The following two videos are a part of a two-channel video installation, installed as projected images on either side of a single hanging screen; viewers are able to hear both soundtracks but can only see one screen at a time. As a web-based installation, you will need to click both thumbnails to open separate viewing windows. By playing both videos at once you will be able to hear both soundtracks, or you may watch each as a single track, but they have been choreographed to play simultaneously.

The destructive character sees nothing permanent.

-Walter Benjamin

 
East by Southeast, Tokyo and Saigon share a history of destruction and occupation while also displaying various forms of shifting Asian urbanism. Modern warfare generated the radical conditions for architectural, political and social change in both cities, but how do we discover the traces of this shared history after intense postmodern re-imaginings concomitant with relentless construction of capitalist space? The cities appear strange to one another, fantastically different, dislocated in time: Saigon radiates a remaining sensual colonial aura; Tokyo shimmers a cool techno-future. The cities’ morphologies hide in fragments, facades, and distortions of built scale. Together they hold phantasmagoria of urban Asian cultures, hyper-capitalism, Cold War spatiality and traces left by the Army Corps of Engineers.
 
We nod to China Míeville’s baroque urban fiction as we examine Tokyo and Saigon through a short video that operates on the tripartite mechanics of ethnographic, documentary, and conceptual visuality. The video is a double projection: each side of the screen bears an image so that viewers must walk around the screen to see what they have been hearing emanating from the other side. Like Benjamin’s dense notations on modernity’s environments, the video accumulates in passages, splitting the screen in double views of the cities’ urban topographies: a noodle cart glowing in the night rain, endless escalators and foot-tunnels, buildings erected and destroyed, walls and doors, fields, rivers and railroad bridges. In shots so slow they seem as photographs, time doubles back and fitfully slips forward between the city and the city. On the other side of the screen is projected another split-screen image: a Japanese man in a karaoke box and a Vietnamese woman in a spare bedroom, both holding microphones, each illuminated in the lyrics scrolling across screens. Two songs play back and forth, sung opposite each other, in different rooms and different spaces. Each vocal performance expresses a longing for a timeless location before change, a desire to re-encounter the space of the nation, of the self, before it went into hiding, lost to violent histories of transformation, destruction. Through song and split images, the video travels through a series of encounters with the persistent memory of the cities.
 
How do we know the cities have changed, coming upon them like this? Do cities travel anywhere after time passes in vortices of war, occupation, revaluation, demolition and ecstatic construction? The video fails to record the deep archaeology of Asia’s urbanism. Instead, fantastic cityscapes rendered in split minutiae emerge from Tokyo and Saigon’s strangely dissembled histories after modernism had fled. The video asks us to undo our seeing, to gaze into the seams between time and the cities, to reorient ourselves through the solitary performances of song.
 

— I remember—
 
— Hold it! You are getting off to a false start. How can you begin a paper on the contemporary with the words “I remember”?
 
— You interrupt me. Does stubborn interruption belong to the condition of the contemporary? I remember Jacques Derrida—
 
— Are you trying to justify your presence here by appealing to the past, by stating your allegiance to a philosopher whose name still resonates in the present, though perhaps no longer in the same way it once did?
 
— You forget that Derrida was your contemporary in the past, as it were, before you knew it and could measure up to him, for in his last conversation with a journalist, he anticipated what you are suggesting now. In 2004, only a few months before he died, he seemed convinced that his writings had not yet been read (Apprendre 35), as if he were waiting for contemporaries to come, or as if one’s contemporaries could never be simply there, be contemporaneous with oneself, coincide with one’s biological lifetime, or as if, in order to be a contemporary, one had to become a contemporary in the first place, make an impossible date, by way of one’s own uncertain achievements, with future generations that might or might not keep this date. Derrida left a note for his son to read out at his funeral. It will not surprise you that in this note he greeted all those who had gathered to bid him farewell with a strange final address: “I love you and smile at you from wherever I might be” (Salut 6). At the same time, and this is what you should remember, Derrida also believed that two weeks or at most a month after his death nothing of his would be left, as if a belief in one’s contemporaries, present or yet to come, were the symptom of an idealism designed to ward off the fact that an achievement must be radically disinterested, and that the expectation of a reward in the guise of some form of contemporaneity already harbors a distorting interest. In the face of this “double feeling,” as Derrida put it, death appears as the agent of the contemporary. It acts on behalf of the contemporary, makes it work as it undoes it, prevents it from ever doing any work. Now tell me: when you say that Derrida’s name no longer resonates in the same way, are you opposing the contemporary to the outdated, to what pertains to a past that is not relevant to the present anymore? Or are you relying on a distinction between different ways of being contemporary, between contemporaries who are not contemporaries in the same manner, who have a different understanding of what it means, and what it takes, to be contemporary? If, by definition, there must be at least two of us, but probably more, for us to be contemporaries, then there is a good chance that different ways of being contemporary also exist.
 
— Let’s assume that there are different ways of being contemporary, that being contemporary entails as much a difference as it entails a virtual unity between the way in which I am a contemporary and the way you are. I imagine then that one such way will consist in rejecting any usage of the word that treats it as a synonym of those old-fashioned battle-horses, the “modern,” the “new,” even the “avant-garde.” Can the “modern,” the “new,” the “avant-garde” still belong to the vocabulary of the most contemporary of all contemporaries? A declared interest in the contemporary often amounts to a wordy invocation bereft of content, or a mere simulation of ideas. At the very tip where the present quickly fades into the past while the future remains unfathomable, or proves all too predictable, we encounter a passion which tries to grasp imminence. “It is happening, yes, so much so that it is not yet happening,” contemporaries say. Or perhaps: “It is about to happen, no, it has happened already.” The contemporary thus is the figure of an emptiness that is mad about itself, mad at itself, a mad or drunken opening that desperately craves emptiness, constantly falling prey to the commonplace or producing a vague and incoherent discourse, constantly vomiting what it has just absorbed, or rejecting what it has almost assimilated. That’s why the contemporary can be so depressing, so sad.
 
— Last week I asked my friend Jean-Luc Nancy to send me an aphorism about the contemporary, and to do so in an e-mail, a very contemporary form of communication, though I suspect that for those who tweet it is already so dated that they will have stopped listening by the time I finish this sentence. Here is what Jean-Luc wrote to me early the next morning, like someone who wishes to be contemporaneous with the day that is just beginning, and share its uncertainty: “To be contemporary, is to share the same time. When time is suspended, as is the case today—that is to say, when ‘today’ ceases to be recognizable, one shares the uncertainty, the suspense. One exists in shared suspension. But one way or the other, one escapes from the flux of time. It is a form of eternity.” What if the contemporary were a Janus-faced figure? When it turns one of its two faces toward us, it appears as a figure of emptiness, secluded from time, endlessly or eternally circling inside the abyss into which the tip of the present collapses again and again, caught in an empty time that only mirrors eternity, sharing nothing except for an insatiable hunger fed by the revulsion that the passing of time inspires.
 
— At the end of Conversation Piece, a film Luchino Visconti made late in his life, one character says about her former lover, a dead young man who may have committed suicide, that he had not had time, that he had not given himself time enough to be taught the lesson of life. Supposedly, what one learns if one’s lifetime is not cut short, if one does not put an end to it prematurely, is that the living forget the dead, no matter how burning the memory of the dead may once have been. Perhaps there is a way of being contemporary that tries to avoid this lesson by abandoning itself so hopelessly to emptiness that emptiness turns into a passion, as you claim. So would the best way of being contemporary, of existing as a contemporary, consist in taking one’s eyes off anything that self-consciously presents itself as contemporary? In a preface added to the first edition of a novel that the Majorcan writer Llorenç Villalonga published in 1963, Desenllaç a Montlleó, I have found an allusion to “original minds” at the “margins of passing fashions” (10). These minds are said to be neither “antiquated” when they look back nor “precursory” when they overturn other minds.
 
— Obviously the fact that, at one point, someone’s ideas were contemporaneous with someone else’s, and influenced them, does not mean that they remained influential and continue to determine contemporary thought. But assuming we can agree on what counts as such thought and what does not, is it enough to state that these ideas do not determine contemporary thought anymore in order to assert that they have lost their force and must be dismissed as meaningless to an understanding of the present? The fate of contemporary thought eager to advertise itself as contemporary, and of contemporary art keen on being seen, is that they must keep changing horses in midstream. Just don’t remind the thinker and the artist of their fate. They won’t like it.
 
— Allow me to intervene. I wish to make a related point by asking whether sharing a room, or a space, with others, being there at the same time as they are, simultaneously, is enough to say that they are one’s contemporaries. If the contemporary is not just an indifferent concept, or a concept used indifferently to designate any possible juxtaposition of existences in the present time—if it is a value and not a fact, then surely it must involve some selection, some filtering, some choice, some elective affinity. It requires an eye capable of seeing differences. You have drawn our attention to the difference between ways of being contemporary. Since there are always many contemporaries, two at least, it is always possible and even likely that there will be differences between ways of being contemporary. But if we now turn our attention to what accounts for the unity of the contemporary, and allows a group of people existing in the same world at the same time to be identified as contemporaries, we find that once again we must resort to difference. From this perspective, I cannot be a contemporary without distinguishing myself from others who are presently alive, or who are more or less my age. Not all attempts at distinguishing myself can be equally valuable or valid. Also, what deserves to be called “contemporary” must be identified on a basis that abstract temporal and spatial simultaneity does not provide. It is inclusive only to the extent that it is exclusive twice over: once with regard to things past and again with regard to things present. This is why the contemporary, so slippery and hard to pin down, is always at risk of solidifying into the most dogmatic and rigid of notions, a notion employed to inhibit and intimidate, sometimes even to bully the other. I have met a person who, each time she vindicates an interest in the contemporary, conceives of it in terms of a moment in an ongoing relay race. This is the moment when a handing over takes place that is also meant to be a sort of transformation: by changing hands, the baton, the object, mutates into something contemporary. “We no longer speak of X, we speak of Y now,” she says, and I am never quite sure whether she is reporting from the front, making it up as she goes along, or imposing words that stand in for thoughts. Walter Benjamin, a critic of the “homogeneous and empty time” of progress, sought a temporal force in the past that would hit the present as if it were coming from the future, even though many of his contemporaries seemed oblivious to the existence of such a force. He conceived of it as the intense experience of a time full of presentness, of a past filled with actuality, and called it “Jetztzeit,” “now time” (“Über den Begriff der Geschichte” 701). Only “now time” opens an access to the future from which the present is forever separated, for only the past can preserve the future’s revolutionary otherness. That the present is the site where an “instinct” must prove itself and sense the undercurrent of “now time” in the past, that it serves merely as a springboard to leap into a “now time” detected instinctively, that it is in the past that the present has to start looking for itself, for the actual or the contemporary, if it ever wants to encounter the future, means that nothing happens in the present, that the present is essentially an empty time. Doubtless “now time” is as devoid of content as the present. Yet what distinguishes it from the present is not a content but an intensity that the present lacks. In “now time,” content has turned into intensity, cannot be separated from an intensity that imparts itself as an urgency. “Now time” is tense, time as tension, while the present is flat, time as emptiness. Perhaps “now time” is eternity at the tip of the present, the other face of the Janus-faced figure of the contemporary, an intensity that escapes the flux of time, the point at which the past communicates with the future, and where the present is left behind in a sudden “instinctive” leap. Benjamin compares this leap to the “leap of a tiger” (701). In his Animal Sketching, Alexander Calder notes that “animals think with their bodies to a greater extent than man does” (53). Perhaps the thinking of the present is a bodily awareness that captures the past. We don’t see it coming because it has come already, it has happened.
 
— Does it then not follow from Benjamin’s argument that there is an illusion which belongs to the present? The illusion or the fiction of the contemporary would consist in the belief that the future begins right now, in the present, and that the task of the living, of the ones who live now but not in “now time,” would be to concern themselves with the present as the time that bears the future, as the time in which the future is given. But why would that be so, exactly? Benjamin claims that past generations have made a “secret appointment” with future generations, with us. By making such a claim, he on the one hand confirms the impossibility of knowing the contemporary, of knowing what it could mean to speak of oneself and others as contemporaries, while on the other hand he hints at the essential secrecy or hiddenness of work undertaken in the present, just as Derrida does in his last interview, or as Nietzsche did, too, in his “untimely meditation” on Richard Wagner, in a meditation directed “against the times” for the sake of “future times” (“Vom Nutzen und Nachtheil der Historie” 247). Work undertaken in the present cannot but remain hidden, hidden to itself, precisely because it is being undertaken as we speak. To see the work undertaken in the present, as we speak, to see whether actually any work is being undertaken right now, something we cannot know in advance, we need to distance ourselves from the present, leap into the past, into “now time,” and return to the present as revolutionaries, from the future that this leap may disclose to us.
 
— In a nutshell, you take Benjamin to imply that contemporaries can never live a life that would be contemporaneous with itself, as it were, and that there is an anachronism that splits the contemporary. However, Nietzsche also reminds us in his Untimely Meditations, from which you quoted a moment ago, that interpretations of the past depend on the “highest powers of the present” (293f.), on the most vigorous of all contemporary efforts, and that only the one who knows about the present and thus proves to be an “architect of the future” is able to listen to the “oracle” of the past. Let’s not forget that Benjamin himself invokes a special sense to attain “now time,” an “instinct” without which the leap into the past can never succeed, and that he regards this sense, or this “flair,” to be active in fashion.
 
— Anna Wintour says that she will quit Vogue when the anger becomes too much for her. My contemporaries are the ones who can make me angry. When I asked Min Hogg how one avoids confusion at a fashion show, she replied: “You must pick three or four dresses that catch your eye and then build your article around these dresses.”
 
— I remember Jacques Derrida telling me, in a private conversation, how irritated he felt when working on a text he had been commissioned to write for a series called “The Contemporaries.”
 
— Was the request not already a distinction?
 
— While you were all talking at the same time, interrupting each other, asking so many questions and going off into so many directions that I got confused, I looked up Derrida’s text and found the following phrase: “One writes only at the moment when one gives the contemporary the slip” (“Circonfession” 63). In French, Derrida uses the expression fausser compagnie, which, if we translate it literally, means to twist or distort company. Idiomatically, it means to break a promise. Is making a promise not always a form of keeping others company and of keeping company with others? Whoever wants to undertake some work, to achieve something, to do some writing, for example, must betray his so-called contemporaries, Derrida seems to tell us, the contemporaries to whom one is not really committed since the time one shares with them is shared only in the abstract. Time cannot be shared otherwise, unless one distances oneself from the presence of the contemporaries and follows the trace of writing. You know that, for Derrida, writing is also and primarily a synonym for experience. Just as writing separates us from the present, experience, the endurance of otherness, begins where presence exposes itself to absence, and the present is interrupted. So the one who betrays his contemporaries, who refuses to include himself within the alleged unity of a temporal presence, follows the trace of writing, all the more so as he devotes himself to the very activity of writing and thereby allows himself to experience something, time, for instance. What emerges at this point is that the hiddenness of work in the present is not simply due to the fact that we are too close to see it, or that, in a sense, it is too contemporary to be truly contemporary, but rather that it results from the displacing and disrupting effect that any experience must have, any experience that reveals itself to be at the origin of, say, a work of art, or that lies in the work’s creation, or that is even the experience which the work itself enables.
 
— Adorno, in his Negative Dialectics, notes that “thoughtful people” and “artists” have often registered a feeling of coldness and distance, of “not being quite present” and of “not joining in the game,” as if “they were not entirely themselves but a kind of spectator” (356). He then asks whether it is not this aspect of human life that constitutes its “immortal part,” whether a detached comportment does not show itself to be more humane than different forms of involvement that deny the “inanity of existence,” at least under specific historical conditions. Such thoughts remind me of two conversations in Thomas Mann’s novel Lotte in Weimar. In this novel, the protagonist visits Weimar as an old woman. She wishes to see Goethe again, for there was a time when the poet was infatuated with her and used her as one of his real life models in his writing. After her arrival, Doctor Riemer, a philologist who belongs to Goethe’s entourage, pays a courtesy call on Lotte. In the course of the long conversation that ensues, Riemer describes the great artist’s character and sees his art as the result of both “absolute love” and “absolute annihilation or indifference” (80). He also mentions a “coldness” entirely peculiar to “absolute art,” a “destructive equanimity.” Lotte later recognizes that, as the young Goethe wooed her, she and her husband could not avoid having a “secret inkling” (107). They felt that, no matter how much suffering the poet’s passion would cause, it was perhaps merely a “sort of game,” something on which one could not rely since it served “ends” situated “outside of the human sphere.” The novel comes to a close with a ghostly conversation between the old Lotte and the old Goethe that takes place in the darkness of a carriage. Here, a Goethe who may not be actually present, appearing only as an interlocutor in Lotte’s inner monologue, or dialogue, justifies his behavior by referring to the cosmic force of metamorphosis, to a “play of transformations” that he takes to be the fate of human existence (Mann 406).
 
— Pascal stresses the “coldness” of the Gospels, a “coldness” that he attributes to the disinterestedness with which they were written, the lack of affectation and resentment (409). Yet he also remarks that we never stick to the present and that therefore we do not live (81f). We hide the present because it is a source of grievance, or because, when it causes us pleasure, it still fades away.
 
— I see. But Derrida does not simply write that one gives the contemporary the slip when one writes. Rather, by writing that “one writes only at the moment when one gives the contemporary the slip,” he acknowledges that one can be deluded about writing and assume that one is writing when in truth one is not. This is the moment when one truly betrays the other, breaks one’s promise, and ceases to keep the other company, not because one turns away from him but because one turns toward him, as if the contemporary were a given.
 
— In the beginning I interrupted you and you wondered whether stubborn interruption does not belong to the condition of the contemporary. I can hear the uninterrupted ringing of a phone. In the film Conversation Piece, the ringing resonates unnervingly in the Professor’s flat after it has been invaded by various members of the most vulgar of families, each one of whom is a specimen of a certain type of contemporary behavior in the mid-seventies. Let me channel the brutality or the violence of an interruption into a series of theses designed to interrupt the interruption of art and thought that seems to define an important dimension of contemporary culture today. I will leave it to you to accept or dismiss them, to relate to them as convincing intuitions or as naive, perhaps even offensive impositions. My theses are meant to illustrate the delusion to which you have just referred when clarifying further the point Derrida makes in relation to the contemporary. They are meant to specify the source of the sadness that befalls me each time the contemporary shows its empty face. My first thesis states that in the past twenty years or so the most pervasive and consistent usage of the adjective “contemporary” in the cultural realm has connected it with the noun “art,” and that the extraordinary attention devoted to “contemporary art” has been, on the level of the infrastructure, the predictable outcome of an accumulation of profits, and, on the level of the superstructure, the consequence of an impoverishment in conceptual imagination equal only to the poverty of much of the production itself. “Contemporary art” has shaped the emperor’s and the empress’s new clothes, whether the royalties were artists, curators or academics driven by “theory.” My second thesis states that the world of “contemporary art,” and especially the jargon that gives credentials to its installations and that in the past decade has given prominence to “archives,” “potentialities,” “participations,” and “binaries,” is a world of make-believe, in which networking and lobbying, naivety and slyness, pseudo-activity and drivel prevail, with the aim only of protecting the machine against an interruption of its functioning, and of ensuring the survival of those who keep boosting the business. Contemporary works of art are frequently said to be “thought-provoking,” but the thoughts they allegedly provoke are rarely put into words and discussed, and never really lead to thinking differently. Also, contemporary works of art constantly seem to “raise questions” of great relevance but these questions tend to be of such a general nature when the critics make them explicit that they can hardly expect ever to meet with interesting answers. Contemporary works of art are regularly credited with “exploring themes” of this and that, of “community” and “access,” but the findings of these explorations are mostly rather predictable and, never mind the excitement, fit perfectly into conventional patterns. Is it not telling that such works so often elicit the most tired and tiresome thematic criticism? My third thesis states that an important element of the superstructure, or the ideology, of the world of “contemporary art,” one that accounts for some of its attractiveness in the eyes of many, is the semblance of radicalism brought about by the integration of politics into the machine, but only after an infantilization and trivialization has rendered politics, or “the political,” harmless, and evacuated any serious critical impulse from it. Here, politics resembles the toys with which, in The Third Generation, Fassbinder’s funny send-up of the German Autumn, a group of bourgeois Berlin ninnies, whose clownish terrorism serves the causes of capitalism, plays at the game of revolution. When the traitor in the group proposes to blow up the town hall of Schöneberg, a city district, the neurotic wife of a bank manager who has joined the group exclaims with childish delight: “That’s genius! I want to do it, please let me do it alone!”
 
— Can you provide an example for your theses?
 
— If you are willing to be patient, I suggest that we read and analyze a few sentences in “Art as Social Interstice,” one of the opening sections of Relational Aesthetics, a book which, from my perspective, has made a great impact on recent contemporary art and has continued to inform, implicitly or explicitly, knowingly or unknowingly, the ways in which such art is often discussed. After having announced, in the previous section, that the “idealistic and teleological version” of modernity is “dead” (13), and after having observed that art can be considered a “place that produces a specific sociability,” Nicolas Bourriaud, the author of this book, unexpectedly picks up a concept to be found in Marx. “Interstice” translates “metakosmion” or “intermundium,” a concept Marx borrows from Epicurus in Das Kapital to designate not so much a gap in which the gods are said to live a blissful life undisturbed by mundane matters, and devoid of all influence upon them, but a gap in which the nations of antiquity went about their trading before becoming producers of commodities, and before relating to these commodities as values and treating their own individual labor as homogeneous human labor. Bourriaud wishes to demonstrate that art, inasmuch as it is “relational” and fulfills a “complementary” function, generates “forms of conviviality capable of re-launching the modern emancipation plan” (16), and that such “conviviality” emerges in the “interstices” of capitalism. He writes:
 

Over and above its mercantile nature and its semantic value, the work of art represents a social interstice. This interstice term was used by Karl Marx to describe trading communities that elude the capitalist economic context by being removed from the law of profit: barter, merchandising, autarkic types of production, etc. The interstice is a space in human relations which fits more or less harmoniously and openly into the overall system, but suggests other trading possibilities than those in effect within this system. This is the precise nature of the contemporary art exhibition in the arena of representational commerce: it creates free areas, and time spans whose rhythm contrasts with those structuring everyday life, and it encourages an inter-human commerce that differs from the “communication zones” that are imposed upon us.

(16)

The political emphasis that characterizes this short passage, if only because Marx is named, and because it alludes to an imposition resisted, is deflated by the depoliticizing effect of its actual content. After all, the interstices or “intermundia” of the “ancient world,” of which Marx speaks, are transferred here into capitalism, where the freedom for which they allow is meant to unfold untouched, despite its immediate vicinity to power and domination, to antagonism and class struggle, to “imposed” “‘communication zones.’” To be sure, Marx also conceives of the existence of Jews in the “pores of Polish society” as analogous to the existence of real “trading nations” in the interstices or “intermundia” of antiquity (Das Kapital 61). Yet one wonders what example he would have given if he had revised Das Kapital after the end of the Second World War. When measured against the depoliticization triggered by Bourriaud’s attribution of harmony and openness to “human relations” that are said to form in the “interstices” of “contemporary art exhibitions,” the political invocation of a “modern emancipation plan,” which still resonates there where he distinguishes between free and imposed communication, appears to be utterly vacuous. If there is a question Bourriaud does not ask, and that his usage of the notion of an “interstice” is intended to suppress, then it must be the question of the immunity granted to “contemporary art exhibitions.” His uncritical celebration of “representational commerce” in current capitalism undermines the affirmative reference to Marx, revealing to the attentive reader, to the reader who is not entranced by catchwords, the shallowness of Bourriaud’s identification with the victims, with those upon whom “‘communication zones’” have been “imposed,” whatever that may mean. The “inter-human commerce” which art exhibitions are said to encourage, turns out to be just as reified, or commodified, or corrupted, as the “representational commerce” itself, for it is arbitrarily posited, “imposed” in the same manner as the repressive “‘communication zones.’” By relating to the contemporary as something given, Bourriaud depoliticizes art’s political ambitions, or uncovers against his will the depoliticization at work in contemporary art.

 
— “Yet, naturally, all of this ends up being somewhat consoling, for out of the negativity quite another message emerges: that such a zone of freedom, and free critique, can be maintained by the instrumental system of capitalism” (4). That’s from Julian Stallabrass’s A Very Short Introduction to Contemporary Art.
 
— It is time to examine whether we have made any headway. The contemporary seems to be a rare animal that can rotate on its own neck and exhibit different faces, depending on whether we think of it as a given or an uncertain achievement, as an empty, abstract, deceptive present, or as a springboard into the past and the untimeliness of creation. But if the contemporary is indeed Janus-faced, even the sadness of an encounter with its emptiness, with the semblance of radicalism, must still relate to the excitement of leaping into “now time” or starting to write. Is the present not necessarily empty and therefore always a cause for sadness, especially when, in acquiring the sense, or developing the instinct, that is required to venture into the past’s “now time,” we begin to depart from it? In one of his last letters to a young poet, dating from 1904, Rilke distinguishes between two forms of sadness, or rather between two ways of being sad, low-spirited. Sadness that we are unable to bear, and that we carry around in a manner reminiscent of the contemporary that publicizes itself, recoils, and becomes “unlived, spurned, lost life, of which [we] may die” (48). However, if it were possible for us “to see further than our knowledge reaches,” then, Rilke says, we would gain an awareness of sadness as a moment “when something new has entered into us, something unknown” (48). Our task would then consist in transforming the future. To the extent that the future releases itself, and makes us sad, before it actually occurs, it gives us the impression that we have nothing left except for the present, for a deadly life that must remain “unlived.” This is the impression we need to withstand, and transform the future into “our destiny,” into a future that will no longer merely happen to us, occur externally, but that will “step out of us to others” (49). Could we ever hope to leap into “now time,” into the past, had the new not entered our lives already, unrecognizable to knowledge? Although Giorgio Agamben does not quote Rilke in his essay “What is the Contemporary?,” it may not be too farfetched to understand his answer to the question in this sense. The “life of the contemporary,” he claims, lies in an attentiveness to the “unlived,” to a “present where we have never been,” whether on account of its forbidding closeness or its traumatic import (22).
 
— No wonder Rilke is addressing his letter to a young poet! It is the sign of youth that it cannot draw on any of the concepts and slogans that circulate in the present if it wants to refer to itself, and that it can trust only its own polemical and critical powers, its own increased feeling of life. This is Nietzsche’s idea of youth at the end of his untimely meditation on history. It suggests that the young are more contemporary than those who live in the present. But that’s not what I had in mind. For it is still Rilke, not quite thirty years old when he writes his letter and nonetheless not a young poet anymore, who sends a young poet his thoughts about sadness. The moment when the future, which has not come yet, is transformed, so that it can no longer come from elsewhere, as it were, not simply, is the moment of the contemporary, the moment of metamorphosis, of youth, of a force or an intensity that cannot be opposed to maturity and old age, to petrification and senility, because such youth names the point at which youth turns into maturity, maturity into youth, the point at which youth, maturity, and old age touch and prove indistinguishable.
 
— I get it. We must choose between the contemporary that remains subject to change and falls prey to the passion of emptiness, and the contemporary that penetrates into the very heart of metamorphosis. But how do I foster a sense for “now time,” how do I begin to write? Do you remember?
 
— Well, give it the slip!
 

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].
 

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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.
 

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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.
 

My hand – is a fool’s hand: woe to all tables and walls and whatever has room left for fool’s scribbling, fool’s doodling!

– Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra

 
After the reunification of Germany in 1990, the project to renovate the Berlin Reichstag was awarded to the British architect Norman Foster, who described his plan for the structure as “a quest for transparency and lightness as well as democracy,” adding that his design was guided by the conviction that a “parliament should be open, accessible, and inviting to the society that it serves” (“Preface” 12-13).¹ Foster’s most striking additions to the historic edifice were a large glass cupola on the roof of the building and a new legislative chamber dominated by glass walls and connected to the rooftop dome by a conic tunnel; during daylight hours, a set of mirrors reflects natural light into the assembly hall, while at night, the artificial lighting from inside is cast upward, illuminating the cupola.²
 

 

 

Click for larger view

Fig. 1.

Reichstag at Night

© Nigel Young/Foster + Partners.

 

 
Commencing just after the wrapping of the Reichstag by Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Foster’s reconstruction of the building appears to cement its status as a modernist icon reborn as a postmodern one. At the same time, his ideology of transparency recalls nineteenth- and early twentieth-century debates about the transformative, even utopian power of glass and steel architecture and their implications for the reshaping of a public sphere more accustomed to the concealing power of stone. Just as many modernist thinkers challenged the notion that transparency was an intrinsically democratizing concept, contemporary critics question whether it is helpful for understanding individual or social agency.³ From this perspective, Foster’s commitment to openness may be an effort to cloak political tensions masquerading as an invitation to free debate, his experiment in sensationalist spectacle offering a vision of a polity grounded in identity and homogeneity, without any place for heterogeneity or difference.
 
The limitations of this architecture of exposure become even more evident if we turn from the showy glass additions to the Reichstag and focus on the original stone. As Foster’s crews stripped away the plasterboard and asbestos lining the interior walls since earlier renovations in the 1960s, they discovered approximately two hundred surviving examples of the Russian graffiti that had covered almost every inch of the building’s vertical surfaces in May 1945 as the victorious soldiers of the Red Army scrawled everything from signatures to vulgar taunts to brief travelogues (e.g., “Moscow-Smolensk-Berlin”).⁴
 

 

 

Click for larger view

Fig. 2.

© ullstein bild/The Granger Collection, New York

 

 
Foster was determined to preserve these wall writings: “the Reichstag’s fabric bears the imprint of time and events more powerfully than any exhibition could convey. I remain convinced that the graffiti should not be erased” (“Living Museum” 11). On his view, the return of the repressed that emerged as the layers of earlier additions were peeled away provides an authentic record of the past. It is a “natural” exhibit of history, a “living museum,” as Foster describes it, which surpasses any “artificial” exhibit a museum curator might organize. Not wiping the walls clean becomes a means for the newly unified German nation to demonstrate that it can face the past honestly and constructively. “Our approach,” writes Foster, “was radical, based in the view that the history of the building should not be sanitized. And the fact that Germany accepted this approach shows to me what an extraordinarily open and progressive society it has become” (qtd. in Cohen).
 
While Germany did accept Foster’s position, it was not without compromise, for critiques of the preservation effort emerged from across the political spectrum. One common objection was that the Red Army’s decoration of the Reichstag walls was offensive and might poison German-Russian relations. The Russian ambassador himself protested that “Death to the Germans” was not an appropriate slogan for the hallway of a parliamentary building, although he also released a contradictory statement claiming that “attempts to wipe away [the graffiti] would be very harmful to the reconciliation and trust between our two peoples, particularly against the background of the sixtieth anniversary of Nazi Germany’s attack on our country” (qtd. in Baker 36; see also Bornhöft 46). Another objection was that preserving the graffiti was tantamount to turning the Reichstag into a museum of Cyrillic characters and that there would not be enough remaining space on the walls for German art; this protest was complemented by the suggestion that the Russian writing should be replaced with “German symbols” (Bornhöft 46-47; Homola). In the opposite vein, the conservative politician Wolfgang Zeitelmann condemned the Russian graffiti for its failure to rise to the level of an aesthetic object, comparing it to dirt or pollution—a denigration that radicalized the widely-held view that Foster’s plan to leave the walls undisturbed exaggerated the significance of what were ultimately trivial markings, of no more interest than what one would find on the walls of a public restroom in any Russian-speaking city (Baker 35).
 
Roger Cohen, the Berlin correspondent for The New York Times, offered a darker interpretation of Foster’s agenda: “Certainly there is something ‘open,’ if not plain masochistic, about obliging Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, whose father died in 1944 on his way back from the Russian front, to pass Russian obscenities to reach his blue-doored parliamentary office.” In these terms, walking down the graffiti-marked halls of the revamped building constitutes a repetition of the death march of one’s forefathers, and the threat of such an experience is perceived to be so acute that it warrants bleaching the past from the walls, as if such an emendation of one of the most historically significant structures in Berlin over the last century could, much less should, cleanse it of its multiple layers of symbolic significance. In the end, Foster yielded to this host of contradictory attacks, but only to a degree—the explicitly lewd and aggressive statements were expunged, and the majority of what remains on the walls today are simply soldiers’ signatures.
 

 

 

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Fig. 3.

© goerner-foto.de

 

 
Whether it has been deemed a transparent portal to the past or an obfuscation of it, hopelessly out of place or in exactly the right spot, a record of the monumental defeat of fascism or a confirmation of the banality of incidental scribbling, the Russian graffiti on the Berlin Reichstag has prompted a host of contradictory judgments that say as much about the uncertain relationship between buildings and writing as they do about European history or the health of democracy in contemporary Germany. We are accustomed to treating graffiti as a provocation. Lying on top of and yet outside of formally or legally delineated surfaces—the sides of homes and businesses, billboards, or official monuments—graffiti can be seen as a challenge to property rights. Mocking the authority of official signs and community announcements, it competes with the corporate advertising that saturates urban space. As a transgression in and of the rules that govern the public and private spheres, it is out in the open for all to see, but it frequently complicates its own exhibitionist tendencies by remaining cryptic or illegible to anyone not privy to the nuances of its scripts and iconographies. Bold, colorful, and enticing, graffiti is equally vexing and impenetrable, a tension between display and inscrutability that is crystallized in the graffiti artist’s tag or “anonymous signature,” the distinctive mark, reproduced over and over again that reveals a given instance of wall writing to be part of a specific—nameless, faceless—individual’s oeuvre, an oeuvre that may consist of nothing more than such tags, spread across the buildings of a metropolitan area or throughout multiple cities.
 
At the same time, the simple equation of graffiti with vandalism is of relatively recent vintage, and its prominence today can obscure some of the other complexities that have surrounded wall writing since ancient times, in particular its challenges to our ideas about the personal or impersonal nature of the written word, its relationship to its addressees, and above all, its significance for the structures on which it appears. If graffiti is often seen to be powerful because it is transgressive, its intricate scripts all the more striking in that they are not supposed to be where they are, graffiti also reveals that the demand to be written on is essential to architecture. The Reichstag will never constitute the “natural” historical phenomenon that Foster envisions because buildings are always potential sites of—if not provocations to—scratchings and scribblings. There is no wall until the writing is on the wall. Conversely, graffiti—putatively writing that is somehow out of place—proves to be the paradigmatic case that shows all writing to be in the wrong place, forever corrupting the propriety of the sites it inhabits. One consequence is that graffiti is fundamentally unreliable as an historical artifact: undeniably a product of its context—local, singular, and contingent—it is nonetheless out of step with any context that claims it as its own. While Foster’s renovation of the Reichstag aimed to preserve the writing on the wall while transforming other features of the building, he failed to see that any instance of graffiti is a display of the capacities, and limits, of writing. This auto-exhibitive trait is crucial for understanding graffiti’s aesthetic and political powers, and dangers.
 
If Foster’s taste for transparency recalls modernist debates about glass architecture, his use of graffiti alludes to an important strand of modernist photography, an obsession with taking pictures of words that stretches from Eugène Atget’s photos of inscriptions on trees to the placards, billboards, and other signs that populate the city scenes of Walker Evans and Aaron Siskind. A key contribution to this project was the oeuvre of the Hungarian photographer Gyula Halász (1899-1984), known more popularly by his pseudonym Brassaï. Half a century before the historic renovation of the Reichstag, Brassaï explored the relationship between language and architecture on the walls of Paris. Many of the scenes he recorded were palimpsest-like combinations of words and images comprised of chalk markings and carvings in stone. In his own accounts of his photographic practice, Brassaï insists that walls are not simply barriers or supports for structures in which people live, work, or shop, but provocations: “A high wall throws down a challenge. Protecting property, defending order, it is a target for protest and insult, as well as for demands of every sexual, political, or social persuasion” (Graffiti 19). For Brassaï, a wall is a field of cultural forces—mores, standards, and injunctions—and the graffiti artist is uniquely positioned to intervene in the expressive dynamics of the social order and transform daily life. In a 1933 essay in the Surrealist journal Minotaure, Brassaï declares that the “bastard art of the streets of ill repute that does not even arouse our curiosity, so ephemeral that it is easily obliterated by bad weather or a coat of paint, nevertheless offers a criterion of worth. Its authority is absolute, overturning all the laboriously established canons of aesthetics” (qtd. in Lewisohn 29). Such claims may seem overblown. It is a rare artistic medium that overturns “all the laboriously established canons of aesthetics,” and urban graffiti, ubiquitous in classical and medieval cities, was anything but a newcomer to the European scene. One might infer that what Brassaï is really celebrating is not the power of graffiti, but the revolutionary power of photography itself, as the newer art form. The problem with such a conclusion is that it would appear to be tantamount to proposing that Brassaï’s photos of Parisian walls negate the transience and fragility that for him define graffiti, fixing for posterity something that he maintains is not fixed at all. However, Brassaï does not actually conceive of photography in terms of its power to preserve the past by presenting it to a viewer in the form of an image that can be identified as a straightforward record of prior experience. In his book Proust in the Power of Photography, he argues that involuntary memory and latent image “are phenomena closely linked in [Proust’s] mind: when he is struck by a sound or a taste which has the mysterious virtue of reviving a sensation or an emotion, he is irresistibly led to relate this phenomenon to the apparition of the latent image under the effect of a revealing agent” (xi). Like his contemporary Walter Benjamin, also a devotee of Proust, Brassaï characterizes the encounter with a photograph not in terms of a viewer’s conscious reaction to what is manifestly presented, but as a process in which he or she unintentionally confronts something that is intimately his or her own yet remains irreducibly foreign; one re-experiences something that has never before been experienced and that gains its psychic significance from the fact that access to it is organized by unconscious impulses.⁵ For Brassaï, a photograph is a representation of the collapse of representation. Rather than reproducing what might otherwise be forgotten, the image captured by the camera confirms that what it allows us to engage with becomes meaningful only as something invisible or missing.
 
Juxtaposing Brassaï’s analyses of photography, graffiti, and Proust, it becomes difficult to distinguish between his accounts of these three different media. Considering the best-known Parisian graffiti artist of the 1930s, Restif de la Bretonne (a.k.a. “The Scribbler”), Brassaï observes that an encounter with one of his creations will prompt involuntary memories: “As he dotted graffiti about the Île Saint-Louis, Restif was preparing and, as it were, inciting reminiscences akin to Proust’s experiences with ‘madeleines,’ ‘uneven paving-stones,’ and ‘starched towels’” (Graffiti 19). For Brassaï, a profound engagement with a cathedral or monument is not a matter of gazing up at it, overwhelmed by its sublime grandiosity or entranced by the interplay of intricate forms. A building is far more imposing when it is confronted as a site of inscriptions—not inscriptions that are read and deciphered, but inscriptions that encipher one’s relationship to one’s own experiences. Treating graffiti as something essential to vertical surfaces rather than as a violation of them, Brassaï proposes that a wall does not truly become a wall until we have glimpsed at least a portent of the writing that will mark it. There is no wall until the writing is on the wall that there will be writing on the wall.
 
The affinity between photography and graffiti lies not in their common capacity to exhibit, but in the way they both illustrate the ruin of any simple connection between an artwork’s manifestation—as a word, an image, or a building—and its status as a representation of something, be it a figure or an idea, that existed prior to its creation. In Brassaï’s photographs, this ruin of representation first and foremost means the ruin of writing. A number of his photographs show walls on which various rogue markings have been sloppily painted over by municipal workers. Half-obliterated, he argues, “each letter is converted into another from some imaginary alphabet, and a curious writing system is born—hermetic, enigmatic, of strange beauty” (Graffiti 20). The conversion of the alphabet in its effacement at the hands of the city employee is powerful because it recalls the original conversion that takes place every time a graffiti artist goes to work. The distinctive way in which a graffito places letters or symbols on display inexorably transforms them. On the one hand, the scriptural excesses of wall writing tend toward the baroque, threatening to produce characters so ornate as to be indecipherable. On the other hand, the words on the wall begin to lose their status as words. In this vein, the author and filmmaker Frederick Baker observes that much of the confusion about the Russian graffiti on the Reichstag stemmed from the fact that it was composed in the Cyrillic alphabet and therefore gave non-Russian speakers the “visual impression of an abstract painting, which to some turns the graffiti into art” (36). Brassaï’s photos of obliterated sentences hint that all graffiti is distinguished by the way in which it turns letters, words, and sentences into non-verbal images or even abstract shapes.⁶ Far from simply constituting an example of writing in the wrong place, graffiti outs writing as something more or less than writing, revealing it to be constantly on the verge of collapsing into either meaningless cipher or unadulterated ornamentation. Prior to any personal or political sentiment it may express, a graffito is an instance of language that provokes language; the primary object of its scorn is not any particular property owner or authority figure, but the belief that wall writing can be written off as more out of place—and hence less serious than, or even somehow fundamentally different from—than any other verbal discourse.
 
If graffiti is writing that is under attack by writing, it does not necessarily constitute an aesthetic spectacle that dominates the wall on which it is exhibited. Brassaï maintains that it is in the nature of a wall to compete with whatever one puts on it, suggesting that the real seduction of graffiti may have to do with the way in which it reveals that a wall is more beautiful than anything a wall writer can do to or on it, even if the wall is the provocation that spurs the artist to action. In these terms, graffiti is of interest precisely because its audiences do not become embroiled in unpacking its symbolic or semiotic nuances and instead see through it to appreciate the elegance and power of the buildings that host it. Brassaï’s photos of painted-over graffiti would thus be parodies of the essential status of wall writing as see-through, sardonic demonstrations that no matter how obscure or imposing a graffito is, it is not what an onlooker processes when he or she confronts it. Ultimately, Brassaï seems unsure about whether it is the writing or the walls that are the real subject matter of his photographs, indicating not that graffiti is an art form so dependent on its material medium as to be indistinguishable from it, but rather that it no longer makes sense to differentiate between the exhibitionary powers of words and buildings.
 
By contrast, Brassaï is unequivocal when it comes to detailing the specificity of the act of graffiti writing, which for him distinguishes its effects from those of other verbal media: “Neither newspapers, nor posters have supplanted ‘the writing on the wall.’ A word inscribed by hand in huge letters has an impact that no poster can possibly have. Imbued with the emotion and anger of the gesture that made it, it holds forth, barring the way forward” (Graffiti 20). According to Brassaï, a work of graffiti should be understood as an event rather than as a static object. The power, not to mention the precariousness, of such a conception of the artwork is explored by Theodor W. Adorno in his Aesthetic Theory, where he avers that “artworks have the immanent character of being an act, even if they are carved in stone” (105). For Adorno the “phenomenon of fireworks is prototypical for artworks” in general, because fireworks “appear empirically yet are liberated from the burden of the empirical, which is the obligation of duration; they are a sign from heaven yet artifactual, an ominous warning, a script that flashes up, vanishes, and indeed cannot be read for its meaning” (107). Adorno’s word for “ominous warning,” Menetekel, invokes a story in the Book of Daniel in which the Babylonian King Belshazzar and his court are shocked to see a human hand appear out of nowhere and write Mene Mene Tekel Upharsin on the wall. Neither the King nor his wise men are able to understand the message, but on the queen’s advice, they invite the dream interpreter Daniel to examine the mysterious scrawl, and he explains that the words, units of measure and currency, indicate that the monarch’s reign is “measured.” If the analysis was simple, it also proved to be deadly accurate. The sovereign was slain that night, his line ended, and his kingdom was divided between the Medes and the Persians.
 
Biblical scholars have interrogated every detail of this tale, starting with the question of why the King and his court could not make out what was written on the wall given that the message was apparently composed in Aramaic, their language. If this is a story about the relationship between political and hermeneutic authority, it is notable that the modern idioms that reference it all but elide the centrality the Hebrew Bible accords to the interpretive prowess of Daniel. The English expression the writing is on the wall implies that knowledge of impending danger is garnered the moment you recognize that script has appeared; there is no need for the assistance of a skilled exegete to grasp that a threat is at hand. The German expression das Menetekel an der Wand, “the omen on the wall,” goes one step further and factors out the written quality of the portent entirely such that the warning appears as a self-evident threat, with no specification as to whether its mode of transmission is graphematic or pictographic. Indeed, in German the wall itself starts to fade away, for if the word Menetekel unambiguously invokes the story from Daniel, ein Menetekel can, as in Adorno’s text, refer to an ominous sign encountered somewhere other than on a wall, suggesting that the force of its threat is independent of the facts surrounding its emergence.
 
The different elements of the Book of Daniel that survive in these contemporary expressions indicate that where the relationship to an uncertain future is concerned—when the writing genuinely is “on the wall”—there is a temptation to forget about the writing, the wall, and the hand, as the mysterious fingers that marked the Babylonian King’s chamber are in effect replaced by Menetekel, a ghostly conjunction of two Aramaic words that point back to the bizarre circumstances surrounding their original production, if only fleetingly. It is as if the spirit hand, the phantom scribe of the original story, has become a second-order ghost, leaving its famous act of “wall writing” to remind us that the origins and intentions of all writing are shrouded in spectral mists and that every effort to understand even the most directed slogan solely in terms of the context in which it appears is doomed to failure. The lesson of Daniel’s hermeneutic prowess is that the space in which an instance of writing appears never completely circumscribes the script, delimits it, or controls its referential or signifying pretensions.
 
The question is whether every time one picks up a can of spray paint or a piece of chalk and starts writing on a wall, one is participating in the same godly or ghostly production logic that left the Babylonian King and his court in confusion as it literally spelled out their doom. Is part of what makes graffiti powerful that it reveals the act of writing itself to be a mystery, an anxiety-inducing, if not lethal, operation? In Adorno and Brassaï, the arresting experience of graffiti is paradigmatic for art as such. The flash whereby the script and the building are momentarily manifest as spectacle warns that the violence that allows media such as writing and architecture to come into their own through their mutual interpenetration also guarantees their essential transience. At its most imposing, if not traumatic, an encounter with a sentence or a building is distinguished by a gesture that foretells the doom of the words or the structure in question.
 
Brassaï’s interest in approaching the relationship between language and architecture through the problem of gesture is shared by his contemporary Bertolt Brecht, for whom wall writing represents a confounding intersection of the material and the immaterial. In a series of poems written in the late 1930s, Brecht casts his net more widely than Brassaï does in considering the entire range of scripts on buildings, from official placards to the scrawls of political dissidents fleeing the police. Some of his observations are practical, e.g., he argues that low-paid construction workers would be empowered if they were permitted to sign their creations, an idea he sought to put into practice decades later when he composed epigrams to laborers for display on East German public buildings. Brecht’s lyrics also make a more abstract call for a merger of poetry and architecture, as if the very distinction between the two art forms were a relic of bourgeois thinking. In a short text called “The Undefeatable Inscription,” Brecht describes an imprisoned socialist dissident who engraves the words “Long Live Lenin!” on his cell wall. Despite the guards’ best efforts to paint over the offending remark, the words continue to shine forth, and even after a stonemason has chiseled away at the phrase for hours, “Long live Lenin!” remains clearly legible. Having failed to eradicate the offending graffito, the head guard becomes frantic, and the poem concludes with his desperate injunction: “Remove the wall!” (39-40).⁷ The irony is not simply that even this final gesture may fail to erase the message. The walls have become dispensable to the prison, toppled, in effect, by the words. The prisoner’s writing is so out of place that the walls have lost their pride of place; their importance as a containment field is undermined by the way in which they serve as a site for a scriptural display.
 
In an essay on Brecht’s poetry, Walter Benjamin dwells on a short collection of texts called “German War Primer.”⁸ Benjamin proposes that these poems that repeatedly discuss wall writing are themselves written in a “lapidary” style, stressing that the word “lapidary” (in German, lapidar) is derived from the Latin lapis (“stone”) and refers to the ancient lettering that was developed for monumental inscriptions. The most important characteristic of this style, Benjamin argues, is its brevity, which he in part attributes to the difficulty of chiseling words into stone, but also to the fact that there was an awareness that “in speaking to subsequent generations it was proper to be brief” (Selected 4 240). The exact parameters of this propriety remain vague, if not counterintuitive, since a review of the surviving objects of antiquity reveals that not every classical author epitomizes the concision Benjamin prescribes, and producing a longer text does not necessarily prove fatal for the reception of one’s work over the millennia.⁹
 
Acknowledging that his friend Brecht did not carve his lyrics into stone with a chisel, Benjamin asks what will remain if we strip away the “natural, material conditions of the lapidary style in these poems” and confront their “inscription style” as such (Selected 4 240). To this end, he cites one of the short pieces in the collection, which he deems to be not simply lapidary, but a text about lapidary writing:
 

On the wall was written in chalk:

Auf der Mauer stand mit Kreide:

They want war.

Sie wollen den Krieg.

The man who wrote it

Der es geschrieben hat

Has already fallen.

Ist schon gefallen.

(240)

Benjamin suggests that the first line of this poem could be the opening line of any of the poems in “German War Primer.” As “inscriptions,” he proposes, these texts should be compared not to the writings on Roman monuments that remain legible millennia later, but to the graffiti that are scratched on makeshift palisades by rebels with hardly a second to spare, writing that is almost immediately lost to posterity. In appropriating an anonymous scrawl that may not survive the next rain storm or police patrol, Brecht’s poem paradoxically ensures that the sentence “They want war” will endure the coming Armageddon, preserving “the gesture of a message [Aufschrift]” made in passing by a rebel fleeing his enemies (240). For Benjamin no less than for Brassaï, the gesture outlives the writer, the material medium of his or her writing, and even the world in which it was penned. “The extraordinary artistic achievement of these sentences composed of primitive words,” writes Benjamin, “resides in this contradiction. A proletarian at the mercy of the rain and Gestapo agents scribbles some words on a wall with chalk, and the poet invests them with Horace’s aere perennius” (240).

 
Brecht’s poem does not preserve this instance of wall writing simply by virtue of recording the words, as a news report would document a politician’s pronouncements. Lapidary writing makes the original gesture quotable by revealing it to be less a force of inscription, Inschrift, than a sort of over-writing or superscription, Auf-schrift; it is the gesture of a “messaging” or “labeling.” Despite its etymology, the lapidary style is not distinguished by a writing in (Inskribieren, Eingravieren, or Einschreiben), but by a “taking down,” “setting down,” or “marking out” (Auf-schreiben). This writing gains its power not from the depths of its marks or the physical solidity of its traces, but from its ability to put language on display (Aufschreiben as Ausstellung).
 
Brecht’s text is lapidary because it reproduces the gesture of verbal exhibition that distinguished the original manifestation of “They want war.” At the same time, his poem cites the words it designates as a quotation by taking them out of their context; it gives them form, it frames them, by interrupting them, tearing them from their original “wall” and putting them up on countless others.¹⁰ This is the “gesture of the inscription” that makes these poems “wall poems,” a combination of contingency and connection produced by the fact that no inscription is ever in the wall and hence truly of it. Instead, writing remains on or by the wall, as much inessential as essential to it, as much a flaw or blemish as the wall’s fulfillment. The lapidary style is forceful because it fails to pierce the surface. One can always pick up a pen, a piece of chalk, or a can of spray paint and slap something down, but Brecht’s verses suggest that such writing never stays down. An over- or superscript as much as an in-script, the letters on the wall become a demonstration of writing, flaunting its powers as much as they attempt to impart any particular message. Graffiti is arresting because prior to the manifestation of any given set of words or meanings, what “flashes up [and] vanishes” is a glimpse of writing as a force beholden to no particular constative or performative agenda.
 
If Brecht’s poem preserves a gesture such that it may survive even the end of the world, his text’s lapidary style is not an affirmation of the immortality of the graffiti artist or of the permanence of his or her product or message. On the contrary, this lapidary quatrain about the lapidary gains its historical force from the fact that what its gesture sets on display is finitude. In the first instance, the poem describes the demise of the composer of the line “They want war” rather than the death of “they” who want it, although there is more than a hint that the warmongers’ days may also be numbered. The full significance of the writer’s fall, in particular the veiled threat that it may include our own demise insofar as we are hailed by his verses, is expressed in the contrast between the open-ended modal verb “want” and the irony it acquires when it is prefaced and followed by simple—Benjamin calls them “primitive”—past-tense constructions: “was written in chalk,” “has already fallen.” When the poem turns back on the line it quotes, it elevates its own lapidary style to new heights, as the “it” of “The man who wrote it” reduces the previous line to a single two-letter word: It is on the wall—need we say more? To the extent that the poem does say “more,” it states the obvious in explaining that the writer of the words on the wall is now gone. Since any grapheme emerges as a sign only by exhibiting its independence from its composer, the closing section of the text merely spells out what has to be the case: “The man who wrote it / Has already fallen,” a judgment that reflexively extends to include the poet presently writing about the wall poet, and the wall itself. Brecht’s poem reveals not just that any sentence can be infinitely cited and re-cited across countless contexts, but that each time this happens, a sentence puts its new “wall”—whether it is made of paper, brick, or digital bits of information—on display, and thereby puts the wall in jeopardy, like the prison walls that were enlisted to celebrate Lenin. In this respect, Brecht’s quatrain is no less in flight from the rain or the Gestapo than the anonymous graffiti artist it eulogizes. Since his poem’s power stems from its ability to reproduce the violent gesture whereby both wall and writing make a vivid but transitory appearance, it is fated to reveal itself to be its own epitaph. From this perspective, all graffiti becomes a play on the expression of doom inherent in the idiom the writing is on the wall, as if “on the wall” can never literally be “on the wall” enough.
 
Benjamin’s analysis of Brecht’s lapidary style is part of a larger study of the relationship between language and architecture that accords particular significance to the shopping passages of nineteenth-century Paris. This Arcades Project, as it is now known, consumed Benjamin for the latter part of his life and has become the centerpiece of his legacy, dominating discussions of his influence on aesthetic and cultural theory. In the host of essays and fragmentary texts he produced in the 1930s, Benjamin moves easily between comments about the artistic and political implications of new building materials and forms of construction and reflections on the concept of experience that emerges in nineteenth-century lyric poetry, especially in the work of Charles Baudelaire. What has not been recognized is that Benjamin’s research of this period was punctuated by a series of challenges to the traditional notion of a wall. In the essay “The Task of the Translator,” first published in 1923, four years before he started his study of Paris, Benjamin offers an intriguing illustration of his now well-known claim that a real translation is transparent and allows the pure language to shine upon the original:
 

This [real translation] may be achieved, above all, by a literal rendering of the syntax which proves words rather than sentences to be the primary element of the translator. For if the sentence is the wall before the language of the original, literalness is the arcade.
 

(Selected 1 260)

Although it appears as the Latinate Arkade rather than the German Passagen that will become common in Benjamin’s texts after 1927 and more directly translates the French passages, this is the first reference in his oeuvre to the arcades. What is unclear is whether the opposition between walls and arcades constitutes a claim about the articulation of space by language or about the organization of the verbal order by space. Commenting on this passage, Jacques Derrida emphasizes its optical motif: “Whereas the wall braces while concealing (it is in front of the original), the arcade supports while letting light pass through and giving one to see the original (we are not far from the Paris arcades)” (210). These remarks echo Brassaï, for whom a given graffito proves its power through its paradoxically untransparent transparency that allows the viewer to see the wall that otherwise was fated to remain hidden in plain view, prompting the passerby to begin to read the wall rather than simply to look at it.

 
In a fragment from The Arcades Project, Benjamin stresses that “in the arcades it is not a matter of illuminating the interior space, as in other forms of iron construction, but of damping the exterior space” (539). In other words, we should not imagine that the glass roofs over these shopping areas turn the interior space into a display in its own right, as if the showcases of the individual stores were being mirrored on a larger scale. The arcade alters the relationship between inside and outside such that the one is no longer separated from the other by a barrier of any sort, be it stone or glass. To characterize the disorientation that plagues efforts to navigate such a system, Benjamin repeatedly invokes dream states. In a formulation that appears more than once in the Passagenwerk, he writes, “Arcades are houses or passages having no outside—like the dream” (406; see also 839). This absence of an outside is equally the absence of an inside. Benjamin sees nineteenth-century Paris as a radicalization of the bourgeois architecture of ostentatious prosperity such that “the domestic interior moves outside,” and any given slice of a building presents itself as a façade, as if people lived in structures of pure frontage (406).¹¹ In these terms, the arcades are passageways between impossible spaces, and Benjamin says that the route one travels “between” them is similar to the path that a ghost follows through walls as it traverses the inside and outside of buildings with equal ease.¹² In the German Passagen, we have to hear not only the French noun passage and the verb passer, but also the adverbial en passant. In the arcades, one is never doing more than passing through, passing by, or moving along “in passing.” In this space of non-spaces, everything happens en passant, by the by, as if the architecture had become phantasmagoric. Going from (non-)place to (non-)place, one is always underway, but there are no longer clear axes with which to plot precise distinctions between “here” and “there.”
 
In this network of pseudo-vectors, it is difficult to know whether the structures formally known as “walls” still exist, much less whether they can be sites of graffiti. These tensions crystallize in the figure of the flâneur, an individual entirely “at home” as he saunters through the urban space of pure façade:
 

The street becomes a dwelling place for the flâneur; he is as much at home among house façades as a citizen is within his four walls. To him, a shiny enameled shop sign is at least as good a wall ornament as an oil painting is to a bourgeois in his living room. Buildings’ walls are the desk against which he presses his notebooks. . . .
 

(Selected 4 19)

For the flâneur, the traditional medium of the graffiti artist has become a desk, a prop that facilitates writing, while the protection provided by the study to the bourgeois vanishes, losing its grounding in the neat alignment of private and public with inside and outside.¹³ The stability of the relation-to-self won by penning notebooks in the sanctity of one’s personal space is jeopardized, since one no longer has the luxury of knowing if and when one is writing to, for, or about oneself. Shedding any pretense to being a process of self-actualization, a secreting away of intimate thoughts and feelings in a vault-like diary, writing becomes a way of tossing one’s “interior” self out onto the street. This recoding of the public and private blurs the borders between discourses, as there can be no clear distinction between signs, like a shop placard, that have overt communicative (commercial) utility, and private wall ornaments of a supposedly decorative nature. Once the very notion of personal composition has been imperiled and all words are potentially on display, the basic opposition between language as an expressive medium and language as an aesthetic object is unsettled—henceforth, no writing can defend itself from the charge of being a mere façade. Like the Cyrillic letters on the Reichstag, any set of characters will elicit a host of contradictory assessments as it is alternatively condemned as dirt-like scribbling, dismissed as a misleading or boring message, or ennobled as enigmatic runes.

 
In Benjamin’s Parisian dreamscape of pure façade, walls are templates for the exhibition of script before they are protective barriers or supports for roofs. It is as if architects labored not to shelter their clients from the elements, offer them privacy, or provide them with an imposing edifice with which to impress or intimidate, but in order to let everyone participate as writers and readers in an unstructured linguistic carnival. The political implications of this transformation are as ambiguous as Foster’s commitment to preserving the Cyrillic characters on the Reichstag. By normalizing the wall as a site of inscription, the flâneur may domesticate the medium of the rabble-rousing author who tries to leave his mark on a barricade, robbing graffiti of its provocative power. When the entire city becomes a blank page for scribbling, whether virtual or actual, any individual scriptural intervention loses the ability to manifest itself as a violation. This is arguably the state of affairs in a modern metropolis such as Los Angeles or Tokyo, where the mélange of professional and amateur advertising, street art, and casual graffiti has become so intricate that even the expert eye has trouble distinguishing them.
 
Does the empire of the façade inhabited by the flâneur leave any space for the rebellious writer seeking to pen a transgressive wall script? Benjamin reflects at length on Haussmann’s renovation of Paris, which sought to sweep away the medieval labyrinth of lanes and alleys of which the arcades were a part.¹⁴ Replacing meandering side streets with broad avenues, Haussmann became the engineer of the anti-dreamscape, dispelling the ghostly walkers who respected no distinction between inside and outside and quelling the protests of the rebellious graffiti artists celebrated by Benjamin and Brecht. As historians have frequently observed, the widening of the Paris streets was intended to make it more difficult to erect improvised barricades in future uprisings, and in fact, the Paris Commune of 1871 was quickly crushed due to the ease with which troops could move about the transformed city. With no more makeshift palisades on which to write, partisan scribblers were threatened with obsolescence. Haussmann’s renovations provide a stern warning to fans of Foster’s transparency, reminding us that nineteenth-century pan-optic logics are predicated on an equation between lines of sight and lines of influence. Invariably, “openness” means “open to control.”
 
Nonetheless, Haussmann’s renovations were not entirely successful in preventing the construction of makeshift defenses. Benjamin stresses that in the 1871 revolt, barricades did reappear, if only briefly, on even the broadest new boulevards, as if the one thing that urban modernization could not repress was the return of the makeshift wall. Ironically, the problem with the Communards’ short-lived barriers was not their inability to span the immense spaces across the avenues, but the ease with which they became part of a larger system of porous structures. Like the ghost effortlessly traversing the borders between inside and outside, the regular army forces who put down the Commune tunneled through the walls of surrounding houses to outflank those manning improvised defenses. While Haussmann profoundly altered the city of Paris, he could not eradicate the phantom logics of passing and the en passant in which the wall’s status as defense or barrier is constantly on the verge of becoming incidental.¹⁵
 
In exposing a rupture in the very notion of the wall as a partition, shield, or surface, the paradoxical spaces of nineteenth-century Paris highlight the degree to which modernist graffiti saw concepts of inscription or superscription give way to a more dynamic model of transcription. For Benjamin, the connection between the tortured geometry of the arcades and a theory of language is captured by a line from one of his favorite poets, Friedrich Hölderlin: “the walls stand / dumbstruck and cold” (188, my translation). In the terms of The Arcades Project, this means that the walls are in shock. One of the central concerns of Benjamin’s Paris research is to explain how lyric poetry such as Baudelaire’s could be “grounded in experience for which exposure to shock has become the norm” (Selected 4 318). In his 1940 essay “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” written shortly after his essay on Brecht’s lapidary texts, Benjamin tries to elucidate the logic of a poetic language that aims to parry shocks, exposing itself to them in order to train itself to defend against them.¹⁶ Crucially, the defenses of Baudelaire’s poems do not assume the form of a wall, as if words could be a barrier behind which one might take refuge. The walls are in shock, which means that the writing is on every wall, and this architextual system is in the grips of the “subterranean tremors by which Baudelaire’s poetry is shaken; it is as though they caused words to collapse” (Selected 4 320). For Benjamin, as for Brassaï, architecture and poetry are two dimensions of a broader discourse in which any sentence is a gesture toward the wall it will mark, if not dismantle, while any wall is a gesture toward the sentence that it will put on display and thereby potentially evacuate of its authority as either a performative act or an expression of an idea or intention. Of course, these gestures gain their power from their inability to assume the solidity of stone monuments or timeless lines of canonical poetry. The core paradox of lapidary writing is its finitude, which explains the abiding sense of futility produced by the discursive shocks that arise at the frontiers of verbal and architectural collisions. Like Brecht’s proletarian, who, “at the mercy of the rain and Gestapo agents scribbles some words on a wall with chalk,” Baudelaire experiences the streets of Paris as a battle he must wage “with the impotent rage of someone fighting the rain or the wind” (Selected 4 240).¹⁷
 
In his critique of the drafts of Benjamin’s Arcades Project, Adorno chastises his friend for “blockading [his] ideas behind impenetrable walls of material” (qtd. in Benjamin, Selected 4 100). If the walls of material Benjamin amassed about the phantasmagoric world of modernist Paris were anything but impenetrable, Adorno’s reproach reminds us that one of Benjamin’s primary arguments was that no writer, and certainly not any writer who writes about writing, can hope to evade walls for long, a point that remains as true today as it was a century ago. We began by suggesting that modernist topoi inform the debates surrounding Foster’s vision for the German Reichstag, from discussions of the democratizing potential of glass architecture to analyses of the relationship between language and buildings. The question is whether in recycling these debates—in putting them back on display—the Reichstag distinguishes itself as a distinctly postmodern construct. In his 1991 Postmodernism, Fredric Jameson brings Brassaï’s interest in the affinities between architecture and photography together with Benjamin’s insight that our day-to-day engagement with buildings is something that occurs en passant. Jameson proposes that as we drive along the freeway past postmodern structures, we scarcely recognize them, and in fact, the only chance we get to enjoy their unique splendor is when we look at photographs of them, in which they “flash into brilliant existence and actuality” (99). Like the arresting moment described by Brassaï when one stumbles upon an instance of graffiti and is suddenly re-confronted with a memory that was always already lost, the experience of buildings mediated by pictures of them is not an engagement with an art of solidity, grandiosity, or monumentality, but an encounter with a phenomenon that is most powerful in the brief instant at which it reveals itself to be most ephemeral, dependent for its very manifestation as a physical presence on a photograph, a reproduction over which it has no control.
 
If Foster’s efforts to create a parliamentary building of democratic transparency are difficult to reconcile with his commitment to preserving a field of wall writing that is far from open or transparent, his building may be an example of the “over-stimulating” ensemble of styles that Jameson calls postmodern pastiche. In these terms, the confluence of controversial Russian graffiti and sensationalist glass spaces constitutes a language that prohibits any recourse to a “healthy linguistic normality” on the basis of which the deviation of a given dialect could be measured (Jameson 17). In the end, Foster’s commitment to preserving the Cyrillic characters ensures only that they will stand as a constant reminder that the free conversation he hopes his legislative chamber and rooftop dome will facilitate is a fantasy. His exhibitionary architecture, his “living museum,” proposes to put the “living” present on display as if it were already part of the “dead” past. The legislative business carried out in the assembly hall thus becomes a blank parody, as Jameson would say, of previous legislative acts, emptying them of their political or historical content and transforming them into recitations of prior messages without the gesture of those messages, as if each time the German Bundestag enacts a law, Brecht’s poem is being rewritten in a new, non-lapidary style.
 

 

 

Click for larger view

Fig. 4.

Reichstag Chamber

© Nigel Young/Foster + Partners.

 

 
It’s been twenty years of Postmodern Culture. The journal published its first issue in September, 1990, and was then the lone peer-reviewed electronic journal in the humanities.
 
PMC was first edited by John Unsworth and myself, then by Stuart Moulthrop and Lisa Brawley, Jim English, and by myself again. The editors chose PMC as the handle for the journal because we didn’t want it to suggest a focus on the personal computer: PMC has always relied on digital technologies, and was shaped by the emerging internets, but its mission was to produce work that was not necessarily about computers or the internet, as much computer-mediated publishing was expected to be at the time. On the other hand, being electronic allowed PMC to publish work not possible for print journals, such as audio, video, and hypertext, and to develop models of distribution and collaboration that were new to the academy. This new model of communal work was from the start a political project based in new technologies. For example, the journal, which was first published by the editors through a listserv at North Carolina State University and then by Oxford University Journals, was free to subscribers, who could download issues and articles from us. With the advent of the World Wide Web in 1994, PMC moved to Johns Hopkins Journals (on their Muse project, which at the start was publishing only Hopkins journals); in that new environment the current issue remained free, and the journal maintained a free text-only archive of back issues. Another example of the politics of the medium is the journal’s decision to publish in unformatted ASCII to begin with, rather than in more specialized formats, so readers across platforms and in different countries could read the journal. This was no longer necessary when we moved from listserv-based delivery to the Web.
 
PMC’s mission has been, and continues to be, to cultivate theoretical and critical cultural studies of the contemporary period. The word “postmodern” was meant to locate the epistemic focus of the journal; postmodernism cannot be understood as a set of stylistic or formal features or attitudes, but as a cultural and intellectual time in the broad sense for which Fredric Jameson argues. The journal has been interested in critical engagements with cultural and theoretical questions rather than in period arguments; has promoted theory as a topic in itself; has engaged work on its own merits, rather than by arrangement, leading us to publish, through the anonymous review process, less known scholars, and to return work by scholars who are justifiably well regarded; and has published experimental work, like the hypertext issue shepherded by Stuart Moulthrop in 1997 and the meditative philosophy by Alexander Garcia Düttmann in this issue, that does not fall into familiar categories. The journal has argued by doing for a material and secular culture of difference—a postmodern culture—because, as Arkady Plotnitsky suggests in his essay here, no other culture does or can exist.
 
This project is important today because while culture is made of difference, it can certainly turn against difference. While critical cultures in the Western academy have been open to repeated challenge and experiment in many ways (sometimes—as Düttmann argues in his essay here—as superficial deflections), they continue to look for ways of safeguarding the same. I am thinking of the rise of the culture of presence in new media studies; the trend for new pragmatism in American studies, which sometimes has little interest in the historical grounding of aesthetics; the popularity of that version of object theory where objects are supposed to speak for us—not to mention that objects have other significance, as commodities for example; the arguments against symptomatic readings of culture, and against “the hermeneutics of suspicion,” which want things in themselves to be what they appear to be; the resurrection of religion, often in the name of materialism; and the conversion to new metaphysical ontologies that can lead, in the extreme, to reified sociological and ethnic categories, and to categorical statements about them. These trends suggest that we ask whether radical or innovative thought has a continuing present, let alone a past, in the academy: untimely meditations are by definition out of place. The potential for a future revaluation of values, as Jan Mieszkowski’s essay suggests, is always a part of the architectural relics of the past. There have been many other trends in cultural studies, of course, including the rise and continuing development of animal studies, environmental studies, queer studies, urban studies, work on the economics of gloalization, and the political study of media, to name a few. It is also the case that deconstructive and textual methodologies continue to be important in these fields, and help make them important and strong. PMC continues to support such projects, as reflected in the works we publish here and that will appear in the forthcoming companion issue.
 
The work in this issue comes from a conference organized at UC Irvine in October 2010 by the journal to celebrate two decades of publishing. A second issue based on the conference is in the works. The conference, “Culture After Postmodern Culture,” asked what postmodern culture means today: we are still postmodern, but the idea that we are postmodern is now, as Arkady Plotnitsky writes in his essay, a given. We are after postmodernism as some new trend in cultural criticism; now postmodernism is a state we’re in, without scare quotes. What it means to be contemporary it is hard to say, as Alex Düttmann shows in his meditation on time and contemporeneity: we entrust the memory of the dead to the dead, and live now by giving the moment the (now often digital) slip. So while Plotnitsky, reading through Jean-François Lyotard, connects a postmodern epistemology of justice (the “irreducibly uncertain and inconstant, multiple justice” of Nietzsche) with an epistemology of post-Einsteinian physics, Düttmann thinks through Derrida about social time, for any sense of time, though it may not be able to know itself, already includes a conversation. Our relation to space and time unfurls, Janus-faced, the banner of difference. Hong-An Truong and Dwayne Dixon also view postmodern culture as the performance of sliding differences, a world where intimate interiority and the voice (Japanese, Vietnamese) are mediated commodities just as impersonal, or personal, as public spaces (Tokyo, Saigon) that, as mere architecture, mask public tragedy that is registered by these double losses. As Mieszkowski notes Benjamin notes, emergent urban spaces have no outside, like dreams. The affect that is present under globalization is a function of global displacement, alienation, and removal. The signs of defacement, war, and destruction, as in Jan Mieszkowski’s essay on graffiti and architecture—writing and building—make up cultural legacies. They are culture after culture, the writing on the wall that is itself the new building, the new wall. This is all the more true in the so-called age of information. We are only beginning to understand the implications of the larger postmodern episteme which will last, like the future, for a long time.
 
Some of the transformations for which PMC stood since 1990 have come to pass. New and flexible forms of publication are available, such as blogs and open access journals, and the mere fact of electronic scholarly publishing is not a subject for comment. Digital media, now in their infancy, increasingly transform the intellectual landscape, giving rise to new configurations that may well eclipse or make obsolete cutlural structures whose contingency has remained invisible—structures such as journals, books, and universities. It is possible to interpret the current attack on public education in the humanities in the US and in Europe as a sign of the success of critical cultural studies—as an effort to preserve traditional cultural structures against critical theories of difference. The cultural shift to deconstruct and revolutionize the production and dissemination of thinking is making visible the heirarchical, linear, and inert paradigms on which modern institutions have depended. To understand what and how we think today we need to read what and how we do; we need theoretical cultural studies, we need a rigorous and ongoing conversation, we need to read the cultural logic of postmodern culture. The writing is on the wall.