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In the wake of the September 11 attacks, commentators on intellectual life from a variety of quarters, including The New York Times, Time magazine, and U.S. News and World Report, speculated that the war into which the United States had been thrust would force a new seriousness upon the nation. And they wondered whether one consequence would be a decline for postmodernist thinking--among both the scholars who propound it and the students who imbibe it. As the argument went, postmodernism--with its celebration of irony, its commitment to the subversive, its conviction that all morality is local, historical, and socially constructed--would soon find itself out of step with the temper of the times.

Stanley Fish thinks otherwise. In an October op-ed for The New York Times--and, just this month, in a cover story for Harper's--Fish has mounted a public relations campaign on postmodernism's behalf. Far from becoming obsolete, Fish says, postmodernism is more timely than ever.

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The rest of it.

[ July 10, 2002: Message edited by: audra estrones ]

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I'm not entirely sure I even grasp the article

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Your not supposed to, Dr. It's about postmodernism, remember.

I suppose postmodernism can mean different things to different people.

To me, postmodernism means that all points of view are valid; that facts are maleable, that an argument based on speculation is as valid as an argument constructed from facts and evidence.

Like a bridge over a river can be as safe if it were built the way we'd like it to be in our imaginations as opposed to a bridge constructed with material science and experimentation.

There are no postmodernist doctors, or engineers, or rocket surgeons.

And for good reason. We want medicine, buildings and rockets to work.

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There are no postmodernist doctors, or engineers, or rocket surgeons.

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postmodernism--with its
celebration of irony, its commitment to the subversive, its conviction that
all morality is local, historical, and socially constructed

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Wow, that's what post-modernism is? I've been asking people for so long always getting "I don't know. But neither does anyone else " as an answer and here pops the definition right into my lap.

...

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There are no postmodernist doctors, or engineers, or rocket surgeons.

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Not entirely true, but largely so. All those people are "professionals," and in North America, especially, professional is another word for fundamentalist ideologue.

Which is why so many doctors will prescribe approved medications right up to the day they are proved to be dangerous, at which point the doctors instantly forget their enthusiasm for the last fad and blithely take up the next one.

And I'm sure someone else could describe the orthodoxies that most engineers and "rocket surgeons" (?) subscribe to, right up to the day that a new orthodoxy supersedes the old one.

Honestly. Tommy, science doesn't need cheerleaders, nor narrators who sound like Grand Inquisitors neither. Loosen up a touch.

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And I'm sure someone else could describe the orthodoxies that most engineers and "rocket surgeons" (?) subscribe to, right up to the day that a new orthodoxy supersedes the old one.

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...with a fervour that is almost religious in intensity and tone...

Slavoj Zizek is right: the term 'postmodernism' is an Anglo-American creation, it began as the concept that more or less stands for 'what-we-anglophones-see-happening-in-France-theory-wise'. The authors in France who are lumped together under this heading mostly don't see eye to eye among themselves, and certainly don't consider themselves protagonists of the same school of thought called 'postmodernism'. (In some North American universities such 'postmodernism' is further merged with the Frankfurt School and the entire melange given the name of 'critical theory', which is outrageous.) But of course, as Zizek also points out, such conceptualization of 'postmodernism' had with time influenced the thinkers encompassed and reluctantly interpreted with it. 'Postmodernism' in theory was an invention of the anglophone gaze (terribly mixed metaphores, I know) but it stuck; through intercultural promiscuity in myriad ways it affected those who were not postmodernists to begin with. (Similar thing happened with the film noir, according to Zizek: the term originated in France as a way of conceptualizing certain American movies.)

I think the only contemporary French theorist who ever used the term postmodern with largesse was J-F Lyotard. However (as I found out in the Bill Reading book on Lyotard) the term never meant to signify a chunk of temporality: 'postmodern' for Lyotard was rather something that takes place during modernity, that disrupts it at certain points and that is in a way 'older' than modernity. It's more a philosophical term than a designation of time, and having in mind Lyotard's resistance to linear history and historical thought in general, it's somewhat unfortunate that progressivist notion of postmodernity as something that comes 'after' modernity, or as an Aufhebung of modernity, is sometimes associated with his name.

As Rorty says, 'postmodern' has one meaning in architecture, another in poetry and literature, and still another one (or better, a series of meaning) in philosophy. Lyotard's book 'The Post-modern Condition: A Report on Knowledge' - which was btw I believe comissioned by the University of Montreal - deals with the issue of legitimation of knowledge in philosophy and its commodification in society, and specifically attacks the type of philosophy that is in the business of legitimazing scientific ways of knowing, of creating a meta-narrative around science, and privileging predictability and controlability as truth criteria. The 'postmodern' from the PM Condition was later used by sociologists of modernity like Anthony Giddens as 'cessation of blind trust in hard sciences' (which he disagrees we are witnessing, and prefers the term late-modern to postmodern). There's a lot of familial relationships with sociologists of 'post-industrialism' (Alain Touraine one of them, if memory serves) in that context.

Then there are people who took over ther 'postmodern' through Baudrillard and writers of viractuality, who focus on mediated and meditised nature of reality.

Then there was a period when Rorty was using the term as the provocation to those Americans and others who legitimise their ethico-political arrangements as God given and/or in some sort of a privileged relationship with the real 'human nature'. He stopped using the term 'ironic postmodern liberal' due to the high digree of philosophical abuse, I would dare guessing.

I am currently reading an influential book that operates with terms like 'postmodern means of control in the age of Empire' on the one hand, and 'postmodern deterritorialization' on the other, positive one. In some books one can find constant ethical and political resignification of the term, which is cool.

Stanly Fish, the provocateur extraordinaire, uses the term 'postmodern' in the way that is most likely to ruffle feathers. He uses it in the "us vs. them" polemical way and I adore his writings for it. Complexity and some distinctions are sometimes harmed in the process, but such is the nature of polemics. Having personally experienced and seen, as well as read about, power-thirst and love of monopoly of some of the more analytically inclined philosophy profs, I think that his brazenness is just what the doctor prescribed. I happen to have learned a lot from his work in critical legal studies and literary strategies. Whoever had to read Ronald Dworkin's essays about liberal/social democracies for credit (OK, and sometimes for personal interest) will enjoy Fish's polemos with Dworkin's philosophy of legal interpretation. (Fish's articles on daily politics might be a different matter - I find myself disagreeing half of the time, often not so much with the goal he's defending as with his stating of the problem.)

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As Rorty says, 'postmodern' has one meaning in architecture, another in poetry and literature, and still another one (or better, a series of meaning) in philosophy.

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The thing is, there is no such thing as 'postmodernism' . Most likely.

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Isn't post-modernism, in it's current popular usage, just one of those things dumb people (usually writers) use to sound smart?

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A Report on Knowledge' - which was btw I believe comissioned by the University of Montreal - deals with the issue of legitimation of knowledge in philosophy and its commodification in society, and specifically attacks the type of philosophy that is in the business of legitimazing scientific ways of knowing, of creating a meta-narrative around science, and privileging predictability and controlability as truth criteria.

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For some reason, I’ve always seen better during the day than at night. I had no idea that this was a result of my ‘privileging’ the sun. I will stop it immediately.

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The 'postmodern' from the PM Condition was later used by sociologists of modernity like Anthony Giddens as 'cessation of blind trust in hard sciences' (which he disagrees we are witnessing, and prefers the term late-modern to postmodern). There's a lot of familial relationships with sociologists of 'post-industrialism'

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I wonder.

[ July 19, 2002: Message edited by: SHH ]

[ July 19, 2002: Message edited by: SHH ]

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At the margins of knowledge, the so-called hard-sciences do not, of course, have all the answers. But to use that obvious shortfall as an angle to suggest that the entire endeavor is equivalent to some philosopher spitting utter nonsense is, well, utter nonsense.

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Fundamentalist defences of the "hard sciences," like SHH's above, tend to come from people who don't really do hard science.

Take your average MD -- please! (I'm assuming, SHH, that you would not consider medicine to be "at the margins of knowledge.") It has been a major amusement of life for some of us to listen to doctors and medical researchers make each of their successive claims to "scientific" certainty on many turfs, only to reverse direction ten or twenty years down the road without turning a hair, sounding as zealous and dictatorial in their new prescriptions as they did in their old -- and always, so utterly ignorant and unaware of the degree to which so much of what they say is socially influenced and constructed.

One of the most interesting books I've ever worked on was a social history of how doctors choose a cause of death to put on your death certificate. You'd be surprised ...

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It has been a major amusement of life for some of us to listen to doctors and medical researchers make each of their successive claims to "scientific" certainty on many turfs, only to reverse direction ten or twenty years down the road without turning a hair, sounding as zealous and dictatorial in their new prescriptions as they did in their old -- and always, so utterly ignorant and unaware of the degree to which so much of what they say is socially influenced and constructed.

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PS: I also notice you had some, shall I say, issues with your TAs and professors: I know just the right Lacanian psychoanalyst to help you cope with that.

[ July 19, 2002: Message edited by: Trespasser ]

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But it bothers many to hear that even science is not all about absolute right or absolute wrong.

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I might go so far as to say "not at all..." There might be absolutes in math; but math is not science, really.

As for M.Deities...

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It has been a major amusement of life for some of us to listen to doctors and medical researchers make each of their successive claims to "scientific" certainty on many turfs...

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Of course all of it's filtered through the series of electrical impulses and chemical reactions that are our thoughts and ideas, the things that collectively we call 'human nature'. What exists outside human perception is irrelevent, since we can't, by nature of being human, have a window to ultimate, objective reality. Because of that, I think attempting to establish any supremacy over post-modernist thought over scientific analysis (or vice versa) is a pointless exercise in what is another aspect of human nature. Competitiveness. The part of our evolutionary hardwiring that helped us get to where we can waste copious amounts of time and energy arguing about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.

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If you can construct a probability logarithm to mathematically predict the outcome of a social situation, is it math, science or philosophy?

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Well, a point I skipped over above is that there's a difference between mathematics, which (strictly speaking) has nothing to do with the real world, and mathematical modelling, which is the use of math to describe real phenomena. Pure mathematics isn't a science because it doesn't depend on observations. Or so I concluded after listening to some interesting digressions on the subject by one of my math profs. Philosophy of math? I'd rather read Swift.

(Incidentally, do you mean a "probability algorithm"?)

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Is statistical analysis a hard or soft science?

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(Incidentally, do you mean a "probability algorithm"?)

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Seriously though, skdadl, although I would agree that throwing the baby out etc. is probably wrong, I certainly wouldn’t put medicine, generally, in the hard-sciences column.

I thought though the easiest and most oft noted negation of much of this body of so-called critical thought was the over assertion/reliance on the notion of constructs at the cost of absolutes. To which, of course, the rejoinder goes: maybe your notion of constructs is just another construct? (That’s putting it politely).

I agree, BTW, with RW’s last paragraph in her longer post.

On the other hand, I do not think everything is socially constructed. For example, I believe that dinosaurs once roamed the earth. I doubt that social construction deposited their bones, or that our conclusion that they belonged to living creatures is a delusion.

Skdadl quite rightly criticises the medical establishment. Much of what they say and do is socially constructed, and functions to maintain the social status of doctors. It also may function as a manner of discriminating against women or social minorities. But there is some real, unconstructed science which underlies medicine. Does blood circulate in the body or is it stagnant? Do bacteria or viruses sometimes cause disease? To me, it throws the baby out with the bathwater to claim that we do not "know" these latter things, or that some other construction explains disease as well as the germ theory does.

The visceral reaction to post-modernism comes, I think from the threat it poses to values. (I think I understand SHH as saying this, above.)
If all human values are socially constructed, then one can envisage and legitimise the practices of any society. Without a ground outside the will, there can be no basis for preferences.

If that is so, then no international standards of human rights have any validity beyond personal/societal preference. If a society decides to murder a minority, we may have our contrary opinion, but have to concede that it flows from local values, and not necessarily international ones.

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That, at least, is the spectre. Maybe someone can tell us why it is not real?

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This is not to say that I believe the latter to be a ghostly figment of the reactionary imagination. Relativism is a real concern. It's just not the same thing as the former, where understanding many value systems is not at the expense of one's own. It's the tendency to polarize post-modern thought against hard science/objective universality/whateveryouwannacallit. It's a false dichotomy that sets each at the extreme, resulting in relativism at one end and rigid absolutism at the other.

Message edited because my fried brain is becoming more incoherent as the day wears on.

[ July 19, 2002: Message edited by: Rebecca West ]

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Stating that there is no universal morality, that they are a social construct, is not the same as being without morals. Once can say, for instance, that they espouse a set of moral values within a Judeo-Christian context while recognizing that there are many other sets of values equally valid to those who hold them to be true.

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But that is a somewhate facile observation, I think. Some people believe abortion is murder. Others don't. Both these moral values, as you say, are socially constructed and equally valid to those who hold them to be true.

That doesn't provide much help in determining whether one of these two conflicting moral views is superior to the other. Or, as Jeff House noted, does it help guide us in our behavior towards those whose moral codes conflict with ours.

After all, everyone--even moral relativists, at least in calling for tolerance and acceptance of other moral beliefs--do believe some moral codes are superior to others. That's why we create them and apply them.

I'm an Enlightenment kinda guy. It seems to me that a moral code based on debate and reason is going to do a better job of balancing the twin requirements of social harmony and individual autonomy than one grounded in tradition, myth or superstition alone.

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Stating that there is no universal morality, that there are many social constructs, is not the same as being devoid of a moral framework.

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Of course not. It is to be devoid of a moral framework which can be imposed on anyone else.
Example: if someone in Rwanda wishes to kill all the Hutus, and that has majority social assent, do I simply say: I disagree, but you have a right to your position? You seem to say this.

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One can say, for instance, that they espouse a particular set of moral values within, say, a Judeo-Christian context while recognizing that there are many other sets of values that are valid to those who hold them to be true.

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Example: if someone in Rwanda wishes to kill all the Hutus, and that has majority social assent, do I simply say: I disagree, but you have a right to your position? You seem to say this.

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that the post-modernists' concept of socially constructed morality leads down the path to a relativism that ceases to be horrified in the face of the intellectual and philosophical challenge presented by something like genocide.

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This definition is highly problematic, and entangles too many threads that should be looked at separately.

Firstly, there isn't a straight path between concepts and theories, and somebody's behaviour. Concepts don't kill, people do. As much as I'd like to think that ideas are the most important determinant of people's behaviour, between the reading and the practices many things interfere. Reading is by itself sufficiently interfered, and it is a social, not an individual philosophical situation.

Then there's the issue of how moral communities and moral sensitivities are being formed. Those who claim that "postmodern moralities" and "postmodern politics" will lead to moral indifference and relativism actually have the burden of proof on their side: were the horrors the twentieth century (and I apologize here for invoking mega-symbols), for instance, result of ironic, postmodern moralists? Or perhaps of those who claim that they 'possess the truth', know the correct answer?

There was a debate between Norman Geras and Rorty about what prompted people in some European countries to be more engaged in helping their Jewish neighbours when the 'trains were running to Auschwitz', and why there was a lower degree of activity in other environment. Rorty writes that some practical points of identification ('my fellow Milanese' or 'a mother of two kids just like me') might have helped more than any universalist humanist notion ('human being that has inherent qualities deserving of our respect') - having in mind the history of the concept of personhood and human being, appealing to that notion in order to include somebody into 'one of us' group will not always be successful. It wasn't for so many centuries.

As well, the 'stretchability' of moral imagination is not reversely proportional to somebody's fondness towards the word 'truth'. To remind of the obvious, those who were in the business of truth production more often than not had very narrow moral imagination, as narrow as to include only a close clique, perhaps, surrounded by the sea of heretics and non-believers (and I'm talking here about religion as well as science, and their political workings). Who knows, perhaps the end of epistemological emperialism would expand moral imaginations and moral concern instead of narrowing it? Rorty would say that how much we care for others' suffering depends, again, on non-philosophical things like profession that one does, the amount of leasure time, whether the moral actor lives in a society that has a secret police or not, whether she has enough to eat, things like that. He also -- as do many other people accused of 'postmodernism' -- emphasizes that poetry, literature and good journalism are much more successful in arousing moral outrage and expanding the 'us' group than philosophy can ever hope to be.

And by the way, some 'postmodernists' have been full-time ethicists, have talked about unconditional ethical responses that come BEFORE philosophical questions are asked: Emmanuel Levinas is such a thinker.

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If all human values are socially constructed, then one can envisage and legitimise the practices of any society. Without a ground outside the will, there can be no basis for preferences. If that is so, then no international standards of human rights have any validity beyond
personal/societal preference. If a society decides to murder a minority, we may have our contrary opinion, but have to concede that it flows from local values, and not necessarily international ones.

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Some people - both Disney-thinkers (and I am insulting Disney) and serious critics - often use the notion 'socially constructed' as if there's somebody (an individual or a group who speaks) doing the construction, building an edifice by picking up bit after bit and constructing a morality or a worldview for themselves. Social construction is anything but that. There is no constructor behind social construction - the process is more like a sedimentation, during which layers upon layers are added and merged, ideas circulated, social sanctions enacted, habits formed, a lot of material forgotten, a lot of saved, until a line of mainstream emerges.

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It means that now that we (and We is always shifting - 'We' is the first question of 'postmodern' ethics) can't count on God or the true human nature or the laws of history or a powerful military to sustain our moral beliefs, we have to work twice as hard to keep them alive and plausible.

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Oh now really. If you can construct a probability logarithm to mathematically predict the outcome of a social situation, is it math, science or philosophy? Is statistical analysis a hard or soft science? Quantum entanglement was considered a mathematical abstraction before we developed the technology to create experiments that proved the principle. We'll probably be able to do the same with a unified field theory when we have particle accelerators powerful enough to smash things close enough together to measure how their behavior at planck distance.

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It is to be noted that quantum mechanics is taken seriously as a description of reality on the microscopic level even though it is fundamentally statistical in nature.

... and QM, being a subset of physics, would be considered a "hard" science, no?

[ July 19, 2002: Message edited by: DrConway ]

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In the wake of the September 11 attacks, commentators on intellectual life from a variety of quarters, including The New York Times, Time magazine, and U.S. News and World Report, speculated that the war into which the United States had been thrust would force a new seriousness upon the nation. And they wondered whether one consequence would be a decline for postmodernist thinking--among both the scholars who propound it and the students who imbibe it.

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It is to be noted that quantum mechanics is taken seriously as a description of reality on the microscopic level even though it is fundamentally statistical in nature... and QM, being a subset of physics, would be considered a "hard" science, no?

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can you think of a more postmodern idea than "the war on terrorism"?

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Is there an alternate mode of expression ?

There is no returning to the past, it isn't there.

We're all waiting.

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But then I can't prevent people from thinking that PM is 'anything goes' kinda thing,

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Well, I'm sure I don't have anywhere near as nuanced and deep understanding of postmodernism as you do, Trespasser, since you've studied it for a long time, and I've only managed to hear about it peripherally in philosophy courses about other stuff. But I don't think I said that PM is "anything goes".

I was talking about how different people have different perspectives on "terrorism", and how the word "terrorism" is being constructed by the people who hold power right now. I wasn't saying that postmodernism was bad. I think it's pretty obvious that people like Dubya are trying to make the world believe in a very absolutist and objective philosophy - this is right, this is wrong, they are evil, we are good. What I was trying to say is that, as the title of this thread states, the whole idea of The War Against Terrorism is something that has been presented as an absolute by the people in power, when in fact it's a phrase that can be stretched to mean pretty much anything that the people in power want it to mean. Which is why perhaps a more postmodern approach is better for understanding what is happening right now than a more objective or absolutist approach.

[ July 20, 2002: Message edited by: Michelle ]

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But then I can't prevent people from thinking that PM is 'anything goes' kinda thing, so I'll just shrug my shoulders

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Firstly, there isn't a straight path between concepts and theories, and somebody's behaviour. Concepts don't kill, people do. As much as I'd like to think that ideas are the most important determinant of people's behaviour, between the reading and the practices many things interfere .

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This is true as far as it goes. But mass movements do depend upon ideas. One may need socal structures to spread the ideas generated in a university context, but those ideas should be carefully examined for weaknesses because those weaknesses may become important in practice.

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Rorty would say that how much we care for others' suffering depends, again, on non-philosophical things like profession that one does, the amount of leasure time, whether the moral actor lives in a society that has a secret police or not, whether she has enough to eat, things like that. He also -- as do many other people accused of 'postmodernism' -- emphasizes that poetry, literature and good journalism are much more successful in arousing moral outrage and expanding the 'us' group than philosophy can ever hope to be.

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Literature may generate moral outrage, but does post-modern literature generate outrage, or is it good ol' fashioned Dickensian-Harriet Beecher Stowe moralism which does that?

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It may be that some think that resistance to postmodernism comes from a belief that the exam-in-the-sky will be on a more traditional topic.

But for me, the problem with post-modernism as a general theory is that I cannot see a methodology of conflict resolution there. In the real world,
to emphasize the historically contingent nature of all values makes it hard to decide who is right when a conflict arises in society.

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Such trivial real world matters as conflict resolution and taking sides as to right and wrong, well, that’s apparently to be left to the Disney-thinkers; like trial lawyers and accountants. Academic ‘Critical Thinkers’ – I just can’t stop laughing every time I type that – are just so advantaged over the mere products of society such as I. Gosh, if I could only be so smart.

Aside from the obvious logical failings; and the game of ‘twister’ that is necessary to sustain; I also can’t help but note the almost religious-like fervor that the disciples of this soon-to-be-scrapped line of pedantry enjoy. I could be wrong. (something you’ll never hear from the ‘converted’ . Let the best ideas win.

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To SHH: 80 % for knowing how to spell Pabulum. Marks docked, though, for not knowing that it's still under copyright (and thus capped -- and thus best kept out of loose conversation). So much in American culture is still under copyright. How far are we expecting the next revision of U.S. copyright law to extend? How old is Mickey Mouse, anyway?

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The more serious error is that I was mixing up copyright law with trademarks: Pablum or Pabulum, whichever the trademark is, presumably goes on as long as the stuff is being made.

But SHH and I may be wrong about the spelling of the trade name. Fast checks on Google are leaving me confused. It appears that "pabulum, -i" is the Latin for food in the sense of fodder, and I see references to the invention of Pablum (TM) by three doctors at Sick Kids' in Toronto in 1930 (royalties "went" to research -- who gets them now?).

Nothin' quite like that early-90s advanced cultural theory swamp.

Is that so different from a medical doctor taking refuge in clinical gobbledygook in order to cover the fact that he or she Really Doesn't Know and doesn't want to rattle the patient?

One of the criticisms often levelled against post-modernists, usually by Marxists, is that they tend towards idealism. Not "idealism" in the political sense of measuring the present against a utopia to be realized; but in the philosophical sense of taking ideas to be the moving force of history. In the context of this thread I think that this criticism needs to be taken seriously.

The concepts that are associated with "post-modernism"--"structuralism," "post-structuralism," "deconstruction," "the dissolution (or death) of the subject," "the will to power," etc.--did not fall from the heavens; they emerged within specific historical contexts in which material forces duelled for supremacy.

"Structuralism," the search for deep structures that give order to social and political realities, makes sense in the context of post-war France during the period when the nationalist/catholic old regime reasserted itself at the expense of the communists who were their allies during the Resistance. Why is it that after liberation from Nazi occupation things ended up looking much like they did before WWII? The answer offered by structuralists in the 1950s was that there must be underlying configurations that can be shaken by major crises, but not displaced to make way for new configurations.

Such theories are "ahistoricist" in downplaying the importance of history to the extent that change is an illusion that conceals fundamental continuity. In short, there will always be a ruling class. But structuralism takes a rather severe knock in the 1960s: France's disastrous war in Algeria leads into a decade of discontent, and by 1968 students and workers have the nationalist/catholic old regime seriously concerned about its ability to survive.

Meanwhile left strategies not primarily based on Marx/Marxism are beginning to emerge. The three books that launched Jaques Derrida's career were published in the previous year, 1967, as was the enormously influential _Society of the Spectacle_ (Guy Debord). Although the term "post-structuralism" is an Anglo-American invention, I think that it is useful to mark this moment when structures rise from the depths to be paraded on the surfaces of capitalist economy/culture along with everything else. Signs and images become the primary materials that are exchanged within this expanding--cannibalistic--economy/culture.

And then came the big crackdown. When everything is becoming unmoored, floating freely to be re-assembled into new orders/configurations, the right relies on might: police and military force is used to smash this "new left" into fragments. A "politics of identity" is elaborated as the next big hope of the left in the late 1970s and 1980s. But doesn't this strategy look like suspiciously like everyone grabbing their little patch after the main battle has been lost?

"Post-modernism" describes this era of fragmentation: fragmentary perspectives, fragmentary culture (advertising's kaleidoscope of signs/images/lifestyles), fragmentary politics ("politics of identity"), fragmentary being. The intellectual gloss was provided by Lyotard in _The Postmodern Condition_, which contains two contradictory ideas.

On the one hand he suggests that people have stopped believing in big pictures, in unified visions, histories, destinies, etc. The implication here is that there was a "modernist" era in which people did believe those things that has now been superceded by a "post-modernist" era in which they don't any more. On the other hand, he suggests, (as discussed in a posting by Trespasser), that post-modernism is contained within the modern as modernist ideas pushed to the extreme. In this case there are no seperate eras of "modernism" and "post-modernism."

Now I suspect that the most important point to make about Lyotard's argument is that he was very, very wrong about people no longer believing in big pictures. From the "war against terrorism" to the Islamic "jihad" that it mirrors, unified visions are proliferating and strengthening.

An Argentinian political theorist, Ernesto Laclau, and a French political theorist, Chantal Mouffe, have attempted to salvage something from the wreckage of identity politics by blending it with some of the ideas of perhaps the most imaginative Marxist of the twentieth century, the Italian revolutionary, Antonio Gramsci. The right got the hang of identity politics faster than the left. They knew intuitively that you have to string together networks/alliances of identities. Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan exemplify this strategy. How do you reassemble a fragmented political landscape? You return to "big picture" politics. So even as Lyotard was pronouncing big picture politics dead, the right was resurrecting it.

Following Stuart Hall, Laclau and Mouffe suggested that the left needed to get in on this game too. And they promoted Gramsci's concept of "hegemony" because Gramsci had faced a similar situation as leader of the Italian Communists when Mussolini came to power, and had come to similar conclusions. The problem for Gramsci was that Mussolini had him locked up almost until the day he died, which is a fairly effective way of keeping the left quiet.

If post-modernism was the time of fragments, then Laclau/Mouffe on the left and Reagan/Thatcher on the right were already post-post-modernists. So should we just abandon the term "post-modernism"? Perhaps. But it would be foolish to abandon the work of Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Jean Baudrillard, Luce Irigaray, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Sarah Kofman, Judith Butler, Brian Massumi, etc., i.e., everyone who tends to get lumped under the term "post-modernism."

I'm going to end this overly long posting by suggesting a different understanding of post-modernism. Think about what we're doing: sitting in front of computers, believing that we are having converations with others sitting at their computers. Each of us constraining our bodies to fit into a position from which we can type or use voice-recognition software. A strange sort of community in a virtual world, a "consensual hallucination" (William Gibson, _Neuromancer_). Not that the "real" and "virtual" worlds are distinct: we chat with friends about the emails we've received, think about images from the net as we walk the streets, rush home to book cinema tickets online. Bodies have quite simply been transformed by these new technologies that penetrate us, shape us, collaborate with us, harm us.

You don't have to be in academia to be living the post-modern condition every day, or even to be thinking about its implications. Films such as _The Sixth Day_, and more recently, _Minority Reports_, force us to think about the technology of human cloning that brings to an end the need for sexual reproduction. That is a post-modern question, and it's one that faces us right here, right now. Friedrich Nietzsche wrote more than a century ago of "the last (hu)man," and was met with laughter, confusion, anger, until he was finally locked up as "insane." It is time for us to ask if we really want to be the last humans, the last mortal beings, before the cloned
"over(hu)man" replaces us...

Also Sprach Zarathustra

[ August 03, 2002: Message edited by: Zarathustra ]