Tony Thwaites

University of Queensland
tony.thwaites@mailbox.uq.edu.au

 

[O]ne of the more striking features of the postmodern is the way in which, in it, a whole range of tendential analyses of hitherto very different kinds--economic forecasts, marketing studies, culture critiques, new therapies, the (generally official) jeremiads about drugs or permissiveness, reviews of art shows or national film festivals, religious "revivals" or cults--have all coalesced into a new discursive genre, which we might as well call "postmodern theory," and which demands some attention in its own right. It is clearly a class which is a member of its own class, and I would not want to have to decide whether the following chapters are inquiries into the nature of such "postmodern theory" or mere examples of it. (Jameson, Postmodernism x)

 

Lists

 

Is there such a thing as the list in general, the general idea of the list? Lists, after all, resist the general as much as they hint at it. Rather than name a general and finite principle of ordering, the list gives a series of specific cases which is potentially endless. It is tempting to say that this is an endlessness in principle, but principle is precisely what the list suspends, for the moment at least, and until further notice, which we have to admit may never come. The figure of the list is asyndeton, usually defined as the absence or omission of conjunctions,¹ but in fact far less committal and more slippery than either of those figures of lack might suggest. Asyndeton refuses to be drawn on lack or presence; it renders indistinguishable the absent, the present-but-unstated, the withdrawn, the obvious, the causal, the consequential and the inconsequential. The asyndetic is not what is absent so much as what refuses to go away: the nagging possibility of connection beyond mere juxtaposition. Lists are thus neither coherent nor incoherent, but work on an unstable margin somewhere between both possibilities, which haunt them both as their possibilities and as the conditions making them possible.

 

Nevertheless, even though the list may suggest the possibility of a general principle, all that is necessary for it to be a list is mere collocation: the minimal and obvious commonality that its elements are grouped together in this list, here, now. Happenstance perhaps. A list may be no more than a disjunct set, the meeting point for things which would share no internal necessity if it were not for the possibility that the very silence of asyndeton makes that boundary between internal and external a somewhat leaky one, subject to all sorts of osmotic exchanges. The list is provisionally (even though that provisionality is quite indefinite in its extent) held together by the very act of listing. It awaits its principle, which lies somewhere in the future and in the past, as something which is yet to be fully determined but which will be installed by this future act as having always already been there, in the will have been of the future anterior. Structurally, the necessity of the principle cannot help but be retroactive, and thus it carries within it the traces of the contingent, the adventitious. This is why, even in its arrival, this principle remains an awaiting, the purest of happenstance. Such a event need not have occurred, in the sense that it is predictable from none of the predicates of its components; but that it has occurred installs it retroactively as necessary: this is what had to happen for the present, this present, to arrive.

 

As John Frow points out (10), the list is one of the recurrent rhetorical devices of writing on the postmodern. It would be easy to propose a meta-list of postmodern texts which rely somewhere in their argument on the potentially inexhaustible listing of postmodern things: we would have the cultural critiques of Jameson or Lyotard, the political economy of Harvey or Aglietta, the geographics of Soja, the literary theory of Hutcheon, the celebrations of Hassan. In the list’s suspension of the principle which seems at times almost coterminous with discussion of the postmodern, it is not surprising that, as Frow says, the very idea of the postmodern should be conceptually incoherent (9-12).

 

Nevertheless, this would not in itself be sufficient reason for discarding the postmodern as simply an ill-conceived notion or an unfortunate mistake. One of the causes for caution Frow gives is that whatever its problems, the postmodern is already in a sense there on the agenda, given as a discursive object, with certain very real discursive, epistemological, institutional and political effects which need to be taken seriously (8-9). This would be a necessary, if minimalist, position: if one cannot take the postmodern as a serious instrument of analysis, one can and should nevertheless treat it at least as a category for analysis, one which must be carefully scrutinised as a socio-politico-epistemological phenomenon rather than dismissed as a mystification. But once this is admitted, another difficulty arises immediately: it may not be possible to draw a clear line between texts which analyse and texts which are analysed. Jameson decides quite early that he is not even going to try to draw that line: “I would not want to have to decide whether the following chapters are inquiries into the nature of such ‘postmodern theory’ or mere examples of it.” Significantly, this declaration follows immediately after a listing: that “whole range of tendential analyses of hitherto very different kinds” which “have all coalesced into a new discursive genre, which we might as well call ‘postmodern theory.'” These analyses coalesce: they are not so much articulated with each other across clear boundaries, like parts of a well-oiled theoretical machine, as subject to a loss of boundary, an indefinition; what they form in their coalescence is something which was not there before, a new genre of uncertain status, whose possibly disjunctive nature is marked by the noncommittal: we “might as well” call it “postmodern theory,” this persistent aggregation whose very structure may be the friability of the list. Jameson’s book is riven–and driven–by an uneasy yet gleeful fascination with a postmodernity it sees as both symptom and treatment, object and means. If the list is asyndetic in its delays and in the instability of its hide-and-seek games with coherence and incoherence, how can one avoid listing in the course of analysing it? Necessary as it is, that minimalist position–at least we should take the postmodern seriously as an object for analysis–cannot be contained, even in the very act of its postulation. From the very beginning, the minimal position is one of excess.

 

To the extent that the postmodern is asyndetic, then, it is not simply incoherent. What is at stake in it, as both object and tool of inquiry, is a complex and unstable play of coherence and incoherence. We should perhaps read the postmodern not merely as a failure of conceptualisation, but–and always among other things–as the question of external and internal limits of the concept: on the one hand as an index of aspects of the specific phenomena the term attempts to conceptualise and of the problems of conceptualising them, and on the other hand of the limits of conceptualisation in general (which is precisely the question of what such an in general might involve, and of the asyndetic nature of that edge between the specific and the general).

 

One way of reading the recourse to listing might, for example, be to emphasise its deictic moment. It is as if somewhere along the line in talking about the postmodern, a blockage occurs: as if, for whatever reasons, “the postmodern,” whatever it might be, resisted abstraction or generalisation, or perhaps were precisely this resistance, and repeatedly forced one back to the specific and a resort to pointing. This is a discursive blockage, on the levels of both signifier and signified: the signified concept “dog” is neither this particular dog nor that one; the signifier is neither the way I say “dog” on this given occasion, nor on another the way you say it with quite different voice, tone, pitch, timbre and accent. In the asyndetic blockage which marks one of the limits of language as system, a stammer develops. Language granulates, into a nomination which can only be repeated immediately, potentially without end. But nomination must always, as a condition of its sense, be accompanied by the non-linguistic, the extra-linguistic. I am forced to gesture. I say the word “dog,” and at the same time I point in some way: this one, this one here…And this one too… The structure of the list, then, is never purely linguistic, for all that a list is a sequence of namings. It is also, at the same time and as a condition of its intelligibility as list (and as linguistic), irreducibly gestural, choreographic. It marks a trajectory (here…and here…), the trace of events: a dance, like the spatterings across a Jackson Pollock canvas. Contrary to the common complaint that the postmodern cannot see beyond the linguistic, the list, which would seem to be its figure par excellence, suggests seeing it as the site of a perpetual and constitutive leakage between word and event in its gestural knotting. A most peculiar knotting: asyndetic, provisional, retrospective and situational, forever in the process of being simultaneously unknotted and done up again. The coherence of the asyndetic link is always at stake, and that is why the list proliferates indefinitely, even the shortest list: no finite number of elements can exhaust its reknotting.

 

If the logic of the list is asyndetic, and if the list is a recurrent figure in discussion or examples of the postmodern, should we just come out and say that whatever else it might be (and that is far from clear) the postmodern is asyndetic? That is, that the postmodern can be predicated as asyndetic, that asyndeton is one of its properties or characteristics? But asyndeton is not just a characteristic among others: it opens the very space of the list in which characteristics and properties can be nominated as such. In a sense which is neither simply logical nor chronological, asyndeton is prior to properties, the proper, the unitary. Once properties are assigned, there is the postulation of a link between the property and the thing which bears it as its property, and thus there is no longer asyndeton. The asyndetic is the keeping open of the question. This is the insistence of the postmodern, certainly, its refusal to go away. It may also be, in a sense on which we will need to elaborate shortly, its value. It may be: the question needs to be kept open. If, of course, precisely, it is to have value.

 

Asyndeton’s game of coherence is a promise. Like any promise, it may not make good on itself: that is precisely what makes it asyndetic. A promise whose fulfilment was absolutely guaranteed would not be a promise at all, but the determined, ironclad operation of a law. A promise is a promise not because it can be fulfilled, but because it need not be: the real figure of the promise is the broken one. Conversely, when a promise is fulfilled there is something in this very fulfilment which is gratuitous, which need not have occurred in order for it to be a promise, and which has arrived like happenstance from the outside. Asyndeton is no more incoherence than it is coherence: it is the promise of coherence, the very opening of coherence as a question which links it–asyndetically, as a question–to the postmodern. As promise, it is also, as we shall see, the site of return of a certain performativity.

 

Much writing on or of the postmodern (and this much, this for example, cannot help but bring with it–already, and before the positing of any specific example to fill that role–the list and the question of coherence) of course poses coherence as a question, to the extent that it is quite precisely and knowingly concerned with what can be characterised as logics of structural limit and margin. To pose the question of limit is not to jettison structure, principle or coherence as such: it is to ask about the ways in which regularities and principles of coherence are embedded in and emerge from fields not governed by those principles. It is to position an investigation on the margins where a regularity is still in the process of formation. The instability which is constitutive of margins is thus not merely a stage to be superseded by a final stable form; on the contrary, it is what remains, as an irreducible ghosting or a zone of undecidability where such stabilities not only coalesce but also just as rapidly dissolve again. Instability here reveals itself as the very condition and limit of any possible stability. The philosophical locus classicus for the investigation of such logics of margins is of course Derrida, but the issue is hardly one engaging only philosophy. Such logics are also involved, for example–and here again we have to go into list mode–in things as different as the flexible accumulation which Harvey sees as characteristic of late capitalism, and the ways in which capitalism perpetuates itself as crisis; the generic differends of phrasing Lyotard examines in The Differend; the machinic assemblages of Deleuze and Guattari; and the Jamesonian “cultural logic of late capitalism” (though we might well want to question the singularity of the definite article of Jameson’s subtitle, and suggest that what late capitalism provides is not so much a singular cultural logic as an endless and never fully systematic negotiability of cultural logics).

 

Exchanges

 

The list is a set of exchanges across limits, a question of what links and separates. What can be involved in such exchanges? What, for a start, of that very concept of exchange? What exchanges does the concept of exchange itself take part in? If categories are formed in exchange, then exchange itself can be no simple category or concept, but already an exchange of exchanges.

 

Exchange is never total equivalence. Equivalence is the overlooking of the remainder and the messy overlaps of the superimposition: equivalence is generalisation, and this is why there can be no general principle of the list. Neither, for the same reason, can there be a generalised exchange, as exchange is the very possibility of generalisation, just as it is of equivalence, which it everywhere exceeds. Exchange is invoked everywhere, and yet it has no principle; without principle, it is the very possibility of principle. Exchange is related to the event before it is a matter of the concept; in its nonequivalence, it marks out as remainder a complex trajectory across a number of regions.

 

Traversing lists, exchange is not a term exclusive to one discourse, or even any totalisable set of discourses. Indeed, the very act of totalisation must necessarily invoke exchange, which thus remains beyond or outside all possible acts of totalisation it enables. Exchange as such cannot be totalised. That there is no general exchange forces us back into list mode, a series of names which will always be haunted by arbitrariness. One such listing: Marx and the political economy of exchange-values; the Saussurean thesis of linguistic value as based entirely on a play of “differences without positive terms”; Lyotard’s familiar argument that performativity, as the effectivity of the circulation and production of exchange-value, becomes late capitalism’s sole legitimation of any action; somewhere nearby, his in many ways complementary argument about incommensurabilities of exchange in the differend; connecting in a number of ways to both of these are the Wittgensteinian problematics of the language-game, with all of their severe disjunctions from the Saussurean model and the various semiotics which come from it; though they seem to avoid mention of each other, a number of connections including a shared one back to Heidegger place Vattimo and Derrida somewhere in the same neighbourhood: Derrida raises the question of a general economy as it emerges in Hegel, Bataille, Freud, and returns repeatedly to the problematics of the post(-) and its destinerrance–to mention only those; in another direction again (now the post- has arrived), there are Harvey’s arguments about market deregulation and the economics of flexible accumulation. And so on, and so on…: the ellipsis, the mark of the list.

 

To list is not to say that the elements of the list are all examples of the same thing: that at some maybe deeper and more essential level which hides itself from the causal gaze, all of these highly disparate discourses and phenomena would show themselves to be just so many examples of a single process (a quite classical structuralist homology, in effect). That is precisely what the list leaves in suspense and demurs from saying. Is exchange the same thing in Marx and Saussure? In the former, to go no further than the starting-point for the first volume of Capital, exchange describes the relationships between two categories, money and the commodity; in the latter, it describes the co-existence of certain elements within a common paradigm-set of morphemes. Different relationships are set up in each case, in different ways and between different categories of different entities. There is no simple equivalence: one cannot superimpose Marx on Saussure and hope for a neat fit. And yet, neither are the two unrelated. When Saussure introduces the concept of value as the mechanism of linguistic meaning, the extended figure on which he draws is, after all, nothing but the coin. Significantly, it is an analogy which cannot even strictly be made in the detail Saussure’s own argument requires (Harris 118-123). There is a complex exchange between Marx and Saussure, between exchange in Marx and exchange in Saussure. One cannot exchange one exchange for the other in the sense of achieving a total equivalence; but on the other hand, the two exchanges cannot but be exchanged, cannot be prevented from exchange, in all sorts of partial and perhaps unforeseeable ways. And then there are all the other terms in our initial list (and more, and more). Not to mention that there will be, in the very next instance, what we can surely take only as the equally complex exchange between the exchange invoked by any term in that potentially endless list and that of any other. And then between that exchange of exchanges and the previous….

 

In this proliferation, exchange is a switchboard connecting and marking the distance between all sorts of things, and in ways which can never wholly be determined before the event. There can be no single or even stable and determinable exchange which will be common coin for all of them. What we have here is more like a sheaf of disparate causalities and temporalities, whose vectors move in different directions, at different rates and in different rhythms. Pierre Bourdieu is fond of citing Cournot to the effect that chance is “a word which…designates the encounter between two independent causal series” (Bourdieu, In Other Words 80). In this sense, exchange opens up to contingency where equivalence would banish it. The contingent is not what is devoid of regularity or causality, so much as that whose regularities and causalities–such as they may be, for that remains the asyndetic question–belong to a different economy. In moving from one such economy to another, in even invoking them in the same breath, what is at stake is not only a mechanism of exchange, but also the rates of exchange: how one exchanges between one exchange and another.

 

Consider this in more detail. Let us continue for a while in the Saussurean circuit. Saussure remodels signification along economic lines, as value produced in the interplay of terms which remain purely differential rather than substantial. An objection frequently raised to Saussure is that this play of differences is nevertheless hampered by its being limited to the linguistic: to the phonemic or graphemic differentials of the signifier on the one hand, and the abstractly conceptual differentials of the signified on the other, in disregard of the nonlinguistic forces at work within language. Under a number of very frequent and influential readings, Saussure is often seen as operating an elaborate and interlocking series of exclusions of the socio-political, through binaries of synchrony/diachrony, langue/parole, syntagm/paradigm: what results is a system which is transcendental, non-phenomenal, frozen off from actual language, actual usage, and all possibilities of agency.² Nevertheless, as Gregory S. Jay points out, the Course itself “cautions against building a formalist theory on such principles as ‘the arbitrariness of the sign’ and does so through socio-political metaphors.” What’s more, these socio-political metaphors cluster in precisely those passages which are so frequently read as proof of Saussure’s very refusal of the social:

 

The signifier, though to all appearances freely chosen with respect to the idea that it represents, is fixed [imposé], not free, with respect to the linguistic community that uses it. The masses have no voice in the matter, and the signifier chosen by language could be replaced by no other. This fact, which seems to embody a contradiction, might be called colloquially “the stacked deck” [la carte forcée]…. No individual, even if he willed it, could modify in any way at all the choice that has been made; and what is more, the community itself cannot control so much as a single word [la masse elle-même ne peut exercer sa souveraineté sur un seul mot]; it is bound to the existing language.

No longer can language be identified with a contract pure and simple…language furnishes the best proof that a law accepted by a community is a thing that is tolerated and not a rule to which all freely consent. (Saussure 71; qtd. in Jay 51- 2)

 

Jay reads this as something quite different from linguistic formalism: it is, he says, a “demystification of a social contract theory of language,” which “offers itself as a course in ideological criticism,” and which “could aim a political semiotics at those theories of individual freedom, law and community that figure themselves as the transparent self-conscious expressions of knowing subjects” (Jay 52).

 

A socio-political metaphor does not, of course, make a socio-political discourse. Jay is not claiming that Saussure is a political theorist who has been misinterpreted by wilful epigones as a linguistic formalist. At very least, the more obvious formalisms exist alongside, within passages such as the one I have just cited; they are even in many ways attempts at resolution of the issues raised by such passages, and themselves complex negotiations of the politico-discursive. A reading of the Course cannot afford to forget, for example, that whatever else it might be, its argument is also a disciplinary one, and its distinctions between what is internal and external to linguistics are never a conceptual or epistemological matter alone, but always a matter of struggle over what sort of activity is to be done in institutions which declare themselves linguistic, by whom and with what training: it is an argument about universities, chairs, professionalisation, and funds. Another complex network of possible exchanges plugs into the switchboard, to be read necessarily both with and against an indeterminate number of those other exchanges, in variable and sometimes downright indeterminable ways, but never with the possibility of reading in simple isolation from them, or with the hope that all of these simply reduce to the one simple transaction.

 

The argument to be made about Saussure, then, is not that he excludes “the political.” (What would the political be, that it could be an option a text could take?) It is rather that such a deliberate methodological refusal is itself a socio-political move. Saussure’s text is itself diacritical: it takes its meanings from a complex set of interchanges which traverse it and which it negotiates but does not regulate, in a way which is both profoundly Saussurean (this is, after all, the very argument the Course makes about meaning as value) and at the same time deeply inimical to the Saussurean project (because these interchanges do not stop short at or even permit the clear definition of a boundary of the text). Saussure’s text operates a set of exchange rates with what is simultaneously incommensurate with it and yet formative of it, and out of which it produces compromises which are functional because of rather than despite their formal incompletenesses.

 

The political is not a realm outside the textual, with which textuality negotiates more or less faithfully or whose story it tells more or less truly. It is this very ad hoc, partially determined and yet partially indeterminate, unstable, traversal process of exchange. If the economy of exchange set out by the Course appears formally less than consistent, this is because it is also negotiating changes across economies, where no smooth transition of values is possible. Needing to admit as the basis of its theoretical exchange mechanisms the interconnections which make up value, it must also and at the same time exclude some of those interconnections (the “sociological,” the “historical,” etc.) on the basis of other and equally necessary exchange mechanisms (disciplinarity, professionalism, pedagogics, etc.), and without common ground. What are the rates of exchange here, marked within Saussure’s text–if indeed we can still speak of a within of something constituted by its exchanges? What interests are to be gleaned, and what unrecuperable losses? “Saussure” is a complex and unresolved network of switching-points between discourses which are–or so it would seem from the evidence of the Course itself, and its own assertions about what can and cannot be considered within its system–strictly incommensurable. This is not to argue that they cannot be put together.³ They obviously can be, and are all the time, beginning with the Course itself, and with certain very real effects when this happens. Anybody knows that incommensurables are exchanged all the time, that they are among the most banal of exchanges, despite the impossibility of any stable or even fully determinable exchange rate. Formal incommensurability has never meant inadjudicability, just the necessity of playing it by ear. True, the fit will never be exact, the translation never true; there will always be residues left to one side, dropouts on the line, interference patterns where the superimposition of two noncongruences produces fleeting, persistent moiré ghosts in the system. But it is this messiness of fit which is the model of exchange, not the balanced equation (which is the freak, the crude approximation, the burst of nostalgia). And it is this messiness of fit which, far from being an indecision which marks the death of the political, is itself the very possibility of the political, the point from which it can begin.

 

There would doubtless be similar moves to be made in the other interconnections available on this exchange. Each of them would be a meta-argument, readable as about itself and its own procedures; each of them raises the meta-economic question of how one converts between economies. None of them provides a position which is epistemologically, at least, necessarily more privileged (or more “meta-“) than the others. At the same time, of course, this is not to say the plurality of perspectives means an indifference, in which all such positions would be in principle interchangeable: exchange is after all not formal equivalence, and asyndeton keeps the question of connection open to contingency. The choice–and we should not assume that this should be simply the free choice of an agent–always stands to be something which matters very much. Metalanguages are always in some sense incommensurable, available or performable in different circumstances, under different conditions, producing different effects, all of which are never simply substitutable one for the other. Nevertheless–or is it because of this?–there are always incessant exchanges and negotiations being made amongst them, according to something like a pragmatics of the ad hoc, of what lies to hand. Their very incommensurability is what makes exchange both crucial and unavoidable.

 

Limits

 

At various points in each of his English-language collections of essays, The End of Modernity and The Transparent Society, Gianni Vattimo expands on an argument whose outline is familiar from Weber, among others: modernity is that epoch in which being modern becomes a fundamental value in itself.

 

Modernity is primarily the era in which the increased circulation of goods (Simmel) and ideas, and increased social mobility (Gehlen), bring into focus the value of the new and predispose the conditions for the identification of value (the value of Being itself) with the new. (End of Modernity 100)

 

Because this fundamental value–the one which effectively founds all other values–is itself necessarily without foundation, one of the consequences of this move is to raise in a particularly acute form the whole issue of axiomatics. With the modern, to the extent of modernity, all that is necessary for value is that something appear in the circulation of exchange: now, here. For modernity, newness itself newly appears as a founding of value (and thus, by its own logic, of the most valued value). The most valued as the most modern is that which is due most to this present circulation, the newest; that which has not, until now, had a place in the incessant circulation of values in which it now appears and for which it now provides a bright, ephemeral point around which everything, at least for now, gravitates. For this modernity, in so far as it is modernity, exchange–and particularly the debut, the entry into circulation–is all. Whatever does not circulate, or at least bear the possibility of circulation, cannot have value. For it even to be value, use-value can only be a derivative form, a sort of residue left behind in the wake of exchange. Value is fundamentally exchange-value: modernity translates currency.

 

This modernity is expansive and linear: a logic of progress, which is “just that process which leads towards a state of things in which further progress is possible, and nothing else” (End of Modernity 101). Yet it also curiously finds itself checked by a set of internal limits, whose figure here will be none other than the list:

 

A good deal of twentieth-century philosophy describes the future in a way deeply tinged with the grandiose. Such descriptions range from the early Heidegger’s definition of existence as project and transcendence to Sartre’s notion of transcendence, to Ernst Bloch’s utopianism (which is emblematic of all Hegelian/Marxist philosophy), and to the various ethics which seem ever more insistently to locate the value of an action in the fact of its making possible other choices and other actions, thus opening up a future. This same grandiose vision is the faithful mirror of an era that in general may be called “futuristic”…. The same may naturally be said of the twentieth-century artistic avant-garde movements, whose radically anti-historicist inspiration is most authentically expressed by Futurism and Dadism. Both in philosophy and in avant-garde poetics, the pathos of the future is still accompanied by an appeal to the authentic, according to a model of thought characteristic of all modern “futurism:” the tension towards the future is seen as a tension aimed towards a renewal and return to a condition of originary authenticity. (End of Modernity 100)

 

Modernity is grandiose in that it tells a narrative–and this can only be a variety of those infamous “grand narratives” of Lyotard–which lays an ethical claim to the future by curving it back onto its past through that “renewal and return to a condition of originary authenticity.” This great sweep marked out by “a good deal of twentieth-century philosophy” and the “most authentic” moments of the avant-garde can nevertheless only be posited metonymically, from examples. Modernity is thus never simply given as general law, but only as asyndetic regularity: or rather, it is able to posit itself as general law only at the cost of excluding as illegitimate or inauthentic whatever might not fall into such a regularity. It would seem to pass over some things, though it may never be quite sure before the event just which they could be. Authenticity and asyndeton thus mark a limit of the modern, its unstable and never complete passage from regularity to rule: the blinking of generality.

 

That modernity does not sweep all of philosophy and the avant-garde along in its necessity implies that it is open to a certain contingency. Diverse things which are not necessarily reducible to the same–that is to say, which steadfastly remain a list–come together in it, but only to “predispose the conditions for the identification of value…with the new:” predisposition is neither strict determination nor pure accident, but the envelope of the adventitious. What authenticity attempts to mark out, selectively and retrospectively, as already beyond the boundaries of modernity, is a multiplicity of histories which are not equivalents.

 

The attempt fails in at least three ways, each of which arises not from the countering of modernity with another opposing mode, but from within the very logic of modernity itself. The first has to do with what Arnold Gehlen calls secularization: if the new is the fundamental value and progress “is just that process which leads towards a state of things in which further progress is possible, and nothing else” (End of Modernity 101), there is no room for narratives of transcendence; secularization involves the “establishment of laws proper to each of many different fields and domains of experience” (End of Modernity 103). But as Gehlen points out, this strategy in the name of progress must turn back on progress itself as it

 

fans out in divergent processes that develop their own internal legality ever further, [so that] slowly progress…is displaced towards the periphery of facts and consciousness, and there is totally emptied out. (qtd. in End of Modernity 102)

 

Secondly, modernity’s insistence on the new cannot but be a determined ethnocentrism: it is possible only at a certain advanced stage of capitalist development. The collapse of colonialism and imperialism makes “a unilinear and centralized history de facto problematic” (Transparent Society 4). And thirdly, the development of mass media and their insatiable demand for content leads to a proliferation of narratives and viewpoints which “do not make [the social] more ‘transparent,’ but more complex, even chaotic.” (Transparent Society 4)

 

If the end of modernity, as Vattimo suggests, is thus “when it no longer seems possible to regard history as unilinear” (Transparent Society 2), this end cannot be just a terminal point in a linear progression, after which everything would change radically. Such a point could only be the very moment of modernity itself, the advent of the new. The end of modernity will already have been everywhere within it, in the asyndetic structure of its very regularity. What begins, with this “end,” to reveal itself as already having been there all along is a manifold of regions in which exchange–no longer under the sole aegis of the new — becomes the question of the exchange of exchange: the exchange for which rules do not already exist, where everything is yet to be made. This is the Riemannian space which so fascinates Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus, and in which, according to Albert Lautman,

 

two neighbouring observers…can locate the points of their immediate vicinity but cannot locate their spaces in relation to each other without a new convention. Each vicinity is therefore like a shred of Euclidean space, but the linkage between one vicinity and the next is not defined and can be effected in an infinite number of ways. Riemann space at its most general thus presents itself as an amorphous collection of pieces that are juxtaposed but not attached to each other. (qtd. in Plotnitsky, In the Shadow of Hegel 57)

 

It is also the space which comes to characterise the sciences of the nouveau Nouvel Esprit and their break with Bachelardian epistemology, according to Michel Serres’ work of the 1960s and 1970s: the space of Hermes, where knowledge is not the uniform taxonomia of the encyclopedia, or even development punctuated by paradigm shifts, but a series of seas connected by all sorts of unforeseeable passages. Hermes: the messenger, god of communication and of crossroads, but also thief. We could continue: Plotnitsky’s complementarity, Lyotard’s incommensurable regimes of phrasing would all be here somewhere: the very shape of the space is that of the list.

 

As is its temporality. The time this break inaugurates–and that inauguration can only be a particularly complex logic of foreshadowing–is multiple, non-linear, a sheaf of non-totalisable and asyndetic temporalities. This does not necessarily imply a refusal of linearity or narrative, but it certainly involves a reframing of their significance. Indeed, linearity continues: how could it not when the end of modernity stops nothing, for the reason that the very figure of the end as terminus is constitutive rather than subversive of modernity? Now–and again that “now” will be already far from simple–the linear is retopologised, as a local or regional regularity of the manifold rather than as general rule. To say this is not to limit its extent: there is no contradiction between a phenomenon’s being regional in this sense and thoroughly global in its spread. What regionality implies is not smallness of scale but that its regularities are not already given, in principle, as rule: that is, that their sway is not guaranteed in advance, but is the outcome of exchanges without rule, exchanges of exchange. In this, regionality remains essentially open to the ethical, the necessity of judgement without model, and to the political, in that the extent of a region is always a matter of hegemonies, dominations and contestations whose outcome may in principle have been otherwise. Regionality does not dismiss or destroy linearity or the grand narrative: it multiplies them, and plunges them into a multiplicity of other exchanges which give rise to and situate them, but of which they are no longer the model. The global strategy is essentially local in that it is situational: its outcome cannot be predicted from universal or general principles. Globalisation is itself a strategy, and a local one: it makes certain claims, from certain positions, and with certain effects which, however, are not simply totalisable, due to the regional structure of the manifold, nor, for the same reason, reducible to the effects intended by the agents of this strategy. While linearity and narrative do not in any sense cease to exist, nevertheless, at the limits of modernity’s narrative of progress and the escalation of the new there is silently everted an underside in which everything is also act, event, strategy without finality. One of the purest figures of this would again be Pollock’s abstract expressionism, which retains the line but multiplies it out into an entire field without boundaries, in a depth which everts itself into an entire choreography of bodily movements. On the one hand, the layered depths into which the lines recede and from which they emerge with startling clarity; on the other, the calligraphy which traces out the dance of the painting body. On the one hand, the symbolic, representational, narrative, conceptual structure; on the other, the act or event which gives rise to and underpins this, but which can thus always threaten it with possible dissolution.

 

Here, it is useful to recall Slavoj Zizek’s characterisation of the act:

 

With an act, stricto sensu, we can…never fully foresee its consequences, i.e., the way it will transform the existing symbolic space: the act is a rupture after which “nothing remains the same.” Which is why, although History can always be explained, accounted for, afterward, we can never, as its agents, caught in its flow, foresee its course in advance: we cannot do it insofar as it is not an “objective process” but a process continuously interrupted by the scansion of acts. The new (the symbolic reality that emerges as the aftermath of an act) is always a “state that is essentially a by-product,” never the result of advance planning. (Enjoy your Symptom! 45-6)

 

The product of the interference of independent series, even if those series should themselves be highly causal, is never entirely predictable. Even so, there is something familiar about this. After all, to see the act as a rupture after which nothing remains the same–whether or not that after should be the expected–is precisely the modern imaginary of the moment of break and the narrative of the new which spirals from it. It needs to be augmented by what Zizek elsewhere characterises as the logic of the symptom.⁴ The eversion effected by the act is not only a break after which everything is different; it is also, and far more oddly, a rupture before which nothing remains the same. The act is retrospective: it reveals this is how things will already have been. Until the moment of the act, things have appeared in one fashion, but with the act the very way in which they have previously appeared now itself appears differently–and in a way which is not predictable from that previous appearance or governed by the intentions of its agents, but is itself also “a state that is essentially a by-product” and thus multiple and asyndetic.⁵ History is never written solely by the victors, and is singular only to the extent that it is hegemonic.

 

The “end of modernity,” then, is not punctual. This internal limit of modernity which manifests itself as the eversion of the linearity of the new into the singularity of the event is not a point on a continuum, whether of rupture or articulation. It cannot be assigned a date, not because such an end is purely mythic and refuses to have anything to do with the events of actual history, but because it traverses events in another way than that of the succession of dates. The end of modernity is always too late or too early, never on time, now, here, but marked by an always already or a not yet; it is not a point on a timeline at which everything winds up and something new prepares to begin, but the ways in which modernity’s timeline itself devolves incessantly into the always already and the not yet. Geoffrey Bennington points out how in its own unravelling temporalities the moment of Derridean deconstruction is similarly unlocatable in a chronology:
 

the logic of supplementarity is stated or signed neither simply by Rousseau nor simply by Derrida (who found it all in Rousseau...)--and this difficulty of assigning (and therefore dating) doctrine or belief obviously explains why deconstruction disrupts any simple history of philosophy or ideas, which would need to know, for example, when the logic of supplementarity was thought or invented (in the mid-eighteenth century by Rousseau or the late twentieth by Derrida--it makes quite a difference in the history of ideas), but cannot know any such thing, for supplementarity exceeds and precedes dating, as its condition of (im)possibility, precisely. (Bennington 198) ⁶

 

The limit is not so much boundary as list: a singularity which is always and already scattered across an asyndetic series of other events, other signs,⁷ traversing which a narrative–many narratives–will be simultaneously both possible and impossible. This is the post- of the postmodern, the “when” in the “when it no longer seems possible to regard history as unilinear” (Transparent Society 2): not an after, or the cut guaranteeing the novelty of the after, but the seriality which now (and that moment is now itself immediately serial, scattered) is seen to have been already always inhabiting history. If modernity is “that era in which being modern becomes…the fundamental value to which all other values refer” (End of Modernity 99), then the postmodern cannot be simply an era.

 

Not simply: for at the same time it cannot not be that. The postmodern, this end-as-limit of the modern, does not simply terminate anything: neither the modern itself as epoch (whose logic, as limit, it must follow impeccably, at and to the limit), nor, more broadly, epochality itself. The postmodern recasts modernity’s narrative of progress: it localises it within a manifold of temporalities which can be reduced neither to survivals of the past nor to seeds of the future, but which in their very multiplicity remain open to “the scansion of acts.” But this does not mean that the postmodern must be some sort of abjuring of dates or events, that it somehow floats motionless above the real stuff of history of events, or that the postmodern is simply the realisation which could in principle be made at any time, that the linear is underpinned by the multiple. After all, Vattimo insists here that the postmodern is tied very closely to certain actual events which are already embedded in and arise from highly modern narratives of progress, whose logic they do not so much terminate as follow impeccably to its limits: secularization, the collapse of colonialism, and the development and proliferation of the mass media. It is not that the postmodern is without anchorage in the chronological, but that it is everywhere in it, proleptically and retrospectively. It arrives (at this date, in this situation, in the form of this question) in the mode of having always already been there. In such an arrival, of which there will never be only one, the postmodern does not so much begin as it is announced, with all the performative force of announcement. To announce an arrival is to bring that arrival into being by and in the act of announcement; but that very arrival can only be effectuated by an utterance which presents that state of things as already accomplished: “The postmodern is here.”⁸ The technologies of the media and the collapse of colonialism do not cause the postmodern: they announce it in this performative sense as what is already underway in its multiple and scattered singularity.

 

We must be careful to give all the necessary performative force to this announcement. There is nothing magical about it: performativity plunges us straight into the social. (Magic would be the imaginary of a performative independent of any real conditions which would make it possible, whose force as performative is rolled up in the word itself, by the tongue of the utterer). Even a classical Austinian performative is unthinkable without this. For “I declare you married” to make any sense at all as a performative, let alone to be felicitous, presupposes as already in place a large array of social, political and institutional formations–legal, religious, familial, governmental, sexual–all of which have their complex, multiple and potentially highly disjunct temporalities. For this reason, the announcement of the postmodern is more than just an essentially epistemological act, a realisation of the complexity underlying logics of progress. Announcement, like a declaration of marriage, makes a difference. For the postmodern to be announced places it already within the real.

 

It is in this light that we should read the “slightly perplexing tension” which Bennington sees between the ideas of the postmodern advanced in the two parts of the English-language version of Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition (Bennington 242). In the long essay which gives the book its title, the postmodern is pictured as succeeding the modern in a relatively unproblematic manner which can itself be described only as modern: certain developments of information technology in particular push the modern into the postmodern. But the shorter appendix, “Answering the question: what is postmodernism?,” sees the postmodern as what precedes the modern, as the cutting edge of its avant-garde. Though the appendix represents a later revision of Lyotard’s position,⁹ the disjunction between the two parts of the book is nevertheless precisely that inherent in the logic of the post-, which is both condition, the state which characterises an epoch, and the question by which that epochality is unsettled. This tension is not a matter of the threatened incoherence of “postmodernity” as a concept, but the very mode of its temporality as both anchored in and dislocative of the modern.

 

Phatics

 

It is of particular interest that the domain to which Vattimo returns so frequently that it seems almost the privileged site for this folding of modernity and the postmodern, should be the aesthetic. Not only does Vattimo philosophise the aesthetic as such, rather than attempt to give it a genealogy elsewhere and in other terms, but he often gives it what at first may seem a surprisingly familiar role: the aesthetic is what allows us to imagine ways of life other than those we live, and to “realize the contingency and relativity of the ‘real’ world in which we have to live” (Transparent Society 10).

 

Taken in isolation, this could almost be the ostranenie of Russian Formalism. But Vattimo’s arguments mark themselves off from these through a series of slight but far-reaching dislocations. In terms which come from the later Heidegger of “The Origin of the Work of Art,” the work is both a setting up of the world and a setting forth of the earth (Auf-stellung and Her-stellung): “The world is set up as the system of significations it inaugurates; the earth is set forth by the work insofar as it is put forward, shown, as the obscure and thematically inexhaustible depths in which the world of the work is rooted” (Transparent Society 53). The world signifies, the earth is the deep substratum of world beyond all signification. But this earth is not simply prior to any world; it is set forth by the work: Herstellung is if anything more active than the English translation would suggest, implying not only a displaying of what is already there or its restoration to visibility but also its production or sheer manufacture. The work is not then a mere froth of temporal and cultural significations beneath which one glimpses the eternal: it is what produces those depths in which world arises as always and already embedded. The work is the retrospective manufacture of the earth, not just of the world. The effect of earth is thus not to root both world and work in an eternal Nature, but on the contrary to deracinate both:

 

Only because the world of significance unfolded in the work seems to be obscurely rooted (hence not logically “founded”) in the earth, can the effect of the work be one of disorientation. Earth is not world. It is not a system of signifying connections: it is other, the nothing, general gratuitousness and insignificance. The work is a foundation only insofar as it produces an ongoing disorientation that can never be recuperated in a final Geborgenheit. (Transparent Society 53)

 

The work sets up a world, and in doing this sets forth an earth in which that world will have been always and already deeply rooted; but that earth is set forth in and by that work, a product of the work, which it can found only in a retrospective circle, and necessarily as obscurity. The work is founded not only in but as obscurity: at its heart, always other than it is, is disorientation.

 

Earth is the obduracy of what refuses to reduce to world, that residue which remains at the heart of any system of signifying and returns to haunt it. In the earlier terms of Being and Time, this disorientation is the anxiety of Dasein faced with a world into which it has been thrown:

 

While single things belong to the world insofar as they are inserted in a referential totality of significance (each thing is referred to others, as effect, cause, instrument, sign, etc.), the world as such and as a whole does not refer and thus has no significance. Anxiety is a mark of this insignificance, the utter gratuitousness of the fact that the world is. (Transparent Society 50)

 

This insignificance is not simply an absence of signification. The world has that, and in plenty: all things in it are connected in a dense web of significations and inter-referrals. In a way, the problem is one of the sheer excessiveness of this exchange, which proliferates endlessly and on the local level; its insignificance lies in its asyndetic refusal of generality, that incessant “scansion of acts” of which Zizek speaks. The distinction Heidegger is later to make between world and earth only serves to make the relationship between work and world clearer: if the work disorientates, it is because it too provides an experience of thrownness, an uncanniness in the face of the insignificance this time of the work, which “does not allow itself to be drawn back into a pre-established network of significance, at least insofar as it cannot be deduced as a logical consequence” (Transparent Society 50). Work and world alike are the sites of asyndetic currency exchanges, open to the contingent and the unforeseen. The work “is never serene, never ‘beautiful’ in the sense of a perfect harmony between inside and outside, essence and existence, etc.” (Transparent Society 53). Its very setting-forth is grounded in the energetic disparity of an exchange which can never be concluded, and which is a refusal of use value. Something in it resists being drawn back into the security of a reorientation; the work leaves a certain excess which cannot be consumed, and which can thus only continue unabated in exchange. Indeed, it is the inequivalence of this remainder, the inexchangeable at the heart of exchange, which guarantees the continuation of exchange itself.¹⁰

 

To this extent, what Vattimo is offering seems at times very close to a quite classically vanguardist view of the aesthetic and its functions, and one which correspondingly gives the aesthetic a massive centrality to modernity itself. Modernity arises when, towards the end of the fifteenth century, “the artist came to be thought of as a creative genius and an increasingly intense cult of the new and original emerged that had not existed before (in previous ages the imitation of models was in fact of the utmost importance)” (Transparent Society 2). The socio-political efficacy of the work considered in these terms is as an art “which refuses to be considered as a place of non-theoretical and non-practical experience, and instead claims to be the model for a privileged mode of knowledge of the real, a moment of subversion of the hierarchized structure of the individual and society, and thus an instrument of true social and political action” (End of Modernity 53).

 

But the twist is that in Vattimo’s argument, this is not simply vanguardism: or rather, it is a vanguardism accelerated to the conclusions of its own logic. First of all, if it claims art “to be the model for a privileged mode of knowledge of the real,” we need to emphasise the indefinite article: a model: by its own logic not the only one, but one which may for all that be global. Aesthetic activity, and particularly the avant-gardist sort, is a useful model for a more generalised economy precisely because in its in-significance it has already performed on itself that transformation into incessant exchange-value which with modernity has come to characterise the monetary economy. (This already is not a chronological marker: it does not suggest some sort of prescience by which, out of all the disparate fields of human activity, the aesthetic has led the way by being first to grasp a logic which will only gradually come to inform other fields; what it points to is a structure of delay, by which that transformation into exchange-value has always and already occurred, even at the very moment of its arrival. What it establishes is not a priority but a folding.) And here lies the second point. In this hegemony of exchange-value, the aesthetic is not just a rather marginal arena of the social, at worst irrelevant and at best the licensed fool. The technological cultures and cultural technologies of late capitalism aestheticise all experience. They produce aesthetic models of behaviour, such as stardom; aesthetic models of government and power, in techniques of consensus, whose effects are made possible only by the essentially rhetorical strategies of the media; even aesthetic models of epistemology, such as Kuhn’s theory of paradigm shifts in the sciences, profoundly based as it is on the figure of genius (End of Modernity 96). Everyday life itself becomes aestheticised.¹¹

 

Here Vattimo invokes Benjamin, to suggest that there is a complex relationship between the Heideggerian Stoss, the disorientating impact of the work, and the shock Benjamin sees as characteristic of the art of technical reproduction. For Benjamin, shock is a necessary feature of the model of the psyche which Freud suggests in Beyond the Pleasure Principle: the conscious registration of the shocks provided by the unforeseeable stimuli which impinge on the organism is a way of minimising the damage they can cause. While shock may be part of the project of a vanguard art, it is far more demotic, even pedestrian, than the Stoss is for Heidegger. Benjamin’s Baudelaire essay keeps returning to those great figures of the city, the crowd, traffic: shock is the daily experience of coping with multiplicity, the manifold, the incommensurate, the inexchangeable which can thus only be exchanged. If shock also belongs to art, it is an art which can no longer keep itself at a hieratic distance, but which, in the loss of the aura entailed by the new processes of technical reproduction, finds itself plunged into the jostle of the crowd. Film, says Benjamin, is like that,
 

the art form that is in keeping with the increased threat to his life which modern man has to face. Man's need to expose himself to shock effects is his adjustment to the dangers threatening him. The film corresponds to profound changes in the apperceptive apparatus--changes that are experienced on an individual scale by the man in the street in big-city traffic, on a historical scale by every present-day citizen. (Benjamin 243, n19) ¹²

 

But now we have left Heidegger. Unlike Heideggerian Stoss, Benjamin’s shock rediscovers itself in the very haunts of das Man, the “they” of “they say” in all its inauthenticity. On the one hand, there are passages throughout the Baudelaire essay (to go no further than that) in which the everyday appears as the very site of alienation. On the other hand, though–and this is what finds no counterpart in Heidegger–the shock which disorientates emerges from within this very milieu, and not against it from outside. Shock opens the question of community, of community as question, from within itself, and it does this in the very movement by which shock is the experience of what is not yet governed by any single prior system of significations. Once raised, the question may of course be closed again, almost immediately parried by consciousness, but what is important and irreducible is that blinking occasioned by the impingement of the new: it remains the very possibility–as question–of community. Shock and community are profoundly linked.

 

Shock, community and the aesthetic: for in opening up the gap of the question Vattimo’s invocation of shock harks back, via Gadamer, to a familiar argument from Kant’s Critique of Judgement. For Kant, aesthetic pleasure is “not defined as that which the subject experiences in relation to the object, but is rather that pleasure which derives from the recognition of belonging to a group…that shares the same capacity for appreciating the beautiful” (End of Modernity 56; see also Transparent Society 66-7). The very possibility of the aesthetic is that of belonging to a group: the experience of the beautiful is also and always the experience of community. For Kant, such a group is simply “humanity itself,” a claim which it is hard to see as other than the metonymic and utopian projection of the values of Kant’s own quite specific community, nationality and class.¹³ (As Vattimo suggests, where foundation is no longer at issue, a group’s identification of itself and its values as universal may be the only form of inauthenticity still possible (Transparent Society 70).) Late capitalism’s technologies of information open up other possibilities, though. The universalisation of the media does not result in the ever more efficient and seductive imposition of a single universal set of values. On the contrary, the media’s very imperatives of efficiency and performativity have the effect of undoing that hegemonic metonym of a single universal set of values. The media allow–even necessitate, as a matter of the very political economy of late capitalism–a multiplicity of narratives, experiences, worlds in the Heideggerean sense. These do not make the social more transparent or utopian; they thicken it into an altogether more chaotic and heterotopian burgeoning of micro-narratives. And all of this, Vattimo argues, occurs as the outcome of the very implementation of rational management, a scientistic rule of reason whose very desire for maximization of effectivity can only scatter out into a multiplicity of dialects, and an erosion of the reality principle. The only universalisation of community the media can offer is the pluralisation of communities (Transparent Society 7).

 

And it is precisely in the domain of popular culture in all its forms that this proliferating articulation of aesthetic experience as community occurs. The very mechanisms of rational domination contain within themselves, as the rigorous and inescapable consequences of their own premises, a certain dehiscence whereby they cannot but open the possibility of the proliferation of the very things they attempt to bring under control. What power seeks to produce as unity must necessarily in part involve a proliferation beyond the bounds of that unity. This of course is to guarantee nothing, neither the reestablishment of power nor its dismantling: all it says is that the balances are always in their very nature yet to be decided (in its various forms, a frequent closing trope for the pieces gathered in The Transparent Society), and thus that the capabilities of the new media and technologies must be met with what Derrida memorably calls “the most vigilant hospitality” (Points 434 n7).

 

While this aestheticisation is certainly due among other things to the rise of new technologies, what these do is only extend, accelerate and multiply what is already there. The technologies of “mechanical reproduction” ensure that what has previously been an experience of disorientation restricted to certain narrow domains such as avant-garde art now becomes the texture of the everyday, at the same time as the non-auratic nature of the everyday enters the avant-garde.¹⁴ The end of modernity is not so much irruption of the new (which is nothing but modernity itself), but the massive eversion which brings to the surface what that very eversion will ensure will have been from that point always and already there.

 

There is another sense, however, in which Vattimo’s argument is quite profoundly and classically Heideggerian. For Heidegger, the aesthetic is not a function of the work’s referentiality, nor of any homology it may set up between inside and outside. The aesthetic functions at an altogether more prior and fundamental level than the proposition. If the proposition makes a certain claim to truth, and demands verification (or refutation) through its correspondence to what is the case, then the aesthetic, qua aesthetic, proposes nothing. What makes the work a work is rather what Heidegger calls its “setting-into-work of truth,” the way in which it is able to disclose a world within which such verification or refutation might be a possibility: the yet-to-be-done of the asyndetic. This “setting-into-work” is not itself propositional, but rather the ground (though itself ungrounded, the pure thrownness of situation) on which proposition is possible. Far from sealing the work off from the world, the insignificance, or perhaps presignificance, of the aesthetic is precisely what aligns them, in the mode of the phatic: the question of community, community as question.

 

The aesthetic, in other words, is already the name for what results when one is faced with the asyndetic. Again, the trajectory of gesture: there it is, facing one; it works, but it nevertheless withholds signification. The work does not so much speak as demand response. What the phatic opens up in the possibility of meeting are the problematics of what Lyotard calls phrasing, the simultaneous possibility (and necessity, as even silence responds) not only of response and responsivity, but also, as Lyotard takes pains to emphasise, of responsibility in its ethico-political dimensions. The horizon of such disclosure of a world is always historical. This is not only in the sense of precise cultural location (the work of art is “the act by which a certain historical and cultural world is instituted, in which a specific historical ‘humanity’ sees the characteristic traits of its own experience of the world defined in an originary way” (End of Modernity 66: my emphases)); it is also, and before that, the very opening of the historical, a term which it asks us to rethink as question. This pre-comprehension which will already have been the space of the aesthetic–the question opened up in and by the asyndetic–is the very possibility of the social and even, in the skewness and even incommensurabilities of reply it guarantees, of the political: “historical, finite” it is “what enables us to speak of an occurrence of truth” (End of Modernity 66).
 

Notes

 

1. As, for example, in Preminger (56) and the almost identical entry in Cuddon (60-1).

 

2. For example, in Eagleton (109-12), Jameson (Prison-House, Chapter III, “The Structuralist Projection)” or Lentricchia (Chapter 4, “Uncovering History and the Reader: Structuralism”).

 

3. This is surely the point of Lyotard’s The Differend–as against, say, Norris’s reading in What’s Wrong with Postmodernism, that Lyotard is arguing for a sort of laissez-faire pluralism where the absence of formal common grounds for decision of an issue can lead only to an impasse in which no position can be argued against any other. Lyotard’s major example, the one the book opens with, should be an adequate caution against this: the revisionist denial of the Holocaust.

 

4. “Symptoms are meaningless traces, their meaning is not discovered, excavated from the hidden depths of the past, but constructed retroactively…the analysis produces the truth; that is, the signifying frame which gives the symptoms their symbolic place and meaning. As soon as we enter the symbolic order, the past is always present in the form of historical tradition and the meaning of these traces is not given; it changes continually with the transformations of the signifier’s networks. Every historical rupture, every advent of a new master-signifier, changes retroactively the meaning of all tradition, restructures the narration of the past, makes it readable in another, new way.” (Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology 55-6)

 

5. Thomas Pynchon’s novels are exemplary here, in that they all imply the revelation of a plot which works in retrospect. At some point in each, the protagonist is made aware that she or he may be already part of a plot which extends far back beyond even their own birth; a singularity detonates into a series of asyndetic signs (V, the letter, the Rocket). In Gravity’s Rainbow, Tyrone Slothrop experiences that moment of eversion as one in which the entire world he has known has silently taken some unimaginable step in a new, previously non-existent direction.

 

6. “The things we are talking about (‘deconstructions’ if you will) do not happen within what would be recognizably called ‘history,’ an orientable history with periods, ages, or episteme, paradigms, themata (to answer according to the most diverse and familiar historiographic codes).” (Derrida, Points 359)

 

7. Deleuze, The Logic of Sense (especially the chapters “Ninth series of the problematic” and “Tenth series of the ideal game” for their discussions of singularity and seriality) and Difference and Repetition (in particular the logic of the “dark precursor,” 119-128).

 

8. Cf. Zizek, Enjoy your Symptom 97. Hence perhaps also the insistent figure of the angel as a figure of this performative annunciation throughout Pynchon: the final gesture of auctioneer Loren Passerine in Lot 49, the strange vast figures in the sky glimpsed throughout Gravity’s Rainbow. If the secularization attendant on modernity “takes shape through a resumption of the Judeo-Christian vision of history, from which all references to transcendence are ‘progressively’ eliminated” (End of Modernity 101), the postmodern is a completion of this process by installing the apocalypse–which as Derrida reminds us in “Of an Apocalyptic Tone Recently Adopted in Philosophy” is also an invocation of the performative–everywhere throughout the secular narrative, at its every point.

 

9.”Answering the question” forms the first section of The Postmodern Explained to Children, published some seven years later. In the second section, “Apostil on narratives,” Lyotard considers that in the earlier text he “exaggerated the importance to be given the narrative genre,” and briefly recasts the issue in terms of the “phrase regimes” from The Differend (Postmodern Explained 31).

 

10. And here we would have to read the work’s simultaneous embrace and rejection of commodity form: the object sui generis, whose project seeks to render it incapable of reduction to equivalences with other objects around it, is also the commodity in its purest form. See Transparent Society 50-2.

11.Here one can see an essential confusion in many of the arguments in cultural studies which seek to oppose cultural policy to cultural critique. In this opposition, policy studies seek to identify the moments of intervention into the apparatuses of governmentality, whereas critique remains content with the moral high ground of the enunciation of principle. Policy studies are thus pragmatic and “realistic” in the sense which always connotes approval, while critique remains tied to the aestheticism of an essentially Arnoldian vision of the role of humanities as intelligence and conscience. Such an argument all too readily buys into the essentially polemical opposition of “ivory tower” and “real world,” and does it very cannily to the advantage of policy studies within the current regimes of funding, research and administration. What it just as readily overlooks, though, is the ways in which governmentality, policy and pragmatism so conceived are themselves phenomena of massive social aestheticisation in precisely the sense we have been discussing. As one of the key theoretical texts of policy studies so well knows–Ian Hunter’s Culture and Government–the conditions of modern forms of governmentality lie in the development of regimes of power which operate an intensive and extensive ethicalisation and aestheticisation of bodies and their practices. Rather than an ideological blind obscuring the real practices of governmentality beneath it, the aesthetic is at the heart of governmentality, which remains unthinkable without it. To the extent that it accepts their opposition, policy studies remains no less stuck in the Arnoldian imaginary, which it merely inverts in the name of a superior performance.

 

12.Two reference points, among the many possible. The first volume of Musil’s The Man without Qualities had appeared in 1930, some nine years before Benjamin’s essay on Baudelaire and six before “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” The nameless pedestrian of its opening–a sort of anti-flâneur–meets his death at the intersection of some of these disjunct causalities:

 

Motor-cars came shooting out of deep, narrow streets into the shallows of bright squares. Dark patches of pedestrian bustle formed into cloudy streams. Where stronger lines of speed transected their loose-woven hurrying, they clotted up--only to trickle on all the faster then and after a few ripples regain their regular pulse-beat. Hundreds of sounds were intertwined into a coil of wiry noise, with single barbs projecting, sharp edges running along it and submerging again, and clear notes splintering off--flying and scattering....

 

Like all big cities, it consisted of irregularity, change, sliding forward, not keeping in step, collisions of things and affairs, and fathomless points of silence in between, of paved ways and wilderness, of one great rhythmic throb and the perpetual discord and dislocation of all opposing rhythms, and as a whole resembling a seething, bubbling fluid in a vessel consisting of the solid material of buildings, laws, regulations, and historical traditions. (Musil I 3,4)

 

And before that, Joyce’s Stephen, baited by Garrett Deasy with the sententious assurance that “All history moves towards one great goal, the manifestation of God,” has gestured towards the schoolroom window through which the sounds of the hockey game can be heard, and placed God firmly in the same street. Behind Stephen’s back, the text agrees, hearing in the shout the name which cannot be spoken:

 

-- That is God.
-- Hooray! Ay! Whrrwhee!
-- What? Mr Deasy asked.
-- A shout in the street, Stephen answered, shrugging his shoulders. (Joyce 42: emphases mine)

 

13. See, for example, Pierre Bourdieu’s “Conclusion: Towards a ‘vulgar’ critique of ‘pure’ critiques,” in his Distinction.

 

14. Two canonical examples of the latter, almost exact contemporaries. 1. As Note 12 would suggest, Ulysses (“Trieste-Zürich-Paris, 1914-1921”), whose scandal is to refuse the very auratics its title offers through the analogy of the banal and the mythic, and to provide instead a densely asyndetic manifold of trajectories, insistently local significations, inequivalent exchanges and irreducible remainders. 2. The series of Duchamp ready-mades from about 1913 to his virtual abandonment of art in 1923, which operate on this edge between shock and aura, between the sacral space of the museum (uniqueness) and the banal spaces of the technically reproducible (multiplicity). The ready-made receives this sacrality and wears it–along with its own use-value now reduced to the empty sign of a function it will now no longer have (snow shovel, bottle rack, urinal)–as fancy-dress. In its gleeful affirmation of exchange-value, it completes the secularisation of the museum’s space.

 

Works Consulted

 

• Aglietta, Michel. A Theory of Capitalist Regulation: The U.S. Experience. London: Verso, 1979.
• Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zohn. London: Fontana, 1992.
• Bennington, Geoffrey. Legislations: The Politics of Deconstruction. London: Verso, 1994.
• Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Trans. Richard Nice. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1984.
• —. In Other Words: Essays Towards a Reflexive Sociology. Trans. Matthew Adamson. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1990.
• Cuddon, J.A. A Dictionary of Literary Terms. Revised edition. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979
• Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. Trans. Paul Patton. NY: Columbia UP, 1994.
• —. The Logic of Sense. Trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale. Ed. Constantin V. Boundas. New York: Columbia UP, 1990.
• Derrida, Jacques. “Of an Apocalyptic Tone Recently Adopted in Philosophy.” Trans. John P. Leavey, Jr. Oxford Literary Review 6.2 (1984): 3-37.
• —. Glas. Trans. John P. Leavey, Jr., and Richard Rand. Lincoln and London: U Nebraska P, 1986.
• —. Limited Inc. Trans. Samuel Weber and Jeffrey Mehlman. Evanston, Il.: Northwestern UP, 1988.
• —. Points: Interviews, 1974-1994. Ed. Elisabeth Weber. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1995.
• —. The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago and London: U Chicago P, 1987.
• —. Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978.
• Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory: An Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell, 1983.
• Frow, John. What was Postmodernism? Occasional Paper No 11. Sydney: Local Consumption Publications, 1991.
• Harris, Roy. Reading Saussure: A Critical Commentary on the Cours de linguistique générale. London: Duckworth, 1987.
• Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989.
• Hassan, Ihab. “The Culture of Postmodernism.” Theory, Culture and Society 2.3 (1985): 119-31.
• —. The Postmodern Turn: Essays in Postmodern Theory and Culture. Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State UP, 1987.
• Hunter, Ian. Culture and Government: The Emergence of Literary Education. London: Macmillan, 1988.
• Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. New York and London: Routledge, 1988.
• —. The Politics of Postmodernism. London: Routledge, 1989.
• Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. London: Verso, 1991.
• —. The Prison-House of Language: A Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1972.
• Jay, Gregory S. America the Scrivener: Deconstruction and the Subject of Literary History. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1990.
• Joyce, James. Ulysses. Introduction by Declan Kiberd. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992.
• Laclau, Ernesto, and Chantal Mouffe. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. London: Verso, 1985.
• Lentricchia, Frank. After the New Criticism. London: Methuen, 1983.
• Lyotard, Jean-François. The Differend: Phrases in Dispute. Trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1988.
• —. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U Minnesota P, 1984.
• —. The Postmodern Explained to Children: Correspondence 1982-1985. Trans. eds. Julian Pefanis and Morgan Thomas. Sydney: Power Publications, 1992
• Lyotard, Jean-François, and Jean-Loup Thebaud. Just Gaming. Trans. Wlad Godzich. Minneapolis: U Minnesota P, 1985.
• Marx, Karl. Capital. Volume 1. Trans. Ben Fowkes. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976.
• Musil, Robert. The Man without Qualities. 3 vols. Trans. Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser. London: Picador, 1979.
• Norris, Christopher. What’s Wrong with Postmodernism: Critical Theory and the Ends of Philosophy. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1990.
• Plotnitsky, Arkady. Complementarity: Anti-Epistemology after Bohr and Derrida. Durham and London: Duke UP, 1994.
• —. In the Shadow of Hegel: Complementarity, History, and the Unconscious. Gainesville: U P of Florida, 1993.
• Preminger, Alex, ed. Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. Enlarged edition. London: Macmillan, 1974.
• Pynchon, Thomas. The Crying of Lot 49. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965.
• —. Gravity’s Rainbow. London: Jonathan Cape, 1973.
• —. V. London: Picador, 1963.
• Saussure, Ferdinand de. Course in General Linguistics. Trans. Roy Harris. London: Duckworth, 1983.
• Serres, Michel. Hérmès. 1. La Communication. 2. L’Interférence. 3. La Traduction. 4. La Distribution. 5. Le Passage du nord-ouest. Editions de Minuit, 1968.
• Soja, Edward. Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory. London: Verso, 1989.
• Vattimo, Gianni. The End of Modernity: Nihilism and Hermeneutics in Post-modern Culture. Trans. and intro., Jon R. Snyder. Cambridge: Polity, 1988.
• —. The Transparent Society. Trans. David Webb. Cambridge: Polity, 1992.
• Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. Trans. G.E.M. Anscombe. Oxford: Blackwell, 1953.
• Zizek, Slavoj. Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out. London: Routledge, 1992.
• —. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso, 1989.
• —. Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology. Durham: Duke UP, 1993.