Hassan on Postmo

8/4/2019 Hassan on Postmo

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From Postmodernism to Postmodernity:

the Local/Global Context *

by Ihab Hassan

What Was Postmodernism?

What was postmodernism, and what is it still? I believe it is a revenant, the return of the irrepressible; every time we are rid of it, its ghost rises back. And like a ghost, iteludes definition. Certainly, I know less about postmodernism today than I did thirty

years ago, when I began to write about it. This may be because postmodernism haschanged, I have changed, the world has changed.

But this is only to confirm Nietzsche’s insight, that if an idea has a history, it is

already an interpretation, subject to future revision. What escapes interpretation andreinterpretation is a Platonic Idea or an abstract analytical concept, like a circle or atriangle. Romanticism, modernism, postmodernism, however, like humanism or realism, will shift and slide continually with time, particularly in an age of ideologicalconflict and media hype.

All this has not prevented postmodernism from haunting the discourse of architecture, the arts, the humanities, the social and sometimes even the physicalsciences; haunting not only academic but also public speech in business, politics, themedia, and entertainment industries; haunting the language of private life styles like

postmodern cuisine--just add a dash of raspberry vinegar. Yet no consensus obtainson what postmodernism really means.

The term, let alone the concept, may thus belong to what philosophers call anessentially contested category. That is, in plainer language, if you put in a room themain discussants of the concept--say Leslie Fiedler, Charles Jencks, Jean-FrançoisLyotard, Bernard Smith, Rosalind Krauss, Fredric Jameson, Marjorie Perloff, LindaHutcheon, and, just to add to the confusion, myself--locked the room and threw awaythe key, no consensus would emerge between the discussants after a week, but a thintrickle of blood might appear beneath the sill.

Let us not despair: though we may be unable to define or exorcise the ghost of postmodernism, we can approach it, surprising it from various angles, perhaps teasingit into a partial light. In the process, we may discover a family of words congenial to

postmodernism.

Here are some current uses of the term:



1. Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao (Spain), Ashton Raggatt

McDougall’s Storey Hall in Melbourne (Australia), and Arata Isozaki’s

Tsukuba Center (Japan) are considered examples of postmodern architecture:they depart from the pure angular geometries of the Bauhaus, the minimalsteel and glass boxes of Mies van der Rohe, mixing aesthetic and historical

elements, flirting with fragments, fantasy, and even kitsch.

2. In a recent encyclical, titled “ Fides et Ratio,” Pope John Paul II actually used

the word postmodernism to condemn extreme relativism in values and beliefs,acute irony and skepticism toward reason, and the denial of any possibility of truth, human or divine.

3. In cultural studies, a highly politicized field, the term postmodernism is oftenused in opposition to postcolonialism, the former deemed historically feckless,

being unpolitical or, worse, not politically correct.

4. In Pop culture, postmodernism--or PoMo as Yuppies call it insouciantly--refers to a wide range of phenomena, from Andy Warhol to Madonna, fromthe colossal plaster Mona Lisa I saw advertising a pachinko parlor in Tokyo tothe giant, cardboard figure of Michelangelo’s David--pink dayglo classes,canary shorts, a camera slung across bare, brawny shoulders--advertisingKonTiki Travels in New Zealand.

What do all these have in common? Well, fragments, hybridity, relativism, play, parody, pastiche, an ironic, anti-ideological stance, an ethos bordering on kitsch andcamp. So, we have begun to build a family of words applying to postmodernism; wehave begun to create a context, if not a definition, for it. More impatient or ambitious

readers can consult Hans Bertens’ The Idea of the Postmodern, the best and fairestintroduction I know to the topic.

But now I must make my second move or feint to approach postmodernism froma different perspective.

Postmodernism/Postmodernity

I do so by making a distinction I did not sufficiently stress in my earlier work:

between postmodernism and postmodernity. This is the distinction that constitutes themain thrust of this statement, and to which I will later return.

For the moment, let me simply say that I mean postmodernism to refer to thecultural sphere, especially literature, philosophy, and the various arts, includingarchitecture, while postmodernity refers to the geopolitical scheme, less order thandisorder, which has emerged in the last decades. The latter, sometimes called

postcolonialism, features globalization and localization, conjoined in erratic, oftenlethal, ways.

This distinction is not the defunct Marxist difference between superstructure and base, since the new economic, political, religious, and technological forces of the



world hardly conform to Marxist “laws.” Nor does postmodernity equal

postcolonialism, though the latter, with its concern for colonial legacies, may be partof the former.

Think of postmodernity as a world process, by no means identical everywhere yet

global nonetheless. Or think of it as a vast umbrella under which stand various phenomena: postmodernism in the arts, poststructuralism in philosophy, feminism insocial discourse, postcolonial and cultural studies in academe, but also multi-nationalcapitalism, cybertechnologies, international terrorism, assorted separatist, ethnic,nationalist, and religious movements--all standing under, but not causally subsumed

by, postmodernity.

From what I have said, we can infer two points: first, that postmodernism (thecultural phenomenon) applies to affluent, high-tech, consumer, media-drivensocieties; and second, that postmodernity (the inclusive geopolitical process) refers toan interactive, planetary phenomenon wherein tribalism and imperialism, myth and

technology, margins and centers--these terms are not parallel--play out their conflictual energies, often on the Internet.

I have said that I did not stress enough the distinction between postmodernismand postmodernity in my earlier work. But in fairness to the subject--and perhaps tomyself--I should note that an internal distinction I made within postmodernism itself

points to a crucial characteristic of postmodernity in its planetary context.

In an essay titled “Culture, Indeterminacy, and Immanence: Mar gins of the(Postmodern) Age” (1977), I coined the term “indetermanence”--that is,indeterminacy combined with immanence--to describe two disparate tendencieswithin postmodernism: that of cultural indeterminacy, on the one hand, and that of technological immanence, on the other. These tendencies are contrastive rather thandialectical: they ensue in no Hegelian or Marxist synthesis. (I can think of no one less

postmodern than either.)

By indeterminacy, or better still, indeterminacies, I mean a combination of trendsthat include openness, fragmentation, ambiguity, discontinuity, decenterment,heterodoxy, pluralism, deformation, all conducive to indeterminacy or under-determination. The latter concept alone, deformation, subsumes a dozen current termslike deconstruction, decreation, disintegration, displacement, difference,

discontinuity, disjunction, disappearance, de-definition, demystification,detotalization, delegitimation, decolonization. Through all these concepts moves avast will to undoing, affecting the body politic, the body cognitive, the erotic body,the individual psyche, the entire realm of discourse in the West. In literature alone,our ideas of author, audience, reading, writing, book, genre, critical theory, and of literature itself, have all suddenly become questionable-- questionable but far from

invalid, reconstituting themselves in various ways.

These uncertainties or indeterminacies, however, are also dispersed or disseminated by the fluent imperium of technology. Thus I call the second major tendency of postmodernism immanences, a term that I employ without religious echo

to designate the capacity of mind to generalize itself in symbols, intervene more andmore into nature, act through its own abstractions, and project human consciousness



to the edges of the cosmos. This mental tendency may be further described by wordslike diffusion, dissemination, projection, interplay, communication, which all derivefrom the emergence of human beings as language animals, homo pictor or homo

significans, creatures constituting themselves, and also their universe, by symbols of their own making. Call it gnostic textualism, if you must. Meanwhile, the public

world dissolves as fact and fiction blend, history becomes a media happening, sciencetakes its own models as the only accessible reality, cybernetics confronts us with theenigma of artificial intelligence (Deep Blue contra Kasparov), and technologies

project our perceptions to the edge of matter, within the atom or at the rim of theexpanding universe.

No doubt, these tendencies, I repeat, may seem less prevalent in some countriesthan others like America or Australia, Germany or Japan, where the term

postmodernism has become familiar both in and outside the university. But the fact inmost developed societies remains: as a cultural phenomenon, postmodernism evincesthe double tendency I have dubbed “indetermanence”--its forms cognate to labyrinths,

networks, the rhizomes of Deleuze and Guattari.

The earth, however, is larger and more significant than Planet Hollywood,Deutsche Bank, or Mitsubishi. Hence the relevance of Postmodernity. For theindetermanences of cultural postmodernism seem to have mutated into the local-global conflicts of postmodernity, including the genocides of Bosnia, Kosovo, Ulster,Rwanda, Chechnya, Kurdistan, Sudan, Sri Lanka, Tibet…. At the same time, cultural

postmodernism itself has metastasized into sterile, campy, kitschy, jokey, dead-endgames or sheer media stunts.

Here, then, are some new terms to add to our family of words about postmodernism: indeterminacy, immanence, textualism, networks, high-tech,consumer, media-driven societies, and all the sub-vocabularies they imply. Have wenudged the ghost of postmodernism toward the light?

Perhaps we need to nudge it further by raising a different question: isn’t the

statement of this essay, so far, a mark of historical introspection? Doesn’t it suggest

that the postmodern mind inclines to self-apprehension, self-reflection, as if intent onwriting the equivocal autobiography of an age?

The Equivocal Autobiography of an Age

In 1784, Immanuel Kant published an essay called “Was Ist Aufklärung?” (“What is Enlightenment?”). Some thinkers, especially Michel Foucault, have takenthis essay to be the first time a philosopher asks self-reflexively: who are we,historically speaking, and what is the meaning of our contemporaneity? Certainly,many of us wonder nowadays: Was ist Postmodernismus? But as Foucault fails tonote--he fails in other respects too--we ask the question without Kant’s confidence in

the possibilities of knowledge, his historical self-assurance.

Children of an equivocal Chronos, versed in aporia, suspicion, incredulity,votaries of decenterment and apostles of multiplicity, pluralist, parodic, pragmatic,



and polychronic, we could hardly privilege postmodernism as Kant privileged theEnlightenment. Instead, we betray an abandon of belatedness, a seemingly limitlessanxiety of self-nomination. Hence the weird terms and nomenclatures surrounding

postmodernism, terms like classical postmodernism, high, pop, po-mo, revisionary,deconstructive, reconstructive, insurrectional, pre-, and post-postmodernism--

neologisms suggesting an explosion in a word factory.

In any case, we can hardly imagine any other epoch agonizing so much aboutitself, only to devise so clunky a moniker, so awkward a name as postmodernism. (Inthis, I share the blame.) Perhaps, after all, postmodernism can be “defined” as a

continuous inquiry into self-definition. This impulse is by no means restricted to theso-called West. The more interactive the globe, the more populations move, jostle,and grapple--this is the age of diasporas--the more questions of cultural, religious, and

personal identity become acute--and sometimes specious. In still another transpositionof postmodernism into postmodernity, you can hear the cry around the world: “who

are we? who am I?”

So, once again, here are some more words accruing to our family of words about postmodernism: historical and epistemic self-reflexivity, anxiety of self-nomination, a polychronic sense of time (linear, cyclical, sidereal, cybernetic, nostalgic,eschatological, visionary times are all in there), massive migrations, forced or free, acrisis of cultural and personal identities.

Brief History of the Term

This attempt at self-apprehension--what I called the equivocal autobiography of an age--appears reflected in the erratic history of the word postmodernism itself, ahistory, nonetheless, that helps to clarify the concept currently in use. I must beruthlessly selective here, particularly since Charles Jencks and Margaret Rose havegiven detailed accounts of that history elsewhere.

It seems that an English salon painter, John Watkins Chapman, used the term, back in the 1870’s, in the sense that we now speak of Post-Impressionism. Jump to1934, when Federico de Onís uses the word postmodernismo to suggest a reactionagainst the difficulty and experimentalism of modernist poetry. In 1939, Arnold

Toynbee takes up the term in a very different sense, proclaiming the end of the“modern,” Western bourgeois order dating back to the seventeenth century. Then, in

1945, Bernard Smith employs the word to suggest a movement in painting, beyondabstraction, which we call Socialist Realism. In the fifties in America, Charles Olson,in conjunction with poets and artists at Black Mountain College, speaks of a

postmodernism that reverts more to Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams than toformalist poets like T. S. Eliot. By the end of that decade, in 1959 and 1960, IrvingHowe and Harry Levin, respectively, argue that postmodernism intimates a decline inhigh modernist culture.

Only in the late sixties and early seventies, in various essays by Leslie Fiedler

and myself, among others, does postmodernism begin to signify a distinct, sometimes positive, development in American culture, a critical modification, if not actual end,



of modernism. It is in this latter sense, I believe, changing masks and changing faces,that postmodern theory persists today.

Why do I make such a seemingly self-serving claim? Consider the sixties for amoment, all the openings and breaks that occurred in developed, consumer societies

(we are speaking of postmodernism). Andreas Huyssen called that decade, straddlingthe sixties and seventies really, the “great divide.” Within ten or fifteen years, the

United States experienced an astonishing succession of liberation and counter-culturalmovements: the Berkeley Free Speech, Vietnam Anti-War, Black Power, ChicanoPower, Women’s Lib, Gay Pride, Gray Panther, Psychedelic, and Ecological

Movements, to mention but a few. Street theatre, happenings, rock music, aleatorycomposition, concrete poetry, the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E group, pop art, and multi-media events spread, blurring the borders of high and popular culture, art and theory,text and metatext and paratext (my Paracriticism, for instance). Hippies and Yippies,Flower Children and Minute Men, Encounter Groups and Zen Monks crowded thelandscape. Elitism and hierarchy were out, participation and anarchy, or at least

pseudo-anarchy, were in. The forms of thought and art shifted from static to performative, from the hypotactical to paratactical--or so it seemed. Not Heidegger but Derrida; not Matisse but Duchamp; not Schönberg but Cage; not Hemingway butBarthelme--and again, most visibly, not Gropius, Mies, or Le Corbusier, but Gehry,Renzo Piano, and Isozaki in architecture, among countless others. (Note, however,that postmodernism in the various arts is not necessarily homologous, as I will later discuss.)

In this climate of cultural “indetermanence” and social “delegitimation” (this

latter, Lyotard’s term), postmodernism grew, assuming its latest guise. Grew and Ithink died, though its specter still haunts Europe, America, Australia Japan…. But

that specter may now find a new life and a new name. Clicking “Postmodernism” in a

search engine, my cybermaven colleague Cam Tatham assures me, yields 92,000links in .06 seconds.

Conceptual Difficulties

The specter still haunts, but it does so ineffectually; for it is conceptually flawed,and time’s wingless chariot awaits no one. Since the theoretical difficulties of

postmodernism are themselves revealing, I will mention at least five:

1. The term postmodernism is not only awkward; it is also Oedipal, and like arebellious but impotent adolescent, it can not separate itself completely fromits parent. It can not invent for itself a new name like Baroque, Rococo,Romantic, Symbolist, Futurist, Cubist, Dadaist, Surrealist, Constructivist,Vorticist, and so on. In short, the relation of postmodernism to modernismremains ambiguous, Oedipal or parasitical if you wish; or as Bernard Smithremarks in Modernism’s History, it remains a conflictual dialogue with theolder movement, which he would rather call “Formalesque”--a term with

problems of its own.



2. Postmodernism, misnamed, Smith would insist, relates itself to a modernismno longer modern; for the latter can no longer describe the high culturalachievement of the years, say, between 1890 and 1940. That is because theterm modern, in its typological sense, keeps moving forward at the cuttingedge of history, and has done so from the Abbot Suger and Shakespeare, who

both used the word, to our time.

3. The term postmodernism, triply inadequate, seems very un-postmodern because postmodern, specifically poststructuralist, thought rejects linear time,from past to present to future as the prefixes pre- and post- imply. Postmoderntime, I have said, is polychronic. As such, it avoids categorical and linear

periodization: for instance, in English literary history, that useful and familiar sequence of Elizabethan, Jacobean, Neoclassical, Romantic, Victorian,Edwardian, Modern, Postmodern.

4. More importantly, postmodernism can not serve simply as a period, as a

temporal, chronological, or diachronic construct; it must also function as atheoretical, phenomenological, or synchronic category. Older or dead writers,like Samuel Beckett or Jorge Luis Borges or Raymond Roussel or Vladimir

Nabokov, can be postmodern, while younger ones, still alive like John Updikeor Toni Morrison or V. S. Naipaul, may not be postmodern (the distinctioncarries no literary value judgments). And so, we can not claim that everything

before 1960 is modern, everything after, postmodern. Beckett’s Murphyappeared in 1938, Joyce’s Finnegans Wake in 1939, both, in my view,

preeminently postmodern. Nor can we simply say that Joyce is modern or postmodern. Which Joyce? That of Dubliners (pre-modern), Portrait of the

Artist as a Young Man (modern), Ulysses (modern shading into postmodern), Finnegans Wake (postmodern)?

All this is to say that a persuasive model of postmodernism requires aconstellation of particular styles, features, attitudes, placed in a particular

historical context. Anyone of these features alone--say parody, self-reflection,or black humor--may find antecedents a hundred or a thousand years ago, inEuripides or Sterne. But together, in their present historical context, thesefeatures may cohere into a working model of the phenomenon called

postmodernism.

5. Having constructed such a model, does postmodernism develop along the

same lines in every artistic or cultural field? Does it manifest itself identicallyin architecture, painting, music, dance, literature--and in the latter alone, in

poetry, fiction, drama, the essay? What are the correspondences andsymmetries, but also disjunctions and asymmetries, in various artistic genres,indeed in distinct fields like science, philosophy, politics, popular entertainment? Obviously, the challenges to a comprehensive model of

postmodernism are daunting. Do we need such a model? Do we still need theword?

Postmodernism as Interpretive Category



At this point, we might as well ask--whether in Cairo, Sydney, Milwaukee, or

Kuala Lumpur--why bother with postmodernism at all?

One answer, I have suggested, is that postmodernism mutates into postmodernity,

which is our global/local condition. I will shortly return, and indeed conclude, withthis theme. But there is another, more immediate answer: postmodernism has become,consciously or unconsciously, for better or for worse, an interpretive category, ahermeneutic tool. As such, it impinges on our business as students of culture,literature, the arts.

Why is that? More than a period, more even than a constellation of artistic trendsand styles, postmodernism has become, even after its partial demise, a way we viewthe world. Bernard Smith may be right in saying that postmodernism amounts to littlemore than a struggle with the modernist “Formalesque.” But this dialogue or strugglealso becomes a filter through which we view history, interpret reality, see ourselves;

postmodernism is now our shadow.

Every generation, of course, reinvents, reinvests, its ancestors--this, too, ishermeneutics. And so we look back on Lawrence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759-1767) and say, here is an instance, or an antecedent, of postmodernism. We can saythe same of Franz Kafka’s The Castle (1926) or Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea (1938) or James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939). But all this simply means that we haveinternalized some of the assumptions and values of postmodernism and that we nowreread the past--indeed, re-appropriate it--in their terms.

This tendency, inevitable perhaps and sometimes enabling, can become offensivewhen postmodern ideologies cannibalize the past, incorporating it wholly into their flesh. Put more equably, we need to respect the otherness of the past, though we may

be condemned to revise it even as we repeat it. In this, as in literary studies generally, postmodern theory, at its best, can prove beneficial: it can become a heightened modeof self-awareness, self-critical of its own assumptions, its own bleached myths andinvisible theologies, and tolerant of what is not itself. But this calls for pragmatism, toavoid the extremes of dogma and skepticism. For the latter, as T. S. Eliot said in his

Notes Toward a Definition of Culture, can be a highly civilized trait, though when itdeclines into pyrrhonism, it becomes a trait from which civilizations can die.

Postmodernism and Pragmatism

Here I must make an excursus on philosophical pragmatism, one more crucialword to add to our growing verbal family.

By 1987, when I published The Postmodern Turn, I had begun to wonder, likeothers, how to recover the creative impulse of postmodernism without atavism or reversion, without relapse into enervated forms or truculent dogmas, without cynicismor fanaticism. Facile skepticism lacked conviction; ideological politics was full of

passionate mendacity. I turned then to the philosophical pragmatism of WilliamJames and returned to the artistic pragmatism of John Cage. Both allowed a place for



belief, indeed for unabashed spirituality, in works like The Will to Believe and A Year

from Monday.

Philosophical pragmatism, of course, offers no panacea. But its intellectualgenerosity; its epistemic or noetic pluralism; its avoidance of stale debates (about

mind and matter, for instance, freedom and necessity, nurture and nature); and itsaffinities with open, liberal, multicultural societies, where issues must be resolved bymediation and compromise rather than dictatorial power or divine decree--all thesemake it congenial to postmodernism without acceding to the latter’s potential for

nihilism, its spirit of feckless and joyless “play.”

But the virtues of Emersonian and Jamesian--far more than Rortian--pragmatismaffect literary studies generally, not only postmodern theory. (The topic warrants amonograph in itself.) Perhaps, in anticipation of my conclusion, I can say simply this:such virtues are inward with reality. They resist the hubris of theory, the impatienceof ideology, the rage of our desires and needs--in short, they nurture that “negative

capability” Keats considered essential to great literature.

As for Cage, that genius of postmodern avant-gardes in music, dance, the visualarts, literature, he carried negative capability to the thresholds of non-discrimination.A pragmatist, a descendant of American Transcendentalism withal, a disciple of Zen,Cage’s sacramental vision of dispossession, of egolessness, perfuses his work from

first to last. Who has not heard rise from his aleatory pages--often composed bychance operations applied to the I Ching --Cage’s happy, open-mouthed laugh,echoing the practical hilarity of holy fools in times past as well as the robust,expansive amiability of William James?

That is the sound of pragmatism, I submit, whose cadences may calm and inspireus all, especially in cultural and postcolonial studies.

Beyond Postmodernism: An Inconclusion

Throughout this paper, the latent question has been: what lies beyond postmodernism? Of course, no one really knows. But my tacit answer has been: postmodernity, pulsing on the Internet. This is no cause to cheer.

Realism teaches us that historical crises do not always come to happy resolution;we need to learn what history can and can not teach. Still, though inequities andiniquities of existence may be indurate, they are not all irremediable in the particular

forms they take.

Two factors aggravate the ordeals of postmodernity in our time: the glaringdisparities of wealth among and within nations, and the furies of nationalism,collective identity, mass feelings. About the first subject, crucial as it may be, I willsay little: it engages the dismal sciences of economics and geopolitics, beyond myreach. About the second, I will hazard a few remarks.

Much is said about difference, about otherness, and much of that is in the



hortatory mode. But those who demand respect for their kind do not always accord itto other kinds. The fact is that the human brain exploded mysteriously into evolution amillion or so years ago, devising hasty strategies for survival, which include thedistinction between Self and Other, We and Them.

The division is manifest in the biological world, not only interspecies (betweendifferent species), but also intraspecies (between individuals of the same species).That is the miracle of our immune systems which distinguish immediately, electro-chemically, between home bodies and “invaders.” Such systems, though, can be

fooled sometimes into attacking friends and ignoring foes--but that is another story.The division between Self and Other is also manifest in nearly all our languages, inthe deep structures of grammar and in the vocabularies of the different pronouns.Hence the distinctions we make between I and You, Us and Them, We and They, andso forth. Furthermore, the division is active in the layers of the psyche, as Freudiansand Lacanians know, in the distinction between Ego Instincts (self-centered) andObject or Erotic Instincts (centered on others), as well as in Lacan’s Mirror Stage and

Symbolic Order. Most pertinent to our topic, however, the division is clear in theevolutionary and historical development of the family, the group, the tribe. Human

beings would have perished long ago in the struggle for evolution--to faster, stronger,fiercer animals like the saber-toothed tiger--were it not for the human brain, humanlanguages, and human social organizations. Hence the profound instinct of tribalism,which develops into nationalisms of different kinds, including ethnic, religious,cultural, and political nationalism.

This instinct is primal--but also primitive. The Bulgarian Nobelist Elias Canettiwrote, in Auto-da-Fé, about the “mass-soul in ourselves,” which foams like a huge,

wild, full-blooded animal. More soberly, the great biologist, E. O. Wilson, describes,in Consilience, the “epigenitic rules” governing the practices of kinship, cooperation,

and reciprocal altruism in human societies.

Now, the mass-soul, the herd or tribal instinct, may be primal. But so isimagination, so is love, so is the power of sympathy--in short, the power to vault over distinctions and identify with others. Moreover, though the division between Self andOther may have been once essential to survival, it may be less so now, may need toassume different shapes, in our interactive, interdependent, cybernetic, and “glocal”

age--this hideous neologism can be used only once--the age of postmodernity.

Still, I do not think that divisions between Self and Other, Us and Them, willsoon vanish, especially if the discrepancies of wealth and power persist in their flagrant forms. But I do think that, instead of wishing or talking the distinction away, we can make it more conscious of itself in our lives. This requires absolute candor, thecourage to speak the truth to ourselves and not only to others. Beyond that, we need tocultivate a keener, livelier, more dialogical sense of ourselves in relation to diversecultures, diverse natures, the whole universe itself. And we need to discover modes of self-transcendence, especially for the “wretched of the earth,” that avoid blind

identification with collectives premised on exclusion of other groups. This, I realize,is far easier said than done, especially for the mass-minded in every clime. Still, Iwould maintain, that is the spiritual project of postmodernity, a project to which

literature and all the arts remain vital.



Of course, we can define the project of postmodernity simply in political terms asan open dialogue between local and global, margin and center, minority and majority,concrete and universal--and not only between those but also between local and local,margin and margin, minority and minority, and further still, between universals of different kinds. But there is never surety that a political dialogue, even the most open,

will not erupt into violence.

To this ancient stain of human violence, I have no remedy. But I wonder: can postmodern pragmatism serve us in a small way? Can the imagination serve us inlarger ways? Will spirit become the ground from which new ecological and planetaryvalues spring? Can the Internet--more conjunctive than disjunctive despite current

parodies of Teilhard.com--abet a noetic, holistic apprehension of reality, which Icalled in Paracriticisms “the new gnosticism”? This I know: without spirit, the senseof cosmic wonder, of being and mortality at the widest edge, which we all share,existence quickly reduces to mere survival. Something we need to release us from the

prison-house of tribal identity, and from the terrible grip of self-concern. That is

spirit.

In this universe, not all the music is of our own making.

Notes

*Variants of the essay have appeared in: Artspace (Sydney), Critical Issues Series No. 3 (2000) and Philosophy and Literature 25, 1 (Spring 2001).

Works Cited

Bertens, Hans. The Idea of the Postmodern: A History . London and New York: Routledge, 1995.

Cage, John. A Year From Monday. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1967.

Canetti, Elias. Auto-d-Fé. Tr. C. V. Wedgwood. New York: Seabury Press, 1979.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Rhizome. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1976.

Eliot, T. S. Notes Toward the Definition of Culture. London: Faber and Faber, 1948.

Foucault, Michel. Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. Ed. Hubert L. Dreyfusand Paul Rabinow. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982.

Hassan, Ihab. Paracriticisms: Seven Speculations of the Times. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press,1975.

Hassan, Ihab. The Postmodern Turn: Essays in Postmodern Theory and Culture. Columbus, OH: OhioState University Press, 1987.

Huyssen, Andreas. After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism. Bloominton,IN: Indiana University Press, 1986.

James, William. The Will to Believe and Other Essays. New York: Dover, 1956.

James, William. Pragmatism. New York: Meridian Books, 1955.



Jencks, Charles. What Is Postmodernism? Fourth Edition. London: Academy Editions, 1996.

Kant, Immanuel.“Was Ist Aufklärung?” Berlinische Monatschrift , November 1784.

Keats, John. The Selected Letters of John Keats. Ed. Lionel Trilling. New York: Farrar, Straus, and

Young, 1951.

Lyotard, Jean-François. La Condition postmoderne. Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1979.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Will to Power . Ed. Walter Kaufmann, tr. Walter Kaufmann and R. J.Hollingdale. New York: Random House, 1967.

Rose, Margaret. The Post-Modern and the Post-Industrial . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1991.

Smith, Bernard. Modernism’s History. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998.

Wilson, E. O. Consilience: the Unity of Knowledge. New York: Random House, 1998.

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Hassan on Postmo

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Transcript of Hassan on Postmo