From Postmodernism To Postmodernity

From Postmodernism To Postmodernity: The Local/Global Context
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, it eludes
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 has changed, I
have changed, the world has changed.
But this is only to confirm Nietzsches insight, that if an
idea has a history, it is already an interpretation, subject to
future revision. What escapes interpretation and
reinterpretation is a Platonic Idea or an abstract analytical
concept, like a circle or a triangle. Romanticism,
modernism, postmodernism, however, like humanism or
realism, will shift and slide continually with time,
particularly in an age of ideological conflict 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 physical
sciences; haunting not only academic but also public speech
in business, politics, the media, and entertainment industries;
haunting the language of private life styles like postmodern
cuisine--just add a dash of raspberry vinegar. Yet no
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consensus obtains on what postmodernism really means.

The term, let alone the concept, may thus belong to
what philosophers call an essentially contested category.
That is, in plainer language, if you put in a room the main
discussants of the concept--say Leslie Fiedler, Charles
Jencks, Jean-Franois Lyotard, Bernard Smith, Rosalind
Krauss, Fredric Jameson, Marjorie Perloff, Linda Hutcheon,
and, just to add to the confusion, myself--locked the room
and threw away the key, no consensus would emerge
between the discussants after a week, but a thin trickle 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 teasing it 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 Gehrys Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao (Spain),
Ashton Raggatt McDougalls Storey Hall in Melbourne
(Australia), and Arata Isozakis Tsukuba Center (Japan)
are considered examples of postmodern architecture:
they depart from the pure angular geometries of the
Bauhaus, the minimal steel 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, titledFides 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 often used 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, from the
colossal plaster Mona Lisa I saw advertising apachinko
parlor in Tokyo to the giant, cardboard figure of
Michelangelos David--pink dayglo classes, canary
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shorts, a camera slung across bare, brawny

shoulders--advertising KonTiki 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 and
camp. So, we have begun to build a family of words
applying to postmodernism; we have 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 fairest introduction I know to the
topic.
But now I must make my second move or feint to
approach postmodernism from a 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 the
main 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 the cultural sphere, especially
literature, philosophy, and the various arts, including
architecture, while postmodernity refers to the geopolitical
scheme, less order than disorder, which has emerged in the
last decades. The latter, sometimes called postcolonialism,
features globalizationand localization, conjoined in erratic,
often lethal, 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 part of 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
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philosophy, feminism in social discourse, postcolonial and

cultural studies in academe, but also multi-national
capitalism, 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 (the cultural phenomenon) applies to
affluent, high-tech, consumer, media-driven societies; and
second, that postmodernity (the inclusive geopolitical
process) refers to an 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 postmodernism and postmodernity in my earlier
work. But in fairness to the subject--and perhaps to
myself--I should note that an internal distinction I made
within postmodernism itselfpoints to a crucial characteristic
of postmodernity in its planetary context.
In an essay titled Culture, Indeterminacy, and
Immanence: Margins of the (Postmodern) Age (1977), I
coined the term indetermanence--that is, indeterminacy
combined with immanence--to describe two disparate
tendencies within postmodernism: that of cultural
indeterminacy, on the one hand, and that of technological
immanence, on the other. These tendencies are contrastive
rather than dialectical: 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 trends that 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 terms like
deconstruction, decreation, disintegration, displacement,
difference, discontinuity, disjunction, disappearance,
de-definition, demystification, detotalization, delegitimation,
decolonization. Through all these concepts moves a vast 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,
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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 and more 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 words like diffusion,
dissemination, projection, interplay, communication, which
all derive from 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, science takes its
own models as the only accessible reality, cybernetics
confronts us with the enigma 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 the expanding universe.
No doubt, these tendencies, I repeat, may seem less
prevalent in some countries than others like America or
Australia, Germany or Japan, where the term
postmodernism has become familiar both in and outside the
university. But the fact in most developed societies remains:
as a cultural phenomenon, postmodernism evinces the
double tendency I have dubbedindetermanence--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 the indetermanences 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-end games 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 we
nudged the ghost of postmodernism toward the light?
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Perhaps we need to nudge it further by raising a

different question: isnt the statement of this essay, so far, a
mark of historical introspection? Doesnt it suggest that the
postmodern mind inclines to self-apprehension,
self-reflection, as if intent on writing the equivocal
autobiography of an age?
The Equivocal Autobiography of an Age

In 1784, Immanuel Kant published an essay called
Was Ist Aufklrung? (What is Enlightenment?). Some
thinkers, especially Michel Foucault, have taken this 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 to note--he
fails in other respects too--we ask the question without
Kants 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 the Enlightenment. Instead, we betray an
abandon of belatedness, a seemingly limitless anxiety 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 about itself, only to devise so clunky a
moniker, so awkward a name as postmodernism. (In this, 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 the so-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 transposition
of postmodernism into postmodernity, you can hear the cry
around the world: who are we? who am I?
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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, a crisis 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, a history,
nonetheless, that helps to clarify the concept currently in use.
I must be ruthlessly selective here, particularly since Charles
Jencks and Margaret Rose have given detailed accounts of
that history elsewhere.
It seems that an English salon painter, John Watkins
Chapman, used the term, back in the 1870s, in the sense
that we now speak of Post-Impressionism. Jump to 1934,
when Federico de Ons uses the word postmodernismo to
suggest a reaction against 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, beyond
abstraction, 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 to formalist poets like T. S.
Eliot. By the end of that decade, in 1959 and 1960, Irving
Howe and Harry Levin, respectively, argue that
postmodernism intimates a decline in high 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?
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Consider the sixties for a moment, all the openings and

breaks that occurred in developed, consumer societies (we
are speaking of postmodernism). Andreas Huyssen called
that decade, straddling the sixties and seventies really, the
great divide. Within ten or fifteen years, the United States
experienced an astonishing succession of liberation and
counter-cultural movements: the Berkeley Free Speech,
Vietnam Anti-War, Black Power, Chicano Power,
Womens Lib, Gay Pride, Gray Panther, Psychedelic, and
Ecological Movements, to mention but a few. Street theatre,
happenings, rock music, aleatory composition, 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 the landscape. 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 Schnberg but Cage; not
Hemingway but Barthelme--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, Lyotards term),
postmodernism grew, assuming its latest guise. Grew and I
think 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 92,000 links in .06 seconds.
Conceptual Difficulties
The specter still haunts, but it does so ineffectually; for
it is conceptually flawed, and times 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

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Oedipal, and like a rebellious but impotent adolescent, it

can not separate itself completely from its 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 modernism remains
ambiguous, Oedipal or parasitical if you wish; or as
Bernard Smith remarks in Modernisms History, it
remains a conflictual dialogue with the older movement,
which he would rather call Formalesque--a term with
problems of its own.
2. Postmodernism, misnamed, Smith would insist, relates
itself to a modernism no longer modern; for the latter
can no longer describe the high cultural achievement of
the years, say, between 1890 and 1940. That is because
the term modern, in its typological sense, keeps moving
forward at the cutting edge 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.
Postmodern time, 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 a theoretical,
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
Updike or Toni Morrison or V. S. Naipaul, may not be
postmodern (the distinction carries no literary value
judgments). And so, we can not claim that everything
before 1960 is modern, everything after, postmodern.
Becketts Murphy appeared in 1938, Joyces 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
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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 a constellation 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, in
Euripides or Sterne. But together, in their present
historical context, these features 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 identically in architecture,
painting, music, dance, literature--and in the latter
alone, in poetry, fiction, drama, the essay? What are the
correspondences and symmetries, 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 the word?
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, with
this theme. But there is another, more immediate answer:
postmodernism has become, consciously or unconsciously,
for better or for worse, an interpretive category, a
hermeneutic 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 trends and styles, postmodernism has
become, even after its partial demise, a way we view the
world. Bernard Smith may be right in saying that
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postmodernism amounts to little more than a struggle with

the modernist Formalesque. But this dialogue or struggle
also 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, is hermeneutics. And so we look back
on Lawrence Sternes Tristram Shandy (1759-1767) and
say, here is an instance, or an antecedent, of postmodernism.
We can say the same of Franz Kafkas The Castle (1926) or
Jean-Paul Sartres Nausea (1938) or James Joyces
Finnegans Wake (1939). But all this simply means that we
have internalized some of the assumptions and values of
postmodernism and that we now reread the past--indeed,
re-appropriate it--in their terms.
This tendency, inevitable perhaps and sometimes
enabling, can become offensive when 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 mode of self-awareness, self-critical of its own
assumptions, its own bleached myths and invisible
theologies, and tolerant of what is not itself. But this calls
for pragmatism, to avoid the extremes of dogma and
skepticism. For the latter, as T. S. Eliot said in hisNotes
Toward a Definition of Culture, can be a highly civilized
trait, though when it declines 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 crucial word to add to our growing
verbal family.
By 1987, when I published The Postmodern Turn, I had
begun to wonder, like others, how to recover the creative
impulse of postmodernism without atavism or reversion,
without relapse into enervated forms or truculent dogmas,
without cynicism or fanaticism. Facile skepticism lacked
conviction; ideological politics was full of passionate
mendacity. I turned then to the philosophical pragmatism of
William James and returned to the artistic pragmatism of
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John Cage. Both allowed a place for belief, indeed for

unabashed spirituality, in works likeThe Will to Believe and
A Year from Monday.
Philosophical pragmatism, of course, offers no panacea.
But its intellectual generosity; its epistemic or noetic
pluralism; its avoidance of stale debates (about mind and
matter, for instance, freedom and necessity, nurture and
nature); and its affinities with open, liberal, multicultural
societies, where issues must be resolved by mediation and
compromise rather than dictatorial power or divine
decree--all these make it congenial to postmodernism
without acceding to the latters potential for nihilism, its
spirit of feckless and joyless play.
But the virtues of Emersonian and Jamesian--far more
than Rortian--pragmatism affect literary studies generally,
not only postmodern theory. (The topic warrants a
monograph 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 impatience
of 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 visual arts, literature, he carried negative
capability to the thresholds of non-discrimination. A
pragmatist, a descendant of American Transcendentalism
withal, a disciple of Zen, Cages sacramental vision of
dispossession, of egolessness, perfuses his work from first
to last. Who has not heard rise from his aleatory
pages--often composed by chance operations applied to theI
Ching--Cages 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 inspire us 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.
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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 and iniquities of
existence may be indurate, they are not all irremediablein
the particular forms they take.
Two factors aggravate the ordeals of postmodernity in
our time: the glaring disparities of wealth among andwithin
nations, and the furies of nationalism, collective identity,
mass feelings. About the first subject, crucial as it may be, I
will say little: it engages the dismal sciences of economics
and geopolitics, beyond my reach. 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 it to
other kinds. The fact is that the human brain exploded
mysteriously into evolution a million or so years ago,
devising hasty strategies for survival, which include the
distinction between Self and Other, We and Them.
The division is manifest in the biological world, not
only interspecies (between different 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, in the 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, and so forth. Furthermore, the division
is active in the layers of the psyche, as Freudians and
Lacanians know, in the distinction between Ego Instincts
(self-centered) and Object or Erotic Instincts (centered on
others), as well as in Lacans Mirror Stage and Symbolic
Order. Most pertinent to our topic, however, the division is
clear in the evolutionary 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, human languages, and human social
organizations. Hence the profound instinct of tribalism,
which develops into nationalisms of different kinds,
including ethnic, religious, cultural, and political
nationalism.
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This instinct is primal--but also primitive. The

Bulgarian Nobelist Elias Canetti wrote, inAuto-da-F, 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 is imagination, 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 and Other may have been once essential to survival, it
may be less so now, may need to assume different shapes,
in our interactive, interdependent, cybernetic, andglocal
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, will soon 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, the courage to
speak the truth to ourselves and not only to others. Beyond
that, we need to cultivate a keener, livelier, more dialogical
sense of ourselves in relation to diverse cultures, diverse
natures, the whole universe itself. And we need to discover
modes of self-transcendence, especially for thewretched 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, I would 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 as an 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 in larger
ways? Will spirit become the ground from which new
ecological and planetary values spring? Can the
Pgina 14
Internet--more conjunctive than disjunctive despite current

parodies of Teilhard.com--abet a noetic, holistic
apprehension of reality, which I called inParacriticisms
the new gnosticism? This I know: without spirit, the sense
of 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
of the essay have appeared in: Artspace (Sydney),
Critical Issues Series No. 3 (2000) and Philosophy and Literature
25, 1 (Spring 2001).
*Variants
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-F. Tr. C. V. Wedgwood. New York:
Seabury Press, 1979.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Flix Guattari. Rhizome. Paris: Les ditions 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. Dreyfus and 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: Ohio State University Press, 1987.
Huyssen, Andreas. After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass
Culture, Postmodernism. Bloominton, IN: Indiana University Press,
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Dover, 1956.
James, William. Pragmatism. New York: Meridian Books, 1955.
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Jencks, Charles. What Is Postmodernism? Fourth Edition. London:

Academy Editions, 1996.
Kant, Immanuel.Was Ist Aufklrung? Berlinische Monatschrift ,
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Keats, John. The Selected Letters of John Keats . Ed. Lionel
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