Taking as its point of departure Jean-François Lyotard’s inaugural argument in The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, this article considers the character of postmodern thought, especially postmodern theoretical thought, a certain type of postmodern theoretical thought (there are other ways of thinking that can be classified as postmodern), and resistance to it, which has been and remains formidable. It also offers an assessment of our theoretical thought now, thought after postmodern thought, as it moves from physics to justice, conjoined in my subtitle.
This conjunction may seem strange. We customarily separate physics and justice, and have done so throughout modernity, which I see here as extending from roughly the sixteenth century on, and then postmodernity, during the last forty years or so, the historical period of postmodernity with which I shall be concerned here. Arguably, the main reason for this separation is that we have grounded modern thinking and culture in the separation between the affairs of nature, especially dead nature with which modern (post-Galilean) mathematical-experimental physics is concerned, and human affairs, where justice belongs.1 This separation is justifiable and even necessary within certain limits, and it is not my aim to dispense with it unconditionally. I would argue, however, that an attempt to relate physics and justice is perhaps in turn unavoidable since the rise of modernity and the revolutionary developments in astronomy and physics that accompanied and shaped this rise. In other words, while physics and justice can and even must be seen as separate within certain limits, they cannot be separated in absolute terms, either historically or conceptually. Modernity and then postmodernity have been shaped by science, not the least physics, and by the politics of justice, and both appear to have had more success with science than with justice.
Modern thought of the type considered here (it has other forms as well, just as postmodern thought does) continues to shape our thinking and culture. So does, as I call it here, “classical thought,” which has a broader scope and a much longer history, extending as far as ancient Greece. Modern thought (again, of the type considered here) is grounded in and derives from classical thought. Classical or modern thought is also found and is unavoidable in postmodern thought, which, however, gives classical thought and modern thought limited and differently delimited roles in theoretical thinking. Accordingly, classical or modern thought is not a problem for postmodern thought: only the claims concerning its unlimited validity are. On the other hand, postmodern thought is a problem for classical or modern (theoretical) thought, even an uncircumventable problem, given that postmodern thought is incompatible with some of the imperatives of classical and modern thought, applied across the spectrum of each. The resistance to postmodern thought, specifically of the type considered here, has been strong, even fierce, and it continues with undiminished force on the contemporary scene, the scene of culture after postmodern culture. On the other hand, one might question whether the imperatives of classical and modern thought, especially those that exclude postmodern thought, are sustainable even within the limits that classical and modern thought envisioned for themselves. Indeed, each envisions itself as having a nearly unlimited power, at least in principle (practical limitations are readily acknowledged), something that, as I shall argue here, postmodern thought in principle precludes. In Niels Bohr’s words, capturing the essence of postmodern thought in quantum theory (which may be seen as a paradigmatic postmodern scientific theory in the present sense of postmodern theory), “we are not dealing with an arbitrary renunciation of a more detailed analysis of atomic phenomena, but with a recognition that such an analysis is in principle excluded” (Bohr 62; emphasis added). In other words, quantum theory in this interpretation (there are competing interpretations) must advance thinking and knowledge, while accepting uncircumventable limits upon how far thought and knowledge can in principle reach. The same is true for the practice of postmodern thought (as understood here) elsewhere. Classical or modern thought, by contrast, only admits practical and, ideally, ever-diminishing limitations upon its power to understand the phenomena it considers. Accordingly, the presence of the uncircumventable limits established by postmodern thought need not mean that we can no longer advance thought and knowledge, as it might appear from the classical or modern perspective. Quite to the contrary, these uncircumventable limits upon thought and knowledge—and, correlatively, the irreducible role of the unthinkable in thought, the unknowable in knowledge—are the conditions of possibility of new thought and knowledge, which indeed would not be possible otherwise.
The terms “classical,” “modern,” and “postmodern” are subject to significant fluctuations in their use, as well as in interpretations of their various uses, for example, the use of the terms “modern” and “postmodern” by Lyotard. I comment on this situation, specifically in connection with Lyotard’s argument concerning the postmodern, and establish my own use of all three terms (“classical,” “modern,” and “postmodern”) below. First, however, I need to explain my use of the term “thought,” which is given a special meaning here, following Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s What is Philosophy? I also need to explain my use of the term “knowledge,” which is Lyotard’s primary category in The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge and to which he in turn gives a special meaning, which I relate to that of “thought,” as understood here.
According to Deleuze and Guattari, “thought” is not merely thinking (i.e., mental states and processes), although, as thinking, thought is viewed by them as a group of particular effects of neurological processes in the brain. They understand “thought,” first and foremost, as a confrontation between the brain and chaos. This is hardly surprising: most thinking may be seen as giving order to our perceptions, images, ideas, words, and so forth, and thus as involving a confrontation with chaos. Thought, however, is a special form of this confrontation, because it maintains an affinity with and works together with chaos, rather than merely protecting us from chaos, as, for example and in particular, the dogmatism of opinion (doxa) would. I henceforth use the term “thought” in this sense of the cooperative creative confrontation between the brain and chaos, and use the term “thinking” to designate the general mental functioning of the brain. Chaos, too, is given a special conception by Deleuze and Guattari.
Chaos is defined not so much by its disorder as by the infinite speed with which every form taking shape in it vanishes. It is a void that is not a nothingness but a virtual, containing all possible particles and drawing out all possible forms, which spring up only to disappear immediately, without consistency or reference, without consequence. Chaos is an infinite speed of birth and disappearance.
(118)
This conception of chaos, which may be called “chaos as the virtual,” is essential to our understanding of thought. However, two other conceptions of chaos or two other aspects of chaos appear to be necessary in order to address postmodern thought, but, I would argue, also for our understanding of the nature of thought itself. The first conception is that of chaos as the unthinkable, which can be traced to the ancient Greek idea of chaos as areton or alogon. It is especially important for my argument because a relation to the unthinkable is one of the defining aspects of postmodern thought. More generally, however, it appears that the processes responsible for the creation or annihilation of forms defining chaos as the virtual may not be representable or even conceivable by any means available to us. Deleuze and Guattari invoke a related, although, as I shall explain, arguably less radical, conception in speaking of “the nonthought within thought” (59; emphasis added). The second conception of chaos that I have in mind is that of chaos as chance or randomness, and hence disorder. As Deleuze and Guattari’s formulation indicates, this concept is not entirely put aside by them: while “chaos” may be “defined not so much by its disorder,” it still takes thought to confront disorder and chance, for example in the emergence (from the virtual to the actual) and disappearance (from the actual to the virtual) of particles and forms. Each such emergence or disappearance may be given a degree of expectation, a probability—but only a probability, rather than certainty. As will be seen, this conception of chaos, too, is essential to postmodern thought, as understood here, but it also appears to be necessary for understanding the general functioning of thought as a confrontation with chaos.
The character of thought makes thought essentially creative and, according to Deleuze and Guattari, art, science, and philosophy are the primary means for thinking to become thought. Deleuze and Guattari even define art, science, and philosophy in terms of neurological functioning of the brain itself, rather than seeing them as merely culturally mediated forms of thinking. Accordingly, they see chaos not only as the greatest enemy but also as the greatest friend of thought, and its best ally in its yet greater struggle, that against opinion, always an enemy only, “like a sort of ‘umbrella’ that protects us from chaos” (202). “But,” Deleuze and Guattari say, “art, science, and philosophy require more: they cast planes over the chaos. . . . the struggle with chaos is only the instrument in a more profound struggle against opinion, for the misfortune of people comes from opinion” (202-206).
Lyotard’s concept of knowledge in The Postmodern Condition is multifaceted and involves “an extensive array of competence-building measures.” According to Lyotard:
But what is meant by the term knowledge is not only a set of denotative statements [often associated with and institutionally defining scientific knowledge], far from it. It also includes notions of “knowledge,” “knowing how,” “knowing how to live,” “how to listen” . . . etc. Knowledge, then, is a question of competence that goes beyond the simple determination and application of criteria of efficiency (technical qualifications), of justice or happiness (ethical wisdom), of the beauty of a sound or color (auditory and visual sensibility), but also “good” prescriptive and “good” evaluative utterances. . . . [Knowledge] is not a competence relative to a particular class of statements (for example, cognitive ones) to the exclusion of all other. On the contrary, it makes “good” performances in relation to a variety of objects of discourse possible: objects to be known, decided on, evaluated, transformed…. From this derives one of the principal features of knowledge: it coincides with an extensive array of competence-building measures and is the only form embodied in a subject constituted by the various areas of competence composing it.
(18-19)
This concept of knowledge also involves the concept of thought in the sense explained above, although this connection is only implicit here and comes into the foreground of Lyotard’s argument later in The Postmodern Condition. For the moment, at stake are, first of all, manifestly social and political determinations of configurations of knowledge and, in part as a result of these social determinations, the heterogeneity, ultimately irreducible, of these configurations. By bringing into consideration knowledge as “embodied in a subject [thus] constituted by various areas of competence composing [this subject],” Lyotard’s argument dislocates the Enlightenment concept and (presumed) practice of subjectivity, defined by the ideas of unity (even if the unity of the multiple), and consensus. This is an Enlightenment or, in Lyotard’s view, Hegelian ideal, championed by Jürgen Habermas, to which Lyotard, who sees this ideal as “outmoded” and ultimately unrealizable, even in principle, juxtaposes his postmodern vision of knowledge, defined by its irreducibly heterogeneous architecture, which he associates with Kant, especially with the Kantian sublime (“Answering the Question” 73).
Lyotard’s concept of knowledge is close to Kant’s, too, a proximity that Lyotard often claims for his philosophy. In particular, it may be seen as a suitably modified amalgamation of Kant’s cognitive concepts: knowledge, understanding, reason, and so forth, conjoined together. This concept is also close to Hegel’s concept of knowledge [Wissen] in The Phenomenology of Spirit, although Lyotard himself might not have sought or have been eager to claim this proximity. Although Lyotard was undoubtedly aware of the complex interplay between Kant’s and Hegel’s concepts (specifically the cognitive ones at stake here), he prefers to stress the differences between them, usually in favor of Kant. Kant, especially the third Critique, The Critique of Judgment, is arguably Lyotard’s greatest philosophical inspiration, both in general and in his argument concerning the postmodern. On the other hand, Lyotard is often critical of Hegel, and he sees Habermas’s thinking as driven by a Hegelian inspiration, as it may well have been. I would argue, however, that Hegel’s thinking is much closer to that of Lyotard than might appear, and might have appeared to Lyotard himself. While Habermas’s vision of the unity of knowledge, rightly questioned by Lyotard, may be of “a Hegelian inspiration,” its “Hegelian” nature is not the same as that of Hegel himself, or (since “that of Hegel himself” is a difficult denomination to sustain) in any event, it is not the only kind of Hegelian inspiration (“Answering the Question” 73).
However one sees the genealogy of Lyotard’s concept of knowledge, the irreducible and irreducibly heterogeneous multiplicity at stake in this concept is a crucial, defining part of Lyotard’s and the present view of postmodern thought and knowledge. As understood here, “postmodern thought” is expressly defined by the following key features (which are more implicit in Lyotard): 1) irreducible multiplicity; 2) the irreducible unthinkable in thought; and 3) irreducible chance. The irreducible nature of each is crucial because the multiple, the unthinkable, and chance are also considered by classical and modern thought, but there they are ultimately reducible, at least in principle, to, respectively, unity, accessibility to thought, and causality. It is also the argument for the possibly irreducible nature of the multiple, the unthinkable, and the random that elicits the strongest resistance to this type of postmodern thought.
As noted at the outset, this is a particular concept of postmodern thought, which also implies a particular view of postmodernism and postmodernity, one among several possible such views. By “postmodernism” I understand the set of practices (philosophical, scientific, artistic, cultural, political) that involve postmodern thinking or thought; and by “postmodernity” I refer to the corresponding cultural landscapes during the last forty years or so. The term “postmodern” itself is a kind of umbrella term, the meaning of which in turn depends on how one understands the phenomena just mentioned, one of which is of course postmodern thought itself, my main subject here. This understanding always reflects an emphasis on specific aspects of the multifaceted postmodern intellectual and cultural scene.
A few alternative conceptions of the postmodern might be mentioned here by way of a background for the present argument. This brief overview does not attempt to cover the spectrum of such conceptions, which would be impossible in any event, or to do justice to those that it does mention or to the work of the figures who advanced them, which the limits of this article would not allow me to do. My aim in offering this overview is to situate more firmly the present argument in the landscape of postmodern theory and culture, and by now of our discussions of them, discussions that are part of the culture that may have moved beyond postmodern culture: a “culture after postmodern culture.”
One might mention, first, Fredric Jameson’s theorizing of postmodernism as, in his well-known title phrase, “the cultural logic of late capitalism.” Jameson’s argument concerning postmodernism has been prominent in literary studies and related fields. While indebted to Lyotard (Jameson also wrote a foreword to The Postmodern Condition), Jameson’s argument is different from Lyotard’s and from the present argument concerning the subject. I only register here the fundamental role of the base-superstructure relationships between capitalism and postmodernism in his Marxist argument. The role of these relationships would not be denied by Lyotard, but they are not seen by Lyotard as most essentially defining the culture, “the cultural logic,” of postmodernity, a position adopted in this article as well. While both Lyotard’s work and, especially, that of Jameson have been influential in literary studies since the 1980s, the term “postmodern literature” had been in circulation there already by the early 1970s, and thus before Lyotard injected the language of the postmodern into theoretical and cultural discussions, and before Jameson adopted this language.2 The term has, for example, been used to refer generally to generally more innovative works of contemporary literature, roughly from the 1950s on, thus often connoting literally literature that comes after modernism, rather than certain more specifically (or differently) postmodern works of the last four decades, which Jameson discusses. Either way, however, such postmodern works of literature and their interpretations are usually associated with conceptions of the postmodern developed to accommodate more specifically literary works, sometimes in accordance with or following Lyotard’s or Jameson’s view, but often moving in other directions.
In visual arts, the denomination “postmodern” functions somewhat differently. It refers to trends from the late 1970s on, sometimes influenced by postmodernist theories, manifest, for example, in the work of such artists as Damien Hirst, Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, Jeff Koons, and Cindy Sherman. In architecture, too, where the denomination “postmodern” emerged in part independently and where it often functions quite differently than it does in other fields, the “postmodern” refers to several different and sometimes disparate architectural styles, e.g., those of Robert Venturi and of Renzo Piano. In sum, the uses and abuses of the term of “postmodern” are diverse, and while they are sometimes related, it is difficult and ultimately impossible to bring them together within a single concept. The situation is hardly uncommon when a term acquires this kind of currency.
By virtue of the same cultural dynamics of terminological dissemination, thinking (or thought) and knowledge that I understand here as “postmodern” may also be, and have been, called differently “poststructuralist,” although this (generally more narrow) term has receded in recent years, in part because it was supplanted by “postmodern.” Some of the authors now commonly associated with postmodernism, such as Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze, resisted attempts to characterize their work as “postmodern,” and even Lyotard had misgivings concerning the language of “postmodernism.” I would argue, however, that most of these attempts have used the term “postmodern” differently from the way I use it in this article, and they have indeed often mischaracterized the work of these authors. I have no special misgivings concerning the term “postmodern” and its plural, heterogeneous yet interactive uses, a plurality that is itself postmodern. We do live in postmodern culture and, by now perhaps even in a culture after postmodern culture, where various forms of the postmodern are in play, and modern culture and modernist literature and art continue to be part of this landscape as well. We also call our culture—our many cultures!—postmodern, poststructuralist, and by still other names, and, as postmodern thought and knowledge tell us, the proliferation of these names and of our cultures themselves is unstoppable. The term postmodern, too, may and even is bound to lose its efficacy at some point, a fate that no term can avoid. This article hopes to relate its argument to thought after postmodern thought, thought that may have arrived already but for which we may not as yet have a name or the arrival of which our culture might not have as yet recognized.
The present understanding of the postmodern follows and extends Lyotard’s inaugural argument in The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge published in 1979. The type of knowledge at stake in Lyotard’s “report” has, he argues emerged as part of the transformation (sometimes referred to as the second industrial revolution) of culture defined by the rise of new, especially digital, information technologies. While at the time of Lyotard’s “report,” these technologies (still in their emerging stages from today’s vantage point) were becoming dominant in the so-called industrialized societies, by now, thirty years later, they have spread and become ubiquitous more or less globally. In this respect, postmodernism may be seen in relation to late capitalism, which was, economically, largely responsible for the development and often the use of these technologies, and as such postmodernism may also be seen as part of the cultural logic of contemporary capitalism. This, however, is not the same as being identified with this logic, as in Jameson and, especially, in the way he envisions this identification. Besides, as Lyotard argues, many key aspects of postmodern thought had emerged in philosophy, art, and science (including mathematics) much earlier, some of them in the 1900s. Lyotard does not consider works of literature and art from the late 1970s on, such as those that attracted Jameson’s attention as postmodernist. This is not surprising, given that these works are characterized by postmodernist features, such as their emphasis, à la Jean Baudrillard, on “simulacra” and “appropriation,” or their overt critique of post-industrial capitalism, that are different from those at the core of Lyotard’s argument concerning the postmodern. Literature and art, such as that of Joyce, the Cubists, Duchamp, and Barnett Newman, that Lyotard considers in conjunction with postmodernism, have been more customarily seen as “modernist.”
For Lyotard, and here, postmodern thought is not only or even primarily a matter of history, although history, specifically that of postmodern culture during the last forty years (from the period covered by Lyotard’s “report” on it), is of course important. At stake, however, is also and even primarily a question of the character of thought—artistic, philosophical, scientific, or other. Some ingredients of postmodern thought can be traced as early as the pre-Socratics, and while Lyotard does not appear to expressly trace them that far, his argumentation implies the possibility of this long history as well. In the present view, postmodern thought is a particular way of thinking concerning certain phenomena and not something that corresponds to actual properties of these phenomena themselves, although it is possible that a rigorous understanding of some of these phenomena requires, at least at the moment, postmodern ways of thinking. Other such phenomena can, however, be understood differently, for example, by way of classical or modern thinking. In still other cases, classical or modern and postmodern thought are in contestation with each other, and it is possible that certain phenomena would require yet different and possibly now unimaginable ways of thought.
As I said, postmodern thought, as understood here, is defined by three interactive components: irreducible multiplicity, the irreducible role of the unthinkable in thought and knowledge, and irreducible chance, all further underlined by the irreducible role of materiality in all phenomena considered by postmodern thought. The irreducible character of each is essential, given that philosophy, science, and literature and art have been concerned with multiplicity and chance long before postmodernism. The question is how we conceive them, and most of the resistance to postmodern thought in the present sense comes down to this question as well. Consider the case of multiplicity, a concept arguably most commonly associated with postmodernism, as it is by Lyotard.
The fundamental role of multiplicity has, of course, sometimes been denied by western metaphysics, beginning with Parmenides’s concept of the One as defining the ultimate reality of things, and Plato’s extension of this doctrine. Difference, multiplicity, and change were in Plato’s view merely illusions of human senses, to be overcome by philosophy. The idea has never died. It has found its arguably most prominent recent reincarnation in twentieth-century “mathematical Platonism,” and recurs, albeit only sporadically and marginally, in contemporary physics. However, our understanding of nature and mind has been most essentially shaped by considering the role of difference, multiplicity, and change in their workings. In other words, what has been primarily at stake, from the pre-Socratics to Heidegger and beyond, is not so much an undifferentiated Oneness, even if one assumes this Oneness as the ultimate nature of reality, but how the play of difference, multiplicity, and/or chance is contained or controlled. Classical and then modern thought sees the multiple as, in Alain Badiou’s idiom, the multiple-One, and the One as the multiple-One, even if in the final analysis this multiple-One dissolves into the One-without-multiple, as in Plato (Badiou 29). I primarily refer to the multiple, since it is more significant for the problematic of the postmodern, although my argument extends to the concepts of difference and change. Accordingly, one can call the multiple-One the classical multiple or, when it acquires philosophically and scientifically post-Cartesian inflections, the modern multiple. Heidegger offers arguably the culminating conception of the modern multiple as the multiple-One in The Question of Being: “The [multiple] meaningfulness [Mehrdeutigkeit] is based on a play [Spiel] which, the more richly it unfolds, the more strictly it is held … by a hidden rule [Regel] … This is why what is said remains bound into the highest law [Gesetz]” (104-5; translation modified).3
By contrast, the postmodern multiple is, in Badiou’s language, the multiple-without-One and, to push the concept beyond Badiou, even the multiple of multiples-without-One, a form of multiplicity that cannot be subsumed by any unity or even by any containable multiplicity, in other words, that cannot be bound by any single rule or law. Lyotard’s argument concerning the postmodern and narrative in The Postmodern Condition can be seen in terms of the narrative multiple-without-One, the multiple that cannot be governed by any single narrative or, in Lyotard’s terms, by a grand narrative or meta-narrative. Postmodern thinking, according to Lyotard, is characterized by its skepticism (“incredulity”) toward grand narratives, in particular that of scientific progress, which narrative has defined modernity or rather modernity’s view of itself. The same view of the multiple as the multiple-without-One defines Lyotard’s argument, via Ludwig Wittgenstein, concerning heteromorphous language games of postmodernity, which cannot be fully coordinated, let alone subsumed or governed by a single language game. Some of these language games cannot be positively related at all: they are strictly “incommensurable.” These two heteromorphous multiplicities, that of narratives and that of language games, are related and interactive, and postmodern subjectivity and knowledge are constituted by both of them and/or by still other multiplicities.
One might say that thinking the multiple-without-One is part of what Deleuze and Guattari call the “plane of immanence” of postmodern thought. According to Deleuze and Guattari, “the plane of immanence is not a concept that is or can be thought but rather the image of thought, the image thought gives to itself of what it means to think, to make use of thought, to find one’s bearing in thought” (37). This plane gives rise to philosophical concepts, which “are like multiple waves, rising and falling, but the plane of immanence is a single wave that rolls them up and unrolls them” (36). Deleuze and Guattari limit the role of the plane of immanence to philosophy alone. I would argue, however, that analogous planes of immanence could be defined for mathematical and scientific concepts or for compositional architectures of literature and art, which Deleuze and Guattari associate primarily with, respectively, the plane of reference in science and the plane of composition in art. Each field may combine various types of planes or make them interfere (in the optical sense of crossing their respective wave-fronts), as Deleuze and Guattari in effect suggest later in the book (217-18).
As I argue here, the plane of immanence of postmodern thought also reveals the potentially uncircumventable limit of knowledge and thinking and, hence, the irreducible incompleteness of both in postmodern registers of thought, which is the second defining aspect of postmodern thought as understood here. These types of limits, although perhaps less radical in character, appear to emerge in Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of “THE plane of immanence,” defined by “the nonthought within thought,” the discovery of which they especially associate with Spinoza. These limits appear to be less radical because, in Deleuze and Guattari’s view, this “nonthought within thought” could still in principle be thought and was indeed thought once by Spinoza, but only once and, it appears, can be never be thought again (59-60; emphasis added). This argumentation appears to me problematic. For one thing, it is difficult and I would argue even impossible to ascertain that Spinoza actually thought “THE plane of immanence” under the assumption that one can never think it again. The idea is also curiously theological, especially for Deleuze and Guattari, radically materialist thinkers that they are. Indeed, in view of this one-time event of thought, they even see Spinoza as “the Christ of philosophy,” only by analogy or metaphorically, to be sure, but still inevitably carrying, at least, some theological weight with it (60). In any event, it is not possible to think, not even once, the irreducibly unthinkable in the present sense, in accordance with the conception of chaos as the incomprehensible, or as the Greek areton. This is why I suggested earlier that, at least when it comes to postmodern thought, Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of chaos as the virtual (defined by the infinite speed of appearance and disappearance of forms) needs to be supplemented with the concept of chaos as the unthinkable. In sum, one can think of the unthinkable but one cannot think this unthinkable itself, which is ultimately unthinkable even as unthinkable.
By the same token, the term “incompleteness” is only used here in juxtaposition to the classical or modern concept of completeness, rather than in order to imply that a more complete way of thinking or a more complete knowledge is possible under these conditions. For example, Einstein saw quantum mechanics, an epistemologically postmodern-like theory, as incomplete because he thought that one should eventually be able to develop a more complete theory, analogous to classical physics. One might say that, while it allowed for the multiple, the multiple-One, Einstein’s plane of thought excluded the irreducibly unthinkable, along with (Einstein appears to be more open on this point) excluding the irreducibly multiple. By contrast, Bohr made the irreducibly unthinkable an essential part of his plane of thought and of his understanding of quantum physics.
Lyotard comes closest to the conception of the unthinkable just outlined in his famous definition of the postmodern, offered expressly in the context of literature and art but extendable to all postmodern thought. He says:
The postmodern would be that which, in the modern, puts forward the unpresentable in presentation itself; that denies itself the solace of good forms, the [Kantian] consensus of a taste which would make it possible to share collectively the nostalgia for the unattainable; [the postmodern is] that which searches for new presentations, not in order to enjoy them but in order to impart a stronger sense of the unpresentable.
(“Answering the Question” 81)
While the nostalgia in question essentially belongs to modern thought, it is not necessarily found in classical thought, thus indicating one difference between them, under largely shared epistemological assumptions. One encounters parallel conceptions of the un-presentable in Jacques Lacan (the Real), Derrida (différance), Paul de Man (on allegory), and Alain Badiou (the event as trans-being), and with qualifications offered above, in Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of “the nonthought within thought,” keeping in mind the differences between these thinkers and different degrees of unthinkability that they give to the unthinkable. One can think of this un-presentable as being beyond thought altogether, unthinkable even as unthinkable, and hence beyond any conceivable beyond, as it were. At the same time, and this is crucial, these unthinkable strata are efficacious in the sense of being responsible for what we think and know, which, as will be seen, also means that postmodern thinking unavoidably involves classical or modern thinking. Accordingly, Lyotard is right to speak of the postmodern in the modern and of the un-presentable in presentation, in the sense that it is made necessary because of its effects on what is presented or represented, or what is thought.
In contrast to postmodern thought, classical thought and then modern thought are both defined by the possibility, at least in principle, of the completeness of thought and knowledge, and thus by the possibility of containing the multiplicity of their practice. Occasioning Lyotard’s reflections on postmodernity, Habermas famously laments our inability or lack of determination to pursue the project of the Enlightenment grounded in this possibility (The Postmodern Condition 66-67; “Answering the Question”72-73). More accurately, one should speak of a certain project of the Enlightenment, since, as Foucault reminded us in “What is the Enlightenment?,” the Enlightenment has other projects and other, sometimes nearly postmodern, ways of thought.
From the pre-Socratics on, classical thought is closely connected to Euclidean geometry, which was essentially in place well before Euclid, but was given its axiomatic-theorematic architecture by Euclid’s Elements. This architecture compels one to proceed from definitions and axioms to theorems by means of firmly established logical deductive rules, and it in turn established a paradigm for classical and then modern mathematical and scientific argument and exposition. The corresponding procedures may not be always expressly enacted in practice (indeed, they rarely are), but the conversion of a mathematical and scientific argument into this form is presumed possible, a possibility put into question, as a possibility in principle, by twentieth-century (and in some respects by even earlier) mathematics and science. This questioning and the necessity of alternative strategies of theoretical exposition are important in postmodern thought. Derrida’s delineation of the workings of différance, in “Différance,” may illustrate the point. According to Derrida: “What I shall propose here will not be elaborated simply as a philosophical discourse, operating according to principle, postulates, axioms or definitions, and proceeding along the discursive lines of a linear order of reasons” (Margins of Philosophy 6-7; emphasis added). In other words, it will not be elaborated on the Euclidean discursive model, and not because it is difficult or for one or another reason undesirable to do so but because is not possible in principle, or at least it does not appear to be (7). Derrida is right to qualify that his proposal “will not be elaborated simply” on the Euclidean discursive model. This model is effective within broad limits and, within certain limits, is unavoidable, and it is used by Derrida in his essay, even though différance itself cannot, as I noted above, be represented or even thought of, and is only manifest in its effects upon what we can think and know.
Modern thought is similarly connected to and often even modeled on classical physics, established as a mathematical science of nature by Galileo and especially by Newton, in turn with Euclidean geometry as their inspiration. This is one of the reasons for my use of the term classical, and classical physics is essentially based in Euclidean geometry. This link was broken by Einstein’s relativity theory, especially the so-called general relativity, his non-Newtonian theory of gravity, based on non-Euclidean geometry, and then more radically by quantum theory, which breaks with geometry altogether.4 Modernity, especially as developed by the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, gave classical thought new dimensions, which define modern thought. Thus, classical physics is paradigmatically modern not only because it is mathematical, crucial as its mathematical character is, but also because it separates nature from mind and culture, in part, as concerns mind, against Aristotle’s physics, a product of a very different culture. As noted from the outset, this separation is a major part of the project of modernity, and it extends into postmodern culture, even though, beyond relatively narrow limits of disciplinary scientific practice, this separation is unsustainable, as Bruno Latour argues in We Have Never Been Modern.
While, however, classical physics and its idealized models (modern theoretical physics, whether classical, relativistic, or quantum, only deals with idealized and mathematized models) offer a good approximation of nature and possess an enormous practical power, classical physics is incorrect at the fundamental level of the constitution of nature, as we understand this constitution now. There one needs at the very least both relativity, in the case of gravity, again, general relativity, and quantum theory—our best fundamental physical theories at present. These theories are not only fundamentally different from classical physics but, in the case of general relativity and quantum theory, are also incompatible with each other. Quantum theory, in the form of the so-called quantum field theory, incorporates only Einstein’s special relativity theory, which deals with the electromagnetic behavior of light in the absence of gravity. This incompatibility of general relativity and quantum theory is one of the greatest unresolved problems of fundamental physics, a problem that cannot perhaps be resolved apart from a postmodern-like understanding of the ultimate constitution of nature.
Twentieth-century mathematics and physics appear to direct us toward postmodern thought and knowledge, which was one of Lyotard’s points. His argument concerning this point, made throughout The Postmodern Condition, may be viewed from the following angle. If we want, as the Enlightenment thinkers did at the time, to model our thinking on mathematics and science, we should perhaps use for these purposes neither eighteenth-century mathematics and science nor the conceptual philosophical models that ground them. Instead we should consider first what mathematics and physics, in particular quantum theory (55-58), or biology and neuroscience, tell us now. And what they appear to tell us now may well require, rather than only allow for, postmodern thought, although even that they allow for it is revolutionary. In other words, postmodern thought appears to be closer to contemporary mathematics and science than Enlightenment-like thinking is.
Our thinking concerning chance and probability plays an especially important role in this problematic, whether one considers it in its scientific, philosophical, or cultural and political register, or in the interactions between these registers. A chance event is an unpredictable, random event. By contrast, probability, which measures our expectations concerning events whose occurrence (say, how a tossed coin will fall) cannot be predicted with certainty, introduces an element of order in our interactions with randomness and chance. I want to distinguish here between causality and determinism. I use “causality” as an ontological category relating to the behavior of systems whose evolution is defined by the fact that the state of the system is determined at all points by its state at a given point. I use “determinism” as an epistemological category having to do with our ability to predict exactly the state of a system at any and all points once we know its state at a given point, at least in idealized cases. There are causal theories, chaos theory among them, where such predictions are not possible. The main question in the present context is whether chance is a manifestation of causality or necessity, however hidden or remote, or not. These two alternatives define the two corresponding concepts of chance—classical or modern, which entails a hidden causality behind chance and which, thus, excludes only determinism, and nonclassical or postmodern, in which case we do not or even cannot assume any causality behind chance.
Classically, randomness is seen as arising from our insufficient (and perhaps, in practice, unavailable) knowledge of a total configuration of the forces involved and, hence, of a lawful causality postulated behind an apparently lawless random event. If this configuration becomes available, or if it could be made available in principle, the chance character of the event would disappear. Chance would reveal itself to be a product of the play of forces that is, at least in principle if not in practice, calculable by man, or at least by God, who, in this view, does not play dice, as Einstein famously said, or who at least always knows how they will fall. It is worth keeping in mind that, while Einstein spoke of God (a brilliant rhetorical move, which immortalized the statement), he meant nature. On this point reality and causality come together, or they are brought together by this point. Subtle as they may be, all scientific theories of chance and probability prior to quantum theory or at least to Darwin’s evolutionary theory, and many beyond them, as well as most philosophical theories of chance, are of the classical type just described. When they occur in a domain handled by classical physics, randomness and probability result from insufficient information concerning systems that are at bottom causal. It is their complexity (due, say, to the large numbers of their individual constituents) that prevents us from accessing their causal behavior and making deterministic predictions concerning it. Thus, the standard classical mechanics deals deterministically with causal systems; classical statistical physics deals with causal systems, but only statistically; and chaos and complexity theories deal with systems that are causal, but whose behavior cannot be predicted exactly in view of the highly nonlinear character of this behavior, also known as the sensitivity to the initial conditions. Hence, neither classical statistical physics nor chaos and complexity theories are deterministic. I speak of the standard classical mechanics above, because many systems considered in chaos theory in fact obey the laws of quantum mechanics, but they are too complex to track in order to make deterministic predictions concerning their behavior.
By contrast, quantum mechanics offers predictions, in general of a probabilistic nature, concerning the systems that may not be and, in many versions of the theory, cannot be considered as causal or, again, in the first place, be subject to any realist ontological description. Quantum mechanics only predicts, probabilistically, certain events but does not explain the physical processes through which these events come about. Even though the probabilistic predictions of quantum mechanics are subject to rigorous mathematical laws, randomness and probability do not arise in view of our inability to access the underlying causal dynamics determining the behavior of quantum systems. It is difficult, if not impossible, to assume quantum behavior to be causal or, to begin with, to see it in realist terms, that is, to assign this behavior a specifiable classical-like ontology.5 In other words, the character of the existence of quantum objects may disallow us not only to describe but also to form a conception of this existence. This impossibility would make such terms as “quantum,” “object,” or “existence” provisional and ultimately inapplicable to such objects. That this type of epistemology is possible and may even be necessary in a scientific theory is a crucial point, since it implies that the same epistemology is possible elsewhere in science, for example in evolutionary theory and in neuroscience. In other words, this epistemology is not merely an invention of postmodern imagination, into which it came in part from mathematics and science.
It does not follow that we should, or for that matter could, abandon classical or modern ways of thinking and knowledge. It may be argued, as it was by Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, that, as against theoretical thinking of the epistemologically postmodern type, classical-like or modern theoretical thinking reflects the essential workings of our neurological machinery born in our evolutionary emergence as human animals. In other words, our thinking in general, as the product of this machinery, is classical-like, as is strongly suggested by recent arguments in neuroscience by, among others, Alain Berthoz and Rodolfo Llinás, which explore the relationships between the brain and movement.6 Our brains appear to guide our perception and motion in accordance with classical mechanics. Reciprocally, classical mechanics may be seen as a mathematized refinement of our daily thinking, in contrast to quantum mechanics, where it is difficult and even impossible to speak of the motion of quantum objects.
If we assume the evolutionary origin of classical-like theoretical thinking, it would hardly be surprising that it has been so pervasive and effective in mathematics, science, philosophy, literature, and culture at large for so long. Classical-like thinking is retained in postmodern theories as well, because that which is beyond the limits of postmodern theories is beyond the capacity of our thought altogether. One can even define as classical that which can be thought at all. Quantum objects and their behavior or the corresponding entities in other postmodern theories are, by contrast, unthinkable, inconceivable. We are compelled to infer the existence of such entities from configurations of their effects upon what we can think and know, in part, inevitably, through classical thinking. Nobody has observed a moving photon or electron as such. We infer the existence of quantum objects from the traces they leave in measuring instruments, traces that we observe classically. This inference is always theoretical. It follows, then, that postmodern theoretical thinking is reached via a classical or modern one, since the postmodern underpinnings of a given situation are manifest in classical features of this situation. Accordingly, it is a matter not of a philosophical or aesthetic preference between classical or modern and postmodern thinking, but of the necessity of using one or the other, or different combinations of them, in different circumstances. Postmodern thought embraces classical and modern thinking, both within its own limits and in postmodern domains, where classical or modern thinking must be deployed along with postmodern thought. By contrast, classical and then modern theoretical thinking aim to, and indeed by their nature must, exclude postmodern thought.
In some respects, this is not surprising, especially in view of the considerations just offered—the biological-evolutionary nature of our perception and thinking in general, and the success of classical and modern mathematics and science. In science, postmodern thought emerged, with the help of nature and technology, from remarkable, even previously unimaginable, phenomena, such as those discovered in quantum physics, and from highly nontrivial technical theories in mathematics, science, and philosophy in the early twentieth century. By then, classical and then modern thinking had become a form of ideology, which defined our culture itself as classical and then modern. It may be more surprising that our culture continues to resist postmodern thought to such a degree, given the extraordinary effectiveness of scientific theories, such as quantum theory, that at least allow for being understood in postmodern terms. In his The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, Stephen J. Gould offers a poignant expression of this surprise. He says:
I confess that, after 30 years of teaching at a major university [Harvard], I remain surprised by the unquestioned acceptance of this view of science [as grounded in the ultimate causality of nature]—which, by the way, I strongly reject. . .—both among students headed for a life in this profession, and among intellectually inclined people in general. If, as a teacher, I suggest to students that they might wish to construe probability and contingency as inherent in nature, they often become confused, and even angry, and almost invariably respond with some version of the old Laplacean claim [of the underlying ultimate causality of nature]. In short, they insist that our use of probabilistic inference can only, and in principle, be an epistemological consequence of our mental limitations, and simply cannot represent an irreducible property of nature, which must, if science works at all, be truly deterministic [causal].
(1333)
One should not be too much surprised. For the reasons just explained, the classical or modern view of chance, as ultimately grounded in causality, has been part of the dominant scientific and philosophical ideology and has had the backing of a great many major figures in science, from physics to evolutionary theory. Einstein led the way in his criticism of quantum theory. Although he admitted that quantum epistemology is “logically possible” and is consistent with the experimental data, he saw it as “so very contrary to [his] scientific instinct that [he could not] forgo the search for a more complete conception [of nature]” (“Physics and Reality” 377). Einstein’s hope has not materialized thus far in quantum theory.
The situation is, however, peculiar. On the one hand, quantum mechanics and several other scientific theories that, at the very least, allow for postmodern interpretations of them are among the most effective theories we have. On the other hand, their postmodern aspects compel many to look for classical-like alternatives to these theories. Such alternatives cannot be excluded, given that our fundamental physical theories, as they stand now, are incomplete. At present, however, there are no signs that such alternatives are any more likely than postmodern-like or even yet more radical theories. According to Anton Zeilinger et al., one of the most prominent quantum information physicists in the world, and his co-authors: “We suggest that these [alternatives] are simply attempts to keep, in one way or other, a realistic view of the world. It may well be that in the future, quantum physics will be superseded by a new theory, but it is likely that this will be much more radical than anything we have today” (237).
The argument of Zeilinger et al. is unlikely to convince most proponents of classically-oriented thinking about quantum theory, or nature and science in general, any more than a more general argument for postmodern thought offered here is likely to do. Both types of argumentation, that concerning postmodern-like science and that concerning postmodern thought in general, are resisted and even attacked jointly, as in the so-called Science Wars of late 1990s, centered on postmodern French philosophy and constructivist studies of science, and more recently in the debate concerning religion and science, on which I would like to comment in closing. I leave aside arguments that try to bring science and religion together, since, whatever their chances elsewhere, such attempts are not of much interest if one adopts the epistemology of postmodern thought, as defined here, since the latter is, by definition, incompatible with any theology, positive or negative.7
Of more interest here are those arguments that oppose religion and science or even counter religion by science on epistemologically classical, rather than epistemologically postmodern, grounds. Such arguments are offered, for example, by Richard Dawkins in God’s Delusion and The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution, and by Stephen Hawking, in The Grand Design (co-written with Leonard Mlodinow). These are suspiciously grandiose titles, with a peculiarly theological ring to them. Dawkins is also known, since the Science Wars, for his discontent with postmodernism, of which he knows little and is willing to understand still less, but which he nevertheless does not hesitate to claim to be a threat to culture and progress (e.g., in “Postmodernism Disrobed”). His view is understandable given that postmodernist thought is in conflict with his own, uncritically Enlightenment, thinking. Dawkins is woefully inattentive to the possibility that postmodernist arguments, attacked by him and by other scientists, show difficulties in maintaining this type of thinking even in science itself. What makes Dawkins’s arguments of particular interest in the present context is the metaphysical grounding of these arguments, specifically the fact that, at bottom, they share the same metaphysical or, in Heidegger’s and Derrida’s terms, ontotheological base with the theologically oriented theories that they attack, such as the argument for “intelligent design” in evolution.
The term “ontotheology” was introduced by Martin Heidegger and then used by Derrida, who gave it a more radical sense (in part against Heidegger’s own grain), along with its more famous Derridean avatars, such as logocentrism and the metaphysics of presence (e.g., Margins of Philosophy 6). For present purposes, ontotheological thinking may be understood as a way of classical or modern thinking that, while not necessarily theological, is (often without realizing it) ontologically modeled on theology, and that in particular has a single all-governing metaphysical base, analogous to that provided by the idea of God in theological thinking. Thus, the concept of intelligent design in biology is theological rather than only ontotheological and is, thus, different from Darwin’s and post-Darwinian conceptions of evolution, which are, generally, not theological. On the other hand, such conceptions may be thought ontotheologically. For example, one thinks ontotheologically if one conceives of evolution as a material but at bottom causal process, for example, as fully governed (“overdetermined”) by a single structure, such as a determinate adaptive mechanism or set of mechanisms, which also establish the causality of evolutionary process. I am not saying that adaptive mechanisms (plural!) are not important to evolution: they manifestly are. But I am saying that, in addition to a likely uncontainable multiplicity of these mechanics, random, a-causal forces of internal (random genetic mutations) and external (environmental) nature may and probably do play an equally important role in the dynamics of evolution. Darwin appears to have at least thought that such may be the case. The corresponding evolutionary framework would, then, not be ontotheological in the present sense.8
To give another example, Marxist or post-Marxist theories, even those with a postmodernist flavor, as in the case of Jameson, offer a materialist view of human history and, hence, are not theological. They are, however, usually ontotheological, insofar as they conceive of human history as a teleological process governed by the class structure defined by the relationships between capital and labor. They also deploy a form of the Enlightenment-like grand narrative, as, for example, in Jameson, in conjunction with the narrative of postmodernism as “the cultural logic of late capitalism,” which logic, one presumes, includes postmodern “incredulity” towards grand narratives, incredulity that grounds Lyotard’s very different argument concerning postmodernism.9
Now, even though the anxieties concerning postmodern-like thinking in science are considerable in the scientific community, that certain scientific theories may be or even may need to be interpreted along postmodern-like lines is at least allowed as a possibility, albeit an unwelcome possibility. When it comes to culture, postmodern thought is met with unmitigated resistance or is rejected outright by most scientists comment on the subject. One reason for this difference is the assumption that, while we have power to shape society and culture, nature and its laws are independent, albeit open to human understanding. As should be apparent from the preceding discussion, both (or all three) assumptions are questionable, especially from the postmodern perspective, in which these assumptions more often than not appear to be part of or to arise from the ontotheological ideologies in question at the moment. Indeed, as will be seen presently, in accordance with one such ideology, nature too may be seen as something to be shaped or “designed,” at least at some levels, by an ontotheologically-based human intervention.
Theology, then, is unequivocally rejected as a way of understanding how nature works or, given the materialist views of the authors under discussion, and the role of theology in our thinking and the rise of its significance in recent decades is lamented accordingly. At the same time, ontotheology is embraced in understanding nature and, again, especially culture, without reflecting either on its common metaphysical base with theology or on problems of the Enlightenment-like ideologies that arise from their ontological character. Hence we also have the continuing dominance of the grand narrative of scientific progress, essentially the grand narrative of the Enlightenment, which was at stake in Lyotard’s critique of modernity and which, so Lyotard hoped, would be subject to postmodern incredulity. Against Lyotard’s expectations, while science and technology open to postmodern-like thought and knowledge have continued to flourish since 1980, the postmodern incredulity toward modern thought and knowledge, or their grand narratives, has actually diminished. On the other hand, a new power of competing ontotheological and, often, theological grand narratives has become prominent during the last three decades.
This last circumstance should give pause to believers in the grand narrative of scientific progress, and make them pay more attention to postmodernist arguments concerning grand narratives and the type of Enlightenment vision of science, history, and culture these scientists adopt. It does not appear, however, that it does. Instead, the situation is, yet again, seen and handled by both sides (apart from a small minority of those who hold postmodernist views of the type advocated here) as a conflict, even a war, of competing ontotheological ideologies and grand narratives. Not surprisingly, divergent phenomena within a given side of these confrontations are often uncritically lumped together by other sides: one speaks of religion (or a given large religious denomination) in general or, conversely, of science in general, and so forth, including, importantly, postmodernism in general. My use of the word “believer” notwithstanding, I am not suggesting, as some have, that the views of believers in the grand narrative of science necessarily amount to a secular religion of its own, although this does happens sometimes. Theological and materialist ontotheologies are not the same. They are only analogously grounded metaphysically, and it is this grounding and its implications that are at stake here. Commenting on the prominent and even dominant ideology of nanotechnology, Jean-Pierre Dupuy made the following perceptive observation:
An expression in the form an oxymoron sums up all this [ideology] up very well: nature has become artificial nature.
The next stage obviously consists in asking whether the mind could not take over from nature in order to carry out its creative task more intelligently and efficiently. Damien Broderick asks: “Is it likely than nanosystems, designed by human minds, will bypass this Darwinian wandering, and leap straight to design success?” (The Spike 118). In a comparative cultural studies perspective, it is fascinating to see American science, which has to carry on an epic struggle to root out of public education every trace of creationism, including its most recent avatar, intelligent design, return to the design paradigm through the intermediary of the nanotechnology program, the only difference being that man now assumes the role of the demiurge.
(158)
While the difference in question deserves more emphasis than Dupuy’s “only” suggests, the appeal, ontotheological in character, of nanotechnological or other biotechnological design paradigms and their shared basis with the intelligent-design theory are indeed striking.
It is important to keep in mind that the paradigm of design originates in cybernetics and in subsequent developments in computer science and information theory. These developments of course contributed to and were even largely responsible technologically for “the postmodern condition(s)” that led to the rise of postmodern thought, knowledge, and culture. They also played an important role in the development of postmodern thinking and thought by helping to dislocate the classical and then modern concept of subjectivity, defined in part by bracketing, from the opposite sides, both concepts, the “animal” and the “machine,” from their conceptions of the human. At the same time, however, some of these developments have exhibited strong ontotheological and intelligent-design-like tendencies, similar to those found in nanotechnology, as Dupuy indicates (155-56). For example, artificial-intelligence (AI) programs, especially the so-called strong AI, assume, roughly, that human or human-like intelligence and consciousness can be enacted by a digital computer. This kind of double and even schizophrenic situation and attitude—the postmodern decentering of subjectivity or post-subjectivity, on the one hand, and, on the other, the ontotheology of the post-human “intelligent design”—also defines certain recent (“post-humanist”) trends in the humanities.
Appeals to the concept of design are also found in ontotheological programs for fundamental physics or for evolutionary biology, as can be seen in Hawking and Mlodinow’s book, The Grand Design. In fundamental physics, mathematics often functions as the ontotheology of the Universe, as the Mario Livio’s recent book, Is God a Mathematician? (whose argument is ontotheological rather than theological, and God is invoked metaphorically, as did Einstein). Conversely, and sometimes reciprocally, although less common, the theological association between divine thinking and mathematics is far from absent. This association also has a much longer history, which, as indicated earlier, extends from Plato and even the pre-Socratics. But then, emerging at least with Democritus, materialist ontotheology has a long history, too.
My main question here is whether certain aspirations for a more just society may be effectively served by these ontotheologically grounded arguments, even if these arguments are advanced against theology. In other words, are aspirations for social justice effectively served if one sees the world in terms of competing ideologies and grand narratives, those of the scientific Enlightenment or those governed by one or another form of theology, or if social justice is better served by more postmodern ways of thinking about the nature and practice of politics and justice? I am willing to grant such aspirations to the scientific authors under discussion, or in other critiques of postmodernism, such as Habermas’s–whom Lyotard, too, credits with wanting a more just society, but not with a good argument concerning how to achieve it (The Postmodern Condition 66-67). First, when it comes to a better, more just society, is ontotheology, such as that of the scientific Enlightenment, better than theology? I think it is likely to be. In fairness, theology has made its contributions to the advancement of knowledge and justice, while science and the ideology of scientific progress have sometimes been used, often in the name of justice, without much regard for actual justice and for purposes that are hardly just, by almost any concept or criterion of justice. Secondly, however, and most crucially here, is Enlightenment ontotheology better for social justice than is postmodernism? While I do not say that it cannot be better, it probably is not.
Consider the case Lyotard makes concerning justice, a case that ultimately drives the argument of The Postmodern Condition, which also proceeds, at least in part, from physics to justice, that is, from the postmodern epistemology of physics, and specifically from atomic or quantum physics, to the postmodern epistemology of justice (55-58).10 First, Lyotard argues that while Habermas’s cause, justice, is good, his conceptions of consensus and of the unity of knowledge and culture, a unity that underlies the idea of consensus, are “outmoded and suspect values.” They are unlikely to survive “that severe reexamination that postmodernity imposes on the thought of the Enlightenment, on the idea of a unitary end of history and a subject.” “But,” Lyotard says, “justice as a value is neither outmoded nor suspect. We must thus arrive at an idea and practice of justice that is not linked to that of consensus” (The Postmodern Condition 66). (This link would also make the idea of justice ontotheological, even if this ontotheology is a materialist one.) Lyotard then offers a brief manifesto-like outline of postmodern politics that would respect both “the desire for justice” and “the desire for the unknown” (67), and I would add the desire for and in any event the acceptance of the irreducibly unthinkable, which view may be more radical than that of Lyotard. It might be closer to that of Emmanuel Levinas, except that Levinas’s ethics of the unthinkable or, in his terms, the infinite is, as Derrida argues, ultimately ontotheological.11 It also follows from the preceding discussion that this desire is the desire for the irreducibly multiple and for irreducible chance—akin to amor fati, invoked by Friedrich Nietzsche, a love of fate, but a “fate” defined by uncertainty without underlying necessity, a love for the uncertainty of the future (On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo 258).
Is this type of justice possible? At least, it appears no more impossible and may even prove to be more likely to work in practice than the idea of justice based on the idea of consensus or other ontotheological (or theological) principles, which have at best a questionable record of leading to just societies. But, perhaps against Lyotard, who appears to have been more optimistic on this point, under postmodern conditions the possibility of justice entails an irreducible possibility of injustice. I am not suggesting that we cannot or should not try to minimize the chance and probability for injustice in our efforts to achieve a better justice, a justice-to-come (a-venir), to borrow from Derrida’s “democracy to-come” in Specters of Marx. My point instead is that we cannot eliminate this chance for injustice, even ideally, if we want our ideal to relate meaningfully to the actual world. Nor can this justice be justice for all: one justice for all or the same justice forever. It cannot be the justice, the justice of the One, even if it is the multiple-One, the multiple of justice underlined by a hidden single justice, theological or otherwise ontotheological. One justice for all is an ontotheological fiction, with which, defined as a monotheistic theological justice, Socrates, arguably the first modern thinker, wanted to replace the Dionysian vision of the world offered by Greek tragedy, according to Nietzsche, the first postmodern thinker or, as he saw himself, the first Dionysian philosopher. This is a great name from the past for his philosophy of the future, as he liked to call it, or for any true philosophy.
In this view and this way of justice, which can only be a view and a way, since, as Nietzsche also tells us, the view or the way does not exist, there has never been any other justice than the irreducibly uncertain and inconstant, multiple justice (Thus Spoke Zarathustra 156). There can be only a possible or at most a probable justice. No court of law and no other form of dispensing justice gives us more than a chance of justice; in all our ethical acts, acts aimed at justice, we make our bets, however certain we might believe ourselves to be in what is just. More often than not it is no more than a blind chance, and, in the present view of chance, there is no ultimate causal architecture underlying this chance. Our knowledge and thought may help us, but they can only help us make more likely bets, and then only sometimes. Justice is blind because, if I can put it this way, it is blind even more toward what is just than toward what may divert us from being just, as the iconic image of the blind goddess balancing the scales is designed to tell us. We cannot count, but can only bet, on what will be defined as just in the future, even a very near future. Not only are people inconstant, but justice itself is inconstant, because it is never itself, never in itself, never apart from people who, however, cannot be completely in control of justice, either. Justice is never divine, but it is never completely human either.
This view of justice also returns us to the tragic thought of ancient Greece, in particular to Aeschylus, whom Nietzsche, a fellow Heraclitean and a fellow Dionysian, singles out, in The Birth of Tragedy, as the greatest tragic poet, and from whom Socrates, a dreamer of permanent, divine justice, refused to learn. In Seven Against Thebes, Aeschylus gives us, as a gift, a profound sense of a Heraclitean river of justice, into which we can never step twice or perhaps even once: “What a City [polis] approves as just [dikae] changes with changing times” (l.1048). This is not a comforting picture of justice, though it fits the tragic scene of Thebes. But there may be no scene of justice that is much different. It is true that Aeschylus’s, or rather (this difference should not be overlooked) the chorus’s, contention as such does not mean that there is no other, more permanent, justice, human or divine, that a city (polis) does not perceive or does not want to, or cannot, maintain, for example, by surrendering the demands of this justice to political interests. But the statement poses a question, reverberating throughout pre-Socratic thought, a question to which Socrates and Nietzsche give two very different answers, or, since one can hardly hope for answers here, which they ask differently. The first is optimistic, reflecting the optimism of Socratic logic, modeled on geometry, and the second is tragic, reflecting the vision of tragic art, such as that of Aeschylus, against which Socratism waged a war. While a more optimistic, more Socratic view of justice, at least future justice, is also possible under postmodern conditions, postmodern thought, as understood here, appears to direct us towards a more Nietzschean, tragic vision of justice. This vision is not negative, nihilistic, or pessimistic; tragedy is not the same as pessimism (Nietzsche is not Schopenhauer). Nor is this vision nostalgic for a lost belief, no longer possible, in some more assured, universal justice.
Instead this vision arises from an affirmation of life, which is rarely just, even in the face of tragedy, which is inescapable.
