## 1. Precursors



The philosophical modernism at issue in postmodernism begins with
Kant's "Copernican revolution," that is, his assumption
that we cannot know things in themselves and that objects of knowledge
must conform to our faculties of representation (Kant 1787). Ideas
such as God, freedom, immortality, the world, first beginning, and
final end have only a regulative function for knowledge, since they
cannot find fulfilling instances among objects of experience. With
Hegel, the immediacy of the subject-object relation itself is shown to
be illusory. As he states in *The Phenomenology of Spirit*,
"we find that neither the one nor the other is
only *immediately* present in sense-certainty, but each is at
the same time *mediated*" (Hegel 1807, 59), because
subject and object are both instances of a "this" and a
"now," neither of which are immediately sensed. So-called
immediate perception therefore lacks the certainty of immediacy
itself, a certainty that must be deferred to the working out of a
complete system of experience. However, later thinkers point out that
Hegel's logic pre-supposes concepts, such as identity and negation
(see Hegel 1812), which cannot themselves be accepted as immediately
given, and which therefore must be accounted for in some other,
non-dialectical way. 



The later nineteenth century is the age of modernity as an achieved
reality, where science and technology, including networks of mass
communication and transportation, reshape human perceptions. There is
no clear distinction, then, between the natural and the artificial in
experience. Indeed, many proponents of postmodernism challenge the
viability of such a distinction *tout court*, seeing in
achieved modernism the emergence of a problem the philosophical
tradition has repressed. A consequence of achieved modernism is what
postmodernists might refer to as de-realization. De-realization
affects both the subject and the objects of experience, such that
their sense of identity, constancy, and substance is upset or
dissolved. Important precursors to this notion are found in
Kierkegaard, Marx and Nietzsche. Kierkegaard, for example, describes
modern society as a network of relations in which individuals are
leveled into an abstract phantom known as "the public"
(Kierkegaard 1846, 59). The modern public, in contrast to ancient and
medieval communities, is a creation of the press, which is the only
instrument capable of holding together the mass of unreal individuals
"who never are and never can be united in an actual situation or
organization" (Kierkegaard 1846, 60). In this sense, society has
become a realization of abstract thought, held together by an
artificial and all-pervasive medium speaking for everyone and for no
one. In Marx, on the other hand, we have an analysis of the fetishism
of commodities (Marx 1867, 444-461) where objects lose the
solidity of their use value and become spectral figures under the
aspect of exchange value. Their ghostly nature results from their
absorption into a network of social relations, where their values
fluctuate independently of their corporeal being. Human subjects
themselves experience this de-realization because commodities are
products of their labor. Workers paradoxically lose their being in
realizing themselves, and this becomes emblematic for those professing
a postmodern sensibility.



We also find suggestions of de-realization in Nietzsche, who speaks of
being as "the last breath of a vaporizing reality" and
remarks upon the dissolution of the distinction between the
"real" and the "apparent"
world. In *Twilight of the Idols*, he traces the history of
this distinction from Plato to his own time, where the "true
world" becomes a useless and superfluous idea (1889,
485-86). However, with the notion of the true world, he says, we
have also done away with the apparent one. What is left is neither
real nor apparent, but something in between, and therefore something
akin to the virtual reality of more recent vintage.



The notion of a collapse between the real and the apparent is
suggested in Nietzsche's first book, *The Birth of Tragedy*
(Nietzsche 1872), where he presents Greek tragedy as a synthesis of
natural art impulses represented by the gods Apollo and
Dionysus. Where Apollo is the god of beautiful forms and images,
Dionysus is the god of frenzy and intoxication, under whose sway the
spell of individuated existence is broken in a moment of
undifferentiated oneness with nature. While tragic art is
life-affirming in joining these two impulses, logic and science are
built upon Apollonian representations that have become frozen and
lifeless. Hence, Nietzsche believes only a return of the Dionysian art
impulse can save modern society from sterility and nihilism. This
interpretation presages postmodern concepts of art and representation,
and also anticipates postmodernists' fascination with the prospect of
a revolutionary moment auguring a new, anarchic sense of
community.



Nietzsche is also a precursor for postmodernism in his genealogical
analyses of fundamental concepts, especially what he takes to be the
core concept of Western metaphysics, the "I". On
Nietzsche's account, the concept of the "I" arises out of
a moral imperative to be responsible for our actions. In order to be
responsible we must assume that we are the cause of our actions, and
this cause must hold over time, retaining its identity, so that
rewards and punishments are accepted as consequences for actions
deemed 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 to
Nietzsche, the moral sense of the "I" as an identical
cause is projected onto events in the world, where the identity of
things, causes, effects, etc., takes shape in easily communicable
representations. Thus logic is born from the demand to adhere to
common social norms which shape the human herd into a society of
knowing and acting subjects.



For postmodernists, Nietzsche's genealogy of concepts in "On
Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense" (Nietzsche 1873,
77-97) is also an important reference. In this text, Nietzsche
puts forward the hypothesis that scientific concepts are chains of
metaphors hardened into accepted truths. On this account, metaphor
begins when a nerve stimulus is copied as an image, which is then
imitated in sound, giving rise, when repeated, to the word, which
becomes a concept when the word is used to designate multiple
instances of singular events. Conceptual metaphors are thus lies
because they equate unequal things, just as the chain of metaphors
moves from one level to another. Hegel's problem with the repetition
of the "this" and the "now" is thus expanded
to include the repetition of instances across discontinuous gaps
between kinds and levels of things.



In close connection with this genealogy, Nietzsche criticizes the
historicism of the nineteenth century in the 1874 essay, "On
the Uses and Disadvantage of History for Life" (Nietzsche 1874,
57-123). On Nietzsche's view, the life of an individual and a
culture depend upon their ability to repeat an unhistorical moment, a
kind of forgetfulness, along with their continuous development
through time, and the study of history ought therefore to emphasize
how each person or culture attains and repeats this moment. There is
no question, then, of reaching a standpoint outside of history or of
conceiving past times as stages on the way to the present. Historical
repetition is not linear, but each age worthy of its designation
repeats the unhistorical moment that is its own present as
"new." In this respect, Nietzsche would agree with
Charles 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 on
the eternal return accordingly.



Nietzsche presents this concept in *The Gay Science*
(Nietzsche 1974 [1882], 273), and in a more developed form
in *Thus 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 nothing
occurs that has not already occurred an infinite number of times
before. However, others, including postmodernists, read these
passages in conjunction with the notion that history is the
repetition of an unhistorical moment, a moment that is always new in
each case. In their view, Nietzsche can only mean that the new
eternally repeats as new, and therefore recurrence is a matter of
difference rather than identity. Furthermore, postmodernists join the
concept of eternal return with the loss of the distinction between
the real and the apparent world. The distinction itself does not
reappear, and what repeats is neither real nor apparent in the
traditional sense, but is a phantasm or simulacrum. 



Nietzsche is a common interest between postmodern philosophers and
Martin Heidegger, whose meditations on art, technology, and the
withdrawal of being they regularly cite and comment upon. Heidegger's
contribution to the sense of de-realization of the world stems from
oft repeated remarks such as: "Everywhere we are underway amid
beings, and yet we no longer know how it stands with being"
(Heidegger 2000 [1953], 217), and "*precisely nowhere does
man today any longer encounter himself, i.e., his essence*"
(Heidegger 1993, 332). Heidegger sees modern technology as the
fulfillment of Western metaphysics, which he characterizes as the
metaphysics of presence. From the time of the earliest philosophers,
but definitively with Plato, says Heidegger, Western thought has
conceived of being as the presence of beings, which in the modern
world has come to mean the availability of beings for use. In fact,
as he writes in *Being and Time*, the presence of beings tends
to disappear into the transparency of their usefulness as things
ready-to-hand (Heidegger 1962 [1927], 95-107). The essence of
technology, which he names "the enframing," reduces the
being of entities to a calculative order (Heidegger 1993,
311-341). Hence, the mountain is not a mountain but a standing supply
of coal, the Rhine is not the Rhine but an engine for hydro-electric
energy, and humans are not humans but reserves of manpower. The
experience of the modern world, then, is the experience of being's
withdrawal in face of the enframing and its sway over
beings. However, humans are affected by this withdrawal in moments of
anxiety or boredom, and therein lies the way to a possible return of
being, which would be tantamount to a repetition of the experience of
being opened up by Parmenides and Heraclitus.



Heidegger sees this as the realization of the will to power, another
Nietzschean conception, which, conjoined with the eternal return,
represents the exhaustion of the metaphysical tradition (Heidegger
1991a, 199-203). For Heidegger, the will to power is the eternal
recurrence as becoming, and the permanence of becoming is the
terminal moment of the metaphysics of presence. On this reading,
becoming is the emerging and passing away of beings within and among
other beings instead of an emergence from being. Thus, for Heidegger,
Nietzsche marks the end of metaphysical thinking but not a passage
beyond it, and therefore Heidegger sees him as the last metaphysician
in whom the oblivion of being is complete (Heidegger 1991a, 204-206;
1991b, 199-203). Hope for a passage into non-metaphysical thinking
lies rather with Holderlin, whose verses give voice to signs
granted by being in its withdrawal (Heidegger 1994 [1937-1938],
115-118). While postmodernists owe much to Heidegger's reflections on
the non-presence of being and the de-realization of beings through
the technological enframing, they sharply diverge from his reading of
Nietzsche.



Many postmodern philosophers find in Heidegger a nostalgia for being
they do not share. They prefer, instead, the sense of cheerful
forgetting and playful creativity in Nietzsche's eternal return as a
repetition of the different and the new. Some have gone so far as to
turn the tables on Heidegger, and to read his ruminations on
metaphysics as the repetition of an original metaphysical gesture,
the gathering of thought to its "proper" essence and
vocation (see Derrida 1989 [1987]). In this gathering, which follows
the lineaments of an exclusively Greco-Christian-German tradition,
something more original than being is forgotten, and that is the
difference and alterity against which, and with which, the tradition
composes itself. Prominent authors associated with postmodernism
have noted that the forgotten and excluded "other" of the
West, including Heidegger, is figured by the Jew (see Lyotard 1990
[1988], and Lacoue-Labarthe 1990 [1988]). In this way, they are able
to distinguish their projects from Heidegger's thinking and to
critically account for his involvement with National Socialism and
his silence about the Holocaust, albeit in terms that do not address
these as personal failings. Those looking for personal condemnations
of Heidegger for his actions and his "refusal to accept
responsibility" will not find them in postmodernist
commentaries. They will, however, find many departures from Heidegger
on Nietzsche's philosophical significance (see Derrida 1979 [1978]),
and many instances where Nietzsche's ideas are critically activated
against Heidegger and his self-presentation.


 Nevertheless, Heidegger and Nietzsche are both important sources
for postmodernism's critical de-structuring or displacement of the
signature concept of modern philosophy, the "subject,"
which is generally understood as consciousness, or its identity,
ground, or unity, and designated as the "I." Where
Nietzsche finds in this concept the original metaphysical error
produced by morality and the communicative needs of the herd,
Heidegger sees in it the end and exhaustion of the metaphysical
tradition, inaugurated by the Greeks, in which being is interpreted as
presence. Here, being is the underlying ground of the being of
beings, the *subiectum* that is enacted in modern philosophy as
the subject of consciousness. But in *Being and Time* Heidegger
conceives the human being as *Dasein*, which is not simply a
present consciousness, but an event of ecstatic temporality that is
open to a past (*Gewesensein*) that was never present
(its *already* being-there) and a future (*Zu-kunft*) that
is always yet to come (the possibility of death). The finitude
of *Dasein* therefore cannot be contained within the limits of
consciousness, nor within the limits of the subject, whether it is
conceived substantively or formally.


In addition to the critiques of the subject offered by Nietzsche
and Heidegger, many postmodernists also borrow heavily from the
psycho-analytic theories of Jacques Lacan. Lacan's distinctive
gesture is his insistence that the Freudian unconscious is a function,
or set of functions, belonging to language and particularly to the
verbal exchanges between the analyst and analysand during the analytic
session (see Lacan 1953-55). For Lacan, the subject is always the
subject of speech, and that means speech directed toward
an *other* in relation to whom the subject differentiates and
identifies itself. On this view, language is a feature of the
"symbolic order" of society, which is constituted as an
economy of signifiers, through which animal need becomes human desire,
whose first object is to be recognized by the other. However, desire
ultimately aims for something impossible: to possess, to
"be," or to occupy the place of the signifier of
signifiers, i.e. the phallus. Insofar as the phallus is nothing but
the signifying function *as such*, it does not exist. It is not
an object to be possessed, but is that through which the subject and
the other are brought into relation to begin with, and it thus imposes
itself upon the subject as a fundamental absence or lack that is at
once necessary and irremediable (Lacan 1977, 289). Hence the subject
is forever divided from itself and unable to achieve final unity or
identity. As the subject of desire, it remains perpetually
incomplete, just as *Dasein* in Heidegger exists "beyond
itself" in temporal ecstasis.


## 2. The Postmodern Condition



The term "postmodern" came into the philosophical lexicon
with the publication of Jean-Francois Lyotard's *La
Condition Postmoderne* in 1979 (in English: *The Postmodern
Condition: A Report on Knowledge*, 1984), where he employs
Wittgenstein's model of language games (see Wittgenstein 1953) and
concepts taken from speech act theory to account for what he calls a
transformation of the game rules for science, art, and literature
since the end of the nineteenth century. He describes his text as a
combination of two very different language games, that of the
philosopher and that of the expert. Where the expert knows what he
knows and what he doesn't know, the philosopher knows neither, but
poses questions. In light of this ambiguity, Lyotard states that his
portrayal of the state of knowledge "makes no claims to being
original or even true," and that his hypotheses "should
not be accorded predictive value in relation to reality, but
strategic value in relation to the questions raised" (Lyotard
1984 [1979], 7). The book, then, is as much an experiment in the
combination of language games as it is an objective
"report."



On Lyotard's account, the computer age has transformed knowledge into
information, that is, coded messages within a system of transmission
and communication. Analysis of this knowledge calls for a pragmatics
of communication insofar as the phrasing of messages, their
transmission and reception, must follow rules in order to be accepted
by those who judge them. However, as Lyotard points out, the position
of judge or legislator is also a position within a language game, and
this raises the question of legitimation. As he insists, "there
is a strict interlinkage between the kind of language called science
and the kind called ethics and politics" (Lyotard 1984 [1979],
8), and this interlinkage constitutes the cultural perspective of the
West. Science is therefore tightly interwoven with government and
administration, especially in the information age, where enormous
amounts of capital and large installations are needed for
research.



Lyotard points out that while science has sought to distinguish
itself from narrative knowledge in the form of tribal wisdom
communicated through myths and legends, modern philosophy has sought
to provide legitimating narratives for science in the form of
"the dialectics of Spirit, the hermeneutics of meaning, the
emancipation of the rational or working subject, or the creation of
wealth," (Lyotard 1984 [1979], xxiii). Science, however, plays
the language game of denotation to the exclusion of all others, and
in this respect it displaces narrative knowledge, including the
meta-narratives of philosophy. This is due, in part, to what Lyotard
characterizes as the rapid growth of technologies and techniques in
the second half of the twentieth century, where the emphasis of
knowledge has shifted from the ends of human action to its means
(Lyotard 1984 [1979], 37). This has eroded the speculative game of
philosophy and set each science free to develop independently of
philosophical grounding or systematic organization. "I
define *postmodern* as incredulity toward
meta-narratives," says Lyotard (Lyotard 1984 [1979], xxiv). As
a result, new, hybrid disciplines develop without connection to old
epistemic traditions, especially philosophy, and this means science
only plays its own game and cannot legitimate others, such as moral
prescription.



The compartmentalization of knowledge and the dissolution of
epistemic coherence is a concern for researchers and philosophers
alike. As Lyotard notes, "Lamenting the 'loss of
meaning' in postmodernity boils down to mourning the fact that
knowledge is no longer principally narrative" (Lyotard 1984
[1979], 26). Indeed, for Lyotard, the de-realization of the world
means the disintegration of narrative elements into
"clouds" of linguistic combinations and collisions among
innumerable, heterogeneous language games. Furthermore, within each
game the subject moves from position to position, now as sender, now
as addressee, now as referent, and so on. The loss of a continuous
meta-narrative therefore breaks the subject into heterogeneous
moments of subjectivity that do not cohere into an identity. But as
Lyotard points out, while the combinations we experience are not
necessarily stable or communicable, we learn to move with a certain
nimbleness among them.



Postmodern sensibility does not lament the loss of narrative
coherence any more than the loss of being. However, the dissolution
of narrative leaves the field of legitimation to a new unifying
criterion: the performativity of the knowledge-producing system whose
form of capital is information. Performative legitimation means
maximizing the flow of information and minimizing static
(non-functional moves) in the system, so whatever cannot be
communicated as information must be eliminated. The performativity
criterion threatens anything not meeting its requirements, such as
speculative narratives, with de-legitimation and
exclusion. Nevertheless, capital also demands the continual
re-invention of the "new" in the form of new language
games and new denotative statements, and so, paradoxically, a
certain *paralogy* is required by the system itself. In this
regard, the modern paradigm of progress as new moves under
established rules gives way to the postmodern paradigm of inventing
new rules and changing the game.



Inventing new codes and reshaping information is a large part of the
production of knowledge, and in its inventive moment science does not
adhere to performative efficiency. By the same token, the
meta-prescriptives of science, its rules, are themselves objects of
invention and experimentation for the sake of producing new
statements. In this respect, says Lyotard, the model of knowledge as
the progressive development of consensus is outmoded. In fact,
attempts to retrieve the model of consensus can only repeat the
standard of coherence demanded for functional efficiency, and they
will thus lend themselves to the domination of capital. On the other
hand, the paralogical inventiveness of science raises the possibility
of a new sense of justice, as well as knowledge, as we move among the
language games now entangling us.



Lyotard takes up the question of justice in *Just Gaming* (see
Lyotard 1985 [1979]) and *The Differend: Phrases in
Dispute* (see Lyotard 1988 [1983]), where he combines the model
of language games with Kant's division of the faculties
(understanding, imagination, reason) and types of judgment
(theoretical, practical, aesthetic) in order to explore the problem
of justice set out in *The Postmodern Condition*. Without the
formal unity of the subject, the faculties are set free to operate on
their own. Where Kant insists that reason must assign domains and
limits to the other faculties, its dependence upon the unity of the
subject for the identity of concepts as laws or rules de-legitimizes
its juridical authority in the postmodern age. Instead, because we
are faced with an irreducible plurality of judgments and
"phrase regimes," the faculty of judgment itself is
brought to the fore. Kant's third *Critique* therefore
provides the conceptual materials for Lyotard's analysis, especially
the analytic of aesthetic judgment (see Kant 1790).



As Lyotard argues, aesthetic judgment is the appropriate model for
the problem of justice in postmodern experience because we are
confronted with a plurality of games and rules without a concept
under which to unify them. Judgment must therefore be reflective
rather than determining. Furthermore, judgment must be aesthetic
insofar as it does not produce denotative knowledge about a
determinable state of affairs, but refers to the way our faculties
interact with each other as we move from one mode of phrasing to
another, i.e. the denotative, the prescriptive, the performative, the
political, the cognitive, the artistic, etc. In Kantian terms, this
interaction registers as an aesthetic feeling. Where Kant emphasizes
the feeling of the beautiful as a harmonious interaction between
imagination and understanding, Lyotard stresses the mode in which
faculties (imagination and reason,) are in disharmony, i.e. the
feeling of the sublime. For Kant, the sublime occurs when our
faculties of sensible presentation are overwhelmed by impressions of
absolute power and magnitude, and reason is thrown back upon its own
power to conceive Ideas (such as the moral law) which surpass the
sensible world. For Lyotard, however, the postmodern sublime occurs
when we are affected by a multitude of unpresentables without
reference to reason as their unifying origin. Justice, then, would
not be a definable rule, but an ability to move and judge among rules
in their heterogeneity and multiplicity. In this respect, it would be
more akin to the production of art than a moral judgment in Kant's
sense.



In "What is Postmodernism?," which appears as an appendix
to the English edition of *The Postmodern Condition*, Lyotard
addresses the importance of avant-garde art in terms of the aesthetic
of the sublime. Modern art, he says, is emblematic of a sublime
sensibility, that is, a sensibility that *there is* something
non-presentable demanding to be put into sensible form and yet
overwhelms all attempts to do so. But where modern art presents the
unpresentable as a missing content within a beautiful form, as in
Marcel Proust, postmodern art, exemplified by James Joyce, puts
forward the unpresentable by forgoing beautiful form itself, thus
denying what Kant would call the consensus of taste. Furthermore,
says Lyotard, a work can become modern only if it is first
postmodern, for postmodernism is not modernism at its end but in its
nascent state, that is, at the moment it attempts to present the
unpresentable, "and this state is constant" (Lyotard 1984
[1979], 79). The postmodern, then, is a repetition of the modern as
the "new," and this means the ever-new demand for another
repetition.


## 3. Genealogy and Subjectivity



The Nietzschean method of genealogy, in its application to modern
subjectivity, is another facet of philosophical postmodernism. Michel
Foucault's application of genealogy to formative moments in
modernity's history and his exhortations to experiment with
subjectivity place him within the scope of postmodern discourse. In
the 1971 essay "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History," Foucault
spells out his adaptation of the genealogical method in his
historical studies. First and foremost, he says, genealogy
"opposes itself to the search for 'origins'"
(Foucault 1977, 141). That is, genealogy studies the accidents and
contingencies that converge at crucial moments, giving rise to new
epochs, concepts, and institutions. As Foucault remarks: "What
is found at the historical beginning of things is not the inviolable
identity of their origin; it is the dissension of other things. It is
disparity" (Foucault 1977, 142). In Nietzschean fashion,
Foucault exposes history conceived as the origin and development of
an identical subject, e.g., "modernity," as a fiction
modern discourses invent after the fact. Underlying the fiction of
modernity is a sense of temporality that excludes the elements of
chance and contingency in play at every moment. In short, linear,
progressive history covers up the discontinuities and interruptions
that mark points of succession in historical time.



Foucault deploys genealogy to create what he calls a
"counter-memory" or "a transformation of history
into a totally different form of time" (Foucault 1977,
160). This entails dissolving identity for the subject in history by
using the materials and techniques of modern historical
research. Just as Nietzsche postulates that the religious will to
truth in Christianity results in the destruction of Christianity by
science (see Nietzsche 1974 [1882], 280-83), Foucault
postulates that genealogical research will result in the
disintegration of the epistemic subject, as the continuity of the
subject is broken up by the gaps and accidents that historical
research uncovers. The first example of this research is *Histoire
de la folie a l'age classique*, published in 1961, the
full version of which was published in English as *History of
Madness* in 2006. Here, Foucault gives an account of the
historical beginnings of modern reason as it comes to define itself
against madness in the seventeenth century. His thesis is that the
practice of confining the mad is a transformation of the medieval
practice of confining lepers in lazar houses. These institutions
managed to survive long after the lepers disappeared, and thus an
institutional structure of confinement was already in place when the
modern concept of madness as a disease took shape. However, while
institutions of confinement are held over from a previous time, the
practice of confining the mad constitutes a break with the past.



Foucault focuses upon the moment of transition, as modern reason
begins to take shape in a confluence of concepts, institutions, and
practices, or, as he would say, of knowledge and power. In its
nascency, reason is a power that defines itself against an other, an
other whose truth and identity is also assigned by reason, thus
giving reason the sense of originating from itself. For Foucault, the
issue is that madness is not allowed to speak for itself and is at
the disposal of a power that dictates the terms of their
relationship. As he remarks: "*What is originative is the
caesura that establishes the distance between reason and non-reason;
reason's subjugation of non-reason, wresting from it its truth as
madness, crime, or disease, derives explicitly from this
point*" (Foucault 1965, x). The truth of reason is found
when madness comes to stand in the place of non-reason, when the
difference between them is inscribed in their opposition, but is not
identical to its dominant side. In other words, the reason that
stands in opposition to madness is not identical to the reason that
inscribes their difference. The latter would be reason without an
opposite, a free-floating power without definite shape. As Foucault
suggests, this free-floating mystery might be represented in the ship
of fools motif, which, in medieval times, represented madness. Such
is the paradoxical structure of historical transformation.



In his later writings, most notably in *The Use of Pleasure*
(Foucault 1985 [1984]), Foucault employs historical research to open
possibilities for experimenting with subjectivity, by showing that
subjectivation is a formative power of the self, surpassing the
structures of knowledge and power from out of which it emerges. This
is a power of thought, which Foucault says is the ability of human
beings to problematize the conditions under which they live. For
philosophy, this means "the endeavor to know how and to what
extent it might be possible to think differently, instead of
legitimating what is already known" (Foucault 1985 [1984],
9). He thus joins Lyotard in promoting creative experimentation as a
leading power of thought, a power that surpasses reason, narrowly
defined, and without which thought would be inert. In this regard,
Foucault stands in league with others who profess a postmodern
sensibility in regard to contemporary science, art, and society. We
should note, as well, that Foucault's writings are a hybrid of
philosophy and historical research, just as Lyotard combines the
language games of the expert and the philosopher in *The
Postmodern Condition*. This mixing of philosophy with concepts
and methods from other disciplines is characteristic of postmodernism
in its broadest sense.


## 4. Productive Difference



The concept of difference as a productive mechanism, rather than a
negation of identity, is also a hallmark of postmodernism in
philosophy. Gilles Deleuze deploys this concept throughout his work,
beginning with *Nietzsche and Philosophy* (1962, in English
1983), where he sets Nietzsche against the models of thinking at work
in Kant and Hegel. Here, he proposes to think *against* reason
in resistance to Kant's assertion of the self-justifying authority of
reason alone (Deleuze 1983 [1962], 93). In a phrase echoed by
Foucault, he states that the purpose of his critique of reason
"is not justification but a different way of feeling: another
sensibility" (Deleuze 1983 [1962], 94). Philosophical critique,
he declares, is an encounter between thought and what forces it into
action: it is a matter of sensibility rather than a tribunal where
reason 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). Since
thought cannot activate itself as *thinking*, Deleuze says it
must suffer violence if it is to awaken and move. Art, science, and
philosophy deploy such violence insofar as they are transformative
and experimental. 



Against Hegel, Deleuze asserts that while dialectic is structured by
negation and opposition within a posited identity, "difference
is the only principle of genesis or production" (Deleuze 1983
[1962], 157). Opposition occurs on the same logical plane, but
difference moves across planes and levels, and not only in one
direction. Furthermore, where Hegel takes the work of the negative to
be dialectic's driving power, Deleuze declares that difference is
thinkable only as repetition repeating itself (as in Nietzsche's
eternal return), where difference affirms itself in eternally
differing  *from* itself. Its movement is productive, but
without logical opposition, negation, or necessity. Instead, chance
and multiplicity are repeated, just as a dice-throw repeats the
randomness of the throw along with every number. On the other hand,
dialectic cancels out chance and affirms the movement of the negative
as a working out of identity, as in the *Science of Logic*
where being in its immediacy is posited as equal only to itself
(Hegel 1812, 82). For Deleuze, however, sensibility introduces an
aleatory moment into thought's development, making accidentality and
contingency conditions for thinking. These conditions upset logical
identity and opposition, and place the limit of thinking beyond any
dialectical system.



In *Difference and Repetition* (1968, in English 1994),
Deleuze develops his project in multiple directions. His work, he
says, stems from the convergence of two lines of research: the
concept of difference without negation, and the concept of
repetition, in which physical and mechanical repetitions are masks
for a hidden differential that is disguised and displaced. His major
focus is a thoroughgoing critique of representational thinking,
including identity, opposition, analogy, and resemblance (Deleuze
1994 [1968], 132). For Deleuze, "appearances of" are not
representations, but sensory intensities free of subjective or
objective identities (Deleuze 1994 [1968], 144). Without these
identities, appearances are simulacra of an non-apparent differential
he calls the "dark precursor" or "the in-itself of
difference" (Deleuze 1994 [1968], 119). This differential is
the non-sensible *being* of the sensible, a being not
identical to the sensible, or to itself, but irreducibly problematic
insofar as it forces us to encounter the sensible as
"given." 



Furthermore, any move against representational thinking impinges upon
the identity of the subject. Where Kant founds the representational
unity of space and time upon the formal unity of consciousness (Kant
1787, 135-137), difference re-distributes intuitions of past,
present, and future, fracturing consciousness into multiple states
not predicable of a single subject. Intensive qualities are
individuating by themselves, says Deleuze, and individuality is not
characteristic of a self or an ego, but of a differential forever
dividing itself and changing its configuration (Deleuze 1994 [1968],
246, 254, 257). In Nietzschean fashion, the "I" refers
not to the unity of consciousness, but to a multitude of simulacra
without an identical subject *for whom* this multitude
appears. Instead, subjects arise and multiply as
"effects" of the intensive qualities saturating space and
time. This leads Deleuze to postulate multiple faculties for
subjectivity, which are correlates of the sensible insofar as it
gives rise to feeling, thought, and action. "Each faculty,
including thought, has only involuntary adventures," he says,
and "involuntary operation remains embedded in the
empirical" (Deleuze 1994 [1968], 145). Subjectively, the
paradox of the differential breaks up the faculties' common function
and places them before their own limits: thought before the
unthinkable, memory before the immemorial, sensibility before the
imperceptible, etc. (Deleuze 1994, 227). This fracturing and
multiplying of the subject, he notes, leads to the realization that
"schizophrenia is not only a human fact but also a possibility
for thought" (Deleuze 1994 [1968], 148), thus expanding the
term into a philosophical concept, beyond its clinical
application.



The dissolution of the subject and its implications for society is
the theme of *Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia*,
which Deleuze published with Felix Guattari in 1972 (in
English 1983). The book, in large part, is written against an
established intellectual orthodoxy of the political Left in France
during the 1950s and 1960s, an orthodoxy consisting of Marx, Freud,
and structuralist concepts applied to them by Louis Althusser and
Jacques Lacan. Deleuze and Guattari argue that this mixture is still
limited by representational thinking, including concepts of
production based upon lack, and concepts of alienation based upon
identity and negation. Furthermore, the Oedipus concept in
psychoanalysis, they say, institutes a theater of desire in which the
psyche is embedded in a family drama closed off from the
extra-familial and extra-psychic forces at work in society. They
characterize these forces as "desiring machines" whose
function is to connect, disconnect, and reconnect with one another
without meaning or intention. 



The authors portray society as a series of
"territorializations" or inscriptions upon the
"body without organs,"or the free-flowing matter of
intensive qualities filling space in their varying degrees. The first
inscriptions are relations of kinship and filiation structuring
primitive societies, often involving the marking and scarring of
human 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 their
organs. The full body of society is the sacred earth, which
appropriates to itself all social products as their natural or divine
precondition, and to whom all members of society are bound by direct
filiation (Deleuze 1983 [1962], 141-42). These first inscriptions are
then de-territorialized and re-coded by the "despotic
machine," establishing new relations of alliance and filiation
through the body of the ruler or emperor, who alone stands in direct
filiation to the deity (Deleuze 1983 [1962], 192) and who institutes
the mechanism of the state upon pre-existing social arrangements.
Finally, capitalism de-territorializes the inscriptions of the
despotic machine and re-codes all relations of alliance and filiation
into flows of money (Deleuze 1983 [1962], 224-27). The organs of
society and the state are appropriated into the functioning of
capital, and humans become secondary to the filiation of money with
itself.



Deleuze and Guattari see in the capitalist money system "an
axiomatic of abstract quantities that keeps moving further and
further in the direction of the deterritorialization of the
socius" (Deleuze and Guattari 1983 [1972], 33), which is to say
that capital is inherently schizophrenic. However, because capital
also re-territorializes all flows into money, schizophrenia remains
capitalism's external limit. Nevertheless, it is precisely that limit
against which thinking can subject capitalism to philosophical
critique. Psychoanalysis, they say, is part of the reign of capital
because it re-territorializes the subject as "private"
and "individual," instituting psychic identity through
images of the Oedipal family. However, the Oedipal triangle is merely
a representational simulacrum of kinship and filiation, re-coded
within a system of debt and payment. In this system, they insist,
flows of desire have become mere representations of desire, cut off
from the body without organs and the extra-familial mechanisms of
society. A radical critique of capital cannot therefore be
accomplished by psychoanalysis, but requires
a *schizoanalysis* "to overturn the theater of
representation into the order of desiring-production" (Deleuze
1983 [1962], 271). Here, the authors see a revolutionary potential in
modern art and science, where, in bringing about the
"new," they circulate de-coded and de-territorialized
flows within society without automatically re-coding them into money
(Deleuze and Guattari 1983 [1972], 379). In this revolutionary
aspect, *Anti-Oedipus* reads as a statement of the desire that
took 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 the
popular imagination. However, in philosophy, it signifies certain
strategies for reading and writing texts. The term was introduced
into philosophical literature in 1967, with the publication of three
texts by Jacques Derrida: *Of Grammatology* (in English
1974), *Writing and Difference* (in English 1978),
and *Speech and Phenomena* (in English 1973). This so-called
"publication blitz" immediately established Derrida as a
major figure in the new movement in philosophy and the human sciences
centered in Paris, and brought the idiom "deconstruction"
into its vocabulary. Derrida and deconstruction are routinely
associated with postmodernism, although like Deleuze and Foucault, he
does not use the term and would resist affiliation with
"-isms" of any sort. Of the three books from 1967, *Of
Grammatology* is the more comprehensive in laying out the
background for deconstruction as a way of reading modern theories of
language, especially structuralism, and Heidegger's meditations on
the non-presence of being. It also sets out Derrida's difference with
Heidegger over Nietzsche. Where Heidegger places Nietzsche within the
metaphysics of presence, Derrida insists that "reading, and
therefore writing, the text were for Nietzsche
'originary' operations," (Derrida 1974 [1967], 19),
and this puts him at the closure of metaphysics (not the end), a
closure that liberates writing from the traditional logos, which
takes writing to be a sign (a visible mark) for another sign
(speech), whose "signified" is a fully present
meaning.



This closure has emerged, says Derrida, with the latest developments
in linguistics, the human sciences, mathematics, and cybernetics,
where the written mark or signifier is purely technical, that is, a
matter of function rather than meaning. Precisely the liberation of
function over meaning indicates that the epoch of what Heidegger
calls the metaphysics of presence has come to closure, although this
closure 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," leaving
it visible, nevertheless, under the mark, Derrida takes the closure
of metaphysics to be its "erasure," where it does not
entirely disappear, but remains inscribed as one side of a
difference, and where the mark of deletion is itself a trace of the
difference that joins and separates this mark and what it crosses
out. Derrida calls this joining and separating of
signs *differance* (Derrida 1974 [1967], 23), a device
that can only be read and not heard when *differance*
and *difference* are pronounced in French. The
"a" is a written mark that differentiates independently
of the voice, the privileged medium of metaphysics. In this
sense, *differance* as the spacing of difference, as
archi-writing, would be the *gram* of grammatology. However,
as Derrida remarks: "There cannot be a science of difference
itself in its operation, as it is impossible to have a science of the
origin of presence itself, that is to say of a certain
non-origin" (Derrida 1974 [1967], 63). Instead, there is only
the marking of the trace of difference, that is, deconstruction.


 Because at its functional level all language is a system of
differences, 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 as
their theme are therefore particularly susceptible to deconstruction,
as are all other texts insofar as they are conjoined with these. For
Derrida, written marks or signifiers do not arrange themselves within
natural limits, but form chains of signification that radiate in all
directions. As Derrida famously remarks, "there is no
outside-text" (Derrida 1974 [1967], 158), that is, the text
includes the difference between any "inside" or
"outside." As he explains in a letter to Gerald Graff,
attached as an appendix to *Limited Inc* (see Derrida 1988, 148),
this means that "every referent, all reality has the structure
of a differential trace." A text, then, is not a book, and does
not, strictly speaking, have an author. On the contrary, the name of
the author is a signifier linked with others, and there is no master
signifier (such as the phallus in Lacan) present or even absent in a
text. This goes for the term *"differance*"
as well, which can only serve as a supplement for the productive
spacing between signs. Therefore, Derrida insists that
"*differance* is literally neither a word nor a
concept" (Derrida 1982 [1972], 3). Instead, it can only be
marked as a wandering play of differences that is both a spacing of
signifiers in relation to one another and a deferral of meaning or
presence when they are read.



How, then, can *differance* be characterized? Derrida
refuses to answer questions as to "who" or
"what" differs, because to do so would suggest there is a
proper name for difference instead of endless supplements, of which
"*differance*" is but one. Structurally,
this supplemental displacement functions just as, for Heidegger, all
names for being reduce being to the presence of beings, thus ignoring
the "ontological difference" between them. However,
Derrida takes the ontological difference as one difference among
others, as a product of what the idiom
"*differance*" supplements. As he remarks:
"*differance*, in a certain and very strange way,
(is) 'older' than the ontological difference or than the
truth of Being" (Derrida 1982 [1972], 22). Deconstruction,
then, traces the repetitions of the supplement. It is not so much a
theory about texts as a practice of reading and transforming texts,
where tracing the movements of *differance* produces
other texts interwoven with the first. While there is a certain
arbitrariness in the play of differences that result, it is not the
arbitrariness of a reader getting the text to mean whatever he or she
wants. It is a question of function rather than meaning, if meaning
is understood as a terminal presence, and the signifying connections
traced in deconstruction are first offered by the text itself. A
deconstructive reading, then, does not assert or impose meaning, but
marks out places where the function of the text works against its
apparent 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 of
experience, where what passes for reality is a network of images and
signs without an external referent, such that what is represented is
representation itself. In *Symbolic 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 of
the political Left, beginning with the assumed reality of power,
production, desire, society, and political legitimacy. Baudrillard
argues that all of these realities have become simulations, that
is, *signs* without any referent, because the real and the
imaginary have been absorbed into the symbolic.



Baudrillard presents hyperreality as the terminal stage of
simulation, where a sign or image has no relation to any reality
whatsoever, but is "its own pure simulacrum" (Baudrillard
1981, 6). The real, he says, has become an operational effect of
symbolic processes, just as images are technologically generated and
coded before we actually perceive them. This means technological
mediation has usurped the productive role of the Kantian subject, the
locus of an original synthesis of concepts and intuitions, as well as
the Marxian worker, the producer of capital though labor, and the
Freudian unconscious, the mechanism of repression and
desire. "From now on," says Baudrillard, "signs are
exchanged against each other rather than against the real"
(Baudrillard 1976, 7), so production now means signs producing other
signs. The system of symbolic exchange is therefore no longer real
but "hyperreal." Where the real is "*that of
which it is possible to provide an equivalent
reproduction*," the hyperreal, says Baudrillard, is
"*that which is always already reproduced*"
(Baudrillard 1976, 73). The hyperreal is a system of simulation
simulating itself.



The lesson Baudrillard draws from the events of May 1968 is that the
student movement was provoked by the realization that "*we
were no longer productive*" (Baudrillard 1976, 29), and
that direct opposition within the system of communication and
exchange only reproduces the mechanisms of the system
itself. Strategically, he says, capital can only be defeated by
introducing something inexchangeable into the symbolic order, that
is, 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 of
violent death and catastrophe, where death is the result of
artificial processes and "accidents." But, as Baudrillard
remarks: "Only the death-function cannot be programmed and
localized" (Baudrillard 1976, 126), and by this he means death
as the simple and irreversible finality of life. Therefore he calls
for the development of "fatal strategies" to make the
system suffer reversal and collapse.



Because these strategies must be carried out within the symbolic
order, they are matters of rhetoric and art, or a hybrid of
both. They also function as gifts or sacrifices, for which the system
has no counter-move or equivalence. Baudrillard finds a prime example
of this strategy with graffiti artists who experiment with symbolic
markings and codes in order to suggest communication while blocking
it, and who sign their inscriptions with pseudonyms instead of
recognizable names. "They are seeking not to escape the
combinatory in order to regain an identity," says Baudrillard,
"but to turn indeterminacy against the system, to
turn *indeterminacy* into *extermination*"
(Baudrillard 1976, 78). Some of his own remarks, such as "I
have nothing to do with postmodernism," have, no doubt, the
same strategic intent. To the extent that
"postmodernism" has become a sign exchangeable for other
signs, he would indeed want nothing to do with it. Nevertheless, his
concepts of simulation and hyperreality, and his call for strategic
experimentation with signs and codes, bring him into close proximity
with figures such as Lyotard, Foucault, and Derrida.


## 7. Postmodern Hermeneutics


 Hermeneutics, the science of textual interpretation, also plays a
role in postmodern philosophy. Unlike deconstruction, which focuses
upon the functional structures of a text, hermeneutics seeks to arrive
at an agreement or consensus as to what the text means, or is about.
Gianni Vattimo formulates a postmodern hermeneutics in *The End of
Modernity* (1985, in English 1988 [1985]), where he distinguishes
himself from his Parisian counterparts by posing the question of
post-modernity as a matter for ontological hermeneutics. Instead of
calling for experimentation with counter-strategies and functional
structures, he sees the heterogeneity and diversity in our experience
of the world as a hermeneutical problem to be solved by developing a
sense continuity between the present and the past. This continuity is
to be a unity of meaning rather than the repetition of a functional
structure, and the meaning is ontological. In this respect, Vattimo's
project is an extension of Heidegger's inquiries into the meaning of
being. However, where Heidegger situates Nietzsche within the limits
of metaphysics, Vattimo joins Heidegger's ontological hermeneutics
with Nietzsche's attempt to think beyond nihilism and historicism with
his concept of eternal return. The result, says Vattimo, is a certain
distortion of Heidegger's reading of Nietzsche, allowing Heidegger and
Nietzsche to be interpreted through one another (Vattimo 1988 [1985],
176). This is a significant point of difference between Vattimo and
the French postmodernists, who read Nietzsche against Heidegger, and
prefer Nietzsche's textual strategies over Heidegger's pursuit of the
meaning of being.



On Vattimo's account, Nietzsche and Heidegger can be brought together
under the common theme of overcoming. Where Nietzsche announces the
overcoming of nihilism through the active nihilism of the eternal
return, Heidegger proposes to overcome metaphysics through a
non-metaphysical experience of being. In both cases, he argues, what
is to be overcome is modernity, characterized by the image that
philosophy and science are progressive developments in which thought
and knowledge increasingly appropriate their own origins and
foundations. Overcoming modernity, however, cannot mean progressing
into a new historical phase. As Vattimo observes: "Both
philosophers find themselves obliged, on the one hand, to take up a
critical distance from Western thought insofar as it is foundational;
on the other hand, however, they find themselves unable to criticize
Western thought in the name of another, and truer, foundation"
(Vattimo 1988 [1985], 2). Overcoming modernity must therefore mean
a *Verwindung*, in the sense of twisting or distorting
modernity itself, rather than an *Uberwindung* or
progression beyond it.



While Vattimo takes post-modernity as a new turn in modernity, it
entails the dissolution of the category of the new in the historical
sense, which means the end of universal history. "While the
notion of historicity has become ever more problematic for
theory," he says, "at the same time for historiography
and its own methodological self-awareness the idea of history as a
unitary process is rapidly dissolving" (Vattimo 1988 [1985],
6). This does not mean historical change ceases to occur, but that
its unitary development is no longer conceivable, so only local
histories are possible. The de-historicization of experience has been
accelerated by technology, especially television, says Vattimo, so
that "everything tends to flatten out at the level of
contemporaneity and simultaneity" (Vattimo 1988 [1985], 10). As
a result, we no longer experience a strong sense of teleology in
worldly events, but, instead, we are confronted with a manifold of
differences and partial teleologies that can only be judged
aesthetically. The truth of postmodern experience is therefore best
realized in art and rhetoric.



The Nietzschean sense of overcoming modernity is "to dissolve
modernity through a radicalization of its own innate
tendencies," says Vattimo (Vattimo 1988 [1985], 166). These
include the production of "the new" as a value and the
drive for critical overcoming in the sense of appropriating
foundations and origins. In this respect, however, Nietzsche shows
that modernity results in nihilism: all values, including
"truth" and "the new," collapse under
critical appropriation. The way out of this collapse is the moment of
eternal recurrence, when we affirm the necessity of error in the
absence of foundations. Vattimo also finds this new attitude toward
modernity in Heidegger's sense of overcoming metaphysics, insofar as
he suggests that overcoming the enframing lies with the possibility
of a turn within the enframing itself. Such a turn would mean
deepening and distorting the technological essence, not destroying it
or leaving it behind. Furthermore, this would be the meaning of
being, understood as the history of interpretation (as
"weak" being) instead of a grounding truth, and the
hermeneutics of being would be a distorted historicism. Unlike
traditional hermeneutics, Vattimo argues that reconstructing the
continuity of contemporary experience cannot be accomplished without
unifying art and rhetoric with information from the sciences, and
this requires philosophy "to propose a 'rhetorically
persuasive', unified view of the world, which includes in
itself traces, residues, or isolated elements of scientific
knowledge" (Vattimo 1988 [1985], 179). Vattimo's philosophy is
therefore the project of a postmodern hermeneutics, in contrast to
the Parisian thinkers who do not concern themselves with meaning or
history as continuous unities.


## 8. Postmodern Rhetoric and Aesthetics


 Rhetoric and aesthetics pertain to the sharing of experience
through activities of participation and imitation. In the postmodern
sense, such activities involve sharing or participating in differences
that have opened between the old and the new, the natural and the
artificial, or even between life and death. The leading exponent of
this line of postmodern thought is Mario Perniola. Like Vattimo,
Perniola insists that postmodern philosophy must not break with the
legacies of modernity in science and politics. As he says
in *Enigmas*, "the relationship between thought and
reality that the Enlightenment, idealism, and Marxism have embodied
must not be broken" (Perniola 1995, 43). However, he does not
base this continuity upon an internal essence, spirit, or meaning, but
upon the continuing effects of modernity in the world. One such
effect, visible in art and in the relation between art and society, is
the collapse of the past and future into the present, which he
characterizes as "Egyptian" or "baroque" in
nature. This temporal effect is accomplished through the collapse of
the difference between humans and things, where "humans are
becoming more similar to things, and equally, the inorganic world,
thanks to electronic technology, seems to be taking over the human
role in the perception of events" (Perniola
1995, *viii*). This amounts to a kind of
"Egyptianism," as described by Hegel in
his *Aesthetics* (see Hegel 1823-9, 347-361), where the
spiritual and the natural are mixed to such a degree that they cannot
be separated, as, for example, in the figure of the Sphinx. However,
in the postmodern world the inorganic is not natural, but already
artificial, insofar as our perceptions are mediated by technological
operations. 



Likewise, says Perniola, art collections in modern museums produce a
"baroque effect," where "The field that is opened
up by a collection is not that of cultivated public opinion, nor of
social participation, but a space that attracts precisely because it
cannot be controlled or possessed" (Perniola 1995, 87). That
is, in the collection, art is removed from its natural or historical
context and creates a new sense of space and time, not reducible to
linear history or any sense of origin. The collection, then, is
emblematic of postmodern society, a moment of its
"truth." Furthermore, Perniola insists that baroque
sensibility is characteristic of Italian society and culture in
general. "The very idea of truth as something essentially
naked," he says, "is at loggerheads with the Baroque
idea, so firmly rooted in Italy, that truth is something essentially
clothed" (Perniola 1995, 145). This corresponds to a
sensibility that is intermediate between internal feelings and
external things. "The Italian enigma," he says,
"lies in the fact that the human component is equipped with an
external 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 must
become "the intermediary, the passage, the transit to something
different and foreign" (Perniola 1995, 40). Hence,
philosophical reading and writing are not activities of an identical
subject, but processes of mediation and indeterminacy between self
and other, and philosophical narrative is an overcoming of their
differences.



These differences cannot be overcome, in Hegelian fashion, by
canceling them under a higher-order synthesis, but must be eroded or
defaced in the course of traversing them. In *Ritual
Thinking*, Perniola illustrates this process through the concepts
of transit, the simulacrum, and ritual without myth. Transit derives
from a sense of the simultaneity of the present, where we are
suspended in a state of temporariness and indeterminacy, and move
"from the same to the same"; the simulacrum is the result
of an endless mimesis in which there are only copies of copies
without reference to an original; and ritual without myth is the
repetition of patterns of action having no connection to the inner
life of a subject or of society. Thus Perniola sees social and
political interaction as repetitive patterns of action having no
inherent meaning but constituting, nonetheless, an intermediary realm
where oppositions, particularly life and death, are overcome in a
to-and-fro movement within their space of difference. 



To illustrate these concepts Perniola refers to practices associated
with Romanism, particularly Roman religion. "Ritual without
myth," he says, "is the very essence of Romanism"
(Perniola 2001, 81). It is a passage between life and death via their
mutual simulation, for example, in the labyrinthine movements of the
ritual known as the *troiae lusus*. These movements, he says,
mediate between life and death by reversing their pattern of natural
succession, and mediate their difference through actions having no
intrinsic meaning. Unlike Vattimo's project of constructing meaning
to overcome historical differences, Perniola's concept of transit
into the space of difference is one of "art" in the sense
of artifice or technique, and is not aimed at a synthesis or
unification of opposing elements. In this respect, Perniola has an
affinity with the French postmodernists, who emphasize functional
repetition over the creation of meaning. However, as Perniola's
notion of ritual without myth illustrates, the functional repetitions
of social interaction and technology do not disseminate differences,
but efface them. This is clear in his account of the ritualized
passage between life and death, as compared with Baudrillard, who
calls for strategies introducing the irreversibility of death into
the system of symbolic exchange. In this respect, Perniola's
postmodernism is strongly aesthetic, and remains, with Vattimo, in
the aesthetic and historical dimensions of experience.


## 9. Habermas's Critique



The most prominent and comprehensive critic of philosophical
postmodernism is Jurgen Habermas. In *The Philosophical
Discourse of Modernity* (Habermas 1987 [1985]), he confronts
postmodernism at the level of society and "communicative
action." He does not defend the concept of the subject,
conceived as consciousness or an autonomous self, against
postmodernists' attacks, but defends argumentative reason in
inter-subjective communication against their experimental,
avant-garde strategies. For example, he claims that Nietzsche,
Heidegger, Derrida and Foucault commit a performative contradiction
in their critiques of modernism by employing concepts and methods
that only modern reason can provide. He criticizes Nietzsche's
Dionysianism as a compensatory gesture toward the loss of unity in
Western culture that, in pre-modern times, was provided by religion.
Nietzsche's sense of a new Dionysus in modern art, moreover, is based
upon an aesthetic modernism in which art acquires its experimental
power by separating itself from the values of science and morality, a
separation accomplished by the modern Enlightenment, resulting in the
loss of organic unity Nietzsche seeks to restore via art itself (see
Habermas 1987 [1985], 81-105). Habermas sees Heidegger and Derrida as
heirs to this "Dionysian messianism." Heidegger, for
example, anticipates a new experience of being, which has
withdrawn. However, says Habermas, the withdrawal of being is the
result of an inverted philosophy of the subject, where Heidegger's
destruction of the subject leads to hope for a unity to come, a unity
of nothing other than the subject that is now missing (Habermas 1987
[1985], 160). Derrida, he says, develops the notion
of *differance* or "archi-writing" in
similar fashion: here, we see the god Dionysus revealing himself once
again in his absence, as meaning infinitely deferred (Habermas 1987
[1985], 180-81).



Habermas also criticizes Derrida for leveling the distinction between
philosophy and literature in a textualism that brings logic and
argumentative reason into the domain of rhetoric. In this way, he
says, Derrida hopes to avoid the logical problem of self-reference in
his critique of reason. However, as Habermas remarks: "Whoever
transposes the radical critique of reason into the domain of rhetoric
in order to blunt the paradox of self-referentiality, also dulls the
sword of the critique of reason itself" (Habermas 1987 [1985],
210). In similar fashion, he criticizes Foucault for not subjecting
his own genealogical method to genealogical unmasking, which would
reveal Foucault's re-installation of a modern subject able to
critically gaze at its own history. Thus, he says, "Foucault
cannot adequately deal with the persistent problems that come up in
connection with an interpretive approach to the object domain, a
self-referential denial of universal validity claims, and a normative
justification of critique" (Habermas 1987 [1985], 286).



Habermas's critique of postmodernism on the basis of performative
contradiction and the paradox of self-reference sets the tone and the
terms for much of the critical debate now under way. While
postmodernists have rejected these criticisms, or responded to them
with rhetorical counter-strategies. Lyotard, for example, rejects
the notion that intersubjective communication implies a set of rules
already agreed upon, and that universal consensus is the ultimate
goal of discourse (see Lyotard 1984 [1979], 65-66). That
postmodernists openly respond to Habermas is due to the fact that he
takes postmodernism seriously and does not, like other critics,
reject it as mere nonsense. Indeed, that he is able to read
postmodernist texts closely and discursively testifies to their
intelligibility. He also agrees with the postmodernists that the
focus of debate should be upon modernity as it is realized in social
practices and institutions, rather than upon theories of cognition or
formal linguistics as autonomous domains. In this respect, Habermas's
concern with inter-subjective communication helps clarify the basis
upon which the modernist-postmodernist debates continue to play
out.