Postmodernist theoryLyotard, Baudrillard and othersThomas DochertyINTRODUCTIONPhilosophy has been touched by postmodernism. Philosophy, in the modern academy, issupposed to be the discipline of disciplines: it is philosophy which will be able to gathertogether, in one over-arching discourse, all the various micro-disciplinary problems andprocedures dealt with in the differing and ostensibly unrelated fields of literature,medicine, law, politics and so on; and it is philosophy which will also set itself the task ofexplaining their necessary separations. Postmodernism has not ‘challenged’ philosophy;rather it has simply enabled an earthquake under its foundations; for postmodernism ismost aptly situated precisely in the moment of the eradication of all foundationalthinking. This, of course, makes it a fundamentally paradoxical exercise to ‘define’postmodernism, for any definition would at once inherently seek the foundationaliststatus lexically integral to any description, while it would simultaneously discount in thesemantic content of the definition the very possibility of such foundationalism. In whatfollows, therefore, I shall not so much ‘define’ postmodernism in philosophy as indicatewhat is at stake in the debates that have constituted the postmodern moment in ourcultures.1The term ‘postmodern’ was probably first consistently used by Arnold Toynbee in1939; and it was prefigured in his writings in 1934 (that is, at around the date of the firstrecorded instance of the term’s usage in Spanish, by Federico de Onis).2 InA Study ofHistory,Toynbee suggested that the ‘modern’ historical period had ended, at a datedetermined in his studies roughly between 1850 and 1918. Toynbee’s historiography wasa product of the late nineteenth-century desire to found a synoptic and universal history;and this desire was most easily accommodated in Toynbee’s own individual work by thefact that his history approximates to the condition of a Christian theodicy.His task was toredeem humanity by discovering the trajectory of history to be a movement of separationfrom God and the eternal returns towards a theocentric and universalizing centre ofmeaning for the world. Secularity—history itself—becomes nothing more or less than ahumble interruption in a fundamentally circular narrative structure, whose end is alwaysalready somehow contained in its beginning. This, of course, is reflected in much of theartistic literary production of the first decades of the present century in western Europe,where writers such as Eliot, Joyce, Mann, Proust and many others all experimented withthe cyclical structures of history. For Toynbee and his kind, the facts of history wouldmake sense in relation to a governing narrative structure which would be given andlegitimated in advance, since it is narrated fundamentally from the point of view of amonotheistic God.Such a notion of history is indebted to conflicts which had their root in Enlightenment.As Hayden White points out, the Enlightenment broadly agreed with Leibniz’smonadology in the sense that the philosophers of the Enlightenment subscribed to theview that there was an underlying unity or direction to human history. But the bigdifference between Leibniz and Enlightenment is that Leibniz thinks that this essentialunity of humanity is simply immanent, whereas the philosophers of the Enlightenmentview it as an ideal whose realization lies in the future, an ideal which is therefore, at best,imminent, or one which isyet to be realizedin historical time. They could not take it as apresuppositionoftheir historical writing, not merely because the data did not bear it out, butbecause it did not accord with their own experience of their own social worlds.For them the unity of humanity was anidealwhich they couldprojectinto thefuture.3Toynbee’s invocation of a postmodern moment can thus be seen to accord with theidealist drive of Leibniz; yet it also acknowledges the necessarily future orientation ofhistory. Toynbee can plainly see that the ‘modern’ moment is not yet a moment of auniversal accord or harmony. In this, he is rather like the literary critic Erich Auerbach,who wrote his great study,Mimesis,while living in Turkey in flight from the Nazis. Inthat study, Auerbach poignantly and desperately attempts to discern, and to validate inthe literary history of the western world, the idea of a shared humanity in which, ‘belowthe surface conflicts’ which ostensibly wedge us apart, ‘the elementary things which ourlives have in common come to light’.4 Both these writers were writing under the sign ofthe Second World War, in which the ideology of a specific racial difference anddisharmony momentarily, but triumphantly, was in the ascendant. Auerbach’s answer tohis predicament was to find solace inaestheticharmony; Toynbee rather hypothesized amoment in the future, a ‘post-modern’politicalmoment, when history and humanity canbe properly redeemed.The word ‘postmodern’ is thus characterized, from its very inception, by an ambiguity.On the one hand, it is seen to describe a historical period; on the other, it simply describesa desire, a mood which looks to the future to redeem the present. This ambiguity is at thecore of a tension between postmodernism as an aesthetic style and postmodernity as apolitical and cultural reality.This is an instance of one of the dominant philosophical concerns responsible forshaping the question of the postmodern: what is the proper relation in our time betweenthe aesthetic and the political? The particular intimacy of the relation between aestheticsand politics in postmodernism is apparent even from the earliest considerations of thequestion. Leslie Fiedler characterized the emergence of new aesthetic priorities in thenovel during the 1960s as a ‘critical point’ in which new attitudes to time weredeveloped; and such attitudes, he claimed, ‘constitute…a politics as well as anesthetics’.5 In the light of this, it is interesting to note that two of the foremost thinkers inthe field of postmodernism, Fredric Jameson and Jean-François Lyotard, both writeequally fluently and influentially on aesthetic culture and on political practices; and, moreimportantly, they have consistently pondered the relation between these hymeneallylinkedactivities. A deep formative influence lying behind much of the contemporarydebate, as is now perhaps obvious, is the legacy of the Frankfurt school, perhaps mostespecially the work of Adorno, to which I shall return. For present purposes, the singlesalient fact is that aesthetic postmodernism is always intimately imbricated with theissues of a political postmodernity, even if postmodernism and postmodernity may notalways themselves coincide.As a result of the legacy inherited from Frankfurt, the question of the postmodern isalso, tangentially at least, an issue of Marxism. Marxism, in placing the labouring body atthe interface between consciousness and material history, is the necessary explanatoryand critical correlative of a modern culture whose technology (in the form of an industrialrevolution) divides human knowledge or consciousness from human power or materialhistory. But the continuing revolutionary shifts within capitalism itself have necessitatedin recent years a marked and vigorous self-reflection on the part of Marxism. InHabermas, for instance, Marxism has taken ‘the linguistic turn’, in arguments for acontinuation of the emancipatory goals of Marxist theory and practice under a revisedrubric of ‘communicative action’. Habermas’s faith in the continuing viability of avigorously self-revising Marxism is shared by Jameson, who models his own version of‘late Marxism’ to correspond with Mandel’s descriptions of ‘late capitalism’.6A key date here, of course, is 1968. This is not only a moment which could bedescribed as the high point of ‘grand theory’ and of the emergence of a poststructuralistchallenge to what had become by then the grand structuralist orthodoxies; it is also themoment of a critical political failure. The seeming availability of a revolution whichbrought workers and intellectuals together all across Europe represented a high point fora specific kind of Marxist theoretical practice. But when these revolutions failed, manybegan, at precisely that moment, to rethink their commitments to the fundamentalpremises of Marxist theory. Simultaneously, most other erstwhile dominant philosophicaltrajectories (the phenomenological tradition; the insistence on the centrality of Hegel viaKojève; the entire ‘history of western thought’) came under suspicion and revision.Rudolph Bahro and André Gorz began, from an economistic perspective, to rethinkissues of growth and sustainable development. Their emergent ecologism coincidedneatly with the ‘imaginative’ aspects of 1968, and Cohn-Bendit began his own movementfrom red to green. Kant began to assume the same kind of position of centrality onceoccupied by Hegel. Feminism and deconstruction both criticized the monolithic aspectsof the institutions of western thinking. These all coincided neatly with the aftermath ofthe Algerian and other colonial crises, and with the growing awareness of the issuesrelating to post-colonialist cultures. The developed countries began to question not onlythe desire of the underdeveloped countries for the same levels of consumerist technologyas those enjoyed by the First World, but also the reliance of that First World uponexhaustible planetary resources.For many European thinkers who were now coming to question the fundamentalgrounds of their intellectual activities and philosophies, Marxism now began to appear tobe part of the problem, especially in its assumption of the desirability of human masteryover nature. The emerging Green movement of this period moved closely to a post-Marxism which was sceptical of Enlightenment: sharing the emancipatory ideals and thedesire for the fullest possible enjoyment of human capacities, but tempering that with theidea of a necessary cohabitation between humanity and the rest of nature. A postmodernworld needed a post-Marxist politics. Gramsci began to assume a prominent position inthis thinking, and the notion of hegemony replaced that of class as a fundamental politicalcategory. A new political pluralism became possible precisely at the moment whentechnology, as Lyotard indicates, had made it possible for the multinational companies tohomogenize and unify their forms of control. Yet underneath the increasinglyhomogenized capitalist world, the play of local forces continues to pose the threat of adisruptive pluralism which capitalism must now police if it is to sustain itself. For thoseforces to be activated, all we require is the release of something inimical to capital, therelease of something which cannot be inserted into or accommodated within a capitalisteconomy. The radical, central philosophers at this moment made their revolutionaryinvestment in the body and in libidinal desire.Perhaps the most extreme re-thinking of Marx began with the socalled ‘philosophy ofdesire’ in texts such as Lyotard’sEconomie libidinale(1974; complete translation notavailable) or in the work of Deleuze and Guattari in theirCapitalisme et schizophrénie(1972, 1980; translated 1984, 1987). This work led Lyotard and Deleuze to the positionwhere they favour the supervention of a micropolitics which will attend to the local andthe specific without recourse to some grand programme or macropolitical theory such asMarxism, psychoanalysis or evolutionary progress to legitimize actions taken at the locallevel. Practice is now valid—that is to say, it becomes an ‘event’—only when it isunanswerable to, or when it is actually disruptive of, a totalizing ‘grand theory’.The most explicit attack on fundamental Marxist theory, and specifically on itsunderlying category of ‘production’ is fully developed in Baudrillard’sLe Miroir de laproduction(1973; translated asThe Mirror of Production1975), a work which setBaudrillard firmly on a trajectory away from any form of classical Marxism. His worksince has increasingly sustained a problematization of the oppositionalist impetusinscribed in Marxist theory. For Baudrillard, opposition to a dominant force is alwaysalready inscribed in the structure which holds that dominant force in power. Theoppositional energy is diverted and recharged to the account of the dominant force:opposition works like inoculation. Marxism inoculates capital, the better to sustain it:‘critical’ or ‘oppositional’ thinking is, as it were, the last refuge of the bourgeois, who iscondemned to go through the motions of theoretical opposition while simultaneouslysustaining the historical status quo.Theory, by which I here mean any critical practice which makes a philosophicallyfoundational claim, enters into crisis itself in the wake of 1968. Not only has knowledgebecome uncertain, but more importantly the whole question of how to legitimize certainforms of knowledge and certain contents of knowledge is firmly on the agenda. No singlesatisfactory mode of epistemological legitimation is available. Even if one were, the verySubject of consciousness has, as a result of deconstruction and psychoanalysis, also beenthrown into doubt. Postmodernism is shaped and informed by these crises inepistemology, in ontology, in legitimation and in the Subject.In what follows, I shall firstly outline briefly the intellectual trajectory of two thinkerswhose work has shaped much of the debate over postmodernism: Jean-François Lyotardand Jean Baudrillard. I shall then substantively address the issue of the Enlightenmentand its contested legacies. This leads into a necessary reconsideration of the question ofpolitics, specifically under the rubric of a theory of justice. In conclusion, I shall drawtogether the characteristics of postmodern philosophy under the sign of what might becalled, in contradistinction to Leibnizian Optimism, a ‘new pessimism’ distinguished notby sadness but by stoicism.TWO PARADIGMATIC THINKERSJean-François LyotardLyotard moved to the centre of debates around postmodernism in the late 1970s when hedefinedThe Postmodern Conditionin terms of an ‘incredulity toward metanarratives’.7By this, he meant that, in the contemporary world, it had become difficult to subscribe tothe great narratives which had previously conditioned existence, be they narratives ofsalvation as in the various religions, or of emancipation as in Marx, or of therapy as inFreud, and so on. Postmodernism was defined in terms of an anti-foundationalism; it wasa mood and not a period; and it was characterized by a pragmatic and experimentalistattitude. Like the artist, the postmodern philosopher was to ‘work without rules in orderto formulate the rules of what will have been done’after the event:8 that is to say,thinking was to be radically experimental and ostensibly undirected in order to allow forthe unpreprogrammed, for the unforeseen, to take place.This led Lyotard to ponder two key theoretical principles: that of the ‘event’; and thatof ‘justice’.9 An ‘event’ occurs when ‘it happens’ without the ‘it’ having any specificidentity. Such an identification of ‘what’ happened can only happen when the event isinserted into a determining structure which will assign a meaning to the happening and asubstance to it. An ‘event’ is, as it were, a happening laid bare, devoid of a Subject,devoid of—or, better, prior to—an assigned significance. For Lyotard, the honour ofthinking can itself only occur when thinking is ‘eventful’, when thinking is of the statusof an event.Thought thus has little to do with the accumulation of ‘knowledges’ whosesignificance can be arrayed and arranged in hierarchical orders and sequences, initiallyplaced in repositories of knowledge such as libraries and museums, but increasingly inour time stored in ostensibly less material but equally reified form on microchips or oncomputer discs.For Lyotard, one effect of this is the necessity to wage war on all forms of totality. Heargues that any ‘grand narrative’ or foundational theory necessarily tends to homogenizethe absolute heterogeneity and specificity of singular events, thereby robbing the event ofits full ontological or historical status and, more importantly for a philosopher, denyingthe possibility of genuine thinking. Further, he argues that such totality most oftenarticulates itself under the form simply of consensus. Here, he explicitly set himself apartfrom a thinker such as Jürgen Habermas, who argues that, given the lack of any priorfoundational philosophy upon which to build a rational society, individual Subjects muststrive collectively or mutually to attain a rational consensus which will enable theformulation of (at least provisional) values against which individual acts can be judged.In other words, a practical social theory is to be based upon rational discourse and thedisinterested pursuit of the better argument by a community. Lyotard argues that theconsensus thus reached is illusory, for it is necessarily founded upon a covert violencebetween the participants in the dialogues, in which the discourse of one Subject willalways find itself degraded in and by the discourse of the other. There is no consensuswithout the covert exercise of an imperialist power, according to Lyotard, who thereforeprefers the pursuit of paralogy over consensus.In order to maintain thinking at the status of the event, it becomes important to bearwitness to what Lyotard calls the ‘differend’. A differend occurs when, in a disputebetween two parties, the rules of conflict which bring them into their opposed positionsare made in the idiom of one party while the wrong from which the other suffers simplydoes not figure and cannot be recognized in that idiom. That is, the fundamental clash isone of language-games; the language-game of each party to the dispute simply cannotaccommodate the terms of the wrong suffered by the other; and further, there is nocommon language to which a ‘neutral’ appeal can be made to facilitate an adjudicationbetween the two parties.Here we enter the second specific realm of Lyotard’s concern: justice. As withknowledge, justice or judging too must become, for Lyotard, an event rather than asubstance. Given that we should abandon the metanarrative, or theory, we now have nogrounds upon which to make our judgments, be they aesthetic, ethical, political orwhatever. Yet we must judge, as a simple condition of living. For Lyotard, we must bearwitness to the differend and learn to judge without criteria. This he relates to the Kant ofthe third Critique, where a fundamental distinction is made between determiningjudgment and reflective judgment. Determining judgments are made in conformity to arule; reflective judgments are those where we lack any formal guiding principle, as inaesthetics. Lyotard urges the prioritization of the latter, for it is only by making judgingand thinking reflective—and thereby ‘eventful’ —that we will attain to the postmodernmood; and it is only that way that we can avoid the tacit political violence whichdominates and informs our modes of philosophy and of social being.Jean BaudrillardBaudrillard, like Lyotard, began his career on the political left. But inThe Mirror ofProduction,he began his trajectory steadily away from any recognizable Marxism andtowards an extremely different position indeed. Fundamentally, Baudrillard began byarguing that Marx was not Marxist enough; that in the attempt to confound politicaleconomy, Marx simply could not manage to escape the form ‘production’ and the form‘representation’ which shape political economy. Marxism is thus tainted by a complicitywith capitalism, argued Baudrillard. He then began himself to try to find a way out of thisby insisting that the world is not ‘pro-duced’ but ‘seduced’: seduction, he claimed inDela séduction,was logically prior to production. Seduction is not simply sexual: it is ratherany mutual interplay of forces of attraction and repulsion. It thus can have noparadigmatic form and veers into a multiplicity of social practices, none of which canassume a position of centrality, normativity or dominance. By this point, Marxism has notbeen modified as much as entirely abandoned.Baudrillard began to indicate that Marxism had become part of the problem rather thanpart of the cure for a society in any case. He suggested that in any given system (such as acapitalist one) which is characterized by efficiency, the possibility of opposition to thesystem has to be controlled internally if the system is to persist. The single best way ofcontrolling opposition is, of course, by accommodation. Hence, using a medical analogy,Baudrillard argued that every system generates localized ‘scandals’ which ostensiblythrow the system entirely into disrepute—but which operate rather like an inoculationagainst disease. Thus, for instance, Watergate was a scandal to the office of the Presidentof the USA; but it was a scandal which ‘purified’ the office by vilifying its temporaryoccupant; it thus enabled the possibility of that now ‘purged’, ‘incorruptible’, office beinginhabited very soon after by Ronald Reagan, whose folly, lies and obvious insincerity faroutstripped anything of which Nixon seemed capable. Similarly, capitalism needs andthrives on Marxism; masculinism and patriarchy need feminism if they are to strengthenthemselves; racism requires anti-racist legislation; and so on.This somewhat desperate scenario provokes Baudrillard into his most radical claims,and into a position usually described as ‘nihilist’. The principle of reality itself, he argues,is defunct. At an early stage in his career, when he concentrated his attention onconsumer society, Baudrillard rapidly realized not only that consumption was the newstructure of power in the social, but also that something had happened to the verymateriality of the object of consumption. He argued that the object as signifier was moreimportant than the object as referent. In other words, classical ‘use-value’ had beenreplaced not just by ‘exchange-value’ but by what might be called ‘signifying-value’, orthe value of the object as a sign. The referent—the ‘real’ world—began simply todisappear in Baudrillard’s theoretical thinking.When allied to his thinking on negation or criticism as a form of therapeuticinoculation, this has far-reaching consequences. Baudrillard is now able to argue thatDisneyland, for example, is there as an arena of fantasy in order to generate the belief thatthe rest of the USA, everything ‘outside’ Disneyland, is ‘real’. In fact, Baudrillard argues,it is the rest of the USA which is now living entirely at the level of fantasy. Meanwhile‘the real’ has disappeared, or has been overtaken by simulacra of the real. Thus he feltable to claim, for instance, that, in a specific sense, the Gulf War of 1990 ‘did not takeplace’. Baudrillard indicates that technology has now made it possible for us to reproducethe real in a ‘more’ real form than the ‘original’; and historical events for us now are onlyreal once they have been mediated, usually by television. If we are to make any genuinephilosophical or political engagement in this state of affairs, it has to be done byattending not to specific aspects of the real but rather to the very principle of reality itself.ENLIGHTENMENT AND ITS LEGACIESA major source for the contemporary debates around the postmodern is to found in thework of the Frankfurt school, and perhaps nowhere more precisely than in the textproposed by Adorno and Horkheimer in 1944, theDialectic of Enlightenment,a work‘written when the end of the Nazi terror was within sight’. This work prefigures some ofLyotard’s later scepticism over Enlightenment; and it also seriously engages the issue ofmass culture in ways which influence Gorz’s thoughts on the ‘leisure merchants’ ofcontemporary capitalist societies. It is worth indicating in passing that it is Adorno andHorkheimer, and not Lyotard, who propose that ‘Enlightenment is totalitarian’:10 thevulgar characterization which describes contemporary German philosophy as pro-Enlightenment and the French as anti-Enlightenment is simplistic and false.Enlightenment aimed at human emancipation from myth or superstition, and from anenthralled enchantment to mysterious powers and forces of nature. Such emancipationwas to be effected through the progressive operations of critical reason. According toPeter Gay, ‘The Enlightenment may be summed up in two words: criticism and power’:11criticism would become creative precisely by its capacity for empowering the individualand enabling his or her freedom. Why would Adorno and Horkheimer set themselves inopposition to this ostensibly admirable programme? Why do they argue that ‘The fullyEnlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant’?12The problem lies not in the theoretical principle of Enlightenment but in its practice. Inthe desire to contest any form of animistic enchantment by nature, Enlightenment set outto think the world in an abstract form. Consequently, the material content of the worldbecomes a merely formal conceptual set of categories. As Adorno and Horkheimer put it:‘From now on, matter would at least be mastered without any illusion of ruling orinherent powers, of hidden qualities. For the Enlightenment, whatever does not conformto the rule of computation and utility is suspect’.13 In a word, reason has been reduced tomathesis:that is, it has been reduced to a specificformof reason. More importantly, thisspecific inflection of reason is also now presented as if it were Reason-as-such, as if itwere the only valid or legitimate form of rational thinking. But Adorno and Horkheimershare a fear that, in this procedure, reason has itself simply become a formal category,which reduces or translates the specific concepts of material realities into rationalconcepts, or into a form amenable to mathematization. Reason becomes no more than adiscourse, a language of reason (the codes of mathematics), which deals with the‘foreign’ matter of reality by translating it into reason’s own abstract terms; andsomething—the ‘event’, non-conceptual reality itself—gets lost in the translation. AsAdorno and Horkheimer have it: ‘The multiplicity of forms is reduced to position andarrangement, history to fact, things to matter.’14 A mathematical consciousness thusproduces the world, not surprisingly, as mathematics. So a desired knowledge of theworld is reduced to the merestanamnesis,in which a consciousness never cognizes theworld as it is, but ratherrecognizesthe world as the proper image and correlate of theconsciousness itself. Enlightenment thus serves only the self-Identity of the Subject ofconsciousness.‘Emancipatory’ knowledge turns out to involve itself firmly with a question of power,which complicates and perhaps even restricts its emancipatory quality. Knowledge,conceived as abstract and utilitarian, as a mastery over a recalcitrant nature, becomescharacterized by power; as a result, ‘Enlightenment behaves toward things as a dictatortoward man. He knows them in so far as he can manipulate them. The man of scienceknows all things in so far as he can make them.’15 Knowledge is hereby reduced totechnology; and that in nature—the ‘event’—which is unamenable to the formal orconceptual categories of such mathematical knowledge simply escapes consciousness.Yet the Subject believes itself to have captured, dominated and conceptually controlledthe event; for it can determine themeaningof the event. There is thus only theillusionofpower over nature; and yet there is a more important dividend of power here: the Subjectendowed with Enlightenment ‘knowledge’ has a power over the consciousness of otherswho may be less fluent in the language of reason. Knowledge is thus caught up in adialectic of mastery and slavery in which the victim is not a dominated and overcomenature but rather other overwhelmed human individuals. Accordingly, knowledge such asthis cannot be purely characterized by disenchantment and emancipation. Enlightenmentdoes not simply produce a disenchanted knowledge of the contents of the material world;rather, it produces a formally empowered Subject of consciousness, a Subject whichexerts its power in the discourse of reason, in a language-game. From now on inphilosophy—and this is what will be characterized as the ‘modern’ philosophy fromwhich postmodernism wishes to escape—to know is to be in a position to enslave, or, asLyotard will argue, ‘what was and is at issue is the introduction of the will into reason’.16What is thus at issue is a confusion between the operations of a pure reason on the onehand and a practical reason on the other: a confusion between theory and practice,betweengnosisandpraxis. This is an old Aristotelian distinction which has resurfacedprecisely at the moment when many thinkers are becoming suspicious precisely of theoryitself. Twentieth-century literary criticism, the field in which much of the postmoderndebate has been fought out, presents us with a series of attempts to yoke together theoryand practice. Language, for instance, is often seen not as something which merely runsalongside and parallel to the ‘real’ events of material history: rather, it is consistentlysecularized, realized as itself a historical event. This is so all the way from J.L.Austin’sspeech-act theories of performative linguistics, through various advocates of the idea of‘language as symbolic action’ (Kenneth Burke, R.P.Blackmur and others), and all theway on to the contemporary revival of Jamesian and Deweian pragmatism in the thinkingof Rorty, Fish and others.17 These are all attempts to bring together the epistemologicalfunction of language with the ontological event of linguistic activity. And in this regard,twentieth-century literary criticism can be seen to be wrestling with one major andfundamental issue: the perceived rupture between the realm of language and the realm ofBeing, a rupture articulated most vigorously by those readers of Saussure’sCourse inGeneral Linguisticswho prioritize above all else the arbitrariness of the relation betweenthe linguistic signifier and the conceptual signified. By inserting the cognitive activity ofa real historical reader between the text and its epistemological content, critics such asFish, Jauss, Iser and others tried to circumvent the threatened split between, on the onehand, the structure of consciousness (i.e., the conceptual forms in which a consciousnessappropriates the world for meaning) and, on the other, history (the material content of atext which may—and indeed, according to Fish,must—disturb such formal structures).In philosophical terms, what is at stake here is an old Kantian question regarding theproper or adequate ‘fit’ between the noumenal and the phenomenal. Kant was aware thatthe world outside of consciousness does not necessarily match precisely our perceptualcognitions of that world; and in theCritique of Pure Reasonhe argued that it waserroneous simply to confuse the two. The two elements of signification being confusedwere distinguished by Frege as ‘sense’ and ‘reference’; and it is a distinction similar tothis which was maintained by Paul de Man, who argued that such a confusion is preciselywhat we know as ‘ideology’: ‘What we call ideology is precisely the confusion oflinguistic with natural reality, of reference with phenomenalism.’18De Man’s concern was to ensure that literary criticism made no premature assumptionsof the absolute validity of reference; and in this he simply followed the deconstructivepractice of maintaining a vigilant scepticism about the legitimacy or truth-contents of anylinguistic proposition made about those aspects of the real world that could properly becalled ‘non-linguistic’. He was aware that the premature assumption that the world wasavailable for precise, ‘accurate’ or truthful linguistic formulation was itself an assumptionnot only grounded in but fundamentally demonstrative of ideology. But this, of course, issimply a reiteration of Adorno and Horkheimer in their complaint about the assumptionmade by (mathematical) reason that the world is available for rational comprehension. Itshould now be clear that the fundamental burden of theDialectic of Enlightenmentis thatEnlightenment itself is not the great demystifying force which will reveal and unmaskideology; rather, it is precisely the locus of ideology, thoroughly contaminated internallyby the ideological assumption that the world can match—indeed, can be encompassedby—our reasoning about it, or by the attendant assumption that the human is notalienated by the very processes of consciousness itself from the material world and eventsof which it desires knowledge in the first place. Enlightenment, postulated upon reason,is—potentially at least—undone by the form that such reason takes.For Adorno and Horkheimer, this argument assumed a specific shape recognizable asan abiding question in German philosophy from Kant to Heidegger. What worriedAdorno and Horkheimer was that under the sign of Enlightenment, the Subject would becapable of an engagement with the world in a manner which would be ‘rational’ only inthe most purely formal (and thus vacuous) sense of the word. That is, they were anxiousthat what should be a properlypoliticalengagement which involves the Subject in aprocess called intellection or thinking could be reduced to a ritual of thinking, to a merelyformal appearance of thinking which would manifest itself as a legitimation not of aperception of the world but of the analytical modes of mathematical reason itself. Thepolitical disturbance of the Subject proposed by an engagement with a materiallydifferent Other (i.e., the Subject as transformed and transfigured through an ‘event’)would be reduced to a confirmation of the aesthetic beauty and validity of the process ofmathematical reason itself, a reason whose object would thus be not the world in all itsalterity but rather the process of reason which confirms the Identity of the Subject as anidentity untrammelled by the disturbance of politics, an amorphous identity predicated ona narcissism and uninformed by any real event. In short, the Subject would be reduced toan engagement with and confirmation of its own rational processes rather than beingcommitted to an engagement with the material alterity of an objective world.19The ‘aesthetic engagement’ with the world might be characterized as follows: thestructure of consciousness determines what can be perceived, and processes it inaccordance with its own internal logic, its own internal, formal or ritualistic operations ofreason. There is thus a ritual or appearance of engagement with the material world only.‘Political engagement’ would be characterized by the rupture of such ritual, by theeruption of history into the consciousness in such a way that the aesthetic or formalstructures of consciousness must be disturbed, reconfigured, rearranged. Enlightenment’scommitment to abstraction is seen as a mode of disengagement of the ideological,opinionated self: abstraction is itself meant to address precisely this problem. But it leads,according to Adorno and Horkheimer, not to a practice of thinking but rather to theritualistic form of thought; it offers a form without content. Adorno and Horkheimer fearthat it is precisely when Enlightenment addresses the political that it in fact mostsuccessfully evades the political; that Enlightenment is Idealist precisely when it pretendsto be fully materialist.One twentieth-century legacy of Enlightenment is the so-called ‘Copernicanrevolution’ proposed initially by structuralism and semiotics. In the wake of RolandBarthes, the world became an extremely ‘noisy’ place: signs everywhere announced theirpresence and demanded to be decoded. Such decoding was often done under the aegis ofa presiding formal structure, such as myth in anthropology (Lévi-Strauss), desire inpsychoanalysis (Lacan), or grammar in literature (Genette, Greimas, Todorov). Insemiotics, it is always important to be able to discover a kind of equivalence betweenostensibly different signs: this is, in fact, the very principle of decoding or of translationwhich is at the basis of semiotic analysis. But as Adorno and Horkheimer indicate:‘Bourgeois society is ruled by equivalence. It makes the dissimilar comparable byreducing it to abstract qualities.’20 Such abstraction must wilfully disregard thespecificity of the material objects or events under its consideration: ‘Abstraction, the toolof enlightenment, treats its objects as did fate, the notion of which it rejects: it liquidatesthem.’21 The semiotic revolution—a revolution which frequently masqueraded as apolitical, emancipatory heir of Enlightenment, but a revolution whose content was only atthe level of the abstract sign and thus at the level of an aesthetics denuded of politics—is,like Enlightenment, irredeemably bourgeois in the eyes of the postmodernist, for it isirredeemably caught up in a philosophy of identity which negates material and historicalreality in the interests of constructing a recognizable Subject of consciousness as a selfidenticalentity.When postmodernism rigorously questions the tradition of a selfconsciously ‘modern’Enlightenment philosophy, it does not do so in the interests of nihilism or irrationality.Postmodernism indicates rather (as did Foucault) that Enlightenment reason may notitself be entirely reasonable.22 Further, postmodernism returns to the great Kantianquestions: how might we know the alterity of a material reality; how might we validate orlegitimize that knowledge?TheDialecticwas written in a profound awareness of the material and historicalrealities of fascism and of the Nazi atrocities. It is a text which inserts itself in a specifictradition of philosophical and ethical tracts which ask for an explanation of the presenceof evil in the world. This tradition was properly inaugurated in the modern world by thedebates around Leibniz and Optimism. Optimism is based on the idea that nature is aLeibnizian monad, and that there is a great unifying chain in nature which links, in anecessary conjunction, all the ostensibly random and diverse elements of a seeminglyheterogeneous and pluralistic world. Much more important for our purpose is theobservation that Optimism must be based upon a specific idea ofprogressive timewhichchallenges the meaning of events. It argues that what appears ‘now’ to be a local evil willbe revealed ‘in the fullness of time’ as something which essentially serves the realizationof a greater good. As Voltaire’s Pangloss has it inCandide,‘All is for the best in the bestof all possible worlds’; or, as a less comic predecessor, Milton’s Satan, has it: ‘Evil, bethou my good.’23 History would reveal the immanent goodness in the most apparentlyevil acts; under the sign of a homogeneous and monadic eternity, the heterogeneous andsecular would be redeemed.In a sense this philosophy is a precursor of some contemporary theoretical principles;and it foreshadows directly the great (and perhaps final) flowering of a modernist thoughtin deconstruction. According to Optimistic philosophy, the meaning of an event is notimmediately apparent, as if it were never present-to-itself: its final sense—to be revealedas the necessity of goodness—is always deferred (to be revealed under the sign ofeternity), and is thus always ‘different’ (or not what it appears to be to the local eyecaught up in the event itself). The major difference between deconstruction andOptimism is that Optimism believes that the final sense liesimmanentlywithin an event,whereas deconstruction eschews any such ‘immanentist’ ideas as metaphysical. Yet thetrajectory underpinning both is the same in that they share fundamentally and tacitly aninvestment in the notion of a ‘progressive enlightenment’: the passage of time is investedwith the idea ofprogress.Optimism was buried, of course, with the buildings under the earthquake in Lisbon on1 November 1755. But at that time a different idea of progress in history arises. After1755, progress is characterized as a gradual emancipation from the demands of the signof eternity. The secularization of consciousness became a necessary precondition for thepossibility of an ethics: that is to say, the ethical is increasingly determined by thephilosophically rational, or the good is determined by the true. Hans Blumenberg in hisThe Legitimacy of the Modern Age,offers eloquent testimony to the inflection this givesto philosophy and to truth. Traditionally, the pursuit of truth had been pleasurable,eudaemonic; from now on, the absoluteness of truth, and correspondingly its asceticharshness, becomes a measure of its validity: ‘Lack of consideration for happinessbecomes the stigma of truth itself, a homage to its absolutism.’24 Pain legitimizesknowledge.There arises thus the possibility—and Kantians would argue the necessity—ofseparating the realm of facts from the realm of values: neither can legitimately be derivedfrom the other, neither facts from values nor values from facts. Optimism has proceededon the grounds that these were intimately conjoined; and it followed that the progressivemovement from evil to good was seen as inevitable. But once epistemology is separatedfrom ethics, the whole idea of historical progress is itself called into question: no longerdo we know with any certainty the point towards which history is supposedlyprogressing. In the wake of this, humanity becomes enslaved not to the enchantments ofmyth but rather to the necessities of narrative, for humanity has embarked upon a secularmovement whose teleology is uncertain, whose plot is not inherently predetermined byvalues or by an ethical end.25This critique of progress returns in the twentieth century; and is acentral component ofa postmodernist mood. The paradigmatic example comes in architecture, where there hasgrown a resistance to the ‘modernist’ idea that all buildings must be innovative in aimand design. As Jencks and Portoghesi have suggested, it is possible to relearn from thepast, to develop a ‘new classicism’ or simply to engage with an abiding ‘presence of thepast’.26 The result is—in principle if not always in practice—a heterogeneousjuxtaposition of different styles from different architectural epochs as a putative responseto the homogenizing tendency of the so-called ‘international style’. This argument leadsto two interrelated consequences. The first is that lived space is inhabited by acomplicating sense of historical time.27 More importantly, there grows an awareness inarchitecture and urban planning in general that the local traditions of a place should berespected in all their specificity, while at the same time these local traditions may beopened to a kind of criticism by their juxtaposition with styles from other localities andfrom different traditions.28 This is a localism without parochial insularity: arevalorization of the ‘periphery’ without the need for a determining ‘centre’.Probably the greatest and most-cited description of the postmodern coincides nicelywith this architectural scepticism regarding inexorable progress. In philosophy, Lyotardargued that the postmodern mood was characterized by an ‘incredulity towardsmetanarratives’. In an argument which he subsequently described as ‘overstated’, Lyotardargued that it was becoming increasingly difficult to subscribe to the great—andtherapeutically Optimistic—grand narratives which once organized our lives.29 What hehad in his sights were the great totalizing narratives, great codes which in their degree ofabstraction necessarily deny the specificity of the local event and traduce it in theinterests of a global homogeneity or a universal history. Such ‘master narratives’, as theysubsequently came to be called, would include the narrative of emancipation viarevolution proposed by Marx; the narrative of psychoanalytic therapy elaborated byFreud; or the story of constant development and adaptation advanced under the rubric ofevolution by Darwin. Such narratives operate like Enlightenment reason: in order toaccommodate widely diverging local histories and traditions, they abstract the meaning ofthose traditions in a ‘translation’ into the terms of a master code, thereby violating thespecificity of the local and rendering real historical events unrecognizable. Asmetanarratives, they also become coercive and normative. In the interests of respectingthe heterogeneity of the real, and (more importantly for Lyotard) in the interests ofmaintaining the possibility of thought, of philosophy, we must wage war on suchtotalizing prescriptive grand narratives. Lyotard’s debt to Adornian critical theory isobvious here.This new pessimism with regard to the idea of historical progress was foreseen byWalter Benjamin, another great source for much postmodern thinking. In his famousseventh thesis on the philosophy of history, he indicates a specific scepticism regardinghistory which has been picked up and thoroughly developed in postmodernism. Hisfamous words in that thesis—‘There is no document of civilization which is not at thesame time a document of barbarism’—prize open the historical document—and, byextension, the event itself—to an internal instability and mutability.30 Postmodernism hasenlarged on this to the extent that it challenges the very notion of there being anyuniversal history at all. It is important to be clear on this: postmodernism does not denyhistory; rather, it denies that there is onlyonehistory. For Lyotard, a universal historyimplies a single transcendent Subject position from which the history might berecuperated, appropriated, recounted or narrated: that is to say, universal history ispredicated on monotheism. In place of this, Lyotard advocates the pluralism of paganism:multiple gods, multiple histories, no transcendence.31 Any singular event can be insertedinto any number of histories, each presided over by a different force or power; and itsvalue—its essence—will depend upon the contradictions and incoherence involved in ournecessarily considering the event from such a pluralist perspective. In the simpler termswhich Benjamin had in mind, the singular event of a battle, say, is different when one isthe victim and when one is the victor: postmodernism would ask us to think the narrativesproposed by both such positions simultaneously.‘Modernity’ itself is increasingly seen as a Benjaminian document of civilization andof barbarism at once. It is a crude banalization of the postmodern position to suggest thatit entirely reneges on modernity. Zygmunt Bauman’s work is an excellent case in pointhere. Given the pessimism regarding Enlightenment and subsequent European history, itwould be an easy step to consider the twentienth century’s greatest disaster, the Naziatrocities, as a consequence of modernity. But Bauman takes a much more circumspectpostmodern attitude to the Holocaust. Citing sociological research into the victims ofhijackings and terrorist activity, he indicates that so-called ‘personality change’ after thetraumatic event is in fact illusory. What happens is that historical circumstances after thetrauma favour the appearance of traits which were always latent, but which were notappropriate under the historical norms which conditioned the life of the victim before thetraumatic event. A different aspect of the personality assumes the normative position: thesame person remains. Bauman allegorizes this to consider the Holocaust:The unspoken terror permeating our collective memory of the Holocaust…is thegnawing suspicion that the Holocaust could be more than an aberration, morethan a deviation from an otherwise straight path of progress, more than acancerous growth on the otherwise healthy body of the civilized society; that, inshort, the Holocaust was not the antithesis of modern civilization and everything(or so we like to think) it stands for. We suspect (even if we refuse to admit it)that the Holocaust could merely have uncovered another face of the samemodern society whose other, so familiar, face we so admire. And that the twofaces are perfectly comfortably attached to the same body.32Modernity does not lead inexorably to the Holocaust; rather, the civilized face ofmodernity is attended constantly by a barbarism which is its Janus-complement.The horror at the evil of the Holocaust is, for Bauman, really a horror at the rationalityinscribed within the practice of the Holocaust. Enlightenment reason had enabled thedevelopment of an extraordinarily complete rationally ordered and self-sustaining socialprocess. Part of the legacy of this is the development of efficiency in productivity, andthe (often self-serving) development of technology. The horrifying truth of the matter,according to Bauman, is that ‘every “ingredient” of the Holocaust…was normal,“normal” not in the sense of the familiar…but in the sense of being fully in keeping witheverything we know about our civilization, its guiding spirit, its priorities, its immanentvision of the world’.33 Structurally, the gas chambers are driven by the same presidingprinciples that were taken for granted as the positive aspects of modernity: rationalizedefficiency in industrial production. The barbarism of the Holocaust arises becauseEnlightenment contained within its drive to reason a carcinogenic drive to rationalism,which can be used as well for fascist as for emancipatory ends. For a postmodernsociologist such as Bauman, it becomes difficult to disintricate the ‘rationality of evil’from the ‘evil of [modern, instrumental] rationality’. As he indicates, in the world of thedeath camps, everything was rationalized: ‘Each step on the road to death was carefullyshaped so as to be calculable in terms of gains and losses, rewards and punishments.’34The SS also knew that, in a perversion of Enlightenment, but a perversion made possiblepreciselybyEnlightenment, reason was their single best ally in ensuring that their victimswould become complicit in their own suffering, betraying their fellows in the reasonablehope of prolonging their own lives thereby: ‘to found their order on fear alone, the SSwould have needed more troops, arms and money. Rationality was more effective, easierto obtain, and cheaper. And thus to destroy them, the SS men carefully cultivated therationality of their victims.’35Reason, which was supposed to legitimize the neo-pagan and emancipatory activitiesof Enlightenment, is now itself in need of legitimation. It can no longer assume thecapacity for self-legitimation without assuming an exclusivity which necessarilyvictimizes other possible (and equally, if differently) reasonable narratives. Its claimsupon universality are supplied by its inherent tendency to fall into the merest rationalism.It produces an administered society, and not a reasonable one; reason is replaced byefficiency and by the aesthetic and formal vacuities of rationalism. As both Derrida andFoucault have argued, though in very different ways, Enlightenment reason is profoundlyexclusivist: it can legitimate itself only by first identifying and then stigmatizing itsOther. As a result, Enlightenment reason is a potent weapon in the production of socialnormativity, driving people towards a conformity with a dominant and centred single‘norm’ of behaviour. Reason, in short, has to produce the ‘scandal’ of its Other to keepitself going. Baudrillard has argued that this has an extremely important corollary effectin the twentieth century. In our time, it is not so much reason itself which requireslegitimation as the very principle of reality (which, it is assumed, is founded uponrational principles). Society, in a move structurally parallel to Enlightenment reason, thusproduces the Other of the real—fantasy—to legitimize the normativity of its ownpractices. Thus: ‘Disneyland is there to conceal the fact that it is the “real” country, all of“real” America, which is Disneyland (just as prisons are there to conceal the fact that it isthe social, in its entirety, in its banal omnipresence, which is carceral.’36 Theemancipation proposed by Enlightenment brings with it an incarcerating impetus: its‘freedom’ turns out to be but theformof a freedom, an aesthetics rather than a politics offreedom. The name for this aestheticization of the political isrepresentation. In thepostmodern, representation, as both a political and an aesthetic category, has come underincreasing pressure; and it is to this that we can now turn.JUSTICE AND REPRESENTATIONEnlightenment reason is self-legitimizing: it takes one historically and culturally specificinflection of reason for the universal form of all Reason; and then adjudges all competingforms of reason to be,ipso facto,unreasonable.37 In crude terms, Enlightenment Europejudged the rest of the cultures of the world in precisely the terms of EnlightenmentEurope; and when, not surprisingly, it found the rest of the world to be ‘different’, itjudged it to be inferior, unreasonable, ‘underdeveloped’. Hence there arises thelegitimation for a racist and imperialist consciousness which underpins some of the mostunjust actions of the modern world, culminating perhaps in the Holocaust.Enlightenment’s difficulty, it seems, was in accepting the possibility of a plurality of theforms of reason, each specific to particular historical or cultural events in theirsingularity. That difficulty had its root in the tendency to abstraction, or to theory.Equally abstract is the idea of a Universal History which, if it is to exist, mustdisregard the singularities of specific events, reading them as ‘signs’ or semiotic counterswhich can be meaningfully inserted into a governing and totalized master narrative.Given that a human culture or society is made possible precisely by the narratives whichit tells to itself, then it becomes clear that what is at stake here is a massive politicalinjustice.The postmodern attack on the notion of a Universal History has importantramifications for the questions of representation and justice. As I indicated earlier, aUniversal History is tacitly predicated upon a monotheism which brings in its wake anincipient totalitarianism. It presupposes a single transcendental position (‘God’) fromwhich the whole of history can be recounted or truthfully narrated. Accordingly, if wesubscribe to such notions, then all contradictory (‘pagan’) human narratives areautomatically discarded and deemed to be nothing more than ‘fictions’. In pragmatic fact,of course, this has meant that, as Benjamin and others have indicated, all history is toldfrom the point of view of the victor, who, as a ‘master narrator’, assumes the position of atotalitarian author, or God; and any opposing narratives—such as the narratives whichconstituted the entire cultural and social history of the victim—are either ignored, deniedor brought into line with the dominant narrative of the victor, from whose point of viewthey appear to be deviant, disjunctive and clearly false. The master narrator simplysubsumes other competing narratives within a totalized framework, and assigns thecompeting narratives to a marginalized position. Those margins have, in modernism,been occupied by various figures such as dissidents, intellectuals, communists, women,lesbian and gay people, ‘foreigners’, and so on. In contrast to this, the postmodern facesthe problematic possibility of a potentially endless and self-contradictory series of representationswithout the predication of an implied presence anywhere which would existto ground or hierarchize the competing representations or narratives.In addition to this, and linked to it, is the political complication of the issue of justice.How can we judge an event? In the ‘modern’ world it is possible to judge according tospecific criteria. These criteria are assumed to be shared by a social consensus. But thisalso implies an instance of presence somewhere, a fundamental ground of truth uponwhich all judgments can be made. That is to say, both representation and justice require afoundational theory. It is precisely such a theory that postmodernism would challenge, onthe grounds that it is a theory which is always tacitly founded upon injustice and upon thecovert violence of totalization.Habermas would agree that no necessary foundation for a social formation exists priorto human beings in community. But he has consistently argued for the necessity ofstruggling towards the fabrication of a society founded upon a rational consensus.Lyotard challenges this on the grounds that consensus without the prior exercise of powerand without covert injustice seems to be impossible; and on the grounds that such aconsensus, which would of necessity conceal and act as a cover for the violences andinjustices upon which the social is founded, may therefore not even be desirable.For Lyotard, there is, in any achieved consensus, necessarily repression or, worse,oppression.38 In order to circumvent this, he advocates that we multiply differences andthat we bear witness to the differend, a term taken from legal discourse. A differendarises under specific circumstances: two opposed parties in a dispute are each in the rightaccording to their own terms of reference; the terms of reference of each party cannotaccommodate, or refuse to accommodate, the other party; and there is no common groundor third set of terms of reference which will allow an adjudication between the twoparties while respecting their own terms of reference. In short, a differend arises when welack a theory which will encompass radically divergent (‘pagan’) narratives. This mayarise in a court of law; but, for Lyotard, it arises everywhere as an issue of justice andrepresentation.39Neither party to a differend can find an adequate representation of itself in thelanguage-game of the other party. Each therefore feels violated by its insertion into thatlanguage-game. Further, we lack a ‘neutral’ or monotheistic theory which can encompassand adequately represent both parties. In the absence of criteria upon which to make thenecessary judgments, how then do we judge?40Judgment and representation are intimately related in the postmodern. The just hasalways been closely linked to the true; and justice depends upon a revelation of truth.There is a clear structural similarity between this and a Marxist hermeneutic. The projectof an ideological demystification starts from the presupposition that a text (or the objectof any critical judgment) is always informed by a specific historical and political nexus,and that the text is the site for the covering over (or disappearance) of the contradictionsimplicit in this historical conjuncture. The task of critical judgment here is in the firstinstance epistemological: it involves the necessary revelation of a truth lying concealedbehind an appearance. But it is precisely the opposition between ideological appearanceon one hand and foundational or true reality on the other which the postmodern putsunder speculative pressure.As Baudrillard has argued, the real in our time is no longer what it used to be.Technology has made it possible to confound the separation between the authentic andthe fake, between the real and its representation, in ways far more radical than evenBenjamin imagined. Yet that separation, of course, is precisely the separation required fora foundational philosophy or for any philosophy which has a strong investment in aunivocal and transcendental notion of truth. The postmodern eschews any such simpleaccess to the true or to foundational criteria upon which to base its acts of criticism or ofjudgment.We live increasingly in the time of what Debord aptly called ‘the society of thespectacle’. Our politics, and our justice, have become increasingly ‘spectacular’, a matterof ‘show trials’ and ‘live’ television courtroom drama. A poignant icon of this state ofaffairs is to be found in the example, often cited by Paul Virilio, of the women of thePlaza de Maya in Buenos Aires, who congregate in silence at regular intervals simply tobear witness to their relatives who have been made to ‘disappear’ by a cruel politicomilitaryregime.41 Political systems—includingsoi-disant‘democratic’ systems—increasingly deal with dissident thought by controlling and regulating its appearances;and, on occasion, dissident thinkers themselves are entirely ‘disappeared’ either directlyby force or indirectly by bureaucratic measures. The essence of the political in our time isformulated not upon the old—the ‘modernist’—relation between appearance and reality,but rather upon the relation between appearance and disappearance. Increasingly, the realitself is subject to this relation as well, when, for a random instance, the reality of theGulf War of 1990 was reduced to the status of a video game, death and destructiondisappearing until such times as the military decided it was appropriate for theirreappearance before the population to be acceptable.42Fundamentally, this shift has affected the status of knowledge upon which judgmentand representation are based. The opposition of appearance to reality assumes necessarilythat the Object of knowledge is stable, and that there exists a model for the Subject ofknowledge which is transcendent. But in the postmodern mood, this has beencontaminated by a historicity and mutability which render both Subject and Objectunstable. As a result, knowledge itself—predicated upon a stable relation between theSubject and Object of knowledge, upon a moment of anagnorisis or recognitionproducing the Identity of the Subject—has entered into crisis.This crisis was foreseen by Kant. In theCritique of Pure ReasonKant faced up to thequestion of the scientificity—by which he meant verifiability—of knowledge about theworld; and he argued there for the necessity of a priori judgment in such matters. Butmore than this, he argued that an a priori knowledge gleaned simply from an analyticmethodology would simply tell us a great deal about the methodology, and notnecessarily anything new about the world: it would provide onlyanamnesis. That is tosay, to perceive the world at all, consciousness needs a form in which to comprehend it;that form—the analytic method of perception—serves primarily the function of selflegitimation.Kant, like the contemporary postmodernist, wanted the world to be able toshock us into new knowledge, into the unforeseen and unpredictable. For Badiou, whomakes a clear—and we might now say ‘Kantian’—distinction between truth and theaccumulation of knowledges, for instance, ‘what is clear is that theoriginof a truth is ofthe order of an event’.43 Kant wanted the world to be able to shock us out of theideological conditioning of our consciousness’s structures. He wanted, thus, what hecalled thesynthetic a priori,which would exceed theanalytic a priori. The syntheticwould not only confirm the method of epistemological analysis of the world; it wouldalso allow for the structural modification of the very analytic method itself to account forand encompass a new given, the new and therefore unpredictable data of the world. Itwould thus provide not just anamnesis but what we would now call the event ofknowledge, or knowledge as event rather than fact.In theCritique of Judgment,this distinction between analytic and synthetic more orless maps directly on to a distinction between determining and reflective judgments, adistinction made much of by Lyotard in the question of postmodern justice. In adetermining judgment, an analytic method determines—predetermines—the result of thejudgment: as in mathematics, say, where the structure of arithmetic determines the resultof its internally generated problems, such as those of addition or subtraction. In reflectivejudgment, we have a different state of affairs, for here, as in our judgments about theaesthetically beautiful, there are no predetermining rules in accordance with which wecan verify our judgments: we judge ‘without criteria’, in the phrase made famous byLyotard. In short, this means that we judge without a predetermining theory. Judgments,we could say, are replaced by acts or by events of judging: the aestheticformof justice isreplaced by the politicaleventof justice.In this state of affairs, the operation of reason extends itself beyond its own internallycoherent framework and attempts to grasp—or to make—the new. This extension is onein which we can see a shift in emphasis away from scientific knowledge towards whatshould properly be called narrative knowledge. Rather than knowing the stable essence ofa thing, we begin to tell the story of the event of judging it, and to enact the narrative ofhow it changes consciousness and thus produces a new knowledge. The postmodernprefers the event of knowing to the fact of knowledge, so to speak.But the central problem remains: how can one legitimize an ‘event’ of judging? Withrespect to what can one validate what must effectively be a singular act? For Lyotard, acredulity towards metanarratives (i.e., subscription to a prevailing theory against whosenorms single events of judging might themselves be judged and validated) is tantamountto a concession to systems theory. Even Habermas, who is opposed to Lyotard on manycounts, opposes this, seeing that in such systems theory ‘belief in legitimacy…shrinks toa belief in legality’.44 For Habermas, communicative action can lead to the establishmentof consensus, which would provide the necessary—if always provisional—grounds uponwhich to make our judgments. But Lyotard would see the establishment of consensus as ameans of arresting the flow of events, in such a way that truth would be reduced to anaccumulation of knowledges. That is to say, in short, that consensus is the meanswhereby a philosophy of Becoming is reduced to a philosophy of Being. The modernistassumes that it is possible to pass from Becoming to Being; the postmodernist believesthat any such move is always necessarily premature and unwarranted, and that its primaryvictim is truth in the guise of the event.Politics, as we usually think it, depends upon consensus; most often, such consensusarticulates itself under the rubric of ‘representation’, in which there is first an assumedconsensus between representative and represented, and second the possibility ofconsensus among representatives. This is bourgeois democracy, and, for thepostmodernist, hardly a democracy at all. In place of such a politics, the postmodernistmakes the demand for a justice. Justice cannot happen under bourgeois democracy, whichis always grounded in the tyranny of the many (and even, of course, in many‘democratic’ systems, on the tyranny of the few—on the hegemonic control of thoughtand of mediatic representations, appearances and disappearances, exercised by a few whomediate the norms of a social formation). We may no longer be able to legislatecomfortably between opposing or competing political systems, for we can no moresubscribe to such totalizing forms; but we can address the instance, the event, of judgingand of justice in its singularities.Here lies the basis of the ethical demand in the postmodern, a demand whose roots liein the work of a philosopher such as Levinas. We must judge: there is no escape from thenecessity of judging in each particular case. Yet we have no grounds upon which to baseour judgment. This is profoundly akin to Levinas:I have spoken a lot about the face of the Other as being the original site of thesensible…. The proximity of the Other is the face’s meaning, and it means in away that goes beyond those plastic forms which forever try to cover the facelike a mask of their presence to perception. But always the face shows throughthese forms. Prior to any particular expression and beneath all particularexpressions, which cover over and protect with an immediately adopted face orcountenance, there is the nakedness and destitution of the expression as such,that is to say extreme exposure, defencelessness,vulnerability itself…. In itsexpression, in its mortality, the face before me summons me, calls for me, begsfor me, as if the invisible death that must be faced by the Other, pure otherness,separated, in some way, from any whole, were my business.45The ‘face-to-face’ implicates us in a response, in the necessity of sociality. We mustbehave justly towards the fact of the Other; but we cannot do that according to apredetermined system of justice or a predetermining political or ethical theory. The Otheris itself always other than itself; it is not simply a displaced Identity in which we mayonce more recognize and reconstitute our self. The demand is for a just relating to alterity,and for a cognition of the event of heterogeneity. In short, therefore, we must discover—produce—justice. Here, for Lyotard and many others is the real political burden of thepostmodern: the search for a just politics which will respect the differend that constitutesthe event.THE NEW PESSIMISMPostmodernism has thrown the very fundamental notion of critique into doubt. It asks twobasic questions of critique: first, given that, in order to be consistent internally, critiquemust have a theoretical foundation, how does it escape the injustice of violence; second,is critique not always accommodated by and within the existing totality of its ostensibleobject, and thereby rendered at best redundant and at worst complicit with its own defeat?Many conclude, as a consequence, that postmodernism is nihilist through and through,and that it gives succour to a contemporary socio-cultural and political state of affairs inwhich late capitalism carries on unabated and uncontested.This view causes a particular concern among critics of culture, who, coincidentallywith the rise of postmodernism in philosophy, have striven to validate mass and popularforms of culture, and who therefore see the work of critical philosophy to be thoroughlyenmeshed in matters of general political interest. It is a widely held belief that thepostmodern has somehow eradicated the boundaries supposed to exist between ‘high art’and ‘popular culture’. This is largely due to an understanding, deriving largely fromJameson, that the fundamental trope of postmodernism in art is pastiche, a ‘parodywithout purpose’.46 While modernists would cite or refer intertextually to a wide range ofother artistic products (Joyce using Homer, say), they would do so for some specific ends.Postmodernists, it is argued, reiterate the same structural strategy of quotation, partialmisrepresentation and so on, but they do this simply for the sake of it. In short, wheremodernism’s strategy of quotation sent the Subject from one signified to another,postmodernism’s similar strategy stays defiantly at the level of the signifier. We watch arock video, in which allusions will be made to Hitchcock, say, and which may use archivecinematic footage; but the point is simply to play with such references and not to assignany governing ‘meaning’ or intentionality to them.This is an ‘ad hocism’ which has seen its counterpart in some forms of contemporaryarchitecture, where some architects have explicitly tried to accommodate their design tothe various tastes and demands of a variegated community. Typically, contemporarypopular art-forms plunder, and thereby question the ‘value’ of, the forms of high art,which are often deemed to be obstructively monumental. Modelling themselves onDuchamp, whose ‘ready-mades’ or ‘LHOOQ’ derive their power from the questioning ofall modes of ‘originality’, contemporary artists frequently ‘sample’ or repeat the ‘greatworks’ of the past. In fact, as a result of this, much of the popular cultural product whichgoes under the name of the postmodern in our time is actually simply a continuation ofthe modern. It is frequently characterized by fragmentation instead of unity, byintertextuality or autoreferentiality instead of reference, by the prioritization of thesignifier over the signified, and similar tropes and figures as we found in Joyce, Proust,Mann, Gide, Picasso, Kandinsky, Schoenberg, Stravinsky and others.There is an important distinction, however. If the allusions and cultural crossreferencesmade in contemporary popular art are not grasped by an audience, then so beit. There is nothing to be gained by such knowledge, which would only allow for the selfsatisfyingcongratulation of narcissistic self-recognition and self-legitimation as a‘connoisseur’. The fundamental argument here is based upon a rather cheerful‘degradation’ of knowledge, or at least a degradation of knowledge-as-fact in favour ofknowledge-as-event.Knowledge here has become nothing more than the next ‘byte’ on the computer screen,the next 30,000 pixel-image, the next software package. It is important to indicate thatthis is as much an effect of the technology of postmodernity as it is of any philosophicaldeterminants of the cultural practices of postmodernism. For the philosopher orintellectual who assumes that his or her position is to be that of the critic whose criticismsare based upon knowledge, enlightenment, the pursuit of truth or at least of the betterarguments in the interests of the construction of a ‘rational society’, this surely provokesa dismal pessimism.Yet it would be true to say that this kind of pessimism is, in a sense, rather banal. Withthis form of pessimism, there yet remains the hope of Enlightenment, of an enlightenmentpossessed by the critic and therefore available to others. What is at stake inpostmodernism is a much more rigorous form of Pessimism, one which will act as aphilosophical counter to the Optimism on which Enlightenment and modernity arefundamentally grounded. As I indicated earlier, such Optimism projects into the future amoment of redemption of the present. It suggests the possibility and even the eventualnecessity of a coincidence between intellection and material practice, between aestheticsand politics, between ‘I’ as the Subject of consciousness and ‘me’ as its Object. Therebyit suggests the immanence as well as the imminence of a moment of self-presence; andfundamentally, therefore, such an Optimism can be seen to be predicated upon aphilosophy of Identity. If the postmodern is distinguishable from the modern, thedistinction lies in the willingness of postmodernism to countenance and indeed toencourage a philosophy of alterity. The Pessimism of the postmodern lies in a realizationthat the future will not redeem the present; that the material world may be thoroughlyresistant to consciousness and to our determination to master it by signification; thathistory, in short, does not existforthe Subject.Such a Pessimism, of course, has nothing to do with an emotion of sadness. It is,rather, of the philosophical order of an ethical demand. If the crude formulation ofOptimism is that ‘all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds’, then Pessimismdoes not strictly speaking simply or simplistically state the reverse, that ‘all is for theworst in the worst of all possible worlds’. Rather, it takes as its first step theacknowledgement, even within modernist Optimism, that there are a number of ‘possibleworlds’. It advances from this that these possible worlds may exist simultaneously (in theform, say, of ‘first’ world, ‘Third’ world, ‘underdeveloped’ world, and so on), and thatwe should bear witness to the differend which constitutes their mutual relations. Wecannot therefore homogenize these worlds, nor can we hierarchize their order of priorityor normativity. We are in no position to speak of the ‘all’, and therefore cannot describe itas being either ‘for the best’ or ‘for the worst’: the ‘all’ is, in fact, precisely the kind ofhomogenizing semantic trope which postmodernism would counter with ‘the local’ or,better, the ‘singularity of the event’. The singularity of the event always implicates theSubject in an act of judgment, and such judgments, made without criteria, are best facedboth stoically and ethically.47 Postmodern Pessimism derives from the realization that‘the just’ can never be formulated; the positive aspect of such Pessimism lies in therealization that the just must be enacted, invented. History may not exist for the Subject;but the Subject must ‘just’ exist.NOTES1 For a full indication of the scope of these debates, see T.Docherty (ed.), Postmodernism: A Reader (Hemel Hampstead: Harvester-Wheatsheaf, 1993), and C.Jencks (ed.), The Postmodern Reader (London: Academy Editions, 1992).2 F.de Onís (ed.), Antologia de la poesia española e hispanoamericana (Madrid, 1934); A.Toynbee, A Study of History, vol. 1 (1934; 2nd edn, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1935), p. 1, note 2, and vol. 5 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1939), p. 43. For a fuller documentation of the history of the term ‘postmodernism’, see M.Köhler, ‘“Postmodernismus”: Ein begriffsgeschichtlicher Überblick’, Amerikastüdien, 22:1 (1977).3 H.White, Metahistory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973; repr. 1987). pp. 61–2.4 E.Auerbach, Mimesis (1946; trans. W.R.Trask; repr. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), p. 552. See my comments on what, theoretically, is at stake in this text in T.Docherty, After Theory (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 122–3.5 L.A.Fiedler, ‘The New Mutants’, Partisan Review, 32 (1965):505–6. The distinction between aesthetic postmodernism as mood and political postmodernity as a periodizing term has often been seen as a state of affairs productive of a specific ‘schizophrenia’. For more on this, see F.Jameson, Postmodernism (London: Verso, 1991), pp. 25ff.; and cf. the work of Deleuze and Guattari and those thinkers usually grouped under the rubric of ‘anti-psychiatry’, such as Rollo May, David Cooper, R.D.Laing, Norman O.Brown and others.6 See, e.g., J.Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action, 2 vols, trans. T. McCarthy (London: Heinemann, 1984); Habermas, Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. F.G.Lawrence (London: Polity, 1985); F.Jameson, Late Marxism (London: Verso, 1990); E.Mandel, Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1978).7 J.Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition [14.44], xxiv. Lyotard indicates that such a definition is ‘simplifying to extremes’; and later, in Le Postmoderne expliqué aux enfants [14.34], 40, he points out that in this text he overstressed the narrative genre.8 Lyotard, Postmodern Condition, [14.44], 81.9 For more on the event, see Lyotard, ‘The Sublime and the avant-garde’, in A. Benjamin (ed.) [14.47] and cf. G.Bennington, Lyotard: Writing the Event (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988). On justice, see Lyotard, Le Différend [14.30] and Lyotard and J.-L.Thébaud, Au juste [14.41].10 T.Adorno and M.Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944; trans. J. Cumming, London: Verso, 1986), p. 6.11 P.Gay, The Enlightenment, vol. 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966), p. xiii.12 Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic, p. 3.13 Ibid., p. 6.14 Ibid., p. 7.15 Ibid., p. 9.16 Lyotard, ‘Svelte Appendix to the Postmodern Question’, trans. T.Docherty, in R.Kearney (ed.), Across the Frontiers (Dublin: Wolfhound Press, 1988), p. 265.17 See, for examples, J.L.Austin, How to do Things with Words 2nd edn, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975); K.Burke, Language as Symbolic Action (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966); S.Fish, Self-Consuming Artifacts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), and Is there a Text in this Class? (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980); W.J.T.Mitchell (ed.), Against Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), which includes a ‘more-pragmatist-than-thou’ statement by Richard Rorty, the most explicitly ‘New Pragmatist’ of current pragmatic theorists.18 Paul de Man, The Resistance to Theory (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986), p. 11. See also G.Frege, ‘On Sense and Meaning’, in M.Black and P.T.Geach (eds), Translations from the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege (Oxford: Blackwell, 1952).19 On the philosophical deconstruction of such identity, see, e.g., V.Descombes, Modern French Philosophy, trans. L.Scott-Fox and J.M.Harding (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 38.20 Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic, p. 7.21 Ibid., p. 13.22 See M.Foucault, Folie et déraison (Paris: Plon, 1961).23 Voltaire, Candide (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), passim; John Milton, ‘Paradise Lost’, in B.A.Wright (ed.), Milton: Poems (London: Dent, 1956), p. 218 (Bk iv, line 112) and p. 164 (Bk i, line 253). Cf. my comments on this in Docherty, On Modern Authority (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1986), ch. 7.24 H.Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (1966), trans. R.M.Wallace (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1983), p. 404.25 The indebtedness of this mode of thinking to the proto-existentialist Kierkegaard should be clear: the sense that one was always ‘embarked’ and that the grounds upon which one makes judgments are constantly shifting was always close to the centre of Kierkegaardian thinking.26 See, e.g., C.Jencks, Postmodernism (London: Academy Editions, 1987), and P. Portoghesi, Postmodern (New York: Rizzoli, 1983).27 See D.Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989).28 See K.Frampton, ‘Towards a Critical Regionalism’, in H.Foster (ed.), Postmodern Culture (London: Pluto Press, 1983).29 J.-F.Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition [14.44], xxiv. For the suggestion that this is over stated, see Lyotard, Le Postmoderne expliqué aux enfants [14.34], 40.SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHYWhat follows here is a list of titles by Lyotard and by Baudrillard which are relevant tothe theme, concept, practices or philosophies of postmodernism. Given the fact thatpostmodernism is explicitly eclectic, it does not comprise a representative selection of thewritings available on postmodernism. For a more detailed bibliography ofpostmodernism, as opposed to a list of the writings of Lyotard and Baudrillard, the readershould consult the following texts: S. Connor,Postmodernist Culture(Oxford: BasilBlackwell, 1989); T.Docherty,Postmodernism: A Reader(London: Harvester-Wheatsheaf; New York: Columbia University Press, 1993); L.Hutcheon,A Poetics ofPostmodernism(London: Routledge, 1988).BaudrillardPrimary texts4.1Le Système des objets,Paris: Gallimard, 1968.4.2La Société de consommation,Paris: Gallimard, 1970.4.3Pour une critique de l’économie politique du signe,Paris: Gallimard, 1972.30 W.Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. H.Zohn (Glasgow: Fontana, 1973), p.258.31 See, e.g., Lyotard, Rudiments païens [14.27] and Instructions païennes [14.26].32 Z.Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Oxford: Polity Press, 1979), p. 7.33 Ibid., p. 8.34 Ibid., pp 202–3.35 Ibid., p. 203.36 J.Baudrillard, Simulations [14.19], 25.37 See J.Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. A.Bass (Brighton: Harvester, 1982), p. 213.38 Lyotard and R.Rorty, ‘Discussion’ [14.49], 581–4.39 See Lyotard, Le Différend [14.30].40 For a full exploration of this notion of ‘judging without criteria’, see Lyotard and Thébaud, Au juste [14.41].41 See G.Debord, La Société du spectacle (Paris: Buchet-Chastel, 1968); P.Virilio, L’Horizon négatif (Paris: Galilée, 1984), esp. cinquième partie.42 See J.Baudrillard, La Guerre du golfe n’a pas eu lieu [14.15], and C.Norris, Intellectuals and the Gulf War (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1991).43 A.Badiou, Manifeste pour la philosophie (Paris: Seuil, 1989), p. 17 (trans. T. Docherty).44 J.Habermas, Legitimation Crisis, trans. T.MacCarthy (London: Heinemann, 1976).45 E.Levinas, The Levinas Reader, ed. Séan Hand (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), pp. 82, 83.46 See F.Jameson, ‘Postmodernism; or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’, in his Postmodernism (London: Verso, 1991); and see also the various earlier, and more influential, forms of Jameson’s essay in Foster (ed.), Postmodern Culture (where it appears as ‘Postmodernism and Consumer Society’) and in New Left Review, 146 (1984):56–93.47 On such stoicism, see G.Deleuze, Logique du sens (Paris: Minuit, 1969).4.4Le Miroir de la production,Tournail: Casterman, 1973.4.5L’Echange symbolique et la mort,Paris: Gallimard, 1976.4.6L’Effet Beaubourg,Paris: Galilée, 1977.4.7Oublier Foucault,Paris: Galilée, 1977.4.8De la séduction,Paris: Denoël, 1979.4.9Simulacres et simulation,Paris: Galilée, 1981.4.10Les Stratégies fatales,Paris: Grasset, 1983.4.11La Gauche divine,Paris: Grasset, 1985.4.12Amérique,Paris: Grasset, 1986.4.13L’Autre par lui-même,Paris: Galilée, 1987.4.14Cool Memories,Paris: Galilée, 1987.4.15La Guerre du golfe n’a pas eu lieu,Paris: Galilée, 1991.Translations4.16The Mirror of Production,trans. M.Poster, St Louis: Telos Press, 1975.4.17For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign,trans. C.Levin, St Louis: Telos Press, 1981.4.18In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities,trans. P.Foss, P.Patton, and J. Johnston, New York: Semiotext(e), 1983.4.19Simulations,trans. P.Foss, P.Patton, and P.Beitchman, New York: Semiotext(e), 1983.4.20The Evil Demon of Images,Sydney: Power Institute Publications, 1987.4.21Selected Writings,ed. M.Poster, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988.LyotardPrimary texts4.22La Phénoménologie,Paris: PUF, 1954.4.23Dérives à partir de Marx et Freud,Paris: Union Générale d’Editions, 10/18, 1970.4.24Discours, figure,Paris: Klincksieck, 1971.4.25L’Economie libidinale,Paris: Minuit, 1974.4.26Instructions païennes,Paris: Galilée, 1977.4.27Rudiments païens,Paris: Union Générale d’Editions, 1977.4.28La Condition postmoderne,Paris: Minuit, 1979.4.29Le Mur du pacifique,Paris: Galilée, 1979.14.30Le Différend,Paris: Minuit, 1983.14.31L’Assassinat de l’expérience par la peinture: Monory,Paris: Le Castor Astral, 1984.14.32Le Tombeau de l’intellectuel,Paris: Galilée, 1984.14.33L’Enthousiasme: la critique kantienne de l’histoire,Paris: Galilée, 1986.14.34Le Postmoderne expliqué aux enfants,Paris: Galilée, 1986.14.35 ‘Sensus Communis’,Le Cahier du Collége International de Philosophie,3 (1987): 67–87.14.36L’Inhumain,Paris: Galilée, 1988.14.37Leçons sur l’analytique du sublime,Paris: Galilée, 1991.14.38 Lyotard, J.-F. and Chaput, T.,Less Immatériaux,Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1985.14.39 Lyotard, J.-F. and Francken, R.,L’Histoire de Ruth,Paris: Le Castor Astral, 1983.14.40 Lyotard, J.-F. and Monory, J.,Récits tremblants,Paris: Galilée, 1977.14.41 Lyotard, J.-F. and Thébaud, J.-L.,Au juste,Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1979.14.42 Lyotard, J.-F. et al.,La Faculté de juger,Paris: Minuit, 1983.Translations14.43 ‘One of the Things at Stake in Women’s Struggles’,SubStance,20 (1978): 9–17.14.44The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge,trans. G.Bennington andB.Massumi, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984.14.45The Differend,trans. G.van den Abbeele, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990.14.46Peregrinations,New York: Columbia University Press, 1988.14.47The Lyotard Reader,ed. A.Benjamin, Oxford: Blackwell, 1989.14.48Just Gaming,trans. W.Godzich, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985.14.49 Lyotard, J.-F. and Rorty, R, ‘Discussion’,Critique,41 (1985):581–4.