” is a fully presentmeaning.

This closure has emerged, says Derrida, with the latest developmentsin linguistics, the human sciences, mathematics, and cybernetics,where the written mark or signifier is purely technical, that is, amatter of function rather than meaning. Precisely the liberation offunction over meaning indicates that the epoch of what Heideggercalls the metaphysics of presence has come to closure, although thisclosure does not mean its termination. Just as in the essay“On the Question of Being” (Heidegger 1998, 291-322)Heidegger sees fit to cross out the word “being,” leavingit visible, nevertheless, under the mark, Derrida takes the closureof metaphysics to be its “erasure,” where it does notentirely disappear, but remains inscribed as one side of adifference, and where the mark of deletion is itself a trace of thedifference that joins and separates this mark and what it crossesout. Derrida calls this joining and separating ofsignsdifférance (Derrida 1974 [1967], 23), a devicethat can only be read and not heard whendifféranceanddifférence are pronounced in French. The“a” is a written mark that differentiates independentlyof the voice, the privileged medium of metaphysics. In thissense,différance as the spacing of difference, asarchi-writing, would be thegram of grammatology. However,as Derrida remarks: “There cannot be a science of differenceitself in its operation, as it is impossible to have a science of theorigin of presence itself, that is to say of a certainnon-origin” (Derrida 1974 [1967], 63). Instead, there is onlythe marking of the trace of difference, that is, deconstruction.

Because at its functional level all language is a system ofdifferences, says Derrida, all language, even when spoken, is writing,and this truth is suppressed when meaning is taken as an origin,present and complete unto itself. Texts that take meaning or being astheir theme are therefore particularly susceptible to deconstruction,as are all other texts insofar as they are conjoined with these. ForDerrida, written marks or signifiers do not arrange themselves withinnatural limits, but form chains of signification that radiate in alldirections. As Derrida famously remarks, “there is nooutside-text” (Derrida 1974 [1967], 158), that is, the textincludes the difference between any “inside” or“outside.” As he explains in a letter to Gerald Graff,attached as an appendix toLimited Inc (see Derrida 1988, 148),this means that “every referent, all reality has the structureof a differential trace.” A text, then, is not a book, and doesnot, strictly speaking, have an author. On the contrary, the name ofthe author is a signifier linked with others, and there is no mastersignifier (such as the phallus in Lacan) present or even absent in atext. This goes for the term“différance”as well, which can only serve as a supplement for the productivespacing between signs. Therefore, Derrida insists that“différance is literally neither a word nor aconcept” (Derrida 1982 [1972], 3). Instead, it can only bemarked as a wandering play of differences that is both a spacing ofsignifiers in relation to one another and a deferral of meaning orpresence when they are read.

How, then, candifférance be characterized? Derridarefuses to answer questions as to “who” or“what” differs, because to do so would suggest there is aproper name for difference instead of endless supplements, of which“différance” is but one. Structurally,this supplemental displacement functions just as, for Heidegger, allnames for being reduce being to the presence of beings, thus ignoringthe “ontological difference” between them. However,Derrida takes the ontological difference as one difference amongothers, as a product of what the idiom“différance” supplements. As he remarks:“différance, in a certain and very strange way,(is) ‘older’ than the ontological difference or than thetruth of Being” (Derrida 1982 [1972], 22). Deconstruction,then, traces the repetitions of the supplement. It is not so much atheory about texts as a practice of reading and transforming texts,where tracing the movements ofdifférance producesother texts interwoven with the first. While there is a certainarbitrariness in the play of differences that result, it is not thearbitrariness of a reader getting the text to mean whatever he or shewants. It is a question of function rather than meaning, if meaningis understood as a terminal presence, and the signifying connectionstraced in deconstruction are first offered by the text itself. Adeconstructive reading, then, does not assert or impose meaning, butmarks out places where the function of the text works against itsapparent meaning, or against the history of its interpretation.

6. Hyperreality

Hyperreality is closely related to the concept of the simulacrum:a copy or image without reference to an original. In postmodernism,hyperreality is the result of the technological mediation ofexperience, where what passes for reality is a network of images andsigns without an external referent, such that what is represented isrepresentation itself. InSymbolic Exchange and Death (1976),Jean Baudrillard uses Lacan's concepts of the symbolic, the imaginary,and the real to develop this concept while attacking orthodoxies ofthe political Left, beginning with the assumed reality of power,production, desire, society, and political legitimacy. Baudrillardargues that all of these realities have become simulations, thatis,signs without any referent, because the real and theimaginary have been absorbed into the symbolic.

Baudrillard presents hyperreality as the terminal stage ofsimulation, where a sign or image has no relation to any realitywhatsoever, but is “its own pure simulacrum” (Baudrillard1981, 6). The real, he says, has become an operational effect ofsymbolic processes, just as images are technologically generated andcoded before we actually perceive them. This means technologicalmediation has usurped the productive role of the Kantian subject, thelocus of an original synthesis of concepts and intuitions, as well asthe Marxian worker, the producer of capital though labor, and theFreudian unconscious, the mechanism of repression anddesire. “From now on,” says Baudrillard, “signs areexchanged against each other rather than against the real”(Baudrillard 1976, 7), so production now means signs producing othersigns. The system of symbolic exchange is therefore no longer realbut “hyperreal.” Where the real is “that ofwhich it is possible to provide an equivalentreproduction,” the hyperreal, says Baudrillard, is“that which is always already reproduced”(Baudrillard 1976, 73). The hyperreal is a system of simulationsimulating itself.

The lesson Baudrillard draws from the events of May 1968 is that thestudent movement was provoked by the realization that “wewere no longer productive” (Baudrillard 1976, 29), andthat direct opposition within the system of communication andexchange only reproduces the mechanisms of the systemitself. Strategically, he says, capital can only be defeated byintroducing something inexchangeable into the symbolic order, thatis, something having the irreversible function of natural death,which the symbolic order excludes and renders invisible. The system,he points out, simulates natural death with fascinating images ofviolent death and catastrophe, where death is the result ofartificial processes and “accidents.” But, as Baudrillardremarks: “Only the death-function cannot be programmed andlocalized” (Baudrillard 1976, 126), and by this he means deathas the simple and irreversible finality of life. Therefore he callsfor the development of “fatal strategies” to make thesystem suffer reversal and collapse.

Because these strategies must be carried out within the symbolicorder, they are matters of rhetoric and art, or a hybrid ofboth. They also function as gifts or sacrifices, for which the systemhas no counter-move or equivalence. Baudrillard finds a prime exampleof this strategy with graffiti artists who experiment with symbolicmarkings and codes in order to suggest communication while blockingit, and who sign their inscriptions with pseudonyms instead ofrecognizable names. “They are seeking not to escape thecombinatory in order to regain an identity,” says Baudrillard,“but to turn indeterminacy against the system, toturnindeterminacy intoextermination”(Baudrillard 1976, 78). Some of his own remarks, such as “Ihave nothing to do with postmodernism,” have, no doubt, thesame strategic intent. To the extent that“postmodernism” has become a sign exchangeable for othersigns, he would indeed want nothing to do with it. Nevertheless, hisconcepts of simulation and hyperreality, and his call for strategicexperimentation with signs and codes, bring him into close proximitywith figures such as Lyotard, Foucault, and Derrida.

7. Postmodern Hermeneutics

Hermeneutics, the science of textual interpretation, also plays arole in postmodern philosophy. Unlike deconstruction, which focusesupon the functional structures of a text, hermeneutics seeks to arriveat an agreement or consensus as to what the text means, or is about.Gianni Vattimo formulates a postmodern hermeneutics inThe End ofModernity (1985, in English 1988 [1985]), where he distinguisheshimself from his Parisian counterparts by posing the question ofpost-modernity as a matter for ontological hermeneutics. Instead ofcalling for experimentation with counter-strategies and functionalstructures, he sees the heterogeneity and diversity in our experienceof the world as a hermeneutical problem to be solved by developing asense continuity between the present and the past. This continuity isto be a unity of meaning rather than the repetition of a functionalstructure, and the meaning is ontological. In this respect, Vattimo'sproject is an extension of Heidegger's inquiries into the meaning ofbeing. However, where Heidegger situates Nietzsche within the limitsof metaphysics, Vattimo joins Heidegger's ontological hermeneuticswith Nietzsche's attempt to think beyond nihilism and historicism withhis concept of eternal return. The result, says Vattimo, is a certaindistortion of Heidegger's reading of Nietzsche, allowing Heidegger andNietzsche to be interpreted through one another (Vattimo 1988 [1985],176). This is a significant point of difference between Vattimo andthe French postmodernists, who read Nietzsche against Heidegger, andprefer Nietzsche's textual strategies over Heidegger's pursuit of themeaning of being.

On Vattimo's account, Nietzsche and Heidegger can be brought togetherunder the common theme of overcoming. Where Nietzsche announces theovercoming of nihilism through the active nihilism of the eternalreturn, Heidegger proposes to overcome metaphysics through anon-metaphysical experience of being. In both cases, he argues, whatis to be overcome is modernity, characterized by the image thatphilosophy and science are progressive developments in which thoughtand knowledge increasingly appropriate their own origins andfoundations. Overcoming modernity, however, cannot mean progressinginto a new historical phase. As Vattimo observes: “Bothphilosophers find themselves obliged, on the one hand, to take up acritical distance from Western thought insofar as it is foundational;on the other hand, however, they find themselves unable to criticizeWestern thought in the name of another, and truer, foundation”(Vattimo 1988 [1985], 2). Overcoming modernity must therefore meanaVerwindung, in the sense of twisting or distortingmodernity itself, rather than anÜberwindung orprogression beyond it.

While Vattimo takes post-modernity as a new turn in modernity, itentails the dissolution of the category of the new in the historicalsense, which means the end of universal history. “While thenotion of historicity has become ever more problematic fortheory,” he says, “at the same time for historiographyand its own methodological self-awareness the idea of history as aunitary process is rapidly dissolving” (Vattimo 1988 [1985],6). This does not mean historical change ceases to occur, but thatits unitary development is no longer conceivable, so only localhistories are possible. The de-historicization of experience has beenaccelerated by technology, especially television, says Vattimo, sothat “everything tends to flatten out at the level ofcontemporaneity and simultaneity” (Vattimo 1988 [1985], 10). Asa result, we no longer experience a strong sense of teleology inworldly events, but, instead, we are confronted with a manifold ofdifferences and partial teleologies that can only be judgedaesthetically. The truth of postmodern experience is therefore bestrealized in art and rhetoric.

The Nietzschean sense of overcoming modernity is “to dissolvemodernity through a radicalization of its own innatetendencies,” says Vattimo (Vattimo 1988 [1985], 166). Theseinclude the production of “the new” as a value and thedrive for critical overcoming in the sense of appropriatingfoundations and origins. In this respect, however, Nietzsche showsthat modernity results in nihilism: all values, including“truth” and “the new,” collapse undercritical appropriation. The way out of this collapse is the moment ofeternal recurrence, when we affirm the necessity of error in theabsence of foundations. Vattimo also finds this new attitude towardmodernity in Heidegger's sense of overcoming metaphysics, insofar ashe suggests that overcoming the enframing lies with the possibilityof a turn within the enframing itself. Such a turn would meandeepening and distorting the technological essence, not destroying itor leaving it behind. Furthermore, this would be the meaning ofbeing, understood as the history of interpretation (as“weak” being) instead of a grounding truth, and thehermeneutics of being would be a distorted historicism. Unliketraditional hermeneutics, Vattimo argues that reconstructing thecontinuity of contemporary experience cannot be accomplished withoutunifying art and rhetoric with information from the sciences, andthis requires philosophy “to propose a ‘rhetoricallypersuasive’, unified view of the world, which includes initself traces, residues, or isolated elements of scientificknowledge” (Vattimo 1988 [1985], 179). Vattimo's philosophy istherefore the project of a postmodern hermeneutics, in contrast tothe Parisian thinkers who do not concern themselves with meaning orhistory as continuous unities.

8. Postmodern Rhetoric and Aesthetics

Rhetoric and aesthetics pertain to the sharing of experiencethrough activities of participation and imitation. In the postmodernsense, such activities involve sharing or participating in differencesthat have opened between the old and the new, the natural and theartificial, or even between life and death. The leading exponent ofthis line of postmodern thought is Mario Perniola. Like Vattimo,Perniola insists that postmodern philosophy must not break with thelegacies of modernity in science and politics. As he saysinEnigmas, “the relationship between thought andreality that the Enlightenment, idealism, and Marxism have embodiedmust not be broken” (Perniola 1995, 43). However, he does notbase this continuity upon an internal essence, spirit, or meaning, butupon the continuing effects of modernity in the world. One sucheffect, visible in art and in the relation between art and society, isthe collapse of the past and future into the present, which hecharacterizes as “Egyptian” or “baroque” innature. This temporal effect is accomplished through the collapse ofthe difference between humans and things, where “humans arebecoming more similar to things, and equally, the inorganic world,thanks to electronic technology, seems to be taking over the humanrole in the perception of events” (Perniola1995,viii). This amounts to a kind of“Egyptianism,” as described by Hegel inhisAesthetics (see Hegel 1823–9, 347-361), where thespiritual and the natural are mixed to such a degree that they cannotbe separated, as, for example, in the figure of the Sphinx. However,in the postmodern world the inorganic is not natural, but alreadyartificial, insofar as our perceptions are mediated by technologicaloperations.

Likewise, says Perniola, art collections in modern museums produce a“baroque effect,” where “The field that is openedup by a collection is not that of cultivated public opinion, nor ofsocial participation, but a space that attracts precisely because itcannot be controlled or possessed” (Perniola 1995, 87). Thatis, in the collection, art is removed from its natural or historicalcontext and creates a new sense of space and time, not reducible tolinear history or any sense of origin. The collection, then, isemblematic of postmodern society, a moment of its“truth.” Furthermore, Perniola insists that baroquesensibility is characteristic of Italian society and culture ingeneral. “The very idea of truth as something essentiallynaked,” he says, “is at loggerheads with the Baroqueidea, so firmly rooted in Italy, that truth is something essentiallyclothed” (Perniola 1995, 145). This corresponds to asensibility that is intermediate between internal feelings andexternal things. “The Italian enigma,” he says,“lies in the fact that the human component is equipped with anexternal emotionality that does not belong to him or her intimately,but in which they nonetheless participate” (Perniola 1995,145). To account for this enigmatic experience, the philosopher mustbecome “the intermediary, the passage, the transit to somethingdifferent and foreign” (Perniola 1995, 40). Hence,philosophical reading and writing are not activities of an identicalsubject, but processes of mediation and indeterminacy between selfand other, and philosophical narrative is an overcoming of theirdifferences.

These differences cannot be overcome, in Hegelian fashion, bycanceling them under a higher-order synthesis, but must be eroded ordefaced in the course of traversing them. InRitualThinking, Perniola illustrates this process through the conceptsof transit, the simulacrum, and ritual without myth. Transit derivesfrom a sense of the simultaneity of the present, where we aresuspended in a state of temporariness and indeterminacy, and move“from the same to the same”; the simulacrum is the resultof an endless mimesis in which there are only copies of copieswithout reference to an original; and ritual without myth is therepetition of patterns of action having no connection to the innerlife of a subject or of society. Thus Perniola sees social andpolitical interaction as repetitive patterns of action having noinherent meaning but constituting, nonetheless, an intermediary realmwhere oppositions, particularly life and death, are overcome in ato-and-fro movement within their space of difference.

To illustrate these concepts Perniola refers to practices associatedwith Romanism, particularly Roman religion. “Ritual withoutmyth,” he says, “is the very essence of Romanism”(Perniola 2001, 81). It is a passage between life and death via theirmutual simulation, for example, in the labyrinthine movements of theritual known as thetroiae lusus. These movements, he says,mediate between life and death by reversing their pattern of naturalsuccession, and mediate their difference through actions having nointrinsic meaning. Unlike Vattimo's project of constructing meaningto overcome historical differences, Perniola's concept of transitinto the space of difference is one of “art” in the senseof artifice or technique, and is not aimed at a synthesis orunification of opposing elements. In this respect, Perniola has anaffinity with the French postmodernists, who emphasize functionalrepetition over the creation of meaning. However, as Perniola'snotion of ritual without myth illustrates, the functional repetitionsof social interaction and technology do not disseminate differences,but efface them. This is clear in his account of the ritualizedpassage between life and death, as compared with Baudrillard, whocalls for strategies introducing the irreversibility of death intothe system of symbolic exchange. In this respect, Perniola'spostmodernism is strongly aesthetic, and remains, with Vattimo, inthe aesthetic and historical dimensions of experience.

9. Habermas's Critique

The most prominent and comprehensive critic of philosophicalpostmodernism is Jürgen Habermas. InThe PhilosophicalDiscourse of Modernity (Habermas 1987 [1985]), he confrontspostmodernism at the level of society and “communicativeaction.” He does not defend the concept of the subject,conceived as consciousness or an autonomous self, againstpostmodernists' attacks, but defends argumentative reason ininter-subjective communication against their experimental,avant-garde strategies. For example, he claims that Nietzsche,Heidegger, Derrida and Foucault commit a performative contradictionin their critiques of modernism by employing concepts and methodsthat only modern reason can provide. He criticizes Nietzsche'sDionysianism as a compensatory gesture toward the loss of unity inWestern culture that, in pre-modern times, was provided by religion.Nietzsche's sense of a new Dionysus in modern art, moreover, is basedupon an aesthetic modernism in which art acquires its experimentalpower by separating itself from the values of science and morality, aseparation accomplished by the modern Enlightenment, resulting in theloss of organic unity Nietzsche seeks to restore via art itself (seeHabermas 1987 [1985], 81-105). Habermas sees Heidegger and Derrida asheirs to this “Dionysian messianism.” Heidegger, forexample, anticipates a new experience of being, which haswithdrawn. However, says Habermas, the withdrawal of being is theresult of an inverted philosophy of the subject, where Heidegger'sdestruction of the subject leads to hope for a unity to come, a unityof nothing other than the subject that is now missing (Habermas 1987[1985], 160). Derrida, he says, develops the notionofdifférance or “archi-writing” insimilar fashion: here, we see the god Dionysus revealing himself onceagain in his absence, as meaning infinitely deferred (Habermas 1987[1985], 180-81).

Habermas also criticizes Derrida for leveling the distinction betweenphilosophy and literature in a textualism that brings logic andargumentative reason into the domain of rhetoric. In this way, hesays, Derrida hopes to avoid the logical problem of self-reference inhis critique of reason. However, as Habermas remarks: “Whoevertransposes the radical critique of reason into the domain of rhetoricin order to blunt the paradox of self-referentiality, also dulls thesword of the critique of reason itself” (Habermas 1987 [1985],210). In similar fashion, he criticizes Foucault for not subjectinghis own genealogical method to genealogical unmasking, which wouldreveal Foucault's re-installation of a modern subject able tocritically gaze at its own history. Thus, he says, “Foucaultcannot adequately deal with the persistent problems that come up inconnection with an interpretive approach to the object domain, aself-referential denial of universal validity claims, and a normativejustification of critique” (Habermas 1987 [1985], 286).

Habermas's critique of postmodernism on the basis of performativecontradiction and the paradox of self-reference sets the tone and theterms for much of the critical debate now under way. Whilepostmodernists have rejected these criticisms, or responded to themwith rhetorical counter-strategies. Lyotard, for example, rejectsthe notion that intersubjective communication implies a set of rulesalready agreed upon, and that universal consensus is the ultimategoal of discourse (see Lyotard 1984 [1979], 65-66). Thatpostmodernists openly respond to Habermas is due to the fact that hetakes postmodernism seriously and does not, like other critics,reject it as mere nonsense. Indeed, that he is able to readpostmodernist texts closely and discursively testifies to theirintelligibility. He also agrees with the postmodernists that thefocus of debate should be upon modernity as it is realized in socialpractices and institutions, rather than upon theories of cognition orformal linguistics as autonomous domains. In this respect, Habermas'sconcern with inter-subjective communication helps clarify the basisupon which the modernist-postmodernist debates continue to playout.

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